Hunnicutt and the Carpet-Baggers

The Radicals have taken $8,000 from Hunnicutt's newspaper, New Nation, and given it to the carpet -bagger friendly newspaper, the Journal, to try and run Hunnicutt out of business.

Hunnicutt and the Carpet-Baggers. We intimated not long since that Hunnicutt, who is a far better man than any of the scabby tribe of carpet-baggers, was about to be driven from his paper, the New Nation , in order that the stream of revenue it afforded - and which, under carpet-bag manipulation, might be vastly increased - might fall into the reservoir of some hungry interloper. The New Nation of yesterday shows that we were right. Hunnicutt exposes the maneuvre by which it is attempted to dislodge him. A large amount of Government advertising - we have heard $8,000 worth - has been withdrawn from him and sent to the carpet-bag organ called the Journal, at Alexandria! In this way Hunnicutt's resources were to be dried up, and he forced to surrender. The ingenious strategist in this imitated Cyrus in turning away the river to take the city. And we fear from the signs in yesterday's New Nation that the artifice is telling - the sustentatious rivulet of the New Nation is grown small and inefficient, and the patriotic conductor of that paper is so straitened for the irrigating supply essential to his domestic economy that he cries out against his oppressors, and direfully threatens them with wrathful revenge unless they cease their war upon him and put a ligament at once around the big artery which is conveying all his official pap to his enemy in Alexandria! He tells them it is mean and baste to filch from him his just rights; and bringing, like Sancho, a proverb to his aid, he exclaims : "He who is unjust in that which is least is unjust also in that which is much." Very true; and he deliberately informs these "unjust" ones that though they may wind him up "financially," he "will see to it that they shall be wound up politically." He further informs them in this wise : " We believe the determined object of these " parties is to force us to sell out for want " of that patronage which they have, and "are wickedly and unjustly withholding " from us, and start a new paper, and keep " up their paper in Alexandria, and thus " secure to themselves the entire public " printing of the State and that of the " Federal Government. If this game be " attempted, we give all the parties inte- " rested in it timely notice that what they "make they must make soon. Let justice " be done though the heavens fall." These are brave words of the old " Hero," but there is a desperation in them which tells too plainly the sad havoc the carpetbag game has made upon his " wherewithal." He was king of the negro vote, and gave it to whom he pleased. He gave it to Underwood, we suspect, for some of this very patronage that's gone to Alexandria - all carpet-baggers and scalawags courted him - he was in high feather with them, and when the Convention met he was as proud and as confident of his power as the King of Dahomey. But the Bureau worked against him - a plot was carried out in due time which cheated him out of all the high ofiices he thought he had the pick and choice of - and now the little stream of pap upon which he has subsisted himself and his is coveted by a greedy carpetbagger, and is absolutely diverted from him. Like old Lear, he may well prefer the biting winds and frosts to "man's ingratitude," and worse than all, the ingratitude of carpet-baggers and scalawags! Poor Hunnicutt! he hasthesinof southern birth. That settles his hash. The combined army of immigrants are here, like leeches, to suck themselves full. They don't intend to give up any southern blood to any one else. They have their "whiskey ring" and their "office rings," and the smaller "rings" within those "rings," all designed to fill their pockets out of the taxes paid by those oppressed southern people over whom they are placed in violation of law, right, justice, and honor. It is desired to add a "printing ring " to their other rings, and Hunnicutt is in the way, and must be removed. No channel that opens the way to the public fise of this impoverished and insulted State must be open to anybody but those carpet-baggers, and all the chances for fraud and corruption, and the thrift flowing therefrom, must alike be confined to them. Hunnicutt may well tell them that "what they make they must make soon," for the day is not remote when they will fly back to their caverns like wolves from their prowling depredations at the approach of day. But let Hunnicutt "howl" - they don't mind him. He has parted with all his black jewels, and they don't fear him. He may cry out in his helpless and despoiled condition, " Oh, fool ! oh, dolt ! "

“Hunnicutt and the Carpet-Baggers,” Reconstructing Virginia, accessed June 1, 2023, https://reconstructingvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/1081.