JEFFERSON AS IT WAS, AND JEFFERSON AS IT IS NOW (Approximately 1868)
 

If there is anything more particularly to deprecated, at this time, in the conduct of the newspaper press, it is intemperate editorial articles.  They not only mislead the unreflecting at home, and keep up an unnatural feverish excitement in the community, but are calculated to produce prejudice abroad.  In periods of ordinary political excitement, such articles do no great mischief.  Reflecting men regard them as so much “leather and prunella;” sounds of fury that die out with their echoes.  Society is anxious for repose.  Quite, and permanent peace.  Jefferson, above and beyond all other places, is weary of such excitements.  It has passed through a terrible ordeal.  All through it while we were solicitous for the safety of its people, and for the preservation of good government, and when duty, honor, and patriotism required plain speech; when we felt, that if the press, yet untrammeled, were silent; the “very stones would cry out,” unwelcome truths, must be mentioned with moderation.

Prejudice abroad has done us great harm, and our own people, in the midst of wrongs, must be cautions in their animadversions upon acts calculated to reflect discredit even upon the worst governments of Europe.

We have crossed the Rubicon.  Hate, envy. And malice, are in the background.  “Reconstruction” as bad as it is as repulsive to all our ideas of civil liberty, opens to our State and people, renewed avenues of prosperity and happiness.  More than this, it promises eventual good government. 

These remarks are predicated upon an article in the columns of a city cotemporary, the sentiment of which, in our judgment, is to be deprecated.  We do not presume the writer intended what his reflections clearly indicate.  The animus of what he says is, that our community is in a state of disorganization if not anarchy, consequent upon the removal of General Buell and his tyrannical authority,

Every good citizen of Jefferson knows that the community has not within the last three year been as quiet and peaceful as now.  Men begin to feel their responsibility, and the officers of the law, uncorrupted by bad men in power, are doing their duty with a fidelity that is commendable.  Yet this writer, after censuring the present police, who were never so diligent as they are at this time, says:

“There is a vindictive malice existing within the corporate limits of this city which may at any moment culminate in the destruction of life, property, and everything we hold dear, and this malice exists among a class of semi-barbarous savages, as it were, who hold nothing paramount to the gratification of an imaginary vengeance and that, too is being directed against the most helpless and innocent class of our community—our wives and children.

It is unnecessary to say this malice is the offspring of the teaching of the last three years, by such men as George W. Smith et als, than whom a more vindictive scoundrel never breathed the breath of life.  With no religion, no respect for the laws of God or man, no holy ties of consanguinity of affinity to mellow down the feelings of their terribly wicked hearts, a constant propensity to evil, we cannot approach nigh unto the amount of injury they are capable of doing us in one short night, without a constant unwavering espionage and an acute sense of duty and obligation on your part—watch men upon the walls of our city.”

 This is all wrong.  No sooner had General Buell left Jefferson, than there was a marked change in the moral tone of the place.  If there have been exhibition of violence, on the part of the negroes and malice, it has been mainly confined to the young and unreflecting men.  The older ones can be controlled, and they must be influenced in a right direction.

When we reflect, that an effort is being made at Washington and Austin to perpetuate the tyranny that has oppressed us for the last two years, and to fasten upon our people a negro militia, that occasion scenes of real horror that we cannot contemplate without a shudder, all reflecting men must recognize the fact, but they cannot be too prudent.  We most live beyond reproach, and do all we can to restore good government

Title:  JEFFERSON AS IT WAS, AND JEFFERSON AS IT IS NOW
Author:
Location: Jefferson, Texas
Year:  Approximately 1868
Media:  Newspaper article, glued to Page 202 of  the Ledger of Captain W. B. Blair

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