The Louisville Democrat . . .

. . . is well acquainted with democracy in all its phases. It has been the aim of its whole life to take whatever of good it found in Democracy and urge it upon the people for its adoption and practice; and whatever of bad it found in the same party, it always set it on a hill so that all might see it and avoid it. As an exemplification of this is supported the administration of Jackson and Polk so far as they stuck to the old issues, and refused to support Buchanan and Breckinridge when they tried to make Democracy synonymous with wrong, disorder and treason. Now, when a discussion has been entered upon the propriety of reorganizing the democratic party, the editor naturally enough wants to know what is meant by it. If it is to bring back into power Breckinridge, and Mason and Slidell, and Benjamin and Bright, and Hunter and Davis and Buchanan, &c., he is against it. In our judgment this is exactly the gist of the whole movement, and if it does not have that effect, we will soon have another rebellion from the same discontented and disappointed patriots! The first effect will be that the new democratic party will find in its ranks every sympathizer with the South, without one solitary exception. That will be a beautiful element – will it not? It will exhibit the interesting spectacle of many a man who has in gone-by times been considered a Whig, chambering in close communication with men who have been plotting the destruction of the Government of the United States – sticklers for the Constitution so long as it protects treason, but against it when it undertakes to arrest and punish it.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 10, 1862, p. 2