Franklin Repository

No intelligent reader of this journal for six months past, will expect us to manifest surprise because President Johnson has formally separated himself from the Union organization, as he did on the 18th inst. by his veto of the Freedman's Bureau bill. While earnestly desiring to sustain him to the very verge of the sacrifice of principle and truth, we could but illy conceal our well settled conviction that his complete apostasy was predetermined and but a question of time. While professing to be within the pale of the Union party, he was laboring untiringly, not to promote its success, and thereby the peace and safety of the Nation, but to demoralize its ranks, corrupt its leaders and destroy its vitality. He would have done as he did last week in the fall of 1865, had he felt assured that his perfidy was appreciated and his power for evil within its ranks at an end; but blinded as he was by his inordinate ambition, he was no less infatuated with the hope of dividing the party that crowned him with honors he knows not how to wear, and for months we have seen his persistent efforts within our ranks to capture as many camp-followers and as much baggage as possible to carry off to the common enemy.

His perfidy to his country and to the loyal men who sustained him in the dark days of trial, is now history. His message to Congress on its meeting in December was carefully prepared to express everything and nothing--he employed language but to conceal ideas, not to express them. In the face of his accepted wishes for a different result, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Ohio had voted overwhelmingly against the principles he meant to enforce upon Congress, and he recoiled from his own wrong for a season; but at last treason became impatient and loyal men had ceased to trust, and he plunged into political suicide as if he were ambitious to make the name of Tyler respected. The Freedmen's Bureau bill was but the pretext, not the cause, for his sweeping deliverance in behalf of traitors. True, he objects to the bill because of various details. He pronounces it an undue tax upon the people, but like a third-rate pettifogger he withholds the important fact that the main purpose of the bill was to make the freedmen's labor remunerative to themselves and to the government. He declaims against pensioning them upon the bounty of the country, but omits to say that it extends equal aid to the poor whites who have been stricken in the dust by treason's war. He elaborates the dangerous power it confers, as if he confessed his unfitness to exercise it, inasmuch that the patronage by the bill became his own to wield wisely or unwisely as he might see proper. He protests against the exercise of the military power contemplated by the enactment, as if forgetful that he now holds the rebel States under martial law, and that he could so exercise the authority conferred as to free it from all the rigors of military government. He denounces it as unconstitutional, as if oblivious of the fact that he recommended it himself less than three months ago, and that the amendment to the constitution abolishing slavery provides that Congress shall make all needful rules and regulations to carry the amendment into effect. All these pretended arguments, however plausibly woven, are for the simple and weak--he has another and evidently a more sincere argument for those who know well his meaning.

President Johnson vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau bill because the Traitors demanded it. This is the simple, unvarnished truth, and the whole truth, and the Nation must look it in the face. The writer hereof was his sincere and earnest friend in the Convention that nominated him for the Vice Presidency. We felt that if any man could be trusted it was Andrew Johnson--the man who had braved treason in the Senate, himself a Southern Senator, and who had been hunted like a stag with a price on his head by every traitor in Tennessee, and had stood unscathed in the terrible struggle. But the sequel shows how sadly were the loyal men mistaken, and in deepest sorrow, but never in anger or disappointment, we have been compelled to complain of his fidelity and fitness for the responsible trust to which he was chosen. We lamented his bitter, revengeful hate of conquered traitors immediately after his succession to the Presidency, as was manifested in his daily speeches to every individual or delegation that would afford him the opportunity, and trembled for the redeemed Republic lest a mad ruler should blot it out in blood; and next we see the traitor, whose life and property and citizenship he seemed to seek with relentless vengeance, sweeping off his pardons, gradually becoming his trembling counselor, next his friend, and then his master; and at last the same men who inaugurated causeless war and ridged our whole fair land with the graves of our martyrs, become the only people for whom he pleads or whose interests he would promote. He distinctly announces in his veto message, that there can be no legislation affecting the rebel States, until they have full representation and participate in the enactment of such laws, and this is the whole sum and substance of his veto. The treason he once denounced as the highest of crimes, must suffer no penalties, must not even be humiliated by protection to the victims of brutal slavery, until they themselves shall be in Congress to be the judges of their own crimes. They must determine what shall be the fruits of the war. They must come into our Senate and Congress, dripping with the blood of our brave brethren murdered by their unholy ambition to overthrow the best government of the world, and in the very temple of our rescued liberties, surrounded by the hallowed graves of our fallen heroes, and where their legislation must reach a million homes bereaved by treason's swift-winged angel of death--there they are to be clothed with honors and the vanquished become the victors in expounding the teachings of the sword. This is the President's only argument, and it is not misunderstood. His special pleading in the shape of objections to the details of the bill might have caused regret among the Union men of the country, but when he demanded the highest honors of the Nation for the treason he but a few months ago declared "must be made infamous," and would crown it with the laurels of victory, while the slave, ignorant, brutalized and rendered helpless by the exactions of bondage, is turned loose upon the mercy of those who most hate him because he was faithful to the government while his master was faithless, he invites for himself a depth of infamy in our crimsoned history in which none but himself can be his parallel.

A president has fallen, and the hoarse salutes of cannon and the blazing bonfires throughout the land, with the wild revelry of men who rejoiced at our country's disasters and mourned at its triumphs when in deadly strife with treason, proclaim that perfidy has won what neither the sword of the traitor nor the ballot of his natural ally could achieve; and wherever treason has a votary, there is gladness! But a people who have appalled the world with their sacrifices for Justice and Freedom are not thus to be crushed or driven into wrong. This rescued Nationality, a fidelity unshaken by treachery, and a future that gives cheering promise of all that is beneficient and great, are theirs; and, though brief authority may forsake virtue and worship at the altar of the country's foes, we shall not despair of the Republic! It will live in fulfillment of its great mission for mankind, when its cruel foes and faithless friends have passed into forgetfulness, or are remembered only to excite the scorn or pity of the happiest and noblest people of the world.

Congress decided on the 19th inst. by a vote of 82 to 58 that Gen. Coffroth was entitled to the seat as representative from the district as having the prima facia right, and he was sworn accordingly. He is, therefore, for the time-being the member, and Gen Koontz is required to go into a regular contest if he would gain the position to which his people fairly and legally elected him in October 1864. At best he cannot hope to get a final decision for several months to come, and even then, judging from the recent vote, it may be doubtful whether justice will be done to him and the loyal people who elected him.

We have heretofore so fully discussed the law and the facts of this case that we do not care to renew it now. It is enough to know that, judged either by law or equity, Gen. Coffroth had no more right to a seat in the present Congress than we have, and the action of the House is but paying a premium for unscrupulous politicians to defy the laws of the State, and corrupt election officers to disregard the vote of the people. Gen. Coffroth has not a shadow of claim for the seat that is not based upon his own deliberate fraud upon the people of his district. No intelligent member of the House could fail to see that Gen. Koontz received a majority of the aggregate vote, and was deprived of the certificate that would have secured him the seat, for the simple reason that Gen. Coffroth and his friends, who controlled the election boards, by an insolence defiance of the law and the vote, and by perjury, refused to give it to him. If Congressmen can read English, they could see it declared so plainly that no average fool could err about it, that return judges in this State are positively required to compute the whole vote returned, to reject no part thereof, and to certify in accordance with the vote. This the copperhead return judges refused to do. They deliberately nullified the law they were sworn to support, and a Republican Congress has sanctioned the fraud.

It may do for such men as Gen. Coffroth, who never had much reputation to lose, to say that he is entitled to profit by his own fraud; but there can be no technical connivance equal to the task of justifying the Union Congressmen who have voted to sustain a bold whole-cloth fraud upon their Union brethren in this district. All the Union members from Pennsylvania, who may be presumed to know something of the laws which govern our elections, voted solid to vindicate justice; but the Republicans of the West seem to have determined that neither law nor justice should prevail in the determination of this case. The truth is that a portion of them had basely bartered the seat involved in this contest for Coffroth's vote on the constitutional amendment last year, and they have acted as was denominated in the bond. We affirm that this is the only explanation that can be given for the vote consistent with truth, and Mr. Ashley, of Ohio, could probably give the particulars. Disgraceful as was the original contract, its fulfillment is rendered doubly so by the blatant disloyalty of Gen. Coffroth, when struggling to regain his party standing at home after he had cast the vote demanded of him.

By the admission of Gen. Coffroth, what the law of Pennsylvania declares to be perjury and fraud, and what the people of the district condemned last fall by an overwhelming majority, is clothed with respectability; an earnest, faithful and loyal man, who was fairly elected, is turned out, and a violent disloyalist, too weak even to transfer himself securely by contract to the right side, will misrepresent the people of this district during most, or perhaps all the period of the present session. Well, since things can't be otherwise, they must be as they are; but the next time that Congress agrees in advance to approve a fraud to promote a fool, they should give those who are to be cheated timely notice to get out of the way!