" COPPERHEAD " MANNERS AND CREDULITY To THE EDITOR OF
THE "SPECTATOR."
I THINK your zeal in behalf of Lincoln and the Yankees super- serviceable. For your sake I fear that Seward and Weed will con- cur with me, and cut short your allowance of "greenbacks." It is all very well to insert the audacious lies of your "Yankee" special correspondent, and in your leaders to picture the vulgar clown Lincoln as a statesman, while you describe Colonel Davis as
sort of demon in human shape. But when you go so far in your anxiety to earn the gratitude of the Yankee greenback manu- facturers as to puff every Yankee book, from those of J. R. Lowell to that which I find eulogized in the enclosed paragraph, and when, not satisfied with warranting the payment of the Lincoln debt, you also endorse the solvency of Yankee" wild cat" railway speculators, you may rely on it you are, to use a New York phrase, "running the machine into the ground," and doing works of supererogation for which your Yankee employers will not thank you or pay you. You are, in fact, "piling on the agony too steep," you are over-doing your advocacy of a cause which, as an intelligent man, you must know to be the basest to the furtherance of which a literary hack can prostitute his pen. There is some excuse to be made for born Yankees who help the Lincoln imposture to pro- long its brief existence ; they are brought up in Massachusetts "common schools," and learn no higher code of morals ; but an Englishman like you sins against his own conscience, as well as against public decency, when he tries to postpone the uprising of the Northern people against the scurvy despotism which oppresses and misrepresents them.—Yours in haste,
A NEW YORKER (a "Copperhead" if you will).
Previous page
