Staunton Spectator

This new reconstruction bill proposes to set aside the President and the courts and the civil governments and laws of the ten excluded Southern States, and to set up over them, in the person of General Grant, an absolute military dictator. Let us suppose that this scheme is carried out, and that these ten outside States are placed absolutely under the will of General Grant, with the army at his back; that he has carried through the work of Congressional reconstruction; that these ten Southern States are again in Congress -- are with radical delegations in both houses, some with a sprinkling of negroes and some with all white radicals ; that these States, so reconstructed, have voted for the radical candidate for the Presidency ; that their votes are necessary to his election, and that their acceptance by this Congress the radical candidate is declared elected by this Southern negro political balance of power. ---What next? Unquestionably such a state of tumult and chaos among the political elements of the North as will invite the experiment of a military dictator over the whole land.

This Southern negro political balance of power in the Presidential contest is clearly the present object of this revolutionary Congress. In this design the radical fanatics have gone too far to recede. The game is desperate, but there is no alternative; and as desperate cases require desperate remedies, we may be prepared for anything from these radicals resolved upon the perpetuation of their power. Where, then, lies the remedy? In the hands of the people of the Northern States, to be applied in the coming Presidential election. -- N. Y. Herald

The Richmond Enquirer says that "the accounts of the despair of the whites, and of the utter demoralization of the blacks which reach us from the South, are all alike. The gloomy outlines and fillings up are all the same whether sketched on the banks of the Mississippi or upon those of the Santee. Everywhere the negroes are armed, and refuse to work. Everywhere bands of predaceous blacks are sweeping the neglected plantations of everything which can be made useful either as plunder or for food. Live stock of all sorts are stolen, corncribs and cotton pens are pillaged, vegetables are stolen from the garden, and the bare land is left for the unhappy planter.

The negroes refuse to contract, and steal all that they can lay their hands upon, while they are waiting for the "Convention" to give them "forty acres of land and a mule." The traveller everywhere encounters these demoralized laborers in gangs, wandering up and down the highways, and skulking through the forests, seeking what they may devour. "The misery of Mexico, of Ireland, and of all the rest of the most wretched sections of the earth seems," says an eyewitness, "to have fallen upon the Cotton States."

The Lynchburg Republican says that "one of the chief aims of the mongrel gatherings which now disgrace the South under the name of Con- stitutional Conventions, seems to be, that they may give to their dirty work the stamp of permanent durability. Vain attempt! the stuff they are now concocting cannot preserve its power for ten years to come: one of two things is morally certain, either the whole nation will soon be sent to Hades, by the vile efforts of a corrupt Radicalism, or else the intelligence and wealth of the South will again assert their na- tural supremacy. In either event, "good-bye" to the Constitution now in the process of manu- facture in the model of the witches' broth in Macbeth.

It may be taken as an axiom, that the better class of a country can never be long nor success- fully kept in political bondage to their inferiors. That is the abnormal condition of affairs which disfranchises the Judges and the Congressman, whilst it sends their boot-black and carriage-drivers as delegates to frame the fundamental laws for sovereign states.

These evils are their own corrective. The very violence and outrage which the Radical party has imposed upon the Southern people, in bringing about the work of reconstruction, will be the sooner cause that great reaction that shall wipe out all remembrance of the infamous vultures now preying upon the popular liberties, save the accursed memory of their diabolical plottings."