True American

A fact for American Mechanics

A few days previous to the Virginia election, (says the Baltimore Clipper,) the Whig papers of that State teemed with indignant accounts of the discharged from the Gosport Navy Yard of a body of American mechanics, who in the simplicity of their honest hearts, and from the reliance upon the sacredness of their right--the foundation of their country's liberty--to the freedom of thought and act guaranteed by the constitution, had dared to exercise the prerogative of American freemen, and expressed their determination of voting according to the dictates of their judgment; for doing which they are fit victims by a corrupt recreant administration, to intimidate the free actions of those thousands in Virginia, and compel them into a support of the demagogue, Henry A. Wise. Thus the hard working, honest American mechanics were deprived of employment--debarred the privilege of obtaining a livelihood, under the plea that they had interfered in politics--while the State was even then being canvassed by Government officials to further the designs of an infamous clique, and seeking to thwart the honest desires of the people of Virginia. And now the Washington Union, the organ of the Democratic party, and one which had expressed in terms of the strongest indignation its abhorrence of the proscription of foreigners, in a laboured editorial, doubtless reflecting the sentiments of the administration, not only justifies their discharge, but advocates, in the desecrated name of "law and the constitution," its general imitation. Let every true American ponder upon this monstrous doctrine, so repugnant to every principle of justice, right and the spirit of our institutions; and let them determine whether they will cooly permit themselves to be deprived of a privilege as sacred as the not more important right to worship God after the dictates of their own conscience. If the hard working mechanics of the land are to be prescribed and persecuted for advocating a principle restricting the influence of foreigners, sanctioned as it is by the character of Washington. We think the sooner the fact is promulgated and published the better for our country's perpetuity, since in the tornado of popular indignation it will excite, the insolence of a power-pampered oligarchy will be most fitly, and we trust most effectually rebuked. It remains to be seen whether the workmen of this State will, by their action in the fall, endorse the conduct of corrupt administration and its foreign instigators.