Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 March 1885 — Old Jeff “the Greatest Patriot.” [ARTICLE]

Old Jeff “the Greatest Patriot.”

The erection of Jeff Davis into a god, now going on so rapidly in the Booth, is enough to nuke even a Copperhead dizzy, saying nothing of thorn who are not yet done langhjng at the fleeing President of the Confederacy being captured in a woman’s dress and hoop-skirts at the close of the war. The Soothcrn press mad the Democratic leaders in the United States Senate got the old traitor np to an altitude of loyalty but two weeks ago, which they claimed made him as great a patriot as any in the country. Then the Liberty Bell was sent South, apd old Jeff, as the South’s greatest man and first citizen, called out tp welcome it and escort it to the New Orleans Exposition. Ever since the Southern press has been lavishly at work to show that not only is he as great a man, and as loyal a citizen, as the nation affords, but that he is the greatest patriot of all, and also—may all file gods defend us—also “the greatest Union man" of all, and indeed the only American statesman who is really true to the Union.

It is not merely the tar-heeled press or cheap papers of the South that are thus making Davis into a hero. The leading and more conservative papers of the South are doing it, too. The St. Louis Times-Demo-crat, the most moderate and tolerant of Southern papers, in its issue of last Sunday, comes up to make the astounding claim that Davis is not only a patriot bnt the beet end chiefest of good Union men. Quoting and growing very indignant over a paragraph in which the St. Louis Globe-Democrat criticised the action of the Southern Democrats in the United States Senate, in defending Jeff Davis as being aToyal man one day, and eulogizing a silk American flag the next, the Times-Democrat says; “We are not quite sure in what the little difficulty of our contemporary consists—whether it is fonnd in reconciling the “honor and patriotism" of Jefferson Davis with the cillture of silk, or with the American flag, or with woman’s work, or with the making of a present to Congress, The honor and patriotism of Mr. Davis are not in antagonism with any pi these things, that we are aware of. Certainly not with the American flag, if the lnster shed , upon its folds and the blood shed in its defense at Monterey and Buena Vista count for aught, or if' a life-long advocacy of the principles which it is supposed to symbolize means anything. In the sense of determined'afld unwavering opposition to sectionalism, Mr. Davis probably carries more genuine American’ feeling—more (rue unionism—in his wounded he?J, than his defamers carry in their heads ana hearts. No nobler protest against the sectional spirit has never been made than that to which he gave utterance in Congress almost forty years ago. * * * His career has been so grossly and persistently misrepresented that there are, no doubt, many who will scarcely believe that we have really been citing the record of Jefferson Davis, or that he was in heart, in speech, and in conduct to the very last, a consistent and genuine devotee of the American flag and American Union, in the only sense in which a State Bights Democrat could be such—and that a for higher and truer sense than his calumniators can comprehend. That is what puzzles the GlobeDemocrat. Happily, the time has come when it has ceased, or will soon cease, to puzzle right-thinking and patriotic people of any section or party,” In other words, the Times-Democrat thinks the time has already come when everybody accepts Jeff Davis as being “the greatest opponent of sectionalism,” and as having “more true Unionism” than any other man now living. What may not be judged as to the feeling, expression, and intentions of the rabble and th§ rqbid elements of the South, when such a moderate paper as the TimesDemocrat thus exalts the arch traitor, whose bones should now be rotting under the gallows-tree, as the greatest of patriots aifd the truest of Union men now living?^— Des Moines Register.