Reconstruction: Voices from America's First Great Struggle for Racial Equality (LOA #303) (The Library of America) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2018-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

“A hunted seeker of the Truth,

Oppressed for conscience sake.”

Possibly, Mr. Editor, your graciousness to recalcitrant Confederates, would be somewhat modified if you lived, as I do, within the theater of their operations. The law of safe distances frequently molds our judgments in regard to men and their acts. Men often bear the misfortunes of their neighbors with great equanimity, and are ready most graciously to forgive wrongs to which they cannot be personally subjected. Thus the philosopher Seneca, seated in his magnificent villa, surrounded by symbols of opulence, wrote upon tablets of gold, his famous “Essay on the Beauties and Advantages of Poverty.” You reason, Mr. Editor, upon the Ku-Klux in the abstract, while I view them as living realities, who show no mercy and, therefore, deserve none.

You are also mistaken in your statement that I made an “allusion to Gen. Farnsworth as a sympathizer with the Rebellion.” On the contrary, I spoke of him as “a man whom I have been taught long to regard as one of those who are unflinching in their devotion to the cause of liberty and the preservation and maintenance of this great Government.” I know Gen. Farnsworth as a Republican too well, and appreciate his services to the country and to my own race too highly, to cast the aspersion of “sympathizing with the Rebellion” upon him; nor do I believe that he so understood me. When, however, he presented an argument in favor of the bill then under discussion, drawing a parallel between the former master now disfranchised, and the former slave now enfranchised, I stated that he sympathized with the first in his present disfranchisement. In this, I differed from him, for I deem it safer for this Republican to intrust the ballot to ignorant loyalty rather than to cultivated treason. I am, Sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

ROBERT B. ELLIOTT.

Washington, D. C., March 17, 1871.

New-York Tribune, March 21, 1871

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