Willis Fletcher Johnson

“ Lincoln harked back to the principle enunciated by Monroe more than forty years before, the principle of self—defence, self—preservation. That principle, Monroe contended, was primal and essential as much for the state as for the individual. So the first Republican government of the nation held in 1861 that the nation had the fundamental and inalienable right of self-preservation. It was the right and the duty of the government to protect itself from dissolution. A government that could not or would not do that had no right or title to existence. ”

“ It did not interfere with the right of a state to make its own suffrage laws and to exclude citizens from the exercise of that right, but it served notice that for such exclusion a state would have to pay a penalty in reduced Congressional representation. It made straight for what afterward became known as “equal suffrage,” the principle that every responsible adult person should be a citizen in the complete sense of the term, that every citizen should have one vote and no more, and that all votes should be of equal value. ”

“ In that policy he was severely criticised by some leaders of his own party who would have made the destruction of slavery the first and chief object. But Lincoln was wiser than they as the chief of his critics, Horace Greeley, afterward gratefully confessed. He was right on the ground of morals and on that of logic; for obviously the whole, the Union, was of greater importance than any of its parts or issues, and it would have been folly to attempt the emancipation of the slaves unless first the nation could be maintained to protect them in their freedom. ”

“ To retain that principle in the Constitution after the abolition of slavery would make the conditions still worse. For then representation would be based upon not merely three-fifths but the whole number of negroes in the former slave states, while the right to vote would be enjoyed by only the whites. Thus in a state in which half the population was black, each white voter would have two or three times the voting power of one in a state where there were few or no blacks. ”

“ He had been willing to retain slavery for the sake of saving the Union but his offer had been rejected. Now he would destroy slavery for the sake of saving the Union. At first his announcement had a politically bad effect. It divided the North and united the South. All through the great free states of the North, where the clamor for emancipation had months before been loudest, men fell away from the support of the administration, declared the war a failure and called for "compromise" with the seceding states. ”

“ Not one of them has ever even approximated control of the government. Not one has ever achieved its purpose. One of the most notable and most recent examples has been that of the Prohibition party which has existed for many years but which at the end entered into a decline and saw the very work which it had vainly striven to do performed by the two great parties against which it had indiscriminately waged its futile warfare. ”

“ The purpose was of course not to destroy those corporations nor to deprive the business of the nation of the advantages which manifestly might be realized from the conduct of affairs upon so extensive a scale, but to curb and check the abuses to which they were subject and to demonstrate the amenability of the largest and richest corporation to the law equally with the humblest and poorest individual. ”

“ It is the party which aims at once at progress in the arts of civilization and in all the beneficent conditions and circumstances of human life, individual and social, and at the conservation of those fundamental rights of person and of property which are essential to the durability of all government and even civilization itself. ”

“ Even if he wishes to have changes and reforms made in the government, he seeks to make them "from the inside." Since, then, it is the established principle of the nation that its government shall be conducted through the agency of two major parties, it becomes scarcely less incumbent upon citizens to recognize those parties, to exercise their political activities in them and through them, and, if ever they desire changes in them, to make them "from the inside." ”

“ Prohibition has been enacted, but the Prohibition party has never carried a single national election. As these pages are written, woman suffrage is at the point of final triumph, but the Woman Suffrage party has never seriously figured in an electoral campaign.
The lesson is obvious and, as it was suggested at the beginning as something to be illustrated in this history, so it may be recurred to at the close, as something which every chapter in the record emphasizes. The American government is a government through parties, and through two major parties and them alone. ”

“ And if it was to remain one nation, all questions of economics must be held in abeyance to that of whether it was to be a nation of free or of slave labor. So, during the protracted debate in Congress over the Kansas-Nebraska bill, there arose an immeasurably wider and more significant discussion throughout the free states of the North as to what should be done to meet the menace of that measure.
The logic of events drew together men of three parties: Democrats, Whigs, and Free Soilers; together with many humanitarians who had not been closely affiliated with any party. ”

“ Similarly it is the duty of every one to participate in the primary elections of his or her party. If citizens of the Republic were generally to abstain from voting we should expect the affairs of the country to be neglected and abused. So if members of a party abstain from interesting themselves in its direction it is bound to suffer abuse. It is from such neglect on the part of citizens that the evils of party management have arisen.
No rational and loyal American citizen thinks of asserting his "independence" of the Republic or of setting up a rival government. ”

“ The Whigs, who formed not only a plurality but probably a considerable majority of the combination, impressed upon it their broad and liberal views of constitutional construction. The Democrats contributed a passionate loyalty to the Union, devotion to the legitimate rights of the states and a fine conception of the equal rights of all men under the law. The Free Soilers who, more than either of the others, had been a party of one idea infused the whole with their passionate determination that there should be no further extension of slavery. ”

“ The policy of the Republican party has, indeed, been notably that which was wisely established at the beginning of our national life by Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson and their compeers. It has been to develop to the full our own continental Republic and to cultivate its territorial possessions; to vindicate the independence of American states against any European attempts at re-subjugation; to participate freely in the commerce of the world and in whatever international intercourse is calculated to advance the humane welfare of mankind ”

“ After safeguarding the Union, there must be a safeguarding of the freedom which had been given to the slaves. The slaves had been set free, as an incident of the war, and their re-enslavement would be forbidden by constitutional amendment. An amendment to that effect was proposed to the states by the Republican Congress on February 1, 1865 and was ratified by the votes of the Republican states—some Democratic states refusing to ratify it—December 18, 1865. But Republican statesmanship did not contemplate merely setting the negroes free and setting them adrift to shift for themselves. ”

“ For a generation that compromise endured, though the inexorable logic of events was steadily working against its perpetuity. Its principle had been to divide the United States west of the Mississippi River on the geographical line of 36° 30′ north latitude, with free territory at the north and slave territory at the south, and to admit a state from one side concurrently with a state from the other, so as to keep the balance even between the two at Washington. ”

“ While thus the Republican administration was efficiently serving the domestic interests of the nation, there were other matters of commanding importance which required attention in our relation to other countries. The Civil War itself profoundly affected our foreign relations. While the attitude of most of the nations was entirely correct the government of one was persistently unfriendly, while that of another was unsympathetic and permitted itself to be used greatly to the disadvantage of the United States. ”

“ But at the middle of the last century far-seeing and thoughtful men perceived that all these were subordinate, for the time, to the two supreme issues of liberty and union. There was little use in debating what should be the policy of the nation until it was positively and permanently determined whether there was to be one nation or two. ”

“ The salient plank was, however, that relating to the tariff which denounced the Democratic “tariff for revenue only” doctrine and demanded that “in raising the requisite revenues for the government, duties shall be so levied as to afford security to our diversified industries and protection to the rights and wages of the laborer, to the end that active and intelligent labor, as well as capital, may have its just reward, and the laboring man his full share in the national prosperity.” ”

“ This exhibition of the industry, commerce and art of all nations was the most extensive ever thus far held in the world, and it had an effect of inestimable value in acquainting America and the rest of the world with each other and in stimulating the domestic industry and foreign commerce of the United States. ”

“ American industrialists were protected against unfair competition of the poorly-paid labor of Europe, a fact which soon induced multitudes of European working-men to migrate to the United States in quest of better wages and better conditions of labor and of life. In this way the Republican government at once supplied the revenue needed for paying the extraordinary expenses of the war and enormously stimulated and expanded the profitable industries of the nation. ”

“ The thoughtful American citizen will therefore affiliate himself with one or the other of the two great parties which have survived the births and deaths of scores of ephemeral organizations, the two great parties to which must be credited all the good and against which must be charged all the evil in our government for the last two-thirds of a century. ”

“ The act of February 25, 1863, with some subsequent amendments, was the beginning of the national bank system which has ever since prevailed and of which the London Times, not always a friendly critic of things American, said that "the genius of man has never invented a better system of finance." The creation of the national bank system was of great service to the government during the war inasmuch as it assured a certain market for the government bonds which were then issued. ”

“ California came in as a single free state instead of being divided into two, one free and one slave; and New Mexico and Arizona would obviously not be ready for statehood for many years. With Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon and other northern territories rapidly preparing for entrance into the Union, each having claims based upon fitness that could not be denied, it was evident that the Missouri Compromise could not prevent the free states from soon outnumbering the slave.
Therefore in 1854 the Pro-Slavery party, with its last control of Congress, enacted the Kansas-Nebraska bill. ”

“ EQUAL SUFFRAGE
Latest of all the great advancements made in the civic life of America and greatest of all the late reforms achieved under the influence and leadership of the Republican party, is the enfranchisement of women. It was eminently appropriate that this work should be done chiefly by Republicans because it was in logical accord with the fundamental principles of that party. An organization which came into existence for the vindication of the rights of man was unmistakably destined to become the champion of equal rights of citizenship for men and women. ”

“ An attempt was made in 1912 to inject the tariff controversy into politics, when the Democrats in their platform again demanded a tariff for revenue only, on the ground that a protective tariff was unconstitutional—an absurd contention, the constitutionality of a protective tariff being all but universally conceded. ”

“ According to the Constitution Representatives in Congress were apportioned among the states according to their population and not according to the number of their actual citizens or of the votes case; but the population was to be reckoned as consisting of all the free persons and three-fifths of the slaves. That arrangement was always repugnant to Republicans because it violated the principle of equality of suffrage, making the vote of a white citizen of a slave state much more powerful than of a citizen of a free state. ”

“ In a decision in which all but one member of the court concurred it was held that Congress had full power to provide for the issuance of such notes in time of war or of peace and thus to make paper money legal tender. These "greenbacks" and the notes of thousands of national banks have now for a generation been the familiar and favorite circulating medium of the Nation. The treasury notes and bank notes are used indifferently and indiscriminately and both are recognized as always and everywhere worth their full face value in gold coin. ”

“ In pursuance of this wise and humane policy the Republicans in Congress enacted, despite Democratic opposition, a bill establishing a Freedmen's Bureau as a part of the national administration, thus giving national guardianship to the negroes as temporary wards of the nation. Following this came a Civil Rights law which recognized negroes as citizens of the United States—they had long been citizens of many of the states—safeguarded them in their rights of person and of property and forbade discrimination against them by any state laws. ”

“ The record of Republican achievement is the record of the nation's progress.
Mention has been made of various minor parties which have disported themselves in every presidential campaign. There have been many more, the very names of some of which are forgotten. They have run their little course and passed away, like the “Quids” and “Hunkers” and Barn Burners” and “Silver Grays” and others which represented divisions in the major parties rather than separate organizations. ”

“ Lincoln was wiser. He discerned the desirability of opposing Douglas on moral grounds and also on grounds of the most practical political strategy. On moral grounds he did not purpose that the Republican party should permit a man to be elected to the Senate unchallenged on a platform of indifference to slavery. That was a subject on which no man had a right to be indifferent or neutral. So he meant to compel Douglas to commit himself on it in some fashion one way or the other. ”

“ Obviously this decision practically outlawed the paramount issue upon which the Republican party had been founded and destroyed the party's reason for existence. It was folly to demand that Congress should prevent the extension of slavery into the territories, when the Supreme Court had decided that it had no power to do so. Republicans generally denounced the decision as unsound and an unwarrantable meddling by the judiciary in a purely political matter and made it plain that they would seek its reversal. ”

“ It is our hope and expectation that this brief account of the Republican party, of what it has stood for and what it stands for today, will assist in convincing an impressive majority of the new voters of the United States that it is the party which on the whole record is the more worthy of their choice. ”

“ When such naturalized citizens of the United States revisited their former homes they were often seized as deserters and subjected to penalties, or were subjected to the laws of those countries as though they had never left them. The Republican party, standing supremely for the rights of man, insisted from the outset that every man in the world had a right to choose for himself to what nation he would belong and to what government he would give allegiance. ”

“ With surpassing prescience he anticipated the reaction of some of the northern states against his administration and realized the necessity, for the continued support of the government, of winning and holding the border states. He knew that these latter would be alienated and perhaps driven into the arms of the enemy by a premature emancipation proclamation. Instead, therefore, of taking precipitate and radical action he wisely and justly sought other means of disposing of the slavery question, in which he was cordially supported by Congress and by the Republican party. ”

“ Thus twenty-six Republican states had ratified and not one had rejected the equal suffrage amendment, while only six Democratic states had ratified and six had rejected it. Thus the granting of equal suffrage, both by congressional initiative and by the final ratification of the states has been and will be unmistakably and indisputably the work of the Republican party, successfully effected in the face of Democratic opposition. ”