Dear Brother: The
political aspect now is interesting to a looker-on. Sumner and Stevens would
have made another civil war inevitably the President's antagonistic position
saves us war save of words, and as I am a peace man I go for Johnson and the
Veto.
I recollect that
Congress is but one of three co-ordinate branches of the Government. I want to
hear the Supreme Court manifest itself, and then can guess at the conclusion. .
. . Let Johnson fight it out with Sumner, who, though sincere, represents an
antagonism as ultra as of Davis himself. Both are representative men, and it
will be a pity if the great mass of our people have to go on fighting forever
to demonstrate the fallacy of extreme opinions.
The Republican party
has lost forever the best chance they can ever expect of gaining recruits from
the great middle class who want peace and industry. The white men of this
country will control it, and the negro, in mass, will occupy a subordinate
place as a race. We can secure them the liberty now gained, but we cannot raise
them to a full equality in our day, even if at all. Had the Republicans
graciously admitted the great principle of representation, leaving members to
take the Ironclad Oath, you would have secured the active cooperation of such
men as Sharkey, Parsons, Wm. A. Graham, Johnson, and others of the South, and
it would not be many years before some of these States would have grown as
rabid as Missouri, Maryland, and Arkansas are now disposed to be. The foolish
querulousness of the Secessionists untamed would soon make a snarlish minority
in their own States. Now, however, by the extreme measures begun and urged with
so much vindictiveness, Sumner has turned all the Union people South as well as
of the West against the party. . . . It is surely unfortunate that the
President is thus thrown seemingly on the old mischievous anti-war Democrats,
but from his standpoint he had no alternative. To outsiders it looks as though
he was purposely forced into that category.
I know that the
Freedmen Bureau Bill, and that for universal suffrage in the District, are
impracticable and impolitic. Better let them slide, and devote time to putting
the actual Government into the best shape the country admits of, letting other
natural causes produce the results you aim at. Whenever State Legislatures and
people oppress the negro they cut their own throats, for the negro cannot again
be enslaved. Their mistakes will work to the interests of the great Union
party.
I can readily
understand what the effect must be in your circle. How difficult it is to do
anything, but if Congress does nothing it will be the greatest wisdom; for the
business relations opening throughout the South will do more to restore peace
and prosperity than all the laws that could be published in six months.
I think Mr. Johnson
would consent to a modification of the Constitution to change the basis of
representation to suit the changed condition of the population South, but at is
all he can or should do. . .
We need the Army Bills1 to get to work. I will have to abandon all the remote settlements to the chances of the Indians, for even after the bill passes, it will take months to enlist the men, and in the meantime all volunteers are clamorous for discharge, and must be discharged as soon as winter lets them come in.
1 The bills providing for the reorganization
of the army.
SOURCE: Rachel
Sherman Thorndike, Editor, The Sherman Letters: Correspondence Between
General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891, p. 263-5
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