Clarksville chronicle. (Clarksville, Tenn.) 1857-1865, 1857-12-18
THE TYRANNY OF LoCoFooo1sM

opposing. the election of Wood. A day
or two afterwards, Steadman, of Ohio.
solicited an appointment at the hands Of
the President, and, his reply was-"Sir
you opposed me in the Cincinnati Conven-
ton" Had the head of a party dared
twenty years ago, to say to a citizen of
this Republic, you shall vote as I please,
or take the consequences, burst of in
dignation would have followed the act of
tyrany, and the tyrant would have been
repudiated by all good citizens. But now
tho self-styled democracy--the party that
boasts so loudly and necessarily of its
devotion to freedom, practically declares
that every man who enlists in its ranks
must be its plant, unreasoning slave, or
submit to all the persecution that can be
legally practiced against him. Wood is
unworthy of the confidence of any gentle
man or patriot, and had declared that we're
he to murder a member of his own family
he would still, as the nominee of his party
be elected. McKeon preferred another
democrat, to such Red Republican, and
for that preferenee-for exercising a right
common to every citizen, and incumbent
upon every honest man, Jimmy Buchanan,
President of the U. States, removed him
from Office. What man, of noble and
generous sentiments, would not rather be
the victim than the tyrantl Where is the
true hearted American citizen who does
blush at the recital of these contemplate
deeds, and tremble for the safety of the
Republic!
Yet so degraded are the politicians, and
so enslaved the masses Of democracy, that
the former have not the virtue, nor the
latter, the sturdy independence to con-
denim acts that disgrace the country, and
rivet yet more firmly chains that bind them
to the car of despotic party rule. Well
may locofocos confer the right of suffrage
upon the worst specimens of alien immi-
grants; they know not its value, them
selves, and what they value not, they may
consistently squander upon objects as
worthless as they. What can slave know
of the value of liberty, or of the means
by which it can best be secured and per-
petuated? What does locofoco care for
the right of sufrage-as privilege of
freedom-when he dare not exercise it but
as he is ordered to do do? McKeon sun
posed himself a freeman, and vainly i'm
agincd that his rights would be respected:
but the executive Of the locofoco party
has been invested, by that party, with the
power to prescribe and punish refractory
subjects, and the District Attorney-that
was-has found his freedom limited to
implicit obedience to king caucus, or dis
franchisement as a member of the locofoco
party. Steadman thought his claims, to
office, as good as those of any other loco
foco; but found his merits measured not
by his intellectual and moral qualifications,
but by his subserviency to this or that
locofoco aspirant, in the Cincinnati Con-
vention. And this is American liberty
This the hateful construction and applica-
ton of those glorious principles and insti-
tutions that were intended to free and
enoble people now abjectly depraved and
enslaved by a jesuit policy at war with
every exalted sentiment that entered into
the erection of this government of glorious
theories and most damnable practices.