And for the erasure of sectionalism, God be thanked! but that a man of Mr. Clark Howell’s preëminent ability should have wandered around so near to the object of his search, the cause of the Republican party’s defeat, and not found it, is astonishing. In his own home, the State of Georgia, the Empire State of the South, and as editor of the leading paper in the State, that he should be so oblivious to the fact that the election, by the votes of the people, was a protest upon the part of the people against the assumption by the rich, that such a thing as “caste” could be possible in America.
Georgia, of all the Southern States, is preëminently industrial. Oglethorpe, when he first settled on the banks of the Savannah river, was himself surrounded by the poor debtors of England. The Salzburgers, who sought the shores of the uninhabited, uncivilized, new colony, were poor, uncultured people. Georgia never possessed, as a colony or as a State, the aristocratic tendencies of its neighbor, South Carolina. The foremost men have ever been essentially of the people; her settlers largely of the Democratic masses; the names preëminent in her history are the names of industrial New England. So Democratic is and was the State of Georgia, that her most eminent son, Alexander H. Stevens, had to be weaned away reluctantly from the doctrine of which Abraham Lincoln was the personification. Since the war, the State of Georgia more readily adapted herself to the new condition created by the result of the struggle. It was never a State of tremendous landed proprietors. The influx of emigration from the crowded Northern States found readier assimilation in the State of Georgia than in any other Southern State. In that State, the negro sooner realized his responsibilities as a citizen of the South, sooner became convinced that his best and wisest course was to merge himself into the large class of toilers and laborers in the commonwealth. That a man with the opportunity, ability, and brilliancy of Clark Howell, should become so utterly befogged by the mists arising from the marsh of old party cries and principles, should fail to recognize that the tremendous majority accorded the Democratic candidate, was but an exhibition of that spirit which has pervaded the State of Georgia from its embryonic existence on the Savannah river; that Mr. Howell should have forgotten the lesson taught by the forefathers of the Georgians of to-day, that Democracy was one of the essential elements to the happiness of the citizens, settlement, colony, commonwealth, and State, is passing strange. The very negro, upon becoming a Georgian and a citizen, became a Democrat, almost as a matter resulting from the atmosphere he breathed. Georgia’s vast majority for the Democratic nominee was not rolled up except by the aid of the negro, who, in his heart of hearts, is a Democrat, and the appeals of the Republican party to his gratitude, claiming that they were the emancipators of his race, were as futile as was the waving of the bloody shirt in the face of the veterans of the North. The negroes of the State of Georgia joined with their fellow-laborers of the Anglo-Saxon race, to give added weight to the opposition of the masses against “caste” in our country.