Bedford Inquirer

BEDFORD INQUIRER

Elegant Extracts.

From John Cessna's Gazette, Dec. 28, 1858.

HON. J. S. BLACK.

The distinguished gentleman whose name stands at the head of this article, is favorably spoken of by a number of Democratic newspapers in this state and elsewhere, as a suitable person to receive the nomination of the Charleston Convention for President of the United States. We were among the first to express our preference for the nomination of Judge Black; indeed had we been slower to recognize his claims, we would have been false to our convictions of duty and utterly recreant to that pride of section which nurtures and rears the great men of the land.

It is said and truthfully, too, that Pennsylvania holds the casting vote in the Electoral Colleges of the Union. No President, we believe, has been chosen by the people, without the vote of Pennsylvania. The reason of this is obvious. Pennsylvania, as a state, is the representative of that feeling which binds together the national confederation. She is the heart and soul, the very vital spark of the Union. Her people have no sympathy with one section as against another. They are neither for the North, nor for the South, but for the equal Constitutional rights of each. With this spirit of justice pervading the hearts and the conscience of her people, Pennsylvania always casts her vote for the candidate chosen by a majority of the electors of the Union, which majority has thus far held with her in common her national and conservative sentiments. It is this that makes Pennsylvania the Keystone of our political arch: not the number of her population--for sectional and factional New York exceeds her on that score --not her wealth of mines, and forges and manufactories-not her cities and commercial marts-not her railroads and public thoroughfares; it is her position as the great breakwater between fanatical extremes, her office as the conservator of the peace between sections embittered against each other by the schemes of crazy theorists, political demagogues and office-hunting knaves (like Stephen A. Douglas.) Such being unquestionably the political status of Pennsylvania, where is the man that is a truer representative of our glorious old commonwealth, than Jeremiah S. Black? Search the record of our statesmen and where will you find him? New York has her Dickinson, Virginia her Hunter, Georgia her Cobb, Illinois her Douglas, but where is the representative man of the great State of Pennsylvania? The public life of Judge Black warrants us fully in regarding him as that man. He has always shown himself the equal friend of all classes-the advocate of religious as well as civil freedom, the guardian of the rights of naturalized as well as of native citizens, and above all the fearless promulger of the Pennsylvania idea-union and harmony between the states and an end to utopian theories and abstractions on the question of slavery. Let us, therefore, have the Representative man of Pennsylvania, as the nominee of the Charleston Convention, and no fears need be entertained of the future.

Yet, notwithstanding all that is said by John Cessna's Gazette, in the above article, in favor of Judge Black, a serious effort was never made to make him the candidate. He did not get a vote, we believe, in the Convention, and the editor and owner of the Gazette, John Cessna, was there and never voted once for Black, but all the time for that 'crazy theorist, political demagogue, and office hunting knave,' Stephen A. Douglas, as Cessna's Gazette styles him in the above article. The Gazette was a great Buchanan and Black paper then, and very bitter against Douglas, but John Cessna, Wm. P. Schell and Samuel H. Tate came out for Douglas flat-footed, and the conductor, not having any soul or body of his own, did the bidding of John Cessna & Co. The persons referred to by Cessna's Gazette, Dickinson, of N. Y., Hunter of Va., Cobb of Ga., as well as Buchanan and that paper's favorite presidential candidate, Black, all support Breckinridge and Lane, in opposition to Douglas and Johnson.