Randolph County Journal

Senator John B. Henderson, of Missouri, has written a letter, which has been published, discussing in full the questions of emancipation, disfranchisement of rebels, and negro suffrage. He indorses immediate emancipation in Missouri; maintains the right to disfranchise those persons who have both renounced allegiance to the Government and rebelled virtually against the elective franchise itself. He holds, however, that such disfranchisement should be confined to traitors who have actually taken up arms; that it should cease with the war, and in some cases even earlier. In regard to negro suffrage, he says color is properly no element of the problem, but rather the subject of a prejudice born of the degradation wickedly inflicted by slavery. Intelligence, with loyalty, he deems the true qualification for voting, and he is wholly opposed to immediately enfranchising the negro, for the reason that he has not yet the intelligence which is indispensable to make his franchise either a blessing to himself or safe for the country.