We have have heretofore charged the Abolitionists with being opposed to the restoration of the Union, unless it can be made a sort of abolition Union. Their presses and their orators now openly disavow all respect for the old Union and their aversion to its reconstruction. They are afraid that if the old Union is restored the democratic party will again obtain the control of the government, and would rather see the old ship of state forever ruined. As evidence of this we copy the following atrocious extract from Greeley’s New York Tribune, which is generally regarded, we believe, as an orthodox republican paper:—
Let us suppose that the war were ended today on some basis which would leave Slavery where this rebellion found it, and bring Mason and Slidell, Toombs and Wigfall, Jeff. Davis and Chesnut, Rust and Breckenridge, Hunter and Benjamin, back into the Senate, and into their normal relations of cordialty and fraternity with Bayard and Price, Bright and Thompson, of N. J. Rice, Wall, Bigler, and the Northern Democracy. They would have nearly half the Senate and about a third of the electors from the slave States alone does any one imagine they would not, aided by the pressure of the war taxes and the partisan clamor sure to be raised thereupon, soon reacquire that ascendency which they in 1860—out of hatred to Douglas and eagerness for a purely slaveholding confederacy—deliberately threw away?—And then do you not see that we who have honestly and earnestly resisted and baffled their ambitious machinations will be made to sup sorrow? Unpleasant neighbors as they are at Richmond and Manassas, we prefer them there rather than in power at Washington, with a drilled partisan majority at their back. But we can well understand why this prospect should have no errors for Mr. Diven.
What claim has such a fellow as Greely to be classed among loyal men or friends of the country?
The Bedford Gazette, Bedford, PA