The Daily Phoenix

STRANGE STATESMANSHIP.—Surely it is the strangest statesmanship ever known, and a legislation that could hardly have been worthy of the dark middle ages, to undertake to proscribe the educated, energetic and honest white men of a province, and give the contest and management of affairs into the hands of the ignorant and utterly uninformed and semi-civilized of an inferior and dependent race, who but a little while ago were slaves. Is that the way to restore peace and harmony? What! to proscribe and make foreigners of the owners of the soil, the wealthy, the industrious, the educated, the Christian gentlemen, the honest mechanics, the industrious and thoughtful farmers, and set over them to rule them the unthrifty, squalid, lazy and degraded African, a thousand times less capable than Neapolitan lazzaroni! What are we to think of the republicanism of a people who are willing to entrust the destinies of a country like Louisiana to the hands of negroes, who are to be manipulated and used for evil and mischievous purposes by a few adventurers? Is that not to make inevitable a reign of terror? What can come of it, in a country peopled in a large measure by the descendants of Frenchmen, but commotion, feuds and bloodshed, and all the horrors of a servile war?