The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-08-18
DENT.
The PrOspeclivc, Conservative Candidate for
Governor of Mississippi Writes u ''swccily
Indignnnto Letter TO Boutwell,.

Governor of mississippi Writes n 'sswceiiy
Indignant" Letter TO Boutwell,.
WASHINGTON, August Il, 1SG9.-To Hon.
George S. Boutwell, Secretary of the Treasury
-Sir:-I shall make little apology for asking
your attention to my letter. and less for the
nature of its contents. You were the first to
deny the political orthodoxy of my friends
and myself, and by all the rules of the forum
am entitled to defense. Again, you hold
an Office of the Republic, and your acts,
therefore, are legitimate subjects of criticism
by the humbest citizen thereof. But in some
respects we are alike. For instance, we are
both aspirants for place, with this difference:
You aim to be the next President, with every
assurance of success except in the opinion of
the people, while | seek an humber place,
with my hopes in disastrous eclipse except in
the judgment of Mississippi.
In the probable results of the future we
both stand amenable to the Judgment of the
country. In the pursuit of your ambition,
you are ungrateful and unscrupulous as to the
means of success. Your organ, the New
York San, in the same breath rdioules the
capacity of your master and dwells with em-
phasis upon your peculiar fitness for his
office. Your excellent tool, Mr. Tulloci
became so reckless in the manipulation OF
your department in the interest of your ambi-
ton, and so defiant of the wishes of the Presi-
dent of the country, that to save yourself
from an explosion of popular indignation you
found it convenient to transfer him to
another sphere of scandalous activity where
his talents might he exerted with equal effect
and less etfrontery. Virginia, Tennessee.
Mississippi, and Texas, not to mention
anything SO humble as myself, were
distractions in the way of your sue
cess, because, through President Grants
intervention in nyqluJiDcy tba Mi,
clauses from their organic law, these States
are brought into the Union and firmly welded
to his support. Now, this is in direct conflict
with your systemized plans; for what General
Grant gets in the next Presidential election,
clearly Mr. Boutwell, will not get, and there
fore have you denounced the conservative
Republicans, who are for Grant, that you may
obtain the proscriptive Republicans who are
for Boutwell, and by some strange dexterous
management and occult political strategy you
have so worked upon the confidence of the
President as to cause him to flourish the club
with which you intend to break his head,
by inducing him to join you in de-
nunciation of the conservative Republi-
cans-a party created by his magnanimity
and triumphant through his encourage
ment. But, sir, your purpose is easily dis
cernible, and has a two-fold object, viz, to
destroy the National Republican party IN the
South and then to reconstruct from its shat
tered fragments a Boutwell, party, with no
Richmond in the field to strike for your
crown. But if you cannot succeed in this
scheme of desperate enterprise you mean to
ruin-a result, from present appearances,
much more likely to be reached. Your
official intervention for Wells, for instance,
gave twenty thousand majority to Walker
Your letter to Stokes gave Tennes-
see to Senter by an overwhelming
vote of seventy thousand. Your mar
vellous political sagacity, now active
in Mississippi and Texas, will repeat your
calamity, and again overwhelm you with dis
comfture and defeat. Superadd to these re-
suits of your unapproachable folly the imposi-
ton on these States of your iron-clad oath,
and the alienation is complete landing them
all into the outstretched arms of Democracy.
But the consequences of your folly do not
stop here. Ohio and Pennsylvania and others
will follow, deciding their political status in
October, and the North will echo back the
condemnation of the South, and peal in your
ears this fact, that there is still left enough of
the incorruptible virtue of the Republic to
rebulze you for a wanton repression of that
most sacred right-the elective franchise.
But sir, this will not deter you from your
mad courses you will still persist until every
prop that supports our party is stricken away,
anu JL6 WuOlS BIdlO SuJSISIIuCLuIS IuluOlSS
about our ears in hopeless ruin. When you
were appointed Secretary of the Treasury,
and unanimously confirmed by Senate of
every shade of political opinion, did you not
take an oath to administer your Office impair
tally, and for the exclusive objects of its
creaton-to collect the revenue and control
the finances of the country? Is not that
Office the property of the nation, and your
self only clothed for time with little brief
authority? Then, sir, how do you explain
this perversion of its legitimate uses and
functions into means and instrument of OPP
preston to force and compel an election of
obnoxious rulers upon the people of the
South?
Is such a course consistent with your oath
of Office or do you call this great moral
idea ? But, Mr. Boutwell,, though you have
thus prostituted the power of your office for
purposes of oppression, without the warrant
of conscience or law, it may be that you can
tell me by what authority you assume to pro-
nounce upon my political orthodoxy? Who
constituted you the infallible pope of Repub-
licanism? Who gave you the authority to
hurl the political anathemas of the party
Again, what right had you to commit the ad-
ministration to your policy? Have you to
learn yet that you are only part of the ad-
ministration, and not the whole of it, though
your friends believe that monomania has
seized your mind on that subject, and thatyou
verify believe yourself the State?
Very resnectfully LEWIS DENT.