Record Data
Source citation
Andrew Johnson, Paul Bergeron (ed), The Papers of Andrew Johnson: Volume 10, February-July 1866 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 94.
Type
Letter
Date Certainty
Exact
Transcriber
John Osborne, Dickinson College
Transcription date
Transcription
The following text is presented here in complete form, as it originally appeared in print. Spelling and typographical errors have been preserved as in the original.
West Chester Penna Feb. 14, 1866
My dear Sir,
The State Convention of the Democratic Party of Penna: will meet at Harrisburgh on the 5th March next. The Delegates from this COunty and Senatorial District were chosen two days ago in this place by a Convention.
The endorsement of your policy of Reconstruction will come up before the State Convention. There is a kind feeling towards you personally and politically among Democrats. You have boldly and frankly thrown yourself upon the People for support, to the great distaste of the Abolition wing of the Republican Party. It may refuse to break with you directly for they have a great object in view - which is the carrying the Congressional Elections of next fall throughout the North - and thus have the Congress which will count the Presidential Electoral vote of 1868. Most assuredly if such vantage ground is gained through Federal influence or patronage, the Electoral vote of the South will be counted out - and a minority of sectional man of extreme views like Butler be smuggled in as your successor. Then the Freedmans policy contemplated in the existing Bill in Congress will be administered with a vengeance - to the degradation of white men every where but specially in the South. It settles hundreds of thousands of Negroes on public lands in sections of five States. Far better that the whole coloured race should be led to Liberia. Emigration is the only sure method of benefitting them and the twenty seven millions of white freemen of our Republic.
Considerations of this kind weigh with our Delegates to the Democratic State Convention of 5th March. As the Senatorial Delegate - after consulting with the three Representative Delegates to that Convention - from this County, I hope you will veto that Freedmans Bill, which may - before the meeting of our State Convention - reach your hands for official action.
John H. Brinton
