Monday, April 13, 2015

Fitz Henry Warren to James S. Pike, February 23, 1860

Burlington, Iowa, February 23, 1860.

Dear James: I must begin to cultivate Southern pronunciation and Southern orthography to prepare for the new Administration. Dana, I suppose, is in the sulks at my nonsense; but I can blackguard you as long as I can raise a three-cent postage-stamp to pay for the amusement. My main purpose now is to ask you if you do not wish to engage a Pike county jeans suit, not of “Tyrian dye,” but of emancipation butternut bark. Of course that must be the court color and court dress. Your bowie-knife and tobacco (pig-tail twist) can be got from Virginia. Bayard Taylor can get you a supply when he goes to Richmond to lecture.

As you have the nomination of President, won't you allow us out here to name the Vice? We shall name Philip M—, of Buffalo, gentleman who once turned the government grindstone for the “use and behoof” of some dealers in sanded cotton. I should have said that I have just been reading Dana's article on Bates or Baits — which is the true orthography?

One word soberly. If I had had my hind quarters kicked to a jelly, as you have by the South, I should wait till quite warm weather — say the temperature of the “brimstone zone” — before I volunteered to advocate a Southern man for the Presidency. I shall not hereafter read your essays on Pluck with half so much relish as formerly.

I am sorry for all this, for I see where we are to drift.

Governor Seward will be the nominee of the convention, if it is to be a choice between him and Bates.

I am in for the New York Evening Post's doctrine—death if need be, but no dishonor.

Very truly,
Fitz-henry Warren.
Don't read this to Dana.

SOURCE: James Shepherd Pike, First Blows of the Civil War: The Ten Years of Preliminary Conflict in the United States from 1850 to 1860, p. 495-6

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