The execution in New Orleans.
The miserable hireling
Butler is playing the tyrant with a high hand.
His savage instincts are far ahead of the most ferocious native of
Dahomey or
Patagonia.
A week or two since, as our readers have already been informed, he had
Wm. B. Mumford executed for tearing down the flag hoisted on the Mint by
Com. Farragut.
He died as a patriot should die — with great coolness and self possession.
An instant before he passed into the presence of his Maker he was calm in his demeanor, and on his countenance could be found no trace of the ordeal he was passing through.
Commenting upon the execution, the black hearted scribbler in the
Delta has the following remarks, which we copy because it speaks the sentiments of the
Nero Butler, and to show the vapid and sickening stuff now in the once eloquent Southern
Delta:
Mumford, the ill starred youth, whose name and fate will be a terror to all who are inclined to trilled with the
Government or its sacred emblems in time to come, justly received the reward of his treason and madness, in presence of thousands of spectators, as announced in the
Delta of last evening.
So far as our knowledge extends in the matter, it is the first instance upon record of a man being tried, found guilty, and executed for laying violent hands upon our national flag, and the lesson it conveys is a solemn, and, we trust, will prove a salutary, one.
Mumford, though standing only as a representative of parties equally guilty at heart as himself, had the misfortune to mingle a little more rashness with his treasonable intents than some of his traitor associates, and paid the penalty with his worthless life.
It is, perhaps, of very little importance whether this individual, so depraved in his nature, so lost to all sense of patriotism and love of country, be dead or alive, and the recompense of forfeiture which he made in the sacrifice of personal existence, is in no degree a compensation for the insult which he offered a great and magnanimous people, by basely trampling their noble ensign under foot.
And the thousands who witnessed the exit of this miserable person from a life he had disgraced, must have learned, if they had need of such a lesson, that it is most dangerous to set at defiance a Government that from its very nature is self protecting, and will, at all hazards, and under all circumstances, vindicate itself and avenge the insult offered its flag.
Deluded men may have flattered themselves that because a rabble or a mob sometimes rules within the narrow limits of some important town or corporation, that there is no power under the
Government sufficiently potent to arrest their mad career, when their high handed wickedness extends to a violation of symbols sacred to a great and powerful nation; but the example of yesterday must disabuse them of any such fallacy.
The hauling down of the flag on the Mint was a much more cowardly act than entering the ranks, in open and armed rebellion; for the perpetrator might well flatter himself that in the absence of those who had either the will or the power to redress the insult at the instant, his escape in the melee of a mob leagued city might be relied upon.
But in this he misjudged, and never did justice overtake a criminal more abandoned, or punish a crime more revolting to the sense of every honorable, high minded person.
There could be no reprieve from the execution of a sentence so just; and forever after, so long as time shall continue, and the good old national flag floats over the
Union, as float if will long after the present race of traitors are dead and buried, let him who would violently lay hands upon it to haul it down, count well the cost by remembering the fate of
Mumford.
And least by your neglect, citizens of New Orleans, some of your children may come to the same bad end, teach them that hauling down the
American flag is an act of treason, and is synonymous with death.
