< Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu
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REVIEW OF WRITINGS OF H. W. SCOTT 163

gon, who originated many measures, including the Fourteenth Amendment. Senator Williams found Mr. Scott his ablest supporter. Friendship between the two, then begun, continued as long as they lived, and on the death of the Senator, the Editor wrote a beautiful tribute and farewell. It was his last large work, for soon afterward sickness stopped his further writing. Articles of Mr. Scott's, during the Reconstruction period, display moderate and lenient spirit toward the South, yet un- yielding demand for extinction of state sovereignty and slavery and for the establishment of national sovereignty and negro freedom. Sovereignty, he insisted, then lay in the victorious North, yet not for vindictive nor despotic purpose. He never reconciled himself to negro suffrage and in his later life, when partisanship disappeared, he felt free to say that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments "made a mess of it" (Oregonian, December 25, 1905), and that "it is not to be denied that the evils of indiscriminate negro suffrage in our Southern States are too great to be permitted/' (Oregonian, August 8, 1907.)

VII NEGRO AND SOUTH

The Editor's paternal forebears were loyalists of South Caro- lina; then pioneers of Tennessee, Kentucky and Illinois. In Kentucky, the birthplace of his father was near those of Jeffer- son Davis and Abraham Lincoln. Currents of westward expan- sion merged from South and North in the Ohio Valley, thence diverged northward, westward and southward. Mr. Scott's people abhorred state rights and slavery ; in other matters thr.y felt sympathy with the South. After these two issues were eradicated, Mr. Scott felt that sympathy recurring. The negro question in the South he knew a natural one in the white popu- lation and not to be argued away. In his later life he often said that disfranchisement or submission of the negro was in- evitable. He foresaw that northern sentiment would not strongly resist disfranchisement; commented often on its grow- ing acceptance in the North and on the baseless fear in the South that the North would uphold the negro.

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