Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 May 1878 — A Republican Organ Rebuked. [ARTICLE]

A Republican Organ Rebuked.

The Springfield (Mass.) Republican, the leading Republican journal of New England, says: ‘‘The Augusta (Me.) Journal, Senator Blaine’s home organ, fairly dances for joy through a leading editorial of nearly a column, over Jeff Davis’ letter to the Confederate-monu-ment dedication, at Macon, Ga., last week. ‘The real voice of the solid South,’ this organ has the supreme impudence to term a document which has met absolutely no popular response. With still more outrageous disregard for facta, this stirrer-np of strife declares that ‘ his sentiments meet with the warmest approval by the Southern papers.’ A Southern journal might, with equal truth, attempt to incite its section against the other by declaring that the wild cries for vengeance to which Wendell Phillips occasionally gives utterance meet with the warmest approval by the Northern papers. There are, of course, Bourbon papers in the South as well as the North, but the representative organs of Southern opinion—such papers as the Richmond (Ya.) State, the Raleigh (N. C.) News, the Charleston (S. C.) News and Courie?, the Atlanta (Ga.) Constitution, the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle and Constitutionalist, the Memphis (Tenn.) Avalanche, the New Orleans (La.) Picayune and Times —so far from “warmly approving” what Jeff Davis said, have passed it by with utter silence. Jeff Davis’ letter only appeared in Saturday morning’s papers, and the Augusta Journal, though nominally issued on Wednesday, must go to press Tuesday, as it reaches this office Wednesday forenoon. The newspapers of Saturday in only the nearer Southern States could by any possibility reach Augusta before the editorial iu question must have been written. The Journal must therefore have been almost entirely ignorant of the tone of the Southern press when it made this statement, while whatever the mails could have brought it absolutely disproved the charge. In other words, it deliberately lied to its readers, and lied purely for partisan purposes, in the hope of stirring up the smoldering ashes of sectional fires for benefit of the Republican party in the approaching campaign. One feels a sort of contemptuous pity for the soured old man who wrote that letter, but no rightminded person can entertain any other feeling than that of utter .loathing for the Maine editor who thus lends his pen to the devilish work of sowing falsehoods, in the hope of reaping further bitter fruits of sectional hatred. ”