Valley Spirit

"Mr. Wm. Wales, Sir we your subscribers intend to give you the Opinion of thousans of your Supporters, Sir when we look at the Criminal records of our country, we are led to believe that our country be over-run with murderers and theives, which is all committed by Dutch and Irish and yet emigration must be tolerated by the presses in general now Sir if you wish to save your Union Subscribers you must give attention to this Grand Subject. this is sent to you as a warning, Sir look at the death of our lamented president Murdered by duch & Irish and nine murders out of tin in the cuntry is committed by the ofscourings of Ireland and Germany, and yet they can come with out the Smallest restrictions yours Secretary of the Meeting."

In the midst of the war there was considerable boasting on the part off some of our neighboring States, as to what they had done and how they were excelling their sister Commonwealth, in supporting the National authorities, and as a consequence, how magnificently prominent in the history and admiration of the people of the world, the authorities and the citizens of such States would appear. In the meantime, Pennsylvania worked on steadily and, as it were, silently. Like a Conestoga wheel horse, she tugged at the load on the Nation carrying it onward to its destiny, satisfied to wait for her reward when the work was done and the end reached. The record is now open, and all the facts are spread before the country for its judgment and consideration, and in order to call public attention to the mattermore than it has yet been, we repeat in a censpicuous form the statistics emanating from the Convention of State Adjutant Generals, which met in Boston, on Thursday last:

The whole number of troops raised in New England, 366,946, thus exceeds the aggregate of Pennsylvania 6,945. According to the United States Census of 1860, the number of white mailes between the ages of 18 and 45 years in these States was as follows:

The fact elicited by these figures is a glorious one for the people of the Keystone State. It thus sets forth in a manner which cannot be controverted, that Pennsylvania has furnished troops in a larger proportion than any of the Eastern States, if we may except Rhode Island. Massachusetts is the only State which has sent three-fourths of her arms-bearing population. Pennsylva- far exceeds this ratio, and Rhode Island is the only State which can take position with the Keystone in the achievement of the same results. Kansas, if she has not increased her population since 1860, must have sent into the field her entire adult inhabitants. But it is well remembered that just previous to the war, the emigration to Kansas was immense, hundreds of the citizens of Pennsylvania having settled in that far distant State.

In alluding to these facts it must be remembered that the figures given above do not include the colored troops, of whom Pennsylvania furnished a large number, while they do include the Massachusetts colored troops, and most likely also those of Kansas. Pennsylvania contributed largely to the colored organizations of Massachusetts. Recruiting officers for Massachusetts colored regiments carried a large number of men from this city, so that even in her colored troops, if justice be done in the calculation, Pennsyvania exceeds the States enumerated above. In addition to these facts, if we could add to our total all the colored troops raised in Pennsyvania by the United States officials, as well as the white and black men raised here for New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Masachusetts regiments, our State would astonish every one by her aggregate. But, taking the figures as they stand, we think they may challenge the attention of all, as shwing the immense strength of this noble old Commonwealth. Pennsylvania has patiently bided her time for justice, and now when white-winged peace folds her her pinions over the land, and prosperity promises to bless the inhabitants thereof, justice and honor and glory attend on the glorious old Keystone State. She has faithfully discharged her duty and the figures prove it. What more could she ask?

In New York some of the Provost Marshals are being hauled over the coals for swindling, damages, false imprisonment, assault and battery, &c. The secret history of the Draft reign is being brought to light and it appears that anybody was drafted who was supposed able to pay; and some who refused to do so were not only kicked and beaten but imprisoned in addition. --When the secret history of the same "powers that were" in Pennsyvania comes to be written, it will be found equally rascally. --The war paid the "loyal," and when it did not legally they made it do so anyhow. It is no wonder they were so anxious to have it go on.

So detestable have these illegal organizations become, that it is the duty of the public press to give voice to their almost universal condemnation. By our clear recognition of this duty, and our appreciation of the grave importance of the subject, we have been led to recar to it again and again. --We believe that in denouncing the dangerous innovation, which owes its inauguration and certainly its prolonged existence to Secretary Stanton, no patriotic public speaker or writer can be too emphatic. We have reason to believe that the people will not grow weary of the discussion, however frequent may be its renewal. They feel the evil more deply than officials at Washington seem to imagine.

This public feeling has arisen not so much from any particular action of these "Commissions," as from the far more important consideration of their entire unlawfulness. When, therefore, by common consent, the people condemn, as without authority of law, the action of their public servants, its continuance is tyranny or despotism. Under our system of government there can be no legitimate proceedings on the part of officers of any of its departments which find their authority elsewhere than in the Constitution or the laws enacted in obedience to or in conformity with its provisions.

"Military Commissions" are justly detested and condemned as the despotic exercise of power, without authority or sanction of the Constitution or the laws which it justifies. The Government of the United States is a political organization deriving its powers from the people. It is a representatvie system, by which the citizens have their political power present in every department or branch of the government. The representative department proper--the legislature--is the primary expression of this power. The executive department is what may be called its secondary expression. --The judicial is the third department, and further removed from the direct exercise of the sovereign will of the people; yet, the judiciary reflects this sovereign power, through the executive nomination to and the legislative confirmation of its constiutional functions. It has its accountability to the political power, by impeachment. --The Constitution of the United States is the foundation on which the powers of these departments rest. Neither can perform a single act which is not warranted by the terms of this organic power. It gives life to the system--without it, "the government" dies--and the system is changed, revolutionized, and becomes anarchy or despotism.

The executive branch of our form of government is the President. He is aided in the performance of his duties by his appointed officers, who are only sub-divisions of the executive authority. They have no independent authority. The legislature enables the executive to act, in conformity with the constitutional requirements obligatory upon the law-making and law-enforcing branches of the political system. The treasury departments are the instruments which the executive employs to perform the duties which the Constitution and Congress authorize. The War Department is as subject to law as the Postoffice Department in our system of government. A mail route is created by law, and a fort, or a regiment, or an army, has no other existense. The War Department is organized, as is the postal service, to aid in the execution of the law, and it has no duty to perform which Congress and the Constitution do not create or enjoin. True, the War Department is more active when the power of executing the law is opposed by insurrection, rebellion or invasion; but this condition of public affairs gives it no power which is not conferred by the Constitution or Congress. --The Postoffice Department, opposed or impeded in its service, can claim no authority to act in such cases, unless the law provides such authority, nor would such a claim be tolerated. War is the exceptional condition of public affairs. It is that relation between systems of government, which, leaving the civil laws of each for the conduct of each, invokes a special law for the decision of issues made by the political policy of either or both. A rebellion, or civil war, neither creates nor destroys rights or powers in our political system. It gains no political power until it ends, and then only by the success which attends it. The civil war, now ended with the South, gave, during its existence, no power to the Executive or Congress, which the Constitution did not confer. If it did, then the easiest mode of amending the Constiution is to create a civil war. But this mode of amendment is ignored by a plan determined and defined by the Constitution itself. Hence if the War Department as an agent of executive power, finds no authority in times of peace for the extraordinary or implied powers, and the Constiution does not authorize such action in times of civil war, by direct grant, then any attempt so to act without law is an odious exercise of illegal power. As well might the Postoffice Department create a "Commission" to try persons and questions in times of civil war because the mail service is interfered with in rebellious States or portions of States. It has the same right to do this as any other branch of the executive authority--the same right, no less, no more, than the War Department, to set itself above the Constituion and Congress. War between nations, or governments, invokes a sytem of military law which does not exist in rebellions or civil war between citizens or subjects of the same government. A rebellion is an armed resistance to the government by people subject to it. The execution of the laws is defied, and the Executive calls on the War Department for those duties in the emergency with which it is charged by the Constituion and laws. Its powers are not enlarged, therefore, but those it possesses are brought into action. To perform consitutional duties does not by implication authorize the exercise of power which the Constitution does not warrant. To justify despotism it would only be necessary for the Executive to declare the existence of the rebellion, and to praclaim martial law. In such a case "Military Commissions," would usurp the functions of Congress and the judiciary at the will of the War Secretary. Then the Postoffice Department would convene its "Commissions," and why not the Treasury Department also? Where then would the consitutional powers, and the laws, and the rights of the people be found? Where the sovereign power of the ballot box, with its corrective appellate jurisdiction? Anarchy and despotism would be the normal conditon of the country. The will of the Executive would be the governing principle, and the people would be subjugated or in continual revolutionary struggle for the recovery of their liberties.

To prevent, to forbid such a state of public affairs our fathers made the Constitution for the people, and for the administration of their system of government. It is alike sufficient for civil war and for times of peace. It decrees that certain rights are not to be denied to the citizen. Trial by jury is one of those rights. If it were only meant to apply to times of peace, it was not necessary to decree it, for then the right is not endangered. It was for all times and all circumstances, "except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger." It could not have been intended by our fathers, that this right of their descendants, so solemnly decreed, should be held by a tenure so insecure that a few men, more or less, in Maine or Louisiana, might, by a civil commotion, called a rebellion by the War Department, be denied to every man in all the other States. This is the mere shallow pretext of tyranny; its absurdity is apparent. These "Military Commissions" exist in places where the rebellion never reached; where every civil court was open and without obstruction exercising its proper functions. That there is no authority for them is shown by the fact that the Constitution does not contemplate their existence, and that by them rights are destroyed which the Constitution decrees shall be indestructible.

If the War Department can set at defiance the rights of citizens, and refuse obedience to the Constitution, it has become more powerful than the organic basis of our sytem of government. If it be more powerful, it is so by force. If by force the Constitution is defied succes fully, it is destroyed, and this is revolution. If our system of government be so changed that its agents can revolutionize and destroy it at will; if this gigantic evil has grown out of the suppression of the rebellion, then indeed is the remedy worse than the disease.

We cannot permit ourselves to abandon the hope than the people will yet drive from power those who are thus trifling with their rights and liberties. Secession, rebellion, "Military Commissions," and the thousand other "chimerasdire" which have been witnessed in our land during the past four years, will, as we are sure, prepare the hearts of all who love this country to look with patriotic hope for the advent of the day when the principles of the Constitution, and liberty, secured by law, will again have effective life, restored by the re-establishment of the Democratic party in the administration of the Federal Government.

The bearing of the southern people under their defeat and the immense loss of property involved in the emancipation of their slaves is more generous, manly and self-respecting than we had any reason to expect. From the Potomac to the Rio Grande, there is not a single guerrilla band, nor any demonstration of resistance to the federal authority. The influential statesmen of the South, and their trusted military leaders, are disposed, to a man, to acquiesce in reunion and make the best of the situation. General Lee, whom the southern people almost revere, is an open applicant for pardon and lends his weighty example to a sincere and faithful submission to the laws. General Johnston, who stood next to Lee in southern consideration, has publicly given as rational advice to his fellow citizens as could have been dictated by the stanchest friends of the Union. Mr. Boyce, of South Carolina, Gov. Brown, of Georgia, and other southern statesmen of equal distinction have made addresses counseling acquiescence in the abolition of slavery, and fealty to the federal government. The southern newspapers are almost universally conducted in the same admirable and manly spirit. There is no contumacious sullenness, no captious refining on the Constituion, no refractory assertion of State sovereignty, no harsh criticism of the policy of President Johnson, none of the haughty tone of self-assertion once so characteristic of southern public men. And yet there is nothing servile or craven in the general tone of acquiescence and submission. It is the simplest manifestation of good sense and manly feeling, which accepts the inevitable without womanish petulance, and seeks, in a straight forward manner, to adapt itself to the actual situation.

As Americans, the South has given us no reason to be ashamed of our countrymen. --They made, to be sure, a terrible mistake in going into this contest; but once in, they bore themselves with a resolution, gallantry, persistence, and fidelity to each other, which did no discredit to their public spirit and soldierly qualities. The herculean and protracted exertions we were compelled to make to subdue them attest their vigor and valor; and, after so tough a contest, we cannot deny them the posession of great qualities without humiliating self-disparagement. --But the frankness of their submission, when they saw they were beaten, is as conspicuous a proof of magnanimity as the chivalric determination with which they fought against superior odds. It adds to our sense of national strength that, in future wars with foreign powers, we shall have the support of men who understand so well the duties of soldiers and citizens.

Considering their present admirable bearing, ought we to treat them as friends or as enemies? When we separated from Great Britain, we proclaimed to the world, in the Declaration of Independence, that we should hold the Britons, like other foreign peoples, "enemies in war, in peace friends." Shall we treat our own repentant brethren with less malignity than foreign nations practice toward each other? Why should our newspapers teem with calumnies on their character? When they so frankly accept the new order of things and the mighty revolution in their social system, what sense, what malignity, what decency even, is there in subjecting them to needles humiliation and indignities? Nobody fears a new rebellion; nobody believes that the frank submission of the South is feigned; and it is unworthy the character of a great nation to practice a mean, suspicious, and irritating surveilance over a proud and spirited community, who bear themselves with such sense and self-command under one of the greatest trials through which any people was ever called to pass.

For the last two or three years it has been the habit of the Jacobin [unclear] equality editors and spouters to [unclear] make it appear that the soldiers of our armies were very hostile to Democrats and democratic principles. "Wait till the soldiers come home," was a kind of unlawful threat that shoddyites and plunderers were constantly holding up before Democrats, intimating by this menace that the soldiers, after their discharge, wer to become cut-throats and assassins, and that their victims were to be prominent Democrats.

The leading Jacobins, who are as cowardly as they are dishonest, would rejoice could they induce the discharged soldiers to become incendiaries and outlaws. Such conduct on the part of our discharged sodiers, we repeat, would have been very acceptible to the negro-equality-stay-at-home patriots.

Well, the soldiers are at last coming home: thousands of them are already here. We have conversed with scores of them and on several occasions had our sanctum filled with them. Many who served with Sherman, and many who served with Grant, in many hard-fought battles, are here, some minus an arm or a leg, but all joyous because of the end of the war, and because once more they are permitted to enjoy the society of the loved ones at home, and to feel that they have no foe to contend with. Do they come home, filled with bitterness and ready to menace Democrats, as the shoddyites hoped? No, no. They talk like men of sense, are liberal in their views and patriotic in their sentiments. To a man they are opposed to negro-equality; opposed to negroes voting: opposed to "loyal thieves," and opposed to those heartless rascals who remained at home to fill contracts and pile up magnificent fortunes at the expense of the soldier and the Government. --These are the men, these the measures the soldiers are hostile to: and mark it, they will let their resentment be felt at the proper time and in the proper way. Hereafter they will vote as freemen and as they please. Many of them remarked to us "we are now out of the army, with no one to threaten us with punishment if we refuse to vote the ticket furnished us; hereafter we vote according to our own judgment." That's the way they talk, and, they are in earnest. --Hundreds, thousands, aye, tens of thousands, who left home three or four years ago, rampant Abolitionists, return cured. --They have seen enough of abolitionism; enough of the doings of the leading men of that traitorous organization. One man who had been a leading Aboltionist in his township, and who has been in the army for more than three years, told us that he was fully convinced that the sudden manner in which the slaves were set at liberty was a terrible calamity to them. He had witnessed the suffering that had followed, and was horrified. Gradual emancipation, he said, might have worked well, but freeing four millions of slaves and turning them lose at once, thousands of them to perish, was a wickedness that no man with a heart in his bosom could endorse. --Those were the views of a man of sense--the views of a man who entered the army a bigoted Abolitonist, and who returns home a full believer in the principles of the Democratic party. Hereafter he will act with and vote with us.

"Wait till the soldiers come home." --Well, we have waited patiently, and right glad are we to see the soldiers and hear them talk. They are with the Democrats, and the only men against whom we hear them hurl their curses are the "loyal thieves" and the negro-equality advocates. Thank, God, the soldiers are again freemen, and cannot be approached by a hireling of the Government, or instructed how to vote.

"The rebels of the South, in all they have done and said since fighting ceased, have failed to give evidence of fitness for the resumption of civil rights. It has been made manifest that the people of the Southern States who were lately in open war against the government, are still under the full influence of the spirit that animated them during the four years of bloody war. To restore to such a people, under thesee circumstances, the State Governments, and admit their representatives to seats in Congress would be to re-establish the state of things that precipitated the war for the destruction of the National Government. Recent events have made this perfectly clear."

It is not quite apparent what the rebels have done since fighting ceased. It would seem more dignified, and certainly much less like anxiety to accomplish a partisan political end, if such writers would wait a decent length of time, at least until something blameworthy has been done, before demning a race of people. It is generally supposed hereabouts that the people of the south are exhibiting a very commendable spirit, and behaving remarkably well under the circumstances. But it is sadly probable that we have politicians who design and desire to keep the country in trouble, and to make dissension the normal and unchangeable condition of things. In time of peace and calm, demagogues sink out of sight more easily than in times of excitement. --Hence their desire to keep the war alive.

Messrs. Editors

Never was there a more deluded party than the advocates of negro suffrage. They are seeking power through an inordinate disgusting display, of love for the "Freedman," as they now call the negro. With him as a voter they feel safe. The power and spoils of the government will remain in their hands, hence as true loyal men they desire negro suffrage. This, and this only constitutes the full measure of their love for the poor "Freed man." They want to use his ignorance, and stupidity to bolster up their cupidity. Convince them, that negro suffrage would throw political power against them; from Sumner down to the lowest scribbler in the party, who would not oppose the measure with all the power he could command? The leaders of the party are not, strictly, negro worshippers. --He may be the idol of their hopes, but he is not the God of their love. They bow the knee to a far different influence. Under an enfranchised negro system, they hope to utterly prostrate the democratic party, and reap a rich harvest of power and spoils. --This is the only spur to their vaunting philanthropy, and every kick aims at the vitality of the Democracy.

They rave and howl about what they call the ignorance of the democratic masses, and yet, seek to enfranchise an inferior, ignorant, mass of negroes, over whose degradation they shed floods of tears but a few months ago. What a beautiful ebony veiled junto these abolitionists are. C.

WASHINGTON, JULY 22

The country will be gratified to learn that Capt. Henry Wirz, lately prison keeper at Andersonville, is shortly to be put upon his trial for the cruelty and barbarity practiced by him upon our prisoners confined at that place. The Military Commission sitting in this city, of which Brig. Gen. A. B. Underwood is President, and Col. N.P. Chipman, of the War Department, Judge Advocate, has been directed to try the case.

The charges embrace a list of atrocities that are little short of fiendish, and will arouse the indignation of the civilized world. The Government is now engaged in the collection of testimony preparatory to the trial. Let the soldiers who have survived their imprisonment at this prison put Col. Chipman in possession of any essential facts.