Rebellion Record: a Diary of American Events: Poetry and Incidents., Volume 7.
Frank Moore, Ed.

Read, if you want to, you thieving scalp-hunter, whoever you are, and forward, post-paid, to the lord high chancellor of the devill's exchequer (?) on earth,

It is with feelings of undeveloped pleasure that an affectionate conscript intrusts this sheet of confiscated paper to the tender mercies of a confederate States mail-carrier, addressed, as it shall be to yourself, O Jeff, Red Jacket of the Gulf and Chief of the Six Nations--more or less. He writes on the stump of a shivered monarch of the forest, with the “pine trees wailing round him,” and “Endymion's planet rising on the air.” To you, O Czar of all Chivalry and Khan of Cotton Tartary! he appeals for the privilege of seeking, on his own book, a land less free — a home among the hyenas of the North. Will you not halt your “brave columns” and stay your gorgeous career for a thin space? and while an admiring world takes a brief gaze at your glorious and God-forsaken cause, pen for the happy conscipt a furlough without end? Do so, and mail it, if you please, to that city the windy, wandering Wigfall didn't winter in, called for short Philadelphia.

The Etesian winds sweeping down the defiles of the Old Dominion and over the swamps of Suffolk come moaning through the pines of the Old State laden with the music and sigh themselves away into sweet sounds of silence to the far-off South. Your happy conscript would go to the far-away North whence the wind comes, and leave you to reap the whirlwind, with no one but your father the devil to rake and bind after you. And he's going.

It is with intense and multifariously proud satisfaction that he gazes for the last time upon our holy flag — that [88] symbol and sign of an adored trinity — cotton, niggers, and chivalry. He still sees it in the little camp on the Chowan, tied to the peak of its palmetto pole, and floating out over our boundless confederacy, the revived relic of ages gone, banner of our king of few days and full of trouble. And that pole in its tapering uprightness typifying some of the grandest beauties of our nationality; its peak pointing hopefully toward the tropical stars, and its biggest end — run into the ground. Relic and pole, good-by. 'Tis best the conscript goes; his claim to chivalry has gone before him. Behind he leaves the legitimate chivalry of this unbounded nation centred in the illegitimate son of a Kentucky horse-thief.

But a few more words, illustrious President, and he is done — done gone.

Elevated by their sufferings and suffrages to the highest office in the gift of a great and exceeding free people, you have held your position without a change of base, or purpose of any sort, through weary months of war, and want, and woe; and though every conscript would unite with the thousands of loyal and true men in the South in a grand old grief at your downfall, so too will they sink under the calamity of an exquisite joy when you shall have reached that eminent meridian whence all progress is perpendicular.

And now, bastard President of a political abortion, farewell.

“Scalp-hunters,” relic, pole, and chivalrous confederates in. crime, good-by. Except it be in the army of the Union, you will not again see the conscript.