Northern Doughfaces

An officer of one of the Ohio regiments writing to the Cincinnati Commercial from Hamburg, Tenn., April 27^th to correct some erroneous statements, adds:

“The time is coming when a battle at home must be fought between those who would yet be free and the miserable fragments of party politics that are now being nursed up for use when the proper hour arrives.  I have never yet been more disgusted with any set of men, than on a recent trip to Ohio in company of some prisoners of war.  Not with the rebels under my charge, for most of them were gentleman commanding my respect, as compared with diverse politicians at every stopping place who button-holed my prisoners, and condoled with them over ‘the unfortunate state of affairs that they had always tried to avoid,’ ‘hoped that it would soon be over and we should be brothers and friends again,’  ‘I stuck out to the last,’  ‘If it hadn’t been for the Abolitionists we never would have had a war,’ &c.  To have an editor as at Dayton, for hours closeted with one of the rebel Generals to be asked by these rebel offices all about Vallandigham, Pugh and Cox and hear them boast of  their excellent qualities and their patriotism – all these things were but straws, but to any man who looks cannot fail to read, that the relic of the old Breckenridge party (not Democrats) is not dead, but is even now tumbling restlessly in his coffin and even gets up at nightfall and walks the allies [sic] about your cities.  Nothing alarming in it!  No – must have an organization ready and perfected in the north to co-operate with the South as soon as we make peace!  Presidents and Cabinet officers – ministers and emoluments smell afar off, and draw like the body does the vultures.

Not content with having been tied body and soul, and all we loved almost lost – we come fawning around the authors of our misery, begging to pick the crumbs that may fall from the master’s table.

There is nothing truer under the sun than if a peace is made until we have whaled the devilish negro white man driving sprit out of the leaders of this rebellion and hung all such men as Jeff Davis, Starke, Bright, Slidell and Vallandigham our peace will only be nominal.  I have more real good feeling for a man who openly comes out and fights than for these political jugglers who are now patching up an old political quilt for the second birth from thralldom of our country.  Give me either a good man and upright or a mean devil and I will get along but a half-way man who can trust.”

O. W. N.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 10, 1862, p. 4