"Had the suggestions of president Lincoln prevailed," he began, "the South would have been God's country; but wicked counsels predominated. There was not a statute enacted by a legislature, nor an order made by a general, nor a proclamation issued by a governor, nor a requisition made by the head of a department that did not whet the sword with which they were prodding into the bowels of the South, after the final capitulation. These atrocious policies were conceptions of men who swore in their wrath that not a blade of grass should spring where their hellish coursers planted hoof; that in the realigning of the federal union, strong black lines should be drawn with a savage vengeance over the face of the South. Reconstruction was the act of self-destruction, and the suicides deserve to be buried without the shedding of a tear, without christian sepulture in outlawed graves. They made the thorn to spring up where the fir-tree had flourished, and the bramble instead of the myrtle tree. In these abominable acts there is death; death enough to satisfy the grave. Before the ink was dry upon the parchment, before the funereal bake-meats were cold, they contract an unnatural covenant of marriage with four million slaves, disbanded outlaws from the army, and put upon them the mask of freedom to conceal the horrid front of tyranny. Sirs, we rebel against the outrage. When the Philistines are upon us shall we not rise and shake ourselves, or shall we lay our heads in the lap of Delilah, to be shorn of our power; to be bound in chains, until we shall pray God to avenge our wrongs in the common destruction of ourselves and our enemies. No sirs, they shall find that when we are prostrated, that like Antæus we shall rise with renewed vigor from our shame. Why this glozing title "Reconstruction?" Who shall declare its generation? What holy font was polluted by its baptism? Whence its bastard origin? Plots, the vile brood of malice have been hatched under fanatical incubation and piloted southward, like flocks of harpies, that by their uncleanness they might defile our civilization. Every blight of calumny from ultra partisan--press and pulpit, has been blown upon southern character. Their speeches are filled with fields scourged down to barrenness, and negroes multiplied and worked up to the very tragedy of indiscriminate assassinations. We will not propitiate the black devils by heaping their altars with sacrifices; black fiends who, like the great dragon in the Apocalypse, are sweeping after them into the abysm, filled with slaughter, one third of the stars in our political heaven. Which of these stars are to be fixed, or which are to be planetary in this black firmament of eternal night; which primary, and which central, which wandering stars and which satellites, are matters for their savage taste. For my state may God in his infinite mercy decree that the laws of position and movement may be ascertained and