“Occasional,” in writing to the Philadelphia Press, discusses the complaint of certain democratic presses and politicians, regarding the conduct of this war against rebellion and its expensiveness with much force and justice. We commenced the following picture drawn by that writer, to the prayerful attention of the Davenport Democrat and its ilk. After referring to the incessant and mischievous murmurings of this class he says:
It does not come with good grace from the known enemies of that war, and the known advocates of the Southern rebellion, to constitute themselves accusers and judges of the shortcomings of others. They should recollect that the entire responsibility of the blood shed in this war is theirs. They know that but for James Buchanan there would have been no war, and consequently no expenditure of the public money, for the purpose of maintaining the integrity of the Government; no great debt, and no complication with foreign powers. When that wicked and wretched man betrayed the party that elected him, deserted the principles upon which he came into power, and struck down every independent spirit that protested against his crimes, the men now so clamorous against Mr. Lincoln’s Administration sustained Buchanan, encouraged him in his tyrannies, and took the guilty wages he was so ready to pay to all his satellites. He saw his Secretary of the Navy sending our ships to distant seas, his Secretary of War leading a series of plundering and frauds unparalleled since the days of Warren Hastings, and nearly all his confidants preparing for the overthrow of the republic, and he neither rebuked the one nor resisted the other. So far from it his most intimate friends were his most corrupt advisers; and even when his Secretary of the Interior, Jacob Thompson, returned from a treasonable mission to North Carolina, he honored him by a sumptuous dinner in the Presidential mansion and thanked him in public letter. James Buchanan was not only the creature and the tool of the murderers of our liberties, but their willing ally; and when the historian comes to select the man who has done the most to plunge the Republic into this sea of blood, he will select James Buchanan. The men who have acted with this arch traitor to freedom and humanity, should be careful, amid their own intrigues against the present Administration, lest in trying to embarrass it they do not revive the recollection, and reopen the great book which records the fact that they and they alone, are responsible for the war and all its sufferings and its atrocities.
– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Thursday Morning, April 10, 1862, p. 2
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