The Oxford Falcon

Blair on Reconstruction.
HIS FORMER LETTER EXPLAINED AND ELABORATED.

The Lafayette (Ind.) Courier, of Saturday last, publishes the following letter from Gen. Frank P. Blair to a citizen of Lafayette:

Fort Sanders, Wyoming Ter.,
Richy, Aug. , 1868.

To James Howes, Esq., Lafayette, Indiana:

Dear Sir: I have received your letter, in which you ask me if I would endeavor to have the constitutionality of the reconstruction acts tested by the Supreme Court before proceeding to treat them as null and void. In answer, I say that the vital principle of the reconstruction acts has already been decided to be unconstitutional, null and void, by the Supreme Court, the whole bench concurring in the case of Milligan and Bowles, which went up from the State of Indiana on a writ of Habeas Corpus.
In that case it was decided, in the plain language of the Constitution, that the Government could not establish martial law in time of peace, or try a citizen by military commission, or court-martial.
The reconstruction acts, so called, stand on martial law, and nothing else. It is the essence of these acts. They were prepared and put in execution in time of profound peace, in defiance of the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court, to which I have referred, and they, and all that has been done under them, are null and void.
A case was made under these acts—the case of McCardle, of Mississippi—and brought before the Supreme Court; and it is well known that the Court was ready to declare these acts unconstitutional, when Congress passed another act to deprive the Supreme Court of its jurisdiction, and openly attempted to intimidate the Judges by threats of remodeling the Court.
The Supreme Court, in another case—that of Cummings, of Mississippi—decided that the disfranchisement of the white people of the Southern States by an act of Congress, was a bill of attainder and an ex post facto law, both of which were forbidden in express terms by the Constitution. Even the Radicals admit, in their Chicago platform, that the States alone have the right to decide who shall be entitled to suffrage within the States; and yet Congress has assumed to take the right from the white people and give it to the negroes within the Southern States.
The reconstruction acts violate the Constitution in all particulars, and it has been already decided by the Supreme Court.
The Constitution says the militia shall always be subordinate to the civil authority but those acts have superseded all civil authority and erected military governments at the South.
Do you want a decision of the Supreme Court to show that this is unconstitutional? Are those who say that the military is subordinate to the civil authority revolutionists? Are those who desire and the restoration of the civil by jury, which has been suppressed in the South by the reconstruction acts, revolutionists? Are those claiming the benefit of the great writ of right, the habeas corpus, which is denied to 8,000,000 of our people by the infamous reconstruction acts; to be branded as revolutionists?
Shall we be called revolutionists because we proclaim, in the very language of the Constitution, that Congress shall pass no bill of attainder or ex post facto law? or shall we be thus branded for claiming what the Constitution concedes in express words, that the States shall regulate suffrage for themselves? Do we want more decisions of the Supreme Court on these points? The truth is that the Radicals are real revolutionists, and have subverted the fundamental principles of our Government, and converted it into a mean and malignant oligarchy, sure to lapse into a military despotism.
"To restore the Government and the great guarantees of freedom, contained in the Constitution, and inherited from our ancestors, in "revolution." To execute the will of the people, whom the fragmentary Rump Congress has put at defiance, is "revolution."
To carry out the decisions of the Supreme Court is "revolution"—
This revolutionary act will build The people's will, the judgment of the Court of the highest jurisdiction, will be enforced against a usurping Rump Congress.
"I am, most respectfully, your obedient servant,
FRANK P. BLAIR"