The William F. Cody Archive: Documenting the life and times of Buffalo Bill

A POLITE NOTICE – "The chief speaker was a fugitive from justice, Isaac Cody, from Kansas, one of the traitors who composed the bogus State Legislature, and judging from the specimen, we came to the conclusion, that if such men composed the legislature, there would be an awful slaughter of Murray and Webster; for his ignorance even of common language made it painful and ludicrous to listen to him."

Such is the polite style in which the Democrat refers to the narrative of Mr. Cody at the meeting on last Friday evening. The Democrat is an apologist for the outrages which have been committed in Kansas and of course it attempts to ridicule all who have suffered there. We have not heard it charged upon Mr. Cody that he made any false statements in the account which he gave to his former neighbors and acquaintances, and we have yet to learn that a man may not be a true Democrat and a good citizen, although he may not be gifted with the oratorical powers of a Demosthenes, or able to express himself with the grammatical correctness of a Quintilian. We apprehend that the Democrat would not have been nearly so sensitive about the slaughtering of Murray and Webster during the fifteen or sixteen years that Mr. Cody voted the Democratic ticket in this county, but would have estimated his vote for a Locofoco candidate as of more value than most Ciceronian style that was ever spoken or written. Such however are the slurs which are to be expected by those Democrats who are honest and independent enough to divorce themselves from that fraction of the party which has sold itself to the aristocrats and nullifiers of the South.