Geo. W. Jones

No public demonstration was made on the arrival of this extinguished citizen of Iowa at Dubuque, but we ascertain form his toady of the Express that a number of his friends called on him. – From the same authority we learn that the story which was put in circulation about him having addressed a letter to Jeff. Davis, which was found accidentally among his papers, is pronounced by Jones to be false.  If Geo. W. Jones said that he lies – under the very grievous charge of an intentional deception upon his fellow sympathizers.  Jones might swear till his face was as black as his character to the truth of what he avows, and he could not change the facts in the case.  Jones, - we are informed, and appeal to Senator Grimes for the truth of the statement, - did write a letter to Jeff. Davis, and addressed it to Hon. Jefferson Davis, President of the Southern Confederacy, in which he sympathized with the arch-traitor, and avowed his own determination of assisting him in his treason.  He might as well attempt to palliate the conduct of his son, taken at Fort Henry with arms in his hands, fighting against the country that raised him from a puling, puking infant in his nurse’s arms to manhood out of the pap-bowl in his father’s hands, that all that time had been replenished from the treasure of the country he since has so ignominiously betrayed.

The senior Jones says that in those letters that were made the foundation and pretext of his arrest, he “denounced the secession theories which have resulted in the existing rebellion, and reproached the South for not endeavoring to maintain its right in the Union.”  A pretty story this.  It’s enough to make a horse-block laugh to see the squirmings and wrigglings  of this modern Othello.  A gentleman in the act of appropriating his neighbor’s wood-pile, might be excused on the plea of short-sightedness; but there is no palliation in the unblushing effrontery of a denial in the face and eyes of a fact that has been interwoven with the history of this rebellion as a part and parcel of the same.  We have no faith in these Joneses, there is bad blood in the old one’s veins, that seven times dipping in the pools of Washington, nor a journey to Mecca nor Bogota, would remove.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Wednesday Morning, March 5, 1862, p. 2