The Ashland Union

THE THREATENED REIGN OF TERROR.

The Cleveland Leader of last Friday, upon receipt of the news that Hon. C. L. VALLANDIGHAM had been sentenced by Gen. Burnside to two years imprisonment on Tortugas Island, in its usual spirit of fiendish malignity indulges in some comments upon the matter. Caring little for the opinion of such a scoundrel as Ed. Cowles or for the influence of any of his publications, yet from the fact that he holds a lucrative office under Lincoln, the sentiments he utters may reasonably be supposed to be to some extent a reflex of the opinions of the Washington dynasty. In the article to which we refer we find the following:

"It will be well for him * * to cast a glance forward two years and see * * what sort of a reception he will receive when he returns to Ohio, if he does so at all."

What means this insinuation "if he does so at all?"

The sentence of Gen. Burnside was two years imprisonment on an Island just West of the extreme Southern point of Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico. A mere sand bar, washed up from the depths of the Gulf by the action of the winds and waves, where disease and pestilence are the masters and humanity the universal victims. The sentence itself, as well as the intimation of the Leader, show that the intent was deliberate and premeditated murder. A Northern man, unaccustomed to the scorching sun and hot withering winds of the Tropics, cannot by any possibility live through a single summer season in such a place. If the infamous sentence of this General Burnside, the imbecile soldier, that but a few months since, led to certain slaughter fifteen or twenty thousand brave and noble men, and whose idiocy has filled the whole land with the wails of widows and orphans, had not been rebuked by the President in his intended murder, it would have been a mercy to Vallandigham in preference to this, to have led him out and shot him. And who is this Ambrose E. Burnside that he should be made the accuser and the judge of C. L. Vallandigham? How is it that he, a man unknown, save as a pauper upon the charity of the government nearly all his life, receives the power to sentence to death a braver, nobler man and a better patriot than himself? It is but a part of the general plan of the Washington despot to try the temper of the people and go as far as he dare in his effort to establish a despotism upon the ruins of the Republic.

But we refer again to the article of the Leader. It says:

"The South (at the close of the war) will be occupied, if by any military force, by Union troops. Colored regiments will garrison the Northern forts. * * Where then will be the Butternuts and Copperheads of the present day?"

And so, according to this organ of the Administration, Southern territory and Southern forts are to be occupied by Northern men, while under this despotism of Abraham the 1st, negroes—mark it, Northern, white free men,—NEGROES are to garrison Northern forts, for the purpose of keeping in subjection Northern white men. Did ever malignity or abject cringing to tyranny go farther than this? The people of the North are to be made subject to the rule, under Lincoln's order, of bullets and bayonets in the hands of his nigger agents and minions.

"Be we men and suffer such dishonor?"
"Be we men and not wipe away the stain in blood?"

We warn the American people, be they Democrats or Republicans, to look well to their own interests. The idea of some that by bending the supple knee to power and kissing the foot that tramples them, they will fare better than their neighbors will be found to be a most delusive hope. In that hour of established despotism, ruin and terror, all will go down together. The insidious foe is gradually but surely sapping all the foundations of liberty and all may find when too late the terrible error that many have committed.