Stephen H. Branch's Alligator, Vol. 1 no. 04, May 15, 1858

Peter Cooper and Mayor Tiemann are old and sacred friends of George W. Matsell, who are more familiar with each other than they are with the Bible, or morning and evening prayers. Mayor Tiemann was elected with the express condition that Matsell should be restored to his old position, and Peter Cooper and Mayor Tiemann, and James W. Gerard, and Ambrose C. Kingsland are at work for their lives to effect the restoration of Matsell, and all impends on the election of a Commissioner in place of the noble Perrit. Matsell was in the city at the last Mayoralty election, conspiring against Wood, who saved him from the scaffold, after we convicted him of alienage and perjury, and the dastard and sacrilegious abjuration of his country. And at the late election, he stabbed his benefactor down in the dust, in the assassin’s darkness, and did not play Brutus for the public virtue, but to consummate his restoration to an office (he had always degraded) which was in the contract between himself and Cooper, Tiemann, Gerard, and Kingsland, and other slavish friends. We know them all and the rendezvous of all their kindred Diavolos, whose names would fill the jaws of the Alligator . Matsell professed to enter the city from Iowa with flags and music on the day after Tiemann’s election, but he was in the city long before, and concealed in as dark a cavern as the odious Cataline, while conspiring to foil the patriotic Cicero, and consign the eternal city to a million thieves. And we now warn Cooper, Tiemann, Gerard, and Kingsland to beware. For if they foist Matsell on the city through the purchase of Nye or Bowen with Mayoralty, Street Commissioner, or the pap of the Mayor’s Executive vassals, we will make disclosures that will make them stare like affrighted cats, (Gerard a la he-cat, and the others a la she-cats,) and rock the city to its carbonic entrails. Talmadge must remain, although he annoyed his nurse and mother when a brat, and so did we; and in boyhood and early manhood we both had worms, and raised Sancho Panza,