Col. Forney writes from Washington to the Philadelphia
Press:
Andrew Johnson is as bold in denouncing treason in Nashville
as he was in Washington. He does not
hesitate, as some of our Northern politicians do, when seeking to find the
authors of our calamities. In Tennessee
he could safely locate this responsibility upon the Abolitionists and Black
Republicans; he could imitate the
Breckinridgers of Pennsylvania and other Free States by criticizing and
condemning Republican legislation.
Disdaining all such shallow tricks, however, he tells the rebels that it
was not Mr. Lincoln and his friends who refused all compromise, but the
Secession leaders, and that these later could have carried the Crittenden
proposition if they had not persistently determined to break up the government
and to dissolve the Union. When the day
of reckoning comes, when the public stewards go before the people to render an
account, Andrew Johnson’s words will drive the plausible falsehoods of the
Breckinridgers away, like so much chaff driven by the whirlwind. – They will
talk against the tax, against the republicans, against confiscation and in
favor of a dishonorable peace. He, and
the millions who believe in him, will assume a high and manly ground – that, as
the war was begun by the rebels, they must be made to feel the indignation of
the Government they have assailed, and that they are no patriots, who in their
sympathy with the rebels, labor only to restore them to power by embarrassing
and misrepresenting the Administration.
This will be the ground of Johnson and the honest masses of the United
States.
– Published in the Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye,
Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, April 12, 1862, p. 4
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