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JOHN JUDSON BAGLEY
BY GEORGE H. HOPKINS
June 7, 1882
Although with Fillmore's aid you have elected your candidate, still you are beaten. Kansas, a slave State, beats you in the North, and Kansas, a free State, beats you at the South. For the Republican party there is a great and glorious future. The great principle of the non-extension of slavery must prevail. The first skirmish has almost defeated you, and although forced to retire from the field, we have succeeded in forcing your outposts and have slain your first generals and disabled your best troops.
"Thank God, Gen. Cass is a defunct institution. His own home repudiates him by 20, 000 paper bullets. Pierce, too, is forsaken by his own State. Everywhere, where schools and newspapers have found their way, you are beaten.
" 'Education is the bane of Democracy, ' said a Democratic member of Congress from this State, and for once he told the truth. " The young man of 24 spoke the words of prophecy. Though engrossed by the cares of a business which he but a short time before had undertaken for himself, he found leisure to read the signs of the times, and with a keen study of cause and effect he saw the impending conflict, and was preparing himself and neighbors for it. In August, 1861, he writes a friend (a Democrat) in Iowa:
"Dear P------: I was glad to see you would not take the treasonable and.
seditious stand attempted to be foisted on the Democracy of Iowa by the State convention. All honor to you. I hope you may always exert every power to uphold the government and its administrators. I think we shall have no party but the party of the Union. I have forgotten all the party I ever had. "
Michigan
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