NAWSA SUBJECT FILE Pillsburg, Parker 1867 THE "PARTY OF PROGRESS." Letter to a Radical Member of Congress MY DEAR SIR: Your favor is at hand. It must be only undue loyalty and fidelity to your party, when you speak of it as "both a generous and progressive party." Deeper down in the strata of conscience and the soul, you cannot I think so regard it. To go no farther back than the Chicago Platform, its record warrants no such estimate of it. The widest and most important plank in that platform is rotted out before the Inauguration of the President. And then the Inaugural Address, spoken as it specially was to insurgents and rebels, already bristling in arms, was to me monstrous and diabolical. What did you yourself think of the words "Express and Irrevocable" in it, when spoken of Slavery, its guarantees and perpetuity? But rebellion and treason would not be appeased, and so on swept the war. Interference with Gen. Fremont in Missouri, over whose Proclamation all the loyalty in the land exulted, added at least three years and three hundred thousand lives to the slaughter. Dallying with Gen. McClellan cost more than ninety thousand unnecessary deaths. And the best men of the war too they were; the first to leap to arms. Not the drafted, the conscripts, the bribed with high bounties, the substitutes, the deserters; not the blood or the corpses of these made or mingled with the mud of Chickahominy. The war, (into which we mustered more than two millions and six hundred thousand men) changing (not ending) by the capitulation of Lee and Johnson, then came attempted restoration of the broken Union and Government. President Lincoln's speech on Reconstruction, the last I think he ever made, showed how little he comprehended, still less commanded the situation; or understood the Mystery of the War. Senator Sumner, by strategy, checkmated his policy in the Senate, and so for that time the country was saved. But alas for Mr. Lincoln! he was not saved. At his Inauguration, Andrew Johnson favored suffrage for two classes of colored men. So he told Senator Sumner. Later in the year, he assured Maj. Stearns, of Boston, that were he in Tennessee, he would favor extending it to three classes,-the soldiers of the late war, the schooled, and the owners of real estate. The New York Herald proposed to add a fourth class,- the members in regular standing of Christian Churches. Just then, Massachusetts held her State Convention, in Worcester, to nominate the successor of Gov. Andrew. Mr. Sumner presided, and on National Affairs a resolution was adopted declaring that "Massachusetts has no theory of suffrage to propose." To propose to whom? To whom but the rebel States? The President had a theory. Parson Brownlow had a theory. The New York Herald had a theory. Connecticut soon after acted directly on the question of colored suffrage; and as if taking the key note from Massachusetts, by a majority of more than six thousand, (tell it not in Richmond, publish it not in the streets of New Orleans!) by a majority of more than six thousand, she declared that not even one of President Johnson's classes, the spared remnants of her brave colored regiments, should have a vote in a government that 2 so many of their brethren had died to defend! Could dastard meanness farther go? It was a Republican majority, remember, that did it. No "copperhead" (I never call men copperheads) work was this. Against the Democratic party, united Republicanism at that time would have been invincible. New York has just shamelessly shirked the issue for the present, in her Constitutional Convention. Ohio, the home of Giddings, of Ben. Wade, Samuel Lewis and Salmon P. Chase, goes remorselessly with Connecticut; only by a far more stunning majority. All last winter, the Thirty-ninth Congress dragged its slow length along, at vast expense, but to little purpose. The session opened with what proved only great swelling words of vanity. Old Thad. Stevens had said the year before, that the Dred Scott decision with its doctrine of a white man's government, "had damned the soul of its author to everlasting fame, and he feared to everlasting fire!!" Sumner also smote the Senate with a two days tornado of eloquence, in a single speech, on the same general subject. And yet both those Ajaxes in the cause of the black man's rights, scarcely more than a month afterwards, advocated and voted for a change in the Federal Constitution, giving the rebel States the right to disfranchise all their colored citizens, and even to enslave any of them for life, as a penalty for crime, provided they would not count them in their basis of representation in Congress, so as to give themselves a power in the Government not shared alike with the North. And they baptized that change in the Constitution by the good name of "Amendment!" Unamended, it disfranchised nobody. On the contrary, at the time, and on the question of its adoption, colored men voted in nearly every State, north and south. Now, the majority can disfranchise the minority in any State, without regard to color or race, only by counting them out of the basis of representation. Such is the present Constitution, "amended" under the directed of Messrs. Sumner, Stevens, and a so-called "radical" Congress and party. The session last winter was exhausted in farther attempts at Reconstruction, including some windy threats of impeaching the President. At the preceding fall elections the most radical wing of Congress had been strengthened and sustained, even the threatened impeachment evidently finding favor with the people; and Ben. Butler as its champion, was the most popular man. But nothing was effected up to the 20th of December, when an adjournment was carried to the 5th of January. Such gigantic labors in three weeks required, so both houses judged, almost three other weeks for holidays. At nearly the eleventh hour of the session, the military reconstruction bill, with many pangs, veto and others, was brought forth and made a law. Congress itself, however, so far disapproved its own work on second sight, as to make farther explanatory enactments, which also passed the veto ordeal. Assured now that its work was done, and well done, as some said, "could be warranted well done," and the nation saved, it again adjourned, to bask with its constituencies in the Paradise Regained. But the Attorney General, bad as another Beelzebub, invaded their Eden. His interpretation of the Reconstruction Acts brought death again into the new world of hope, and with it all imaginary woes. And so in July heat, with cholera impending, Congress reluctantly scampered back to Washington to drive out the serpent, and re-enforce the gates with other guardian angels and more double flaming swords. The President kindly consented, (so the papers said) at the earnest request of Congress, cholera threatening, to have the veto making, like the cover to a box, while they made the law. And the whole was to be done by a given, and that no distant hour. The President was tardy, but so was the cholera, and the whole business 3 was dispatched without tolling of one funeral knell; and the country was now saved beyond all need of insurance policies. Congress again breathed freely, and once more adjourned. But other plagues were in store. New vials were to be uncorked. Scarcely had the last Senator left the Capital, before Secretary Stanton was hurled headlong after him, spite of all tenure, or other bills to the contrary. Sheridan and Sickles soon followed; Gen. Grant lending himself pliantly to the work, the willing lacquey of the President. Clerks in lower stations were marched off by platoons, and all that remain are held by a new and special edict, to observe all the Presidential requirements. And to-day we are confidently assured from Mr. Johnson's own mouth, that before the assembling of Congress he "will make an entire change in his Cabinet." Whether it shall be so or not, the President is master of the situation. And so the South is victorious. Can you wonder then at the defiant thunders of Kentucky? Is it a mystery that Montana, Colorado, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Maine are deserting a banner that conducts them only to nothing, or to far worse? Nor, it seems to me, can you comfort yourself that there are no real Democratic gains. It may be so, Republicans, and many of your new Democratic allies, staid away from the polls in disappointment and disgust. I speak what I know of many places.— Neither is there consolation for you that there were great Democratic successes years ago, from which your party soon after leaped to new victories. For at that time the cowardice and corruption of Republican leaders and office holders, were not revealed as now. But at last the people are waking and wondering as never before. Cheerfully and loyally they trusted their leaders and lawmakers last year, and re-elected the most radical of them, wherever Congressional elections occurred. Now, in the face of all that has been done and not done in the Thirty-ninth Congress, and in the Fortieth so far, Republicans are asking, to what purpose is all our devotion to party? And who does not ask to what purpose? Professions and promises, threats, brag and bluster have had their day. I tell you my friend, the people have been deceived too long. You say the Financial question should now give us most concern. I quite agree with you as to its perilous importance; and all the more readily, seeing the sad work made and making of it hitherto, in the hands to which it is, and has been entrusted. Who knows to-day the actual extent of the nation's liabilities, in Federal, State, County, City and Town indebtedness? Is any other nation half so heavily taxed in the civilized world, as is this? And who doubts that the present Congress would assume and pay the rebel debt, as twenty years ago another did the debt of Texas? Let it be funded as was the debt of Texas, and offered to Congress for only a nominal price, and who would dare be bail that the present body would be more immaculate than was that in the case of Texas? Congress, we were told, bought the ten millions of Texas debts for rather more than nothing, and then voted to pay them of course.— The like might happen again. You speak of a "new party," when yours "shall have grown too wicked for longer endurance." It is so already. How dare its leaders ask honest men of any party for their longer support? There must be brazen faces, as well as "copper heads." And then the weakness, the cowardice, the imbecility of most of them are as hard to forgive as their wickedness. And so I long to see the party displaced by one immeasurably better. My hopes and wishes and almost all my friends, including every adult relative, remote and near, on the side of both father and mother, were long with it, and would have been to this moment, had it been found worthy. You have long known my estimate of the Democratic party. As Babylon was drunk on the blood of the 4 saints, so was that party on the sweat, the tears, the blood of slavery, until the wrath of Jehovah stove down its grim idol with its altars, let us hope, to be recovered no more. And the party itself seemed almost whelmed in the general cataclysm. Dismal indeed will be the day when the still greater infamy of the Republican party shall restore it again to power! an event now scarcely more to be dreaded than expected. O, no sir! the Republican party has proved itself neither "generous" nor "progressive." That it should have done so, was not more your desire than mine. But what generous or progressive deed has it ever done? Or what brave word spoken and maintained? From Mr. Lincoln's inauguration to his assassination, it was his boast that he never interfered with Slavery but by the sternest "Military Necessity." And this too was the pride and glory of his party. With a million of men under arms, or under the clods of many valleys, he wrote Horace Greeley that he "was not prosecuting the war to abolish slavery, but to save the Union;" and added, "If I can save the Union without emancipating any slave, I will save it so; or to save the Union, I would free a part or all of the slaves." But the slave was to be no party to the transaction. He had no rights which anybody was bound to respect. the army was not to be consulted. The President virtually said, "I will weld a million brave young men of the North into one thunderbolt and fling it against the rebellion, and if it go down before it, there shall not a hair on the head of slavery perish! The streets of New York and New England may be gloomy with mourning, but no rebel planter shall be despoiled of a single slave!" Call you this "generous" my friend? Or is such Republican "progression?" Generals Fremont, Hunter, Butler, Phelps, all liberated or armed slaves, or both, and would have used them in the Union cause. But all these were reprimanded, or relieved of command, or both; while Halleck and McClellan, who proved more than kings of terror to the enslaved, were each in turn called to Washington and placed at the head of the army. Have you forgotten this history? or will you call it "generous and progressive?" At last, when we had actually mustered into service almost two millions of men, and sacrificed more than two hundred thousand of them to save, not the slaves, but the nation, ourselves, our Government, our Union, our Union with Slaveholders, we spoke the word Freedom. Was there "generosity" in this, whereof to boast? And now, the crowning act of "generosity and progress," for which the party should, in your esteem, be perpetual, immortal, colored suffrage must be forced on the south where the colored people are of course more or less ignorant and degraded, which in Connecticut, Ohio, and perhaps New York, where nearly all are intelligent, and many highly cultivated, refined and wealthy, they are to be still robbed of that, to every white American citizen, more priceless boon, the Ballot; the badge and glory of Freedom? You will not deny that this is only to save the party. It has nothing in it of "generosity, or progression." Let me say, in one word, I now class both political parties, as parties, together. That both contain good men I know. And I long to see the new Phœnix that I hope is yet to rise in strength and honor from their ashes; bringing suffrage, citizenship, all civil, political, education, economical and religious rights and privileges; regardless alike of race, complexion, or sex. Faithfully and Fraternally Yours; even to differ, PARKER PILLSBURY. Concord, N. H., Oct. 20th, 1867 [*Pillsbury's Pamphlet*] [*1868?*] CAPITAL versus LABOR. BY PARKER PILLSBURY. (The following is from "THE REVOLUTION," a Workingmen and Women's paper.) "LARGEST STORE IN THE WORLD."—A New York exchange says of A. T. Stewart's new store: The building on Broadway and Tenth streets is of iron, covering two a half acres of ground, and is six stories in height, besides a high basement story and a sub-basement. Its rotunda and dome in the centre–rivalling those of the National Capitol at Washington–admit the sun's light by day to the whole of the immense building; and will be lighted at night by a similar arrangement of gas and electricity to that of the Washington rotunda. The iron columns surrounding the rotunda, painted white as marble, are ornamented almost equal to the famous bronze doors of the House of Representatives. In the upper stories, already one thousand females are employed in the manufacture of the numerous articles of the toilet sold below. When completed, the building will contain some three thousand employees, including the salesmen. The Cathedral in Dublin is also a huge pile, but it is surrounded by myriads of human habitations glued together by filth, squalor and wretchedness, as though that vast excrescence had sapped up into itself all the vitality, energy and life blood of multitudes to construct itself. For a quarter of a mile in every direction, though the dens are almost as thick as cells in a honey-comb, there is scarcely one in which a well fed, well conditioned person would be willing to dine, or could dine with any appetite. To rear that ancient and immense structure exhausted the lives of thousands of miserable men. To support it from generation to generation requires the toil of many other thousands. And yet, what earthly, mortal use it is or ever was to humanity, or what true honor to Him who dwelleth not in temples made with hands, it would be hard to say. Had the millions on millions of money it has cost been expended in comfortable homes for Ireland's starving poor, no such multitudes as now would not have where to lay their heads! For it and its platoons of well paid priests, thousands and thousands of God's children, houseless, homeless, hungry and wretched, toil unpitied, uncared for, from generation to generation. The most merciless aristocracy on earth is a priesthood that thus binds in adamantine chains the weak, the poor, the ignorant, under the pious pretence that in all this poverty and misery, they are pleasing God, performing to him most acceptable worship, and preparing themselves for heaven. And akin to it is that aristocracy of wealth, that high priesthood of Mammon to which A. T. Stewart, the proprietor of "the largest store in the world," pre-eminently belongs. "Merchant prince" he is sometimes called. And why not? For are there not "princes of darkness" in the divine (or devil's) economy, as well as loftier nobility? Jesus recognized a "prince of devils," why should not we? Moloch and Mammon have long been known among the deities, both demanding human sacrifices, both drinking human blood, the ancient (heathen we call it), directly, dispatching his victims at once and ending their miseries; the modern, the christian, by slow degrees,, by lingering tortures and torments, but no less sure at last. O, if the working millions did but comprehend how many of them and their 2 families must drudge and toil life after life to create one Stewart and his world of wealth, they would loathe and dread his very presence. They would overwhelm him with their execrations. The ancients supposed the vampire to be a dead man returned from the other world, to wander over earth, doing no good, but only evil, sucking the blood of persons asleep till they died, but killing them also into vampires like themselves. To kill them, it was held that their bodies must be pierced with stakes cut from a green tree, their heads must be cut off and their hearts burned up with fire. This terrible superstition is almost a frightful reality in some of its ghastliest features applied to the "merchant princes," the archangels of Mammon in our time and country, had the people eyes to see and comprehend it. But they did not discern the horrors of the African slave trade and chattel slavery till light and lightning flashed down among them more than a hundred years. A traveller in a desert crept one night into a cave in the darkness and slept and rested till morning dawned in upon him. Its first rays revealed to him a monstrous serpent coiled up in a corner near him. Increasing light shewed other companionship not less deadly, or to be dreaded. Full daylight found him surrounded with reptile and every loathsome thing. How he sped is not told; but with heavenly interference and aid, our hugest dragon, chattel slavery is slain. And now we begin to see what other monsters not less deadly beset us on every hand. The people look with envious admiration at the untold and unknown wealth of A. T. Stewart. He is even approached with reverence, humility and awe on account of it. On account of it alone; for apart from his huge fortune, he would not measure favorably with many men in his employ. And this he himself knows full well. He is rearing that immense store in which it is said he employs already one thousand women, and when it is completed the number in all of women and men, will be swelled to three thousand! The population of a large town in that one building alone! Then he has another immense wholesale warehouse down town where he may employ at least half as many more. To which, let supernumeraries, household domestics, tenants and their families be added, and it perhaps would appear that this one mortal man has at least five thousand as immortal as himself, as good as himself, many of them more intelligent than himself, as completely in his power, to be retained or discharged, in youth or old age, in health or sickness, in plenty or poverty, as ever could have been a plantation of chattel slaves! True, he cannot offer them for sale to the highest bidder in front of the City Hall. But he and others have so adjusted the laws of capital and interest, that they all appear before his mighty temples of Mammon and offer themselves to him at such prices as he will pay. Live they must, at least they think they must, and they must abide the mandates which he and the like of him have made as to the conditions. And what are those conditions? The income of A. T. Stewart has been rated by some at two millions per annum. It may be more, it may be less. But it will not be unreasonable to place it at two millions. He may then be worth at a fair estimate twenty millions, for such estates in hands like his do not often yield a less profit than ten per cent. And if property be really only production from the earth and sea, one thing is certain: A. T. Stewart really produces none of his property; but we have come to a practical comprehension of the question "Who first taught souls enslaved, and realms undone, The enormous faith of many made for one?" And by how many is this one instance of vampirism supported? Do the five thousand in his immediate employ do it by their labor? In the first place most of them produce nothing more than their employer himself. Selling goods is not producing them. But were they all actual producers at the present prices of productive labor, the five thousand would go but little way towards paying the income of two millions a year. It is estimated, and no doubt very accurately, that the average income of ten thousand New England and New York farmers, beyond necessary expenses, is not above one million a year. So that it requires the use of twenty thousand average New England and New York farms, and the surplus earnings of the owners and all their families to pay the annual income of this one A. T. Stewart, who actually produces nothing whatever? 3 A few farmers become capitalists and their incomes also swell to immoderate size. Slavery parcelled land into plantations, some of them of thousands of acres. Gov. Aiken of South Carolina owned and appropriated the labor of a thousand laborers. A. T. Stewart appropriates the labor of many thousands, though he does not absolutely own them. It is computed that five thousand of the inhabitants of New York own a far greater amount of real and personal property than all the rest of the city together. It is also estimated that one hundred and fifty thousand of the wealthiest men in the United States own as much real and personal property as the whole of the remainder of the nation. Two and a half per cent of the whole people have as much wealth as the other ninety-seven and a half per cent. Does any one doubt that wealth rules the nation? We are called a democracy; a republic. And yet only two and half per cent of the population have really any power in the government whatever. Government professes to establish laws for the benefit of the whole nation; and yet the whole laboring, producing people are at the mercy of a vulgar fraction, the vulgarest kind of fraction of capitalists. And yet did they but know it, the remedy for this astonishing inequality is within reach of the victims. In a monarchy it requires violent revolution, generally attended with much bloodshed, and then never yet resulting in radical improvement. In a republic no war is required, no violence. But virtue and intelligence are needed, and these it is to be feared we have not. To a sufficient extent we have them not, or the evil would not exist. No twenty thousand intelligent and virtuous farmers would work all their lives to swell the hoards on hoards of A. T. Stewart if they knew it; bequeathing the same servile legacy to their sons. And then ten years will double the two millions, and twenty thousand more producers by a similar grinding process will be kept down to the same low level, to meet their their sweat and toil this increased demand. Meantime the lordly owner, consuming more than many, many honest workers, produces nothing. He sits under the shadow of his spreading banyan that sheds its golden stores into his insatiable lap, but watered by the sweat, fed by the unprotected, unpitied toil of thousands and thousands of laborers, his banyan becomes to them a Upas, exhaling only poison, poverty and untimely death. But so long as labor permits Capital TO MAKE THE LAWS AND THE LAW-MAKERS, the curse must and will continue. Let that be read, marked, and inwardly digested by productive labor in all its departments. Slave-owners lived in England, their slaves toiled in the West Indies. A. T. Stewart may go and reside in England also, his property remaining here. His incomes in notes, bonds, stocks mortgages, must be earned here, paid here, by the productive labor of the working people. The poverty of a West India plantation was as apparent as its burning suns, because all the wealth produced was devoured by English horse-leeches in London who owned the soil and its products, and whose ringing cry through the slave-drivers' whips was ever and always—give, give Under our new form of slavery, our high art slavery, let two or three hundred thousand of the wealthiest men in the nation emigrate to foreign countries, taking with them only the evidences of their immense wealth, leaving the enormous incomes to be levied on the labor of the producing classes under the existing laws, doubling those incomes at least once in thirteen years, and what must be the fate of the nation? Let arithmetic and history solve the problem. Meantime, as we have said, the remedy is with the myriads of the laborers themselves. With them are the numbers, the material strength, and more than all, the justice and the right, did they but know it. The lion would burst the frail bars of his cage did he know his own strength. Slaves in the West Indies, in our own states, would soon have made havoc with their masters, had they been as wise, and as firmly united. One fiery, bloody insurrection, and one generation of masters at least would surely have been no more! We need no insurrection of blood and fire. The ballot is our more excellent way. There must be Revolution, deep and thorough, reaching to both laws and law-makers. The present parties must cease to be, forever. Like the upper and the nether millstones, they are grinding the nation to powder. They legislate for capital, not for its producers. Grant is the candidate of capital, Seymour of the old lords of the lash at the south and their blind allies of the 4 north, whose iron rule scourged the nation for almost a century and ended with rebellion, war and desolation. Those parties, with all their fair pretences, and all their leaders and chieftains, their Congress, their candidates for President, their Constitution must be repudiated. Even their Declaration of Independence must be born again. Hitherto, even it has known only men, and they must be white. Woman, at last, has been discovered, the other hemisphere of humanity. Woman as worker has been discovered. And so terribly does the "curse" of labor cleave to her that the "eight hour system" eve, offers her no hope. Man may enjoy his eight hour law relief, but it will be found still true that "Woman's work is never done." The new order must know no distinctions in right or privilege. And labor, not capital, nor cunning, nor brute force, must make the laws. Whoever is President, or Cabinet, or Supreme Court, laboring men and women must be majorities in Congress and in every state legislature. The government must be the people themselves; not a part, but the whole people. Suffrage must be based on intelligence of some kind, but available to all of common capacity. It may be in books, or better yet, in a knowledge of practical life. He or she who knows and obeys the laws, and cares properly for the household and educates the children is fit to share in the government of the country. And it is time the Revolution were inaugurated. Delays, ever dangerous, in our case may be fatal. It is not possible the present misrule can last long; perhaps not another four years. Neither political party offers any remedy whatever for existing ills. Neither comprehends the situation even, much less proposes any adequate change. Grant is the man for Stewart, Seymour for Wade Hampton. And Stewart and Hampton represent bankruptcy, poverty, slavery, high art, double distilled slavery for the people. For well and truly does Ruskin say, "that all rates of interest or modes of profit on capital which render possible the rapid accumulation of fortunes are simply forms of taxation, by individuals, on labor, produce, or transport; and are highly detrimental to the national interests; being indeed, no means of national fain, but only the abstraction of small gains from many to form the large gain of one." Just as has been shown in this already too long article. It is not pretended that Stewart or even Wade Hampton is a sinner above all other men. They are in some sense victims themselves. Victims to divine laws violated, to institutions perverted. The vampire was not made so of his own election. The serpent might have been created a seraph had the choice been left to him. But being what they are, let mankind beware of them. Though spawned in Eden, or in heaven, they are not less hurtful. And toiling, struggling humanity should not longer be their prey. The Revolution.—A Weekly journal, devoted to Equal Rights to all. The only paper in the nation that demands the IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL ENFRANCHISEMENT OF WOMAN. Price, $2 a year. ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, PARKER PILLSBURY, Editors. SUSAN B. ANTHONY, Proprietor, 37 Park Row (Room 20), N. Y. Robert J. Johnston, Printer, 33 Beekman street, N. Y. Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.