Yourself and half-brother Havron were confined in Blountville Jail, for the murder of William Humphreys, a promising young man, whom you brutally assaulted and murdered in open daylight in the streets of Kingsport, in Sullivan county, and without provocation! You were tried and convicted of manslaughter, and branded in the hand and on the cheek. After being branded, you bit the letters out of your hand, and clawed them out of your face, but the scars are to be seen in both. Indeed, I have been written to, to know why these scars are on your face! I take this method of answering those inquiries; and publishing them in my "Whig," which has a circulation of 5,000, and our "Campaigner," which circulates 7,000 copies, I shall be able to introduce you to as many persons as may have heard you preach my funeral.
While in the Blountville Jail, with your half-brother, Havron, whose blow killed Humphreys, after you had weakened him, you caught hold of the jailor, Montgomery Irvin, and held him in a scuffle, when he entered the room with your dinner, until Havron made his escape. Havron would have pulled hemp, had he not escaped; and had our penitentiary system existed at that time, you would have been sentenced for life! But you would not have remained there longer than the past summer, as we have a Governor who pardons out all such men, and has more sympathies for them than any other Executive Officer in the nation. You have a half-brother who is a Sag Nicht member of our Legislature, and a great friend and supporter of our Governor and his foreign associates, and he could have turned you out and procured for you an office if you had remained. But then you followed the teachings of "the spirit" of Sag Nichtism, in leaving between two days, and emigrating to Kentucky, as many precious souls would never have "heard the word," or had their sin washed away, but for you!
In an unmentionable and disgraceful enterprise, you became possessed of a broken leg, and were mean enough to abscond without paying the bill of your physician, Dr. Patton, whose unremitting attention saved you from your grave, and from the clutches of the Devil, sooner than the old fellow was prepared for your reception! If you had the honor of a first class thief, you would pay this medical bill out of the proceeds of the first public collection you take up, either in Missouri or Kentucky. And if you suffer it to go unpaid until your infinitely infernal career is wound up, the Day of Judgment will disclose the manner of your breaking your leg! If I were you, I would sooner pay this bill now, than to be asked in the great day how my leg was broken!
Disgraced as you are, unprincipled and villainous, you have gone into Kentucky, taken upon yourself "holy orders," and married a wife, imposing most shamefully upon the family into which you married. The woman you have thus imposed upon, would be justifiable now, in the eyes of both God and man, in forsaking you and applying for a divorce. And no court or jury would refuse her application, when made acquainted with your character.
It is a remarkable fact—one that I desire to call, not so much to your notice, as to the notice of the public generally—that while all the members of this Foreign Democratic party are by no means villains, destitute of principle; yet, all the assassins, cut-throats, thieves, and hypocrites in the country have crowded into the ranks of that party! Fawned upon, fostered and pampered by the villainous leaders, demagogues, and tricksters of the party, who need the services of all such scavengers, you are encouraged to act with them. These leaders, who are really no better than you are, generously admit you to a fellowship, and courteously acknowledge all such abandoned rascals to be their equals! Such men, to a great extent, now constitute the free-democracy of the country—they desecrate the ballot-box—disgust decent men wherever they come in contact with them—blaspheme the name of God—and swear that they will either rule or ruin the country!
But, Sir, it was said of a certain man in the Scriptures, that he was a "sinner above all the sinners that dwell in Jerusalem." So it may in perfect truth be said of you, that you are a scoundrel above all the scoundrels in the hateful ranks of Sag Nichtism. You deserve, for your depraved course of life, a greater punishment than you have received or are likely to receive in this life. The guilt of foul calumny, of the most black and odious kind, attaches to every sentence uttered by your lying tongue. Guilt, the offspring of fiend-like malice, shamefully false, deeply corrupt, and badly matured: perfidy, dishonesty, and rank poison—hot incense of murder, theft, inhuman spoliation, and deep, dark forebodings of damnation have been rooted and grounded in your heart, for lo! these many years! Dark despair, endless death, inexpressible misery, manifold, and worse than death, follow in the ghastly train of your crimes, and riot in your corrupt bosom, as with infernal drunkenness of delight! The record of your deep depravity, of your utter want of principle, and of your ten thousand villainous exploits, is stereotyped upon the burning sands of eternity, and stamped on the imperishable walls of the rotunda of the Devil's Hell, to which you are driving at railroad speed! In upper East Tennessee, where you are known, it would disgrace an Algerine Bandit to sit and hear you pretend to preach! You pretend to preach Christ and him crucified, and immerse persons in the name of the Trinity! Shrouded in the sackcloth and ashes of disgrace, enclosed in a vault filled to the brim with buried and putrefied venality, and steeped to the very nose and chin in crime, how dare you attempt to preach!
I repeat, you vile slanderer of the living and the dead, that, in justice to the cause of God and of civilization, I will keep spread the unfurled banner of your infamy on every breeze, and cause it to float in the atmosphere of every State in this Union, until your very name becomes a mockery and a by-word! And I call upon the people of Kentucky and Missouri to ring the loud knell of your infamy, from steep to steep, and from valley to valley, until their swelling sounds are heard in startling echoes, mingling with the rush of the criminal's torrent, and the mighty cataract's earthquake-voice!
W. G. Brownlow,
Editor of the Knoxville Whig.
June 7th, 1856.