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who was prominent in the Rebellion, every man at the North who was
prominent in aiding the Rebellion, is now openly or covertly his
partisan, and by fawning on him earns the right to defame the
representatives of the people by whom the Rebellion was put down. Among
traitors and Copperheads the fear of punishment has been succeeded by
the hope of revenge; elation is on faces which the downfall of Richmond
overcast; and a return to the old times, when a united South ruled the
country by means of a divided North, is confidently expected by the
whole crew of political bullies and political sycophants whose profit is
in the abasement of the nation. It is even said that, if the majority of
the "Rump" Congress cannot be overcome by fair means, it will be by
foul; and there are noisy partisans of the President who assert that he
has in him a Cromwellian capacity for dealing with legislative
assemblies whose notions of the public good clash with his own. In
short, we are promised, on the assembling of the next Congress, a _coup
d'etat_.
Garret Davis, of Kentucky, was, we believe, the first to announce this
executive remedy for the "radical" disease of the state, and it has
since been often prescribed by Democratic politicians as a sovereign
panacea. General McClernand, indeed, proposed a scheme, simpler even
than that of executive recognition, by which the Southern Senators and
Representatives might effect a lodgment in Congress. They should,
according to him, have gone to Washington, entered the halls of
legislation, and proceeded to occupy their seats, "peaceably if they
could, forcibly if they must"; but the record of General McClernand, as
a military man, was not such as to give to his advice on a question of
carrying positions by assault a high degree of authority, and, there
being some natural hesitation in following his counsel, the golden
opportunity was lost. Mr. Montgomery Blair, who professes his
willingness to act with any men, "Rebels or any one else," to put down
the radicals, is never weary of talking to conservative conventions of
"two Presidents and two Congresses." There can be no doubt that the
project of a _coup d'etat_ has become dangerously familiar to the
"conservative" mind, and that the eminent legal gentlemen of the North
who are publishing opinions affirming the right of the excluded Southern
representatives to their seats are playing into the hands of the
desperate gang of unscrupulous politicians
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