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THE

CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:

DEVOTED TO

LITERATURE AND NATIONAL POLICY.

Vol. II--OCTOBER, 1862.--No. IV.




'THE CONSTITUTION AS IT IS--THE UNION AS IT WAS.'


This has been a pet phrase, in certain quarters, ever since the
rebellion broke out. The men who use it are doubtless well aware of the
prodigious power of such cries adroitly raised. The history of their
influence over the unreflecting masses in all ages would be one of the
most curious chapters in the history of human nature.

The phrase has a grand air. Its words are brave words to conjure with.
It is susceptible of a good and loyal sense. It may mean, restore the
supremacy of the Constitution and the integrity of the Union by crushing
this atrocious rebellion to utter extinction by force of arms. It may
mean that all the revolted States are to be brought back into the Union
and under the authority of the Constitution by military subjugation. It
_may_ mean this, though it is certainly not a short or strong way of
expressing the only thing which patriotic men have now to think of, to
wish done, and to help do; and I do not believe any man of strong, clear
head or right loyal heart would take this way of expressing it. Still,
it may mean this; but if it does not mean this, it means nothing
pertinent to exigency, nothing patriotic, nothing loyal.

But is this what they mean who trade with it now? No--nothing of the
sort. They use it to distract and perplex the public mind; to draw it
off from the one paramount obligation which the times impose upon the
nation--the obligation of saving the national existence by the military
extinction of the rebellion, regardless of all other ends and aims. They
trade upon the popular reverence for the Constitution--that sense of its
sacredness which lies so deep in the heart of the North. They do it to
mislead the honest masses, whose hearts are mainly right, but whose
heads--some of them, but, thank God! not many now--are not so clear to
see the miserable fallacy of its application. They make it a text and
pretext for inveighing against the government, and so weakening its hold
on the popular confidence and support; for raising seditious outcries
against any restriction of the license to talk and print treason--what
they call tyrannical oppression of the freedom of speech and of the
press. They know perfectly well that not a thousandth part of the
toleration which traitorous talking and printing enjoy at the
North--through the extraordinary and amazing leniency of the
Government--is for one moment granted to Union sympathizers by rebel
authorities in the South. They never have a word to say against the way
in which loyalty to the Union is there crushed down by imprisonment,
banishment, confiscation, and hanging. They have never a word to say
against the brutal and fiendish atrocities of cruelty perpetrated there
upon all who are even suspected of Union sentiments. They reserve all
their indignation for the moderate repression which our Administration
has seen fit, in some cases, to apply to traitorous utterances. They
have even risen to the sublime impudence of denouncing it as a monstrous
outrage on the constitutional rights of Northern traitors, that our
Government has declined, in a few instances, to allow the United States
mail to be the agent for transporting and circulating treasonable
newspapers. I have quite lately been edified with the tone of lofty,
indignant scorn with which one of these papers--published in the city of
New-York--cries shame on the Government for refusing to be its carrier;
though no man knows better than the editor that a publication at the
South as much in sympathy with the Union as his is with the rebellion,
would not only not get carried in the rebel mails, but, before
twenty-four hours, would be suppressed, and its editor in prison, or
more probably hung, by the direction or with the approbation of the
rebel authorities; and in such a case, our New-York editor would not
have space for a line to chronicle the fact, or for a word to denounce
it to Northern indignation. But for our Government to decline carrying
his treasonable sheet--that is monstrous! Behold him, a confessor in the
sacred cause of freedom of speech and of the press! _He_ will not
succumb to unconstitutional tyranny! He will continue to print in spite
of Government, and to send his treason through the land by the express
companies, until the millennial day of the restoration of 'the
Constitution _as it is_, the Union _as it was_!'

The men who utter this phrase talk, too, about the constitutional rights
of the rebels--just as if those who are waging war for the overthrow