Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 July 1896 — Stump Ashby’s Meeting. [ARTICLE]

Stump Ashby’s Meeting.

H. S. P. Ashby, otherwise “Stump” Ashby, spoke at Rensselaer last Thursday afternoon, in the populist cause. The meeting had been much advertised by great big posters, and through the People’s Pilot, and a crowd of 4000 to 5000 people had been confidently predicted. As an actual fact however, it would be a liberal estimate to say that 300 people were in sound of the speaker’s voice, at any one time. And fully half of the crowd was made up of town people. The Pilot estimates the crowd at 1,500, but it either looked at it through 16 to 1 spectacles, or perchance the last cipher in the 1500 got in by mistake, and 150 was what the paper intended to have said. Although Ashby told his hearers that they were so poor that they had to live on com bread and sour milk, he insisted on having his SSO for his speech here sent to him in advance, and for the truth of that fact we have plenty of people right here in Rensselaer who were told so by the highest populistic authority. Either Stump don’t believe whai he says when he tells the people they are so terribly poor, or else he is as greedy and heartless a grasper after wealth, so far as he gets an opportunity, as any of the “plutocrats” whom be wants to have hung* and their substance divided. .... . .

Ashby told his hearers that he was an ex-confederate soldier, and a “bad one,” but we suspect that then, as now, he was “bad” only with his mouth. The real fighting men of the Confederate army are now generally loyal citizens, but if Ashby holds any sentiments of loyalty towards the nation, the tenor of his talk belied such sentiments, entirely. That be regrets that slavery was abolished, Is evident from his assertion that the Negroes are ten times worse off now than when in slavery • That he regrets that the south did not succeed is evident from that same assertion, and from his consuming hatred of the nation and its institntions and all its public men. He did manage to speak in a half favorable way of Lincoln, but it was

only to give him an opportunity to quote a certain passage which has f alsely been attributed to Lincoln for years, but which he never uttered and which time and again hss been exposed as a forgery,. The whole tenor of his speach was socialistic, or rather anarchistic. Every thing is wrong according to him. The American people are worse than slaves; and are as bad off morally as they are economically, according to Ashby; and the younger generation is growing up in irreligion and infidelity. It was a speech, in shtort, to stir up hatreds and discontents, Whose only logical outcome would be civil war, revolution and final anarchy. And it is to the credit of the Populists of this county who were present and listening to his tirade; that they gave it no visible sighs of approval. There was considerable laughing at his jokes, which were quite numerous, but thpre was absolutely no applause for the serious portions of his speech.