Volume 18 , Issue 41

1884 - The Effect Of The Victory

As the Marion County Herald, Palmyra, Missouri, dated 25 December 1884, Thursday, page 4, stated: "The Effect of the Victory." The efforts of Republican Leaders to create distrust and Disturb the Peace for the sake of discrediting the Democracy was in play.

Found on Newspapers.com

Since the election of President Cleveland the Republicans of the Blaine stamp had been devoting their energies to two points. They had been trying to persuade mill owners to shut down and turn their hands adrift, and had been predicting all sorts of persecution and suffering for the negroes of the "Southern" States. Fred Douglass thought the return of the Democracy to power meant "The political death of the negro." Other less intelligent Republicans were foolish enough to assert that it was the first step towards the re-establishment of slavery.

It was evidently the wish of some Republicans to disturb the peace and damage the business interests of the country as much as possible for the purpose of discrediting the democracy. That was the object of the long delay in admitting defeat. These disappointed politicians were indifferent as to the injury they might inflict on business or individuals so long as they can make it appear that disturbance and distress result from Democratic success.

Manufacturers would soon find that an honest Democratic policy was far better for them than the unhealthy favoritism of Republicanism for which they have had to pay very dearly. As to the colored citizens of the South, whose rights were entirely safe under the Constitution, no greater blessing could have befallen them than the overthrow of the Republican party. Designing persons have taught them that they had some great advantage to expect form the Administration at Washington of which the Democrats at home deprived them, and this had served to keep them restless and dissatisfied. With this deception exploded they would settle down to the consideration of their real interest and the intelligent exercise of their political rights.

Democracy sought to make people enlightened and happy. It raised the oppressed, instructed the ignorant and protects the weak. Democracy would not had conferred the franchise suddenly on millions of negroes sunk in ignorance, but since they had been invested with the privileges of citizens, Democracy sought to make them capable of using them intelligently.

The negroes only study their own good when they resist the attempt of the Republicans to hold them as political chattels and vote as their own judgment dictates. The interests of the citizens of a State are identical, whether their skins are black or white, and it is quite natural that where a majority of the whites were Democratic a majority of the colored citizens should be the same.

Four years of Democratic rule will dispel all the illusions raised by partisan unscrupulousness for political effect. The South would be "solid" in the future, because ignorance would gradually disappear and the negroes would learn that the white residents of their own States had naturally more regard for their interests and were more honestly concerned for their prosperity than Republican partisans, who only enfranchised them because they believed they could use them for their own purposes, and who today, if they could, would reduce them to a condition of political servitude only a little less degrading than the bondage from which they were released by the war. - Washington Post.
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