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How Pardons Might be Purchased |
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How Pardons Might be Purchased
Southern
landowners were not the only persons concerned about the
attempts in Congress to give land to the freedmen. The
editors of The New York Times feared that land
distribution in the South would lead to the undermining of
all property rights, even in the North.
How Pardons Might be Purchased -- Agrarianism In a
New Dress.
Mr.
Sumner has invented a new method of securing to freedmen a
proprietary interest planters' estates. His scholarly nature
revolts at the rude agrarianism of Mr. STEVENS and the
stand-and-deliver doctrine of Senator WADE. He appreciates
as keenly as either of these statesmen the '"terrible
distinction" between rich and poor, and the desirableness of
some patent process for making everybody prosperous. But be
has no faith in the efficacy of legislation as an agency for
producing equality of wealth, and no liking for the
demagoguism which courts popularity at the expense of social
order. He proposes to reach the same end by a different
route. He suggests that as a condition of obtaining pardons,
the President shall require every rebel landowner to convey
to his former slaves "a certain portion of the land on which
they have worked, so that"--as the Senator's resolution
pathetically and philosophically declares--"they may have a
homestead in which their own labor has mingled, and that the
disloyal master may not continue to appropriate to himself
the fruits of their toil."
***
Enveloped
in an atmosphere of self-sufficiency and sentimentalism, Mr.
SUMNER may not perceive the drift of his own resolution.
Whether he sees it or intends it or not, this is
undeniable--that an attempt to justify the confiscation of
Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the
freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both
sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as seriously as
Mississippi.
Source: New York Times, July 9, 1867.
Asterisks [***] indicate edits
of the original document by Michael
O'Malley.
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