The Great Conspiracy, Volume 7 by John Alexander Logan
page 83 of 87 (95%)
page 83 of 87 (95%)
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Slavery and Free-Trade, were two leading ideas inspiring the Southern
Conspirators and leaders in their Rebellion; Freedom to Man, and Protection to Labor, were the nobler ideas inspiring those who fought for the Union. The Morrill-Tariff of 1860, with modifications to it subsequently made by its Republican friends, secured to the Nation, through the triumph of the Union arms, great and manifold blessings and abundant prosperity flowing from the American Protective policy; while the Emancipation proclamations, together with the Constitutional amendments, and Congressional legislation, through the same triumph, and the acceptance of the legitimate results of the War, gave Freedom to all within the Nation's bound aries. This, at least, was the logical outcome of the failure of the Rebellion. Such was the general understanding, on all sides, at the conclusion of the War. Yet the Republican Party, in failing to stigmatize the heresy of Free Trade--which had so large an agency in bringing about the equally heretical doctrines of State Sovereignty and the right of Secession, and Rebellion itself,--as an issue or question settled by the War, as a part and parcel of the Rebellion, was guilty of a grave fault of omission, some of the ill-effects of which have already been felt, while others are yet to come. For, quickly after the War of the Rebellion closed,--as has been already mentioned--the defeated Rebel leaders, casting in their lot with their Democratic friends and allies, openly and without special rebuke, prevailed upon the National Democracy to adopt the Rebel Free-Trade Shibboleth of "a Tariff for revenue;" and that same Democracy, obtaining power and place, through violence and fraud and falsehood at the so-called "elections" in the Solid Southern States, now threatens the Country once more with iniquitous Free-Trade legislation, and all its attendant train of commercial disasters and general industrial ruin. |
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