In this free country of ours, gentlemen have a right to support any Presidential or other ticket they may choose to support; and where they are governed by pure motives in differing from a majority of their neighbors and old political associates, no one has a right to complain.

Some few gentlemen, known as “Old Line Whigs,” will not come into the support of the American ticket, but will even support the Democratic ticket; and do it from an honest (though mistaken) belief that they can most effectually serve the interests of the country by this course. With such, we shall be the last man to raise a quarrel claiming the right to do as we please in matters of the sort. But there are some men in the ranks of the enemy now, who are governed by very different motives; and as these are quoted against the American party, or, as their refusal to act with the party is a matter of boasting in the Democratic ranks, it is due to the cause of truth, and of the country, that they should be understood, that their efforts may be appreciated.

Without intending to be tedious, we name JAMES C. JONES, of Tennessee, as at the head of the list of Old Liners, whose devotion to the South, and love of liberty, prevent him from supporting Fillmore and Donelson. This is the veriest stuff in the political world! Gov. Jones cannot excuse the matter of his opposition to Millard Fillmore upon the grounds he rests the case, in his Circular addressed to his constituents. The true secret of the matter must come to light, that old Whigs and new Whigs, Americans and Democrats, may appreciate his motives.

Last fall, at the Fair in Jackson, in West Tennessee, in the house and at the bedside of ANDREW GUTHRIE, on being inquired of as to his future course, the Governor became very much excited, and roundly asserted, that if the American party nominated Fillmore, he should go against him. ==> Because Fillmore, in his appointment of persons to office in Tennessee, did not consult him, but in many cases appointed his personal enemies! Mark, he did not pause to inquire who might be the opposing candidate to Mr. Fillmore. He was not then, as he is not now, governed by any principle in the matter, but by passion. He is against Mr. Fillmore, under all circumstances, no matter who may oppose him! And why? Because Mr. Fillmore did not suffer him to put his numerous active friends into fat offices under the General Government; to many of whom he had made pledges while he was struggling for a seat in the United States Senate where he ought never to have gone, and where the better portion of those who aided in his election now regret having sent him!

But it is true, Fillmore and his Cabinet did refuse the extravagant demands made for office by the Governor; and in no single instance did they appoint men to office from Tennessee without consultation with BELL, GENTRY, and WILLIAMS; all three of whom were offensive to Jones. They had proven themselves to be worthy of consultation; the Governor had not! This accounts, moreover, for the efforts of Jones at Baltimore to defeat the nomination of Fillmore, and to procure the nomination of Scott efforts which, unfortunately for the country, were but too successful!

When the American party was organized in Tennessee, JONES had no objection to the creed, and would have fallen into the ranks, but then he beheld Gentry and Brownlow in the party men whom he despised above all others. He tried to prevent the nomination of Gentry for Governor by letter-writing, and by seeking to get up a Whig Convention. Failing in these schemes, he threw himself into the arena, and secretly damaged Gentry all he could, and played into the hands of Johnson, who was only elected by a majority of some two thousand votes!

We are not informed as to the course Gov. Jones will pursue in this contest, further than this, he will go against Fillmore. We predict that he will support Buchanan. Pride of character may keep him from it if he have any of that commodity left, after his five years’ residence at Washington! The platform upon which Buchanan has been placed by the Cincinnati Convention, is a reiteration of violent and undying hostility to every measure of public policy that was advocated by HENRY CLAY and the Old Whig party. Jones still professes an equally undying devotion to Clay and his principles. Moreover, Jones has, on every stump in Tennessee, held up Buchanan as a rank old Federalist, a Pennsylvania Abolitionist, and as the wicked traducer, violent calumniator, and malignant persecutor of Henry Clay even attributing his promotion to the Secretaryship of State, by Mr. Polk, to his infamous agency in fastening upon Mr. Clay the foul charge of “bargain, intrigue, and corruption.” We confess that we are at a loss to see how Jones can fall into the support of Buchanan. The nomination of the man is a direct insult to Old Clay Whigs!

ALBERT G. WATKINS, the Representative in Congress from the First Congressional District of Tennessee, has gone over to Democracy, placing his change upon the ground of his great concern for the South! We take it that he will support Buchanan without hesitancy. This would place Watkins before the country in his true colors, and reflect the likeness of the man with daguerreotype accuracy!! With such a platform, and such a candidate on it, Watkins would have the appearance of a man walking in one direction, with his head turned completely around, and his face looking the other way! The incongruity of the platform, and the peculiar reputation of Buchanan for political inconsistency, are alike adapted to the history and incidents of Watkins’s late canvass for Congress! The plain truth is, that the man so completely destroyed himself, and was so ruinously exposed by his competitor, COL. TAYLOR, whom he beat only some two hundred votes, (and that by means that make his seat in Congress one of thorns,) that he could but go over to Locofocoism. And although he has, in former days, held up Buchanan on the stump as an old Federalist, and as the reviler and persecutor of Henry Clay, he can advocate him now with a better grace than he can look his Know Nothing constituents in the face! We cannot say of this man as Pope said of Craggs:

“Broke no promise, served no private end,
Gained no title, and who lost no friend.”

WILLIAM G. SWAN, of Knoxville, is next on the list of “Old Line Whigs” who have gone over to the Foreign Catholic Democratic party, and of whose conversion the Democrats at a distance boast. Here they do not brag; but on the other hand, some of the leaders, whose names we can supply, authorize us to state that they do not want him, and will not receive him. This man was twice beaten for the Legislature in this county never elected by the people to any position outside of Knoxville and became soured at the Whig party. He went for Johnson and Sag Nichtism last summer, and his loss is not regretted by the American party in this county.

But JOHN H. CROZIER, of Knoxville, has gone over to “Old Buck” and his admirers; and this is claimed as a change! This little man, supremely selfish, was turned out of Congress five years ago, by JOSIAH M. ANDERSON, with the people at his back, for taking too much mileage, by several hundred dollars per session, for four years! He afterwards desired the Whig party to run him for Governor; but they were not willing to undertake the load. He became soured, and last summer paid a visit to some of the counties below, to avoid, as was believed, voting for Gentry for Governor, and Sneed for Congress. He was formerly very bitter in his opposition to Democracy; and on many a stump has he denounced Buchanan, and all others concerned in the “bargain and intrigue” slander of Clay, besides holding up “Buck” as a Blue-light Federalist! At a recent Buchanan Ratification meeting in Knoxville, he made a bitter speech against the American party!

These two men, Swan and Crozier, were active in getting up an organization against us, in 1849, by heading a company which purchased the “Register Establishment,” of this city, at the head of which they placed one john miller m’kee, behind whom they and others concealed themselves and wrote violent and abusive articles, through a controversy of two years. Driving the whole of them to the wall, as we did, in the controversy, they determined to mob and tear down our office; and with a view to this, those concerned deposited their guns, and other “implements of husbandry,” in the law office jointly occupied by these two men, who have operated as twin brothers for several years each sympathizing with the other in his political defeats! Those concerned were deterred from this contemplated and well-arranged assault upon our office, by COL. LUTTRELL, the Comptroller of the State, and other gentlemen of nerve, arming themselves with shot-guns, pistols, and hatchets, and taking their stand at our office!

Nothing daunted by this defeat, these gallant lawyers, and generous not to say brave opponents betook themselves to the county of Anderson, in this Judicial Circuit, and with great difficulty got up an indictment against us, under an old statute, forgotten by gentlemen of the bar, for advertising a Baltimore lottery scheme; when they themselves, and their relatives, were dealing in the Art Union lottery in this city! They were most signally defeated in that indictment; and, together with the two Williamses, brothers-in-law of Crozier, sought to drive the business men of the place, and others, from advertising in our paper, or subscribing for it. Failing in this, they sought to prevent us from getting the Government advertising under Fillmore’s administration; and in this they failed, though this is the ground of their hostility to Fillmore and his Cabinet, as well as to John Bell, M. P. Gentry, and C. H. Williams.

The Register fell through was sold under the hammer for twenty-two hundred dollars McKee ran away and the company have had about FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS to pay for him, which hurts prodigiously! Our WHIG has steadily increased in favor with the people, and its circulation is now THE RISE OF FIVE THOUSAND being the largest circulation that any political or other journal ever attained in East Tennessee! Indeed, no political weekly in Tennessee now has, or ever did have, a circulation equal to “BROWNLOW’S KNOXVILLE WHIG.”

A young man calling himself Luther Patterson, has been conducting a foreign Sag Nicht sheet at Kingston, called the “Gazetteer,” and which has gone by the board for the want of patronage. This little eight by ten sheet has been editorially, and by means of anonymous communications, assaulting the writer of this work, and the editor of the Register, MR. FLEMING. Patterson paid a recent visit to this place; at which time Fleming met with him on the street, and publicly chastised him, applying the toe of a stiff boot to the west end of his person, with some force. Patterson turned about and boasted in his paper that he had the best of the fight. Our paper and Fleming’s corrected this false version of the affair, and gave the facts; whereupon Patterson sued out a writ in the Circuit Court for Fleming, for damages done to his person in said rencontre, laying his damages at $5,000! Shortly after this he instituted a civil action against the publishers of the paper we edit, and another against us for the article we wrote against him; and these suits are now pending.

These two gallant attorneys, as we are informed, are employed as counsel by Patterson a young man who has no visible means of paying lawyers, but the eagerness of these gentlemen to get after us would lead them to “work for nothing and find themselves.” In addition to their several civil suits against several of us, they have sent their man before the Grand Jury of Knox county, and made a presentment against us for having out-wrote their Sag Nicht editor! The object of these suits against the editors and publishers of the American papers here, is to gag them, or to check their influence in this contest. But they have mistaken their men. Like other vipers, they will find, before these matters end, that they bite a file a file of good American steel, and tempered to that degree of hardness that all their malignity, intense and active as it is known to be, will not be able to prevail against it!

When we came to this city of Knoxville, in 1849, we sold our office at Jonesborough, at private sale, to pay a security debt, and purchased a new press and materials on a credit. These we sent on to the care of WILLIAMS & CO., the brothers-in-law of Crozier, who kept about the only commission and forwarding house in Knoxville. We were detained at Jonesborough four weeks by close confinement to our bed; and our materials arriving here, these “Old Line Whigs,” who had always professed friendship toward us, refused to give them house-room; and had not JAMES W. NELSON and others stepped forward and paid the charges, and procured a house for them, the steamboat captain would have sold them out for the carriage!

These magnanimous gentlemen, members of the learned profession of the law, next contrived, through certain influences they brought to bear, to turn us out of the only office we could rent in the city, and thus they drove us without the limits of the Corporation, and compelled us to erect a temporary office upon our own lot, which we had bought on a credit. They were now at the end of their row. One was a candidate for Congress, the other for a seat in the Legislature. We pitched into both, and they were both defeated; but we do not claim that it was through our influence. Like Cardinal Wolsey, however, they both had to bid “farewell, a long farewell, to all their greatness.” From the pinnacle of Congressional and Legislative honors, they have been precipitated to the shades of private life, and to political obscurity. Their chief ambition now is, to play “fantastic tricks” in courts of justice, and before grand jurors, in the way of annoying those they have neither the manliness nor courage to call to an account upon their own hooks!

The established usage of gentlemen, when offended by a newspaper editor, is to exact personal satisfaction. To acknowledge that you are personally aggrieved, and then to retort in tricks behind the offender’s back, or words behind your privileges at the Bar, is to acknowledge that one is either a fool or a coward perhaps both. A chief object in this crusade against us is to gag us during this campaign, and kill us off from the stump and the press; but they have certainly studied our character to but little purpose. And whatever line of policy their prompters and associates of the Locofoco school may urge upon them, let them be assured that they cannot muzzle criticism of their personal or political delinquencies. It is a sacred duty to unmask the renegade, to expose the traitor, and to hold up the demagogue to public reprobation. That duty will be performed freely and fearlessly, by the author of this work, come weal or come woe. If these two “Knights of the Rueful Countenance” kill and eat a dozen Know Nothings, we know one member of the Order they will not affright into silence. For their cowardly assaults and their officious intermeddlings they may bare their backs to the lash. We will be with them to the bitter end, and will only forsake them in the Gethsemane of their retreat!

Had we come here with press and type, in 1849, and agreed to be controlled by these men and their particular friends, we could have been the man for the times. Had we stooped to flirt and coquette and fawn and dance around these men, we could have had their endorsement, their influence, and their money, to any reasonable extent. But we neither sought their friendship, nor coveted their adulations. We claim to have been made of such inflexible materials, as not readily to go through the transmutations necessary to secure the kind regards of these men. We are no office-seeker, and desire no reward beyond the consciousness of having performed our duty, and of having served our country to the best of our ability.

We take this occasion to repeat what we have heretofore said in our journal, that nearly every prominent man in the country, calling himself an “Old Line Whig,” and now opposed to Fillmore and Donelson, is influenced by personal grievances, or a desire to get office matters with which the people have not the slightest concern. Their opposition to the American ticket proceeds from personal hostility, either to the candidates, some of the electoral candidates, or certain prominent advocates of the ticket, and from no less unworthy motives. Of course there are exceptions to this rule.

The idea of an Old Clay Whig supporting the Buchanan ticket is both absurd and ridiculous. To say nothing of the foul and malignant charge of “bargain, intrigue, and corruption,” Buchanan labored to fasten upon Clay, the Platform upon which the Cincinnati Convention has placed Buchanan repudiates every principle Clay contended for, and held as sacred to the day of his death. On the contrary, the American party has not ignored one political tenet held by the Whig party, but has added new ones; none of which are at war with the creed of Clay, or the Constitution of our country! To make short work of a long story, no man who ever was a true Whig, and acted with that party from principle, can consistently go over to the bogus Democracy of this day, and vote for Buchanan and Breckenridge!

Talk about a Clay Whig turning Sag Nicht! What an idea! What principle does this Foreign Democratic party hold, that an Old Line Whig, or a conservative man, North or South, does not disapprove? What principles have they ever held, the evil effects of which are not now standing out in bold relief as a monument of their shame, and to which they have added the unpardonable sin of making war upon NATIVE AMERICAN PROTESTANTS?

In conclusion, the reader will please allow a few remarks PERSONAL to the writer, and he is done leaving the public to make their own comments, and their own disposition of both this book and its author. Our life has been a public life our cause a public cause. We have our faults, as most men have; and we have committed some errors, as most men have. Our few acts of goodness and virtue, if any, we leave others to hunt up; our faults are subjects of criticism, and are viewed with a jaundiced eye by our opponents. Through a course of eighteen years of editorial invective, (whether right or wrong,) we claim to have been actuated by none other than the best of motives. We have never been prompted by ambition, malice, or a desire to make money. Our voice, which has echoed over many hills and through many valleys, has never been heard in extenuation of guilt; has never been heard to plead the cause of the gambler, the swearer, the drunkard, the robber, or the assassin. Wherever vice has lifted its “seven heads and ten horns” wherever fraud has showed its thieving hand wherever gambling has displayed its rotten heart wherever demagogues have sought to impose on the honest people there have we tried to be conspicuous; not as their aider and abettor, but as their scourge, their accuser, and their unrelenting foe. And among this class of men are our most bitter foes. What friends we have are to be found at the fireside of virtue among sober, sedate, and thinking men, and among the brave and honorable. We have never been the slave or sycophant of any man or party, as our immense band of subscribers, numbering thousands, will bear us witness.

And now, AMERICANS, while we look forward to the future with pleasing anticipations while we rejoice in prospect of the final triumph of wisdom, of reason, and of virtue, over audacious ignorance, palpable corruption, canting hypocrisy, and caballing Democracy God forbid that we should indulge the vain idea that we have nothing to do! Let every friend of American rights and Protestant liberties take a bold, a decided stand, vowing most solemnly that he will have no fellowship at the ballot-box with the friends of that unpitying monster, a DEMOCRATIC PAPAL HIERARCHY! Be active, be vigilant, and persevering, and the day is ultimately ours!

“Strike till the last armed foe expires;
Strike for your altars and your fires;
Strike for the green graves of your sires,
God, and your native land!”