Rensselaer Union and Jasper Republican, Volume 8, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1876 — A. Persecuted Candidate. [ARTICLE]

A. Persecuted Candidate.

■“No, sir, I'tt never run for office again,” said Judge Pitman, just after the last election in our State. “ You know when they came and asked me if I’d accept a nomination to the Legislature, they told me that the whole community wanted me to run, and that I was certain to be elected because 1 was‘a man whose character .was so good that nobody could find fault with it. I thought so myself, and I agreed to run; and accordingly they nominated me. Well, sir, the very next morning the Argus came out with an assertion that I had been detected in stealing chickens, and it gave a full history of the case, together with pictures of the chickens, and after darkly hinting that since abandoning chicken stealing I had been continually engaged in other forms of robbery, it asked if the people of this State wanted to see a chicken-thief making laws for them. And the mischief of it was that I did hook a couple of chickens from my grandmother’s coop when I was a small boy, but how’n the thunder they ever found it out beats me. It was fifty-two years ago. “ Now look at my nose! 'Taint much of a nose for beauty, is it ? ’ 1 know well enough that it’s crooked. But nobody ever alluded to it until I was nominated, and then the Argus said that there was a tradition that 1 bad the nose mashed around sideways during my career as a prize-fighter, although some people insisted that ! had run it hard against a door while I was drunk. And then all the illustrated papers in the State began to publish pictures of me with a nose like the jib-sheet of an oyster sloop, only twisted around sideways, until I looked as if I was tied to half a ton of crooked proboscis, and one ot them said that when 1 sneezed on the front porch the concussion acted like a boomerang and blew the back door open. —. “And then they tackled me about my war record. You know I was out with the militia. And the Argus published a. letter from a man who said that during the battle of Gettysburg I was hid in a refrigerator in a cellar in the town pretending that I wits ordered there to mount guard over some rations of cold beef. And the Argus asserted tnat the only miltary maneuver I was ever good a't was falling back; that •whenever the enemy was expected to be approaching I always made a bee-line for Nova Scotia, and never turned up until after the light but once, and then we were surprised, and I fired my musket so wildly that. I shot our own Colonel in the leg and surrendered to an Irishman who belonged to our regiment and who came up to me to borrow a plug of tobacco. To tell the truth, I wasn't much of a fighting man, but how in the mischief they found out about that refrigerator gets me. Awful, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have minded it so much only they got up a poster and stuck it around the streets, and headed it * Pitman’s War Record,’ and put on it a picture of me with a monstrous, lopsided nose, sitting inside that refrigerator gnawing at a bone out of the roast beef.

“And then, as the campaign went along, they accused me of having delirium tremens, of beating my wife, of wiping my nose on my sleeve, of robbing a bank, of selling my dead aunt to a medical college, and of holding the doctrine that the whale didn’t swallow Jonah, and that when Moses crossed the Red Sea he paddied over in a boat. The Argus said that if my wife dared to tell how I treated her the community would be filled with horror, but anybody might see for themselves who would notice that her back hair was all thinned out, and it said that I had a wen on my leg that unfitted me for active duty anyhow, even if I had not forfeited all claim to public confidence by turning my grandfather out of doors when he was dying of consumption, and then setting my dog on him and making the aged man roost in a mulberry tree on the coldest night last winter for fear of being eaten up. “People began to avoid me on the street. The general impression prevailed that 1 was a desperate and hardened villain. I might have stood that, but you know the way they levied on me for expenses was awful. There was that brass band. 1 kept that band in luxury for three months; and it used to come around and serenade me three nights in the week, and wake all the babies in the neighborhood. I lost 200 votes in consequence of those wakened babies. Then the clubs would come and call me out for a speech, and when I would get through I would have to ask them in to a feed, and they would stay there and howl until four o’clock in the morning, and get drunk, and tight, and smash the furniture, and bleed over the carpets. Then they would assess me for a mass meeting, and adjourn. I handed out cash for posters, and rum, and brass bands, and barbecues, and fireworks, and torch-light processions, and transparencies, and for flags, and the Argf/s all the time accusing ,me of buy ing up votesand having repeaters in my pay. “ The night of the election the brass band and the club came around to congratulate me on my success, and after having a final spree and a concluding riot in the parlor, I went to bed, glad 1 had won anyhow. The first thing 1 saw in the Argus in the morning was the announcement that the hoary-headed chick-en-stealer had been beaten by 2,000 majority, and would have to keep his eccentric nose at home-, and spend his time in reflecting that a free people would never elect to a responsible ortico a man who would tree his consumptive grandfather and traffic in the remains of his aunt. So that lets me out in politics. When I run for office again, you chuck me right into an insane asylum.”— .Wax Adeler, in If. Y. Weekly.