Stephen H. Branch’s Alligator.
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JUNE 5, 1858.
This is the seventh week of the Alligator, and nearly every editor in this city has had the courtesy, and kindness, and generosity to notice my efforts to establish a journal on the basis of truth and justice, save James Gordon Bennett, Horace Greeley, and Henry J. Raymond. As I have written for the Herald, Tribune, and Times nearly since their birth, the premeditated slight of Bennett, Greeley, and Raymond seems so impolite and unkind and ungenerous, that I have resolved to analyse the editorial career of these notorious big and little villains of the press, who are a greater curse to the people of this country than all the thieves who ever entered the City Hall, or our State or National Capitols. And next week I will begin their dissection, and pluck out their livers, and cast them to the cadaverous and greedy vultures for a choice repast, which will present the novel spectacle of thievish crows devouring the livers of their own species. It is the custom of these editors to unite and crush those who dare oppose them, and expose their crimes, by refusing to let the wholesale newspaper venders have the Herald, Tribune, and Times, if they sell the public journals of their adversaries. If they strive to deprive me of bread, by intimidating the wholesale newspaper dealers of Ann, Nassau, and Beekman streets, so help me God, I will enter their editorial closets, and lash them until the blood streams from every pore, if I am slain in the attempt. Next week, then, and as long as I can wield a pen, I will show the people of this country how these editors blow hot and cold, and black mail, and collude with thievish politicians, and share their spoils, and sell the people! And from my knowledge of Bennett, Greeley, and Raymond (after a close communion with them for twenty years,) I brand them as three of the biggest villains that ever breathed. So, next week, let the American people prepare for startling revelations!
James R. Whiting is a man whose head commands our profoundest respect, and his heart our warmest attachment. This is no age for him. He is like a cat in a strange garret among the Busteeds, and Connollys, and Pursers, and Devlins, and Smiths, and Erbens, and other perjured aliens and plunderers that prowl around the City Treasury. But James R. Whiting would have been adored in the halcyon or tumultuous days of the Persian, Egyptian, Grecian, or Roman Empires. But neither the press nor the people will ever appreciate his wisdom, patriotism, and sacrifice in these degenerate times. God bless James R. Whiting! and when he dies, the honest people will weep over his departure, as the Athenians did over the bones of Socrates, whom they kicked, and cuffed, and taunted with insanity, and accused of corrupting the youth of his country, and thrust poison down his throat, but they deeply regretted their folly and cruelty, and the Grecians of every age have mourned his melancholy fate, and cursed their ancestors for their neglect and persecution of the scholar and patriot, and unrivalled Father of Philosophers, since the globe was launched into the atmospheric waves.