Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 13.djvu/48

40 W. C. WOODWARD renegades have no party no strength. Having led their followers into the camp of the enemy, Bush and Harding are officers without privates. They have no party, but de- sire to get back and take the lead of ours. ... To thwart these men next June, let the legislative tickets be watched in the various counties. These fellows who elected Baker in 1860 must be punished. . . . Until these Judases are dead and buried and their memories made in- famous, there can be no clean foundation on which to build a Democratic party in Oregon." To add to the complexity of the situation, a controversy was raging in the ranks of the Copperhead Democracy itself, be- tween two of its leading papers, the Albany States Rights Dem- ocrat, edited by O'Meara and the Eugene Review, edited by Noltner. O'Meara insisted on "committing the party to an unequivocal endorsement of the most extreme doctrines ever taught by the politicians of the Calhoun school." He fought Johnson and opposed the idea of the party's adopting a policy of expediency insisted on remaining unreconstructed, in brief. The Review on the other hand wished to follow the expedient policy adopted by the Northern Democracy. It inclined toward Johnson and wished to profit by the strife between him and the Radicals. Thus, in 1865 we find on one hand, the Union party with its two Statesman-Oregonian, later Johnson-anti-Johnson, wings. On the other, the organized or Copperhead Democracy with its discords. And between the two organized parties fluttered the following of Bush and Harding, who, in the lan- guage of the old fable, had hardly determined whether they were to be beasts or birds. The manner in which, within the next three or four years, these various factions were fused and aligned in two political parties and the influences which brought about that result, it will be the purpose of the remaining pages to show. The Oregonian had spoken on the subject of reconstruction as early as the summer of 1864 and voiced clearly the congres- sional attitude. It held that before the seceded states should be readmitted to the Union they must first "be divested of all sovereign capacity and pass through a probationary territorial