Clearfield Republican

ADDRESS.

To the Democratic Citizens of Pennsylvania:

I have but waited the tardy movements of our public authorities in collecting the result of the election held on the 8th ult., in order to discharge the incumbent duty of calling your attention to the means by which a majority of 20,081 votes (as I now learn from official circles) has been recorded against us.—This majority is made up from all the votes stated to have been given in the districts at home, including those by proxy, and all those given in the armies—negro votes and all—in every form of returns, lawful and otherwise.

There have been at least two palpable forms of fraud practiced by the supporters of Abraham Lincoln, in order to make up this majority, and thus secure him the electoral vote of the State. Fictitious ballots have been placed in the ballot-boxes, answering to false registries, the same as has been repeatedly proven to have been the case in our elections heretofore; and secondly, the suffrages of the volunteer soldiers have not only been over-awed and perverted by corrupt partisan officials, but the returns themselves, in many cases, have been tampered with and transformed. In reference to fictitious votes, who believes that the city of Philadelphia has to-day, or ever had, 90,000 voters legally and properly registered in her various wards and precincts?—And yet that number of votes had been counted as thus resident—giving near 12,000 Abolition majority in a city that not many years since burnt an Abolition hall in open day, as a public nuisance!

The late attempt to exercise the right of suffrage on the part of the volunteer soldiers, has proved a signal failure—farce I would call it, but for its various melancholy concomitants. The doubts entertained by many as to the wisdom and propriety of this measure, prior to its adoption, would seem to have been fully realized.

It is impossible ever to secure a fair and full distribution of tickets, so as to allow a free choice to the voters in army service. The expenses of the attempts made to do so, are almost beyond belief. On the part of this State, they will reach at least $30,000; and the two political organizations expended fully as much more.—The system will always be liable to great abuses, and must ever be unequal in its operation, and unfair in its results.

Certain it is, that the privilege of voting given to the soldier is a mockery, when the very man against whom, perhaps, he would like to vote, has the most despotic control over those who rule that soldiers' every movement, and could send him at a word to the front of battle and to death, if he refuses compliance with their behests. Until the volunteer soldiery have the power of choosing their own officers, the right of suffrage for other purposes can never be properly carried into effect in the army. Had they been fairly and freely left to their own preferences, can any sane man doubt, but that there would have been about the same proportionate division of sentiment expressed by the soldier in the late elections, that was manifested by their fathers and brothers at home?

It is this army vote, (not to speak of the other frauds,) which has given our opponents their recent beggarly triumph in Pennsylvania. Beggarly indeed—when it is recollected that it shows a falling off of from forty to fifty thousand in their majority, within the last four years! Such a victory, and so obtained, betokens a speedy downfall as a party, to the advocates of negro equality in our staunch old Commonwealth. Revolutions never go backwards.

It is worthy of remark here also, that a change of twenty-five thousand votes properly divided amongst the larger States would have defeated Mr. Lincoln altogether.

It was our duty, fellow citizens, to have rescued the constitution at the late elections, if we could. The effort was gallantly, but unsuccessfully made. And now in view of all that must inevitably transpire within the next four years, I feel honestly, more like congratulating you as a political party, on having escaped a fearful responsibility, than offering explanations and condolence over a defeat. After entailing a weight of suffering upon this country, from which nothing but the most radical measures can ever relieve it; after having forced into operation a financial system, which is but the mask of ruin in that regard; after so mis-managing the unfortunate civil war now upon their hands, as to leave scarcely a hope of saving the Union—it is but right that the Abolitionists, and their instrument, Abraham Lincoln, should remain in a position to feel the first fruits of their own wickedness and folly, and meet the curses and condemnation of an outraged and suffering people, when the impending clouds shall mature into storm and darkness.

Our plain duty, fellow-citizens, both as a party and as patriots, is to maintain our noble organization in all its power and activity. It now comprises upwards of two hundred and seventy-six thousand freemen—the bone, sinew and brains of the Commonwealth. Every hope of an ultimate re-union of the States, and of restoring the Government and laws to their original purity and vigor, lies in the progress and ultimate triumph of the Democracy. We must continue to act as the sentinels of freedom, and vindicate our time-honored principles before the people. Instead of disbanding our clubs and associations, let us increase their number and inspirit their action. Hold, at least, monthly meetings. Gather if possible, and organize a Democratic association in every school district, and boldly canvass on all proper occasions, the measures of our corrupt and imbecile rulers. Expose the secret leagues and banditti-like gatherings of our opponents; and hold up to merited scorn those who, in midnight assemblies, and under kindred darkness, conspire to rob and ruin our country, and at the same time to degrade our people by plotting and affiliating with the negro race. Let us, as a party march steadily on our accustomed path, employing neither stealth nor secrecy they are unworthy of freemen, who are afraid to defend it in open day.

Allow me, in this connection to add a word, also, in behalf of the Democratic press of Pennsylvania. Always but too poorly rewarded, now, when nearly all public patronage is in the hands of the fanatics, and the expenses of printing greatly increased, it becomes the manifest duty of every faithful Democrat to support and strengthen his local paper, and to discriminate in his patronage if compelled to do so at all, in favor of the Democratic press of our own State. There is a culpable carelessness in this respect, in many of our public men, which is a very proper subject of reprehension, as well as of remembrance to those who suffer from it.

Under ordinary circumstances, fellow citizens, I would deem the present duty of my place fully discharged in this hasty reference to the late election, and the subsequent suggestions which I have ventured upon. And in what I further undertake at this time, it is possible I may be charged with traveling somewhat out of the sphere of my appointment, and with entering upon a field of inquiry that is beyond its usual limits. But as my purpose is manly and upright, and, I may add, patriotic—I feel I may safely rely in these times, that the spirit of liberty will secure me at least your indulgence.

On, or about the 24th day of September last, forty-four substantial and reputable citizens of Columbia and Luzerne counties, in this State, were seized by military authority and hurried with indecent haste, at the bayonets' point, into the depths of a distant and dismal military fortress, as a place of confinement. One of them in a letter to his relatives, in simple words that must touch every honest heart, thus describes their imprisonment:

"Our treatment was inhuman. When first taken and incarcerated in this cell, not a stool or bench to rest our weary limbs on: not a bed, or knife, or fork, or plate: and these indispensable articles were purchased at exorbitant prices, attended with vexatious delay. Forty-four of us in one cell, without even a separate place to attend to the calls of nature. It is no wonder that one of our number was soon laid in his last resting place, and many others prostrated by disease."

Four of their number have recently been brought to trial before a military commission, and three of them sentenced to heavy fines and imprisonment, upon charges clearly cognizable in the Civil Courts of the State and of the United States. With the question of the guilt or innocence of these men, (and I believe them truly innocent of any deliberate infraction of law) I have in this place, nothing to do: It is the startling fact that forty-four men of good repute in their respective neighborhoods, some of whom had held places of high public trust and honor, should be seized by soldiery, in the heart of the peaceful and loyal State, dragged off to noisome military dungeon, and there kept for months, without being confronted by an accuser; one of them in the meantime dying, as is believed, from suffering the same; another becoming blind from his confinement, while most of the others still continue shut up in Fort Mifflin—a damp, island fort, constructed more with a view of resisting a bombardment, than anything else! A brave old name desecrated; a fortress associated with many proud recollections and memories of our forefathers' struggle for freedom, turned into a Bastile for the uses of modern tyranny!

This is not all, nor in my view the worst of the case if it is to be established as a precedent. These men are being drawn out, one by one, to be tried before a tribunal unknown to the Constitution—called a Court Martial, in which they are denied the privilege—priceless in a freeman's estimation—of trial by a jury of their peers, and of the vicinage.

I should not impliedly impugn your intelligence and love of freedom, fellow-citizens, by offering here, any elaborate discussion of this sacred right of trial by jury. No work of tyranny so stirs the inmost depths of every freeman's heart, as any attempt at infringement of this precious principle of liberty, which has come down to us untrammelled and unimpaired from the days of Magna Charta to the present moment. The very idea of a Military Commission sitting in the heart of our faithful, law-abiding old Commonwealth, to try anything but simply breaches of military law and regulations, is monstrous and unbearable. Our Legislature fairly humbled itself to subserviency, in passing laws punishing any resistance, by word or deed, to the conscription laws of Congress; and Congress in its turn has piled enactment on enactment—now endorsing our gracious President's proclamations of martial law, and next restraining them—but all the while pointing to the Civil Courts as the proper tribunals to try the class of offenses newly announced—shall I say, created, by both President and Congress—Lord and Masters of a submissive people!

I submit, fellow-citizens, whether it is not the duty of the two hundred and seventy-six thousand Democrats of Pennsylvania, to inquire into this alarming violation of those great principles of human rights, which even no monarch on the throne of our English ancestors since the date of Magna Charta, ever yet invaded with impunity; and no administration of our government ever before dared to infringe, even in the slightest degree? The fate to-day, of these men of Columbia county, if innocent, may be ours to-morrow. Besides if it really has come to pass, that the old laws of the land require enforcement by bayonets, and the new ones introduced, and about to be introduced, need the same illustration and support, it must at least be interesting to the people to know it, and be prepared to yield up gracefully all those cherished principles of civil freedom baptized in the blood of our fathers of the revolution, and bequeathed to us as their inestimable legacy.

True, we had the boasted announcement of the Secretary of State at Washington that the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus placed every independent heart in the land under his jailership; and we had also the practice of Secretary Stanton's satraps in various places in other States, showing the same grand estimate of his powers; but that military commissions and secret trials without juries, are to be substituted for proceedings in the civil courts of the country, in cases clearly defined by statute law as belonging exclusively to their jurisdiction, is a state of things which could not have been fully contemplated by the people of Pennsylvania at the late election. We really seem to be fast reaching the condition of the German Baron of olden time, who, in order to provide the means for maintaining his castle against assailants, mortgaged it to some neighboring Shylocks, who seized and appropriated it themselves, before the Baron's defences were completed. Or, in plainer words, in conducting what appeared at the outset to be a proper struggle to sustain the powers of the Constitution, and the supremacy of the laws over the southern States—we are now sinking the same vital principles here at home!

Who is responsible for this position of affairs so far as our State is concerned? The new military commander of this Division, with his own fair record to preserve, and a bright ancestral fame in memory, cannot be acting a voluntary part in them. The Governor of Pennsylvania disavows all prior knowledge of the original proceedings against the Columbia county prisoners, and all responsibility in the premises. The Judiciary, if applied to, would probably be disinclined to enter into a conflict with the military authorities, in which would simply be illustrated that the President and his Cabinet ministers are the Lords paramount to our destinies, both civil and military!

The people can allow—can perpetuate this position of our liberties if they desire. They have the power—the awful power to prove recreant to themselves; to become the executioners of their own liberties, their own happiness, and their own glory illustrated in the past. Yes: if they so elect as a people, they may, in cowardly supineness, allow themselves to be covered with the pall of a despotism as dark and dismal as ever shrouded any of its victims in the Old World: and finally fill the last of these ignoble graves of National freedom, that lie in dreadful warning along down the great pathway of time!

In behalf of the Democratic State Central Committee of Pennsylvania.

C. L. WARD, Chairman.

Towanda, Pa., Dec. 5, 1864.