Addresses: by John A. Martin. Delivered in Kansas.Martin, John Alexander
History
Addresses: by John A. Martin. Delivered in Kansas.
Martin, John Alexander
Kansas
But they “turned the rascals out.” Oh, yes—that business has been
attended to with promptness and regularity. An unending procession of
“rascals” has been moving out for a year and a half. “Rascals” who had
invaded the sacred soil of Virginia and Kentucky; who had stolen negroes
and made them free; who had been with Grant at Vicksburg and in the
Wilderness, and with Thomas at Mission Ridge, and with Sherman on the
march to Atlanta and the sea, and with Meade at Gettysburg. Some of
these “rascals” had grown old and gray; some limped out painfully,
because of old wounds; some wore a vacant sleeve; some had voted against
that great Democratic patriot, Vallandigham; and some had, years before,
been guilty of singing a song about hanging a great Democratic statesman
on a sour-apple tree. Men guilty of such “rascalities” as these of
course deserved to be “turned out,” and they were promptly bounced.
DEMOCRATIC PATRIOTS AND MARTYRS WHO CAME IN.
In their stead, a long line of Democratic martyrs and patriots marched
in—men who had “fought four years for their Democracy” under Lee, or
Bragg, or Joe Johnston; men who had expatriated themselves to the wilds
of Canada to avoid Lincoln’s “bastiles;” men who had wandered through
the timbers of the Wabash or the Miami bottoms hunting their lodge of
“Knights of the Golden Circle” or “Sons of Liberty;” men who had
rejoiced over every disaster to the Union arms, and mourned over every
Union victory; men who had denounced that gentle and loving Greatheart,
Abraham Lincoln, as a “tyrant,” a “baboon,” and an “ape;” men who had
assailed our great commander, Ulysses S. Grant, as a “bloody butcher”
and a “drunken tanner”—these, in large measure, were the “honest
patriots” who marched in, while the drums beat and the fifes whistled
the old familiar tune, “Turn the rascals out;” and the Democratic party
of Kansas, assembled in State convention, formally indorsed and approved
this programme by adopting a resolution that “the soldiers and sailors
of the late war”—not Union soldiers, not loyal soldiers, mind you, but
“soldiers of the late war,” Confederate as well as Union—“are entitled
to the first consideration in appointments.”
CONCLUSION.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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