I am, Dr. Hopkins, your humble servant,
W. G. Brownlow,
Editor of the Knoxville Whig.
[From the Knoxville Whig.]
TO STEPHEN TRIBBLE.
Villainous Sir:—Letters from my friends in the West inform me that you are making a full team in the service of the Devil, Locofocoism, and crime, in portions of Missouri and Kentucky! You have recently held forth in Charleston, a pleasant post-village, the capital of Mississippi county, Missouri, about six miles south-west of the "Father of Waters!" In that town you undertook to inform the good people, the Circuit Judge being present, who I am, and to demonstrate that I am not entitled to credit in any thing I say! You claimed to have once lived in East Tennessee—to know the people and the country—and to have known William T. Senter and James Y. Crawford, two other Methodist preachers, whose pedigrees you pretend to give!
Mr. Senter was an able man—a moral and upright man—and a Whig Representative in Congress, from the District you represented in the jail of Sullivan county, for a long time previous to your being branded in the hand and on the cheeks, for MANSLAUGHTER, the particulars of which I will remind you of before I close this familiar letter! Mr. Senter could have gone to Congress longer, but voluntarily retired. Mr. Crawford was a brother-in-law to Mr. Senter, and was a preacher of respectable talents, and in good standing in his Church. They are both in their graves, beyond the reach of your malice, where the sound of your infamous voice, and the words of your lying tongue, can never penetrate their ears! But I am still above ground, daily kicking, and making war upon the Locofoco Paupers and Foreign Catholics, as well as Native Traitors, with whom you are associated, and with whom you act in politics. I acknowledge myself to be game for you to hunt down!
You are now a Campbellite preacher as well as a Sag Nicht Missionary; and the garb of religion you wear, gives a degree of weight to your falsehoods and slanders, among strangers, that they otherwise would not have. The idea of "Stev Tribble," who ingloriously fled from this country for crimes he could not meet in open court, being a preacher, and itinerating through the West, "in search of the lost sheep of the house of Israel," is so ridiculous, as scarcely to be believed at all, although there is no doubt but what he has been regularly installed in Kentucky, and now has the "care of souls."
Why, you unmitigated old villain, your whole career, from your "youth up," has been one of crime and revolting blackguardism. While a boy and a young man, where Hoss's school was taught in Washington county, your vulgar conversation, immoral practices, indecent habits, and blackguardism, disgusted the entire neighborhood, and rendered you so odious that no decent family would board you! All the waters of the far-famed Jordan, in the palmiest days of that bold stream, were not sufficient to wash your sins away! If the Lord Bishop of London were to immerse you as often as "seventy times seven," in the waters of "bold Jordan," and in the name of the holy Trinity, you would still remain what you were when you fled from this country to avoid the extreme penalty of the law—one of the greatest scoundrels for whom Christ died!