The editor of the Memphis Avalanche swoops thus mildly down upon a correspondent who posted him as a Radical: “While he was writing the first word, the middle word, dotting his i’s, crossing his t’s, and punching his period, he knew he was concocting a sentence that was saturated with infamy and reeking with falsehood.” —Exchange.
I was told by the physician that a Southern climate would improve my health, and so I went down to Tennessee and got a berth on the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop, as associate editor. When I went on duty I found the chief editor sitting tilted back in a three-legged chair with his feet on a pine table. There was another pine table in the room, and another afflicted chair, and both were half buried under newspapers and scraps and sheets of manuscript. There was a wooden box of sand, sprinkled with cigar stubs and “old soldiers,” and a stove with a door hanging by its upper hinge. The chief editor had a long-tailed black cloth frock coat on, and white linen pants. His boots were small and neatly blacked. He wore a ruffled shirt, a large seal ring, a standing collar of obsolete pattern and a checkered neckerchief with the ends hanging down. Date of costume, about 1848. He was smoking a cigar and trying to think of a word. And in trying to think of a word, and in pawing his hair for it, he had rumpled his locks a good deal. He was scowling fearfully, and I judged that he was concocting a particularly knotty editorial. He told me to take the exchanges and skim through them and write up the “Spirit of the Tennessee Press,” condensing into the article all of their contents that seemed of interest.
I wrote as follows:
“SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS.
“The editors of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake evidently labor under a misapprehension with regard to the Ballyhack railroad. It is not the object of the company to leave Buzzardville off to one side. On the contrary they consider it one of the most important points along the line, and consequently can have no desire to slight it. The gentlemen of the Earthquake will of course take pleasure in making the correction.
“John W. Blossom, Esq., the able editor of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle-Cry of Freedom, arrived in the city yesterday. He is stopping at the Van Buren House.
“We observe that our cotemporary of the Mud Springs Morning Howl has fallen into the error of supposing that the election of Van Werter is not an established fact, but he will have discovered his mistake before this reminder reaches him, no doubt. He was doubtless misled by incomplete election returns.
“It is pleasant to note that the city of Blathersville is endeavoring to contract with some New York gentlemen to pave its well nigh impassable streets with the Nicholson pavement. But it is difficult to accomplish a desire like this since Memphis got some New Yorkers to do a like service for her and then declined to pay for it. However the Daily Hurrah still urges the measure with ability, and seems confident of ultimate success.
“We are pained to learn that Col. Bascom, chief editor of the Dying Shriek for Liberty, fell in the street a few evenings since and broke his leg. He has lately been suffering with debility, caused by overwork and anxiety on account of sickness in his family, and it is supposed that he fainted from the exertion of walking too much in the sun.”
I passed my manuscript over to the chief editor for acceptance, alteration or destruction. He glanced at it and his face clouded. He ran his eye down the pages, and his countenance grew portentous. It was easy to see that something was wrong. Presently he sprang up and said:
“Thunder and lightning! Do you suppose I am going to speak of those cattle that way? Do you suppose my subscribers are going to stand such gruel as that? Give me the pen!”
I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously, or plough through another man’s verbs and adjectives so relentlessly. While he was in the midst of his work somebody shot at him through the open window and marred the symmetry of his ear.
“Ah,” said he, “that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano—he was due yesterday.” And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and fired. Smith dropped, shot in the thigh. The shot spoiled Smith’s aim, who was just taking a second chance, and he crippled a stranger. It was me. Merely a finger shot off.
Then the chief editor went on with his erasures and interlineations. Just as he finished them a hand-grenade came down the stove-pipe, and the explosion shivered the stove into a thousand fragments. However, it did no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my teeth out.
“That stove is utterly ruined,” said the chief editor.
I said I believed it was.
“Well, no matter—don’t want it this kind of weather. I know the man that did it. I’ll get him. Now here is the way this stuff ought to be written.”
I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and interlineations till its mother wouldn’t have known it, if it had had one. It now read as follows:
“SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS.
“The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evidently endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack railroad. The idea that Buzzardville was to be left off at one side originated in their own fulsome brains—or rather in the settlings which they regard as brains. They had better swallow this lie, and not stop to chew it, either, if they want to save their abandoned, reptile carcasses the cowhiding they so richly deserve.
“That ass, Blossom of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle-Cry of Freedom, is down here again, bumming his board at the Van Buren.
“We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Springs Morning Howl is giving out, with his usual propensity for lying, that Van Werter is not elected. The heaven-born mission of journalism is to disseminate truth—to eradicate error—to educate, refine and elevate the tone of public morals and manners, and make all men more gentle, more virtuous, more charitable, and in all ways better, and holier and happier—and yet this black-hearted villain, this hell-spawned miscreant, prostitutes his great office persistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny, vituperation and degrading vulgarity. His paper is notoriously unfit to take into the people’s homes, and ought to be banished to the gambling hells and brothels where the mass of reeking pollution which does duty as its editor, lives and moves, and has his being.
“Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement—it wants a jail and a poor-house more. The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town with two gin-mills and a blacksmith shop in it, and that mustard-plaster of a newspaper, the Daily Hurrah! Better borrow of Memphis, where the article is cheap. The crawling insect, Buckner, who edits the Hurrah, is braying about this pavement business with his customary loud-mouthed imbecility, and imagining that he is talking sense. Such foul, mephitic scum as this verminous Buckner, are a disgrace to journalism.
“That degraded ruffian Bascom, of the Dying Shriek for Liberty, fell down and broke his leg yesterday—pity it wasn’t his neck. He says it was ‘debility caused by overwork and anxiety!’ It was debility caused by trying to lug six gallons of forty-rod whisky around town when his hide is only gauged for four, and anxiety about where he was going to bum another six. He ‘fainted from the exertion of walking too much in the sun!’ And well he might say that—but if he would walk straight he would get just as far and not have to walk half as much. For years the pure air of this town has been rendered perilous by the deadly breath of this perambulating pestilence, this pulpy bloat, this steaming, animated tank of mendacity, gin and profanity, this Bascom! Perish all such from out the sacred and majestic mission of journalism!”
“Now that is the way to write—peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods.”
About this time a brick came through the window with a splintering crash, and gave me a considerable of a jolt in the middle of the back. I moved out of range—I began to feel in the way. The chief said:
“That was the Colonel, likely, I’ve been expecting him for two days. He will be up, now, right away.”
He was correct. The “Colonel” appeared in the door a moment afterward, with a dragoon revolver in his hand. He said:
“Sir, have I the honor of addressing the white-livered poltroon who edits this mangy sheet?”
“You have—be seated, Sir—be careful of the chair, one of the legs is gone. I believe I have the pleasure of addressing the blatant, black-hearted scoundrel, Col. Blatherskite Tecumseh?”
“The same. I have a little account to settle with you. If you are at leisure, we will begin.”
“I have an article on the ‘Encouraging Progress of Moral and Intellectual Development in America,’ to finish, but there is no hurry. Begin.”
Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant. The chief lost a lock of hair, and the Colonel’s bullet ended its career in the fleshy part of my thigh. The Colonel’s left shoulder was clipped a little. They fired again. Both missed their men this time, but I got my share, a shot in the arm. At the third fire both gentlemen were wounded slightly, and I had a knuckle chipped. I then said I believed I would go out and take a walk, as this was a private matter and I had a delicacy about participating in it further. But both gentlemen begged me to keep my seat and assured me that I was not in the way. I had thought differently, up to this time.
They then talked about the elections and the crops a while, and I fell to tying up my wounds. But presently they opened fire again with animation, and every shot took effect—but it is proper to remark that five out of the six fell to my share. The sixth one mortally wounded the Colonel, who remarked, with fine humor, that he would have to say good morning, now, as he had business up town. He then inquired the way to the undertaker’s and left. The chief turned to me and said:
“I am expecting company to dinner and shall have to get ready. It will be a favor to me if you will read proof and attend to the customers.”
I winced a little at the idea of attending to the customers, but I was too bewildered by the fusillade that was still ringing in my ears to think of anything to say. He continued:
“Jones will be here at 3. Cowhide him. Gillespie will call earlier, perhaps—throw him out of the window. Ferguson will be along about 4—kill him. That is all for to-day, I believe. If you have any odd time, you may write a blistering article on the police—give the Chief Inspector rats. The cowhides are under the table; weapons in the drawer—ammunition there in the corner—lint and bandages up there in the pigeon-holes. In case of accident, go to Lancet, the surgeon, down stairs. He advertises—we take it out in trade.”
He was gone. I shuddered. At the end of the next three hours I had been through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all cheerfulness had gone from me. Gillespie had called, and thrown me out of the window. Jones arrived promptly, and when I got ready to do the cowhiding, he took the job off my hands. In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill of fare, I had lost my scalp. Another stranger, by the name of Thompson, left me a mere wreck and ruin of chaotic rags. And at last, at bay in the corner, and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, blacklegs, politicians and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished their weapons about my head till the air shimmered with glancing flashes of steel, I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the chief arrived, and with him a rabble of charmed and enthusiastic friends. Then ensued a scene of riot and carnage such as no human pen, or steel one either, could describe. People were shot, probed, dismembered, blown up, thrown out of the window. There was a brief tornado of murky blasphemy, with a confused and frantic war-dance glimmering through it, and then all was over. In five minutes there was silence, and the gory chief and I sat alone and surveyed the sanguinary ruin that strewed the floor around us. He said:
“You’ll like this place when you get used to it.” I said:
“I’ll have to get you to excuse me. I think maybe I might write to suit you, after a while, as soon as I had had some practice and learned the language—I am confident I could. But to speak the plain truth, that sort of energy of expression has its inconveniences, and a man is liable to interruption. You see that, yourself. Vigorous writing is calculated to elevate the public, no doubt, but then I do not like to attract so much attention as it calls forth. I can’t write with comfort when I am interrupted so much as I have been to-day. I like this berth well enough, but I don’t like to be left here to wait on the customers. The experiences are novel, I grant you, and entertaining, too, after a fashion, but they are not judiciously distributed. A gentleman shoots at you, through the window, and cripples me; a bomb-shell comes down the stove-pipe for your gratification, and sends the stove door down my throat; a friend drops in to swap compliments with you, and freckles me with bullet holes till my skin won’t hold my principles; you go to dinner, and Jones comes with his cowhide, Gillespie throws me out of the window, Thompson tears all my clothes off, and an entire stranger takes my scalp with the easy freedom of an old acquaintance; and in less than five minutes all the blackguards in the country arrive in their war paint and proceed to scare the rest of me to death with their tomahawks. Take it altogether, I never have had such a spirited time in all my life as I have had to-day. No. I like you, and I like your calm, unruffled way of explaining things to the customers, but you see I am not used to it. The Southern heart is too impulsive—Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger. The paragraphs which I have written today, and into whose cold sentences your masterly hand has infused the fervent spirit of Tennesseean journalism, will wake up another nest of hornets. All that mob of editors will come—and they will come hungry, too, and want somebody for breakfast. I shall have to bid you adieu. I decline to be present at these festivities. I came South for my health—I will go back on the same errand, and suddenly. Tennessee journalism is too stirring for me.” After which, we parted, with mutual regret, and I took apartments at the hospital.
September 4, 1869