Newspaper Page Text
The Empire State of Dixie Must
Not be Debauched.
(CONCLUDED FROM PAGE ONE.)
For his activities in procuring the divorce
which enabled Morse to relieve Dodge of his
wife, Abe went to the penitentiary for a short
while, and then passed over to Europe where,
it was said, he appeared to be flush of ducats.
Morse had also organized the Ice Trust,
piratically destroyed the natural ice on the
Hudson, breaking it up as fast as it formed,
thus making it impossible for New York and
Jersey to get any ice except his.
Then the hot summer came on, human
beings sweltered in the narrow streets, sick
people panted in the packed tenements, babes
gasped for breath—and Morse raised the price
of ice, and cut out the 5-oent sale entirely.
Result? The sick, the weak, the fevered
"died like flies.
I have never read more pleadingly pathetic
editorials than those addressed to Morse,
sonally, by the New York Daily papers.
They implored the man to spare the inno
cents, the helpless infants and the fevered
sick, by returning to the former price and the
former 5-cent block.
Those appeals might as well have been ad
dressed to Stone Mountain.
Remorselessly, this monster held to his
course, and never for an instant did he show
such a weakness as human sympathy.
Convicted later for some of his banking
operations which were said to be gigantic
crimes, he came to Georgia to serve out a short
term.
Did he serve it? Oh, no. His wife got
busy, wept her way from one big man to
another, wept her way into his sympathies,
and got his name on a petition for a pardon.
Newspapers of a certain sort took the mat
ter up, and they w T ept column after column
over Charles W. Morse. Gradually, the
maudlin portion of mankind got Morse on the
brain. The country would go to the dogs, and
the world would be scandalized, if Morse were,
allowed to continue in the penitentiary.
Then Morse’s health broke down, and a
most awful break-down it was. Nobody had
ever been as sick as Morse was; nobody ever
had such an accumulation of incurable dis
eases, all of them in their last stages.
M rse bad diabetes in its worst form and
its last stage: Morse had Bright’s disease so
fearfully advanced that his death was only a
question of a few days.
Bosh Felder said it: Fred Seely said it: the
daily papers reeked with it; and every morn
ing there came big headlines over the state
ments made by Bosh and Fred to the general
efleet that—
•J/O/ZNA’ 7N A DYING MAN!
A LL HE WANTS IS TO DIE OUTSIDE
THE DEN.
For God's sake don't break. his wife's heart
by letting husband die in felon's
stripes!'
It went on, day after day, until the hysteri
cal element were almost throwing fits, and the
maudlin noisily wept.
The Jeffersonian warned the public and the
President that Bosh Felder and Fred Seely
were working a huge fraud upon them.
'i here were circumstances about the manu
factured clamor for Morse that were quite
suflicient to convince a close observer that the
whole thing was an elaborate sham.
But there was no stopping it: Big Money
wc booming it, and it had to succeed.
President Taft hastily signed the pardon, in
order that Morse might gratefully die in the
arm- of Bosh Felder and Fred Seely, just
outside the prison door, with the blessed
bi ec u- of freedom fanning his radiant brow.
immediately after the pardon. Bosh and
Fred put a human screen around the dying
uiuii, -o that nobody could see him.
THE JEFFERSONIAN
No one saw him in Atlanta, no one on the
cars going away, no one in New York, and no
one as he took ship for Europe and hid in his
luxurious stateroom—no one except the men
who were hired to stand so close and so thick
around him that no one else could see him.
The dying man toured Europe, had a glad
some time, returned completely cured, and at
once began to organize another lawless, ma
rauding Trust; and the Morse Ship Trust is
now one of the most powerful in existence.
Morse’s health is better than that of Taft,
or Bosh Felder or Fred Seely, and he doubt
less hopes to read the obituary of each of
those estimable individuals.
I merely cite this recent and familiar case
to illustrate the case with which Big Money
can impose a fiction upon honest people.
It is said that Morse’s campaign for a par
don cost him somewhere about $250,000.
The State of Georgia suffered the most from
that campaign of lies, for the simple reason
that Georgia lawyers, and Georgia papers
took the leading part in it. In other words,
the local stage of the debasing farce, and
defeat of the Law, was Georgia.
To some extent, that case demoralized us,
because one bad precedent is prone to lead
to another; and the success of one sham
campaign in behalf of a rich criminal or a
criminal in 'whom the rich interest them
selves, is almost certain to pave the way for
another. |
If there had been a failure in the sham
campaign for Charles W. Morse, there might
have been no attempt at a sham campaign
in behalf of Leo M. Frank.
Every method used for Morse was copied
in the campaign for Frank—not only copied,
but improved on by elaborations and ad
ditions.
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH THE
EMPIRE STATE OF DIXIE!
Are we to lose sight of old landmarks?
Are we to wipe out the lines between small
crimes and great ones?
Are we to demolish our standards? Are
we to weigh Justice by the pound, and sell
it in the open market?
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH US?
One of the truest of Southern men re
cently wrote me a letter which I pray you to
read and consider:
Dear Mr. Watson: Looking over some num
bers of The Jeffersonian, I find in your issue of
March 21, 1907, an admirable editorial which I
think you should now re-publish. It is on the
killing of the scoundrel who seduced his cousin,
Viola Strother, the mother of General Zacfhery
Taylor and grandmother of General Richard Tay
lor, of the Confederate army. In that editorial
you took the same position you now do in the
case of the Jew and the scoundred who seduced
the Southern girl and who was as cultured as the
Cornish graduate and of Virginia aristocracy,
showing the rot of the contention as to education
being a bar to crime.
Another case in point is that of the young
attorney and member of the Baptist Church,
Thomas Jeffersonian Chuverius. He was a grand
nephew of President John Tyler, and often, while
engaged to be married to her, he put her in a
delicate situation. He refused to marry her, and
murdered her. Her name was LUlian Madison, of
the family, collaterally descended, of President
James Madison. He was hanged on circumstantial
evidence, which was not a whit stronger than in
the Frank case.
A lot of fool preachers and fool women peti
tioned Governor Fitzhugh Lee to commute to life
imprisonment, but he refused, and this cultured
Virginian of good family was hanged, and the
public approved. Cheverius choked the girl into
unconsciousness and then threw her into the res
ervoir at Richmond. There was no “nation-wide”
nor Virginia-wide campaign for Cheverius. Big
Money did not interpose. Cheverius had too
much family pride to confess, though he did have
a Baptist pastor to pray for him. Possibly he
confessed to his God if not to his pastor.
They don’t always confess publicly as did
Henry Clay Beatie, who was electrocuted a few
years ago for the murder of his wife, and as did
McCabe, mayor of Charlottesville, Va., when he
murdered his wife and when he was hanged.
Both. Beatie and McCabe were of good old Virginia
stock.
Two days ago a leading attorney of Knoxville
stopped me in the street to tell me that your
review of the Frank case in your August maga
zine was the ablest paper he had ever read.
Yours tru Iy, .
At the State Farm in Georgia, is an assas
sin who admits that he killed his victim by
shooting him as he was undressing to go to
bed, in his own home, after he had come in
from a sick neighbor’s, where he had "sat up”
with the sufferer during the first half of the
night.
Murdered in his own home!
MURDERED WITHOUT WARNING!
Murdered in the most dastardly and atro
cious way.
Great God in Heaven ! If the law of Geor
gia cannot throw her shield oner you, and
protect you in your home, where are you- safe?
If cold-blooded, midnight assassins are to
be pardoned, who is it that should be pun
ished ?
That man confessed, and the jury evidently
softened to him because he did confess; and
the jury saved his neck.
He escaped to Virginia, and it is said (hat
he killed one white man and one negro while
there, shooting them both in the back.
Be that as it may, he has only been in the
penitentiary about six years; and from some
source, is coming a tremendous pressure on
Governor Nat Harris to pardon this self
convicted assassin.
What sinister influence is at work? It all
seems to come from Atlanta.
Is there some Big Money clique which sees
the vast benefit to itself m putting Nat
Harris in a worse hole than John Slaton dug
for himself?
Why is it that the activities for Stribling
began as soon as Slaton slunk back into
Atlanta?
Pardon a confessed assassin?
Why? Because his little girl asked it!
If such a Code supplants the Law. who can
be punished?
Even somebody loved Nero, for some
loving hand strewed fresh flowers on that
human hyena’s grave.
Not long ago, a Cobb County boy snatched
a purse from a lady’s hand, on the road, and
Judge Ben Hill gave the boy fifteen years
in the penitentiary for it.
Has anybody in Atlanta bellyached over
this boy?
In Cullman, Alabama, a white man was
hanged, last summer, for having done exactly
what Stribling did: he had shot and killed a
man, by firing upon him through the window
as the man sat reading in his own home.
Virginia can enforce the law against scions
of the F. F. V’s, no matter how great the
pressure on the governors.
Alabama can enforce the law on assassins,
without any pressure being brought upon her
governor.
What’s the matter with Georgia?
Is our grand old State to be debauched,
every time Big Money starts a campaign,
when a down-and-out Traitor wants a plan#
to come back on?
No friend of Governor Nat. Harris will
ask him to pardon Stribling.
Those who do it, ARE HIS
They seek to have him do something whicli
will tend to lessen, in the public mind, the
guilt of what Slaton did last year.
Don’t forget the Cordele
meeting of
THE FARMERS’ UNION,
Saturday, January 22,
10 o’clock forenoon,
BE THERE!
PAGE FIVE
