Page two, column one
A MONUMENT TO WALKER – We understand that a movement is on foot (says the Mobile Register) to erect a suitable monument in this city to the memory of the remarkable man whose life is a sacrifice to his devotion to southern interest and southern expansion, and who failed in his magnificent plan, only because he had to contend against the two greatest powers in the world – Great Britain and the United States of America.
FANNY FERN’S “AWE” OF A HUSBAND – A lady having remarked that awe is the most delicious feeling a wife can hold towards her husband, Fanny Fern thus comments:
Awe of a man whose whiskers you have trimmed, whose hair you have cut, whose cravat you have tied, whose shirt you have put in the wash, whose boots and shoes you have kicked in the closet, whose dressing-gown you have worn while combing your hair, who has been down in the kitchen with you at eleven o’clock at night to hunt for a chicken bone, who has hooked your dresses, unlaced your boots, fastened your bracelets, and tied your bonnet; and who has stood before your looking-glass with thumb and finger on proboseis, scratching his chin; whom you have buttered and teased; whom you have seen asleep with his mouth wide open; ridiculous!
Page two, column three
INCENDIARISM IN BASTROP – The Austin State Gazette of the 29th has the following :
We have seen a letter from Hon. Geo. W. McKown of Cedar Creek under date 16th September, in which he says his house was fired the previous Thursday night at ten o’clock. Part of the building was destroyed, and about $150 worth of furniture. It was lighted in three places, being a most deliberate act. It is not known who the guilty party may be – perhaps his own negroes. It is probable, however, that it may have been done by abolitionists. Judge McKown was a member of the Lecompton convention in Kansas, and the abolitionists swore his death. It is believed in northern Texas that a part of the secret order of black republicans in Texas are from Kansas. They may have discovered the residence of McKown, and either done the infamous act themselves or instigated negroes to do it. We hope that a rigid inquiry may be instituted. We learn that it was a hard struggle to arrest the flames and save the dwelling.
Page two, column four
The Overflow
The WATER FALLING – We are glad to report that the overflow in the rear of the First and Second districts ceased rising late last night, and commenced receding about three o’clock this morning, and up to the time we write the water has probably gone down six inches or more.
The overflow in the First district, which has brought more or less suffering to at least a thousand families, and which will not add to the healthiness of that part of the city from some time to come, is chiefly attributed to the digging away of large portions of the levee on the north side of the new canal. The effect of taking away that protection to the rear of the First district might easily have been foreseen, and was thought a grievous worn by the people, but they were powerless to prevent it. The back water from the lake had, of course, much to do with the unfortunate state of affairs, but the worst feature of it is said to be the carrying off of the new canal embankment. This is the talk back of town, anyway, and the subject is one that should claim the best and speediest attention of the city surveyor.
We find that the water has backed up along the rear of the city from the new and old canals, and the breaking of the lower side of the old canal sent some flood water down to St. Anne street, and up as far as Roman. But the surveyor and a gang of men got to work at this point, and soon prevented further damage. The city in the rear of and along the line of St. Mark, or Magnolia, down to Common street and along Claiborne street, down the old basin, was in good boating order late last night, but the cross streets, Common, Gravier, Poydras, Lafayette &c, showed a very watery appearance several squares nearer the heart of the city.
It gives us pleasure, however, to say that a more satisfactory state of things was perceptible on our visit out there this morning. The water began to recede slowly about three o’clock and had gone down as much as six inches in nearly as many hours. This will be cheering news, indeed, to the sufferers by the overflow.
Many a poor man, many a poor woman, struggled hard to get together such articles of furniture of family use as would make that dear spot, home, respectable and comfortable. A cheap yet pretty carpet, worth to the poor owner as much as a costly Brussels to a man of wealth, here and there a mahogany ornament, and a hundred little things, kept clean and nice and prized, have either been ruined or damaged or lost in many if the low, one-story tenements in the inundated districts. Nor is this all. The lives of the feeble victims of ill-health have been jeopardized from exposure to damps and water, and in moving from one place to another to escape the rising flood.
Not a few housewives, who held their little parlors and bedrooms as the apple of their eye, look tearfully upon the damage done them, as furniture floating about at will in a foot or two of water, and everything around was soiled and damaged.
The recent increase of house rent and the expenses of the table in this city, make these losses the more severe.
Page two, column five
Burglary
The residence of Mr. J. B. Brown, No. 493 Baronne street, was entered night before last, and a gold watch and chain, and Mr. B’s coat, pantaloons, vest, and some small change, carried out of his room. A negro is supposed to have been the thief, and a cool darkey he must have been, as he changed coats in the bedroom, putting on Mr. Brown’s (we suppose) after taking off his own, which he threw on the floor and left there. He carried an undershirt out of the bedroom, but didn’t bring it further than the parlor. The watch is an English patent lever, of Liverpool make, numbered 5745.
Destructive Fires -- The same paper [Alexandria Louisiana Democrat] has the following: Residents of Rapides north of the river have suffered and are still suffering from the numerous and extensive fires now raging in the pine woods. Whole square miles are overrun by the flames, which destroy also a large proportion of the timber and often endanger houses, mills and fences. The loss in pasturage alone is very serious.
Dry and Dusty -- Our weather is still dry and dusty, and no sign o hopes of rain cheer the husbandman and the parched earth. It is about time to commence putting up seed cane, but what can be done in that line without rain? The standing cane in many places in different parishes is dying. The fall gardens are in a hopeless condition. Franklin (St. Mary Parish) Planters Banner, 29th ult.
An “Irrespressible” Juror Fined for Contempt Mr. Oliver Johnson, editor of an anti-slavery paper, has been fined $25 for refusing to act as a juror in the New York Supreme Court, because he conscientiously believed that the constitution of the United States was “A league with death and a covenant with hell.”
Page one, column seven
A POWERFUL APPEAL -- We want our readers to peruse the following powerful appeal from the address of the Hon. Jeremiah Clemens, lately delivered at Huntsville, Ala., and we therefore make room for it in lieu of any remarks of our own. It contains matter worthy of profound reflection:
[only two paragraphs of this long speech are quoted]
My purpose is to place before you a connected chain of facts which clearly prove that the Southern rights leaders have for ten years persistently and assiduously labored to destroy the government. There is no escape from this conclusion except upon a plea of lunacy. If they had the least conception of the necessary consequences of their acts, they were and are disunionists. First, the non-existence of the Missouri line was held to be sufficient cause for dissolution. Then came the recommendation to break up all national parties. After that we had resolutions declaring that the Compromise of 1850 ought to be resisted to the extremity of revolution.
I deny in toto the right of secession. I deny that any one State has the right to put in jeopardy the freedom and happiness of all the rest. I affirm that the Constitution is a perpetual compact in its nature, and its express terms – that it was so understood by the framers – that it contains no such absurdity as a provision for its own destruction, and that its authority can only be abrogated or destroyed by a resort to the natural right of revolution – a right that can be enforced by the armed hand alone. There can be no such thing as stealing out of the Union, or begging out of the Union. We must go out of it, if we go out of it at all, at the cost of civil war. The Chief Magistrate, and every officer under his control, are sworn to execute the laws. He and they would be perjured if they permitted you peaceably to withdraw.
Page two, column two
“First Blood” – The New York Herald which came yesterday mentions an attack made by a company of “Wide-Awakes” on a crowd of citizens, mostly Southern men, in front of the New York Hotel. The armed abolitionists beat and maltreated several of the inoffensive Southerners. The police came and arrested the Southerners. One, a Bell man, was locked up all night in the tombs and fined bext morning.
Wouldn’t Mr. Hilliard like to have been there and “Felt that he was an American citizen!”
TEXAS ABOLITION INCENDIARIES. The following letter of Judge Watkins, a well-known and highly-respected citizen of Hays, encloses the subjoined slip, showing that the Rev. Buley, a leader of the Texas Abolition conspiracy, has been arrested in Arkansas. What a howl Gen. Houston and his friends will raise over this!
RIO BLANCO, Sept. 24, 1860
MAJOR MARSHALL:
Dear Sir: I received a letter from a friend dated Fayetteville, Ark., Sept. 4th, enclosing this slip.
Respectfully,
“A few minutes ago I was to see that man Buley, who had two sons hung in Texas as Abolitionists. Buley was on his way North to Missouri, when people here received a letter from Texas that there was a $1,000 reward offered for Buley, and they went after, took him, and have him confined here now. He says that if they come for him from Texas he will be sure to be hung.”
MAINE – A gentleman from Mobile writes from Lincoln (Maine), under date of Sept. 21, as follows:
Politics are waxing pretty warm here. I was glad of one thing when I came here. That was to find all of my folks for Breckinridge. My brother has a Breckinridge and Lane flag flying from the top his store. I tell you that Douglas won’t do! I have heard two or three Douglas speeches while I have been here, and I never heard any stronger abolitionist denounce the South than they do. I never knew what was meant by Squatter-Sovereignty until I came down East. Now I am satisfied Breckinridge is the man for the South” and it may be added, the whole country, if the fundamental law is to be respected.
Page three, column one
CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM
Resolved, That the platform adopted by the Democratic party at Cincinnati be affirmed, with the following explanatory resolutions:1. That the Government of a Territory organized by an act of Congress is provisional and temporary, and during its existence all citizens of the United States have an equal right to settle with their property in the Territory, without their rights, either of person or property, being destroyed or impaired by Congressional or Territorial legislation.
2. That it is the duty of the Federal Government, in all its departments, to protect, when necessary, the rights of persons and property in the Territories, and wherever else its constitutional authority extends.
3. That when the settlers in a Territory, having an adequate population, form a State Constitution, the right of sovereignty commences, and being consummated by admission into the Union, they stand on an equal footing with the people of other States, and the State thus organized ought to be admitted into the Federal Union, whether its constitution prohibits or recognizes the institution of slavery.
Resolved, That the Democratic party are in favor of the acquisition of the Island of Cuba, on such terms as shall be honorable to ourselves and just to Spain, at the earliest practicable moment.
Resolved, That the enactments of State Legislatures to defeat the faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law are hostile in character, subversive of the Constitution, and revolutionary in their effect.
Resolved, That the Democracy of the United States recognize it as the imperative duty of this Government to protect the naturalized citizen in all his rights, whether at home or in foreign lands, to the same extent as its native-born citizens.
WHEREAS, One of the greatest necessities of the age, in a political, commercial, postal and military point of view, is speedy communication between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Therefore be it
Resolved, that the National Democratic party do hereby pledge themselves to use every means in their power to secure the passage of some bill, to the extent of the constitutional authority of Congress, for the construction of a Pacific Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, at the earliest practicable moment.
THE DANGERS REAL – Shall They Be Arrested?
We have been trying to impress upon our readers the conviction that the evils that environ us are real, not imaginary, and we have done this because we thought, and still think, that the truth demands it and the facts warrant it. We see evidences of it on every hand; and hence we have appealed earnestly to good men to forget mere party, to rise above it, and endeavor in a common sense way to ward off the thronging disasters that threaten us. There are those who affect to speak lightly of these disasters, and even to risk them, for the sake of a petty bit hopeless party struggle. We shall be gratified if they do not have cause to regret their course when it is too late to repair the evils that might have been averted by a timely patriotism and the abnegation of a little prejudice. All that is necessary to avert the threatened evils is to place country, its material and moral interests, above party. The evils are not imaginary. They are real, and already begin to be felt. Will the reader peruse the following, from a sectional paper of last week, published in Montgomery, Alabama?
Never have such hard times been known here since 1837; hard times too, that somehow arise out of financial mismanagement. It is the banks and one set of brokers versus another set of brokers, in the face of the fact that cotton advances by every steamer. Next Monday is the 1st, and alas! we fear several good substantial men will go down in the commercial melee, between that and the 4th! And this ought not to be – and it would not be, but for the cause already mentioned, aggravated by the antagonism of the several financial “machines” of the city. We can, however, only wait and hope; the gloom ahead is impenetrable.
Just go ahead with your shouts and huzzas for disunion and revolution one month longer, and then you will have something in reality to complain of. You haven’t seen anything yet. Just let the impression get out and be pretty generally believed that the Union is going to be dissolved, and we will see whether you can sell cotton or anything else, at any price at all. There is no use railing at the bankers and the brokers. They are like everybody else; will take care of themselves, and they are right. If the people threaten to break up to government, and there is any probability of it, of course the banks and all the moneyed men will “haul in the horns” and prepare for the storm. A highly respected cotton buyer told us a day or two since that he could not get a bill discounted to buy a bale of cotton, payable beyond the day of the Presidential election. Indeed are the times hard, but the worst is ahead. It is so throughout the South. Here is what is said of Memphis, Tenn. What a glorious time the disunionists are likely to have: “The money market at Memphis is unusually tight. Money is worth 1-1/2 to 2 cent per month. The banks are doing nothing. Cotton goes in fast, but the sales do not relieve the money market. Protests are common. Secession at Charleston and Baltimore, to elect Lincoln, is the first cause of the general pressure in the South. Capital is timid, and hides itself during a threatened revolution.”
Is it wise to treat with ridicule disasters whose first breath already begins to be felt by the business of the country? Is it wise to invite the tempest that is to lay low the mighty oaks of the forest when the faintest rustling among their leaves thus sends incipient paralysis through communities? Is it reasonable thus to trifle? Does it argue sanity thus to play the bravado when the tornado sends its rumbling forerunners to warn us of its approaching fury?
We are sometimes asked why a commercial journal should take such interest In the politics of the country. Read over the above abstracts, and you will learn the reason why. The business, agricultural and commercial interests of the country are at stake. They begin already to be affected. The crazy men who talk complacently of revolution in this country can begin to perceive the first faint consequences of their course.
We are threatened with the success of a sectional party in the North that wages war against one half of the country, when this sectional party is absolutely in the minority of the
whole vote of the Union, and may consequently be easily defeated by a union of the conservative men of the country against it; but when the effort is made to produce this union through a common medium of a national conservative party that every patriot may support, we find sectional men in the South turning their batteries, not against the common foe, but against this very effort to produce harmony and to ward off the threatened dangers. Let us ask any man of common sense how he expects the triumph of either wing of the Democracy, and especially of the Breckinridge, or weaker wing, when united they elected Mr. Buchanan by a minority vote? Mr. Buchanan, we say, was elected by a minority vote, and yet we are gravely asked to suppose that one half of this minority will now prevail against the great sectional party of the North! We further remind the common-sense reader that Mr. Buchanan received just double the vote in the North that he did in the South, receiving – omitting fractions – twelve hundred thousand votes in the North and six hundred thousand in the South. The twelve hundred thousand votes which he received in the free States are now actually lost to Mr. Buchanan’s candidate, the number of votes which he can receive in those States being so inconsiderable as to be unworthy of notice. The six hundred thousand which were cast for Mr. Buchanan in the South have split in two, leaving his candidate say a trifle over one-half of that vote, in a vote which, at the next election, will approximate five millions! Yet we are seriously asked to reply upon Mr. Breckinridge’s shadowy vote for success over Lincoln! Was there ever anything before so utterly preposterous and absurd! It is no wonder, in view of these overwhelming, crushing facts, that Mr. Speaker Orr of South Carolina, says that he sees no prospect of the election of Mr. Breckinridge, either by the people or otherwise.
Why, then, we ask, is he run? His friends do not expect to elect him. What do they expect to do? If we may believe what his leading supporters say in every State in the South, they expect Lincoln to be elected, and they expect to break up the Union, and bring upon the country the long train of gloomy and inconceivable afflictions which even the very edge of the shadows gives ominous token already will follow so dire a calamity. Yet the defeat of Lincoln may be easily affected, and all these thick-thronging convulsions avoided. So strong a hold has the Congressional movement already obtained upon the popular heart that a generous and vigorous and masterly rally around it will carry upon the topmost wave of patriotic enthusiasm over all opposition on to the glorious victory of peace and commercial, agricultural and manufacturing prosperity. Is the object worth striving for? Is it worth the prolonged thoughts and actions of every good man from this day to the day of the election? We think it is. We can scarcely comprehend how patriotic, good men, upon taking a calm survey of the whole state of the country at the present time, can hesitate for a moment to rally with all their hearts to the support of the only candidates that have a reasonable prospect of defeating Lincoln. It seems to us that the facts stand out in too bold a relief to admit of cavil except merely for the sake of evil. And for this the interests of the country should not be jeopardized.
TOBACCO FOR BOYS – A strong and sensible writer administers a wholesome dose for boys who use tobacco in any form, assuring them that tobacco has utterly spoiled and utterly ruined thousands of boys, inducing a dangerous precocity, developing softening and weakening of the bones, and gradually injuring the spinal marrow, the brain, and the whole nervous fluid. A boy who early and frequently smokes, or in any way uses large quantities of tobacco, never is known to make a man of much energy of character, and generally lacks physical and muscular, as well as mental energy. We would particularly warn boys who want to be any body in the world, to shun tobacco as a most baneful poison.