William M. Fishback's Unconditional Unionist
February 19, 1864

During the war, William M. Fishback published a newspaper called "The Unconditional Unionist" in Arkansas. This is but one example of the hardline anti-secessionist articles published in that paper.

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“Extract from Mr. Fishback’s Editorial, ‘Rally Around the Flag, Boys’

            “For three years a devastating and consuming civil war has raged in our State which, like the Simoon, has withered and blighted all that fell in its way. For three years the loyal men of this State have had no certain tenure of life or property; no home or abiding place, but mere aliens in the land of their birth, cast out and proscribed by a wicked, unpitying, and unrelenting rebel tyranny; a tyranny which delighted in blood, hungered and thirsted after the lives of the loyal people, and, in the consummation of its inhuman purposes and desires, arrived at a perfection in the art of torture and brutality that the th[r]ongs of India, though guided by the inspiration of the heathen goddess of murder, have failed to attain.

            “The Union men of Arkansas have been hunted through wilds and mountains with bloodhounds, urged forward by the minions of the Davis oligarchy, who were not less cruel and bloodthirsty than the irresponsible animals whose actions they controlled. And when the victim of the chase was overtaken he was forced into the rebel service or hanged upon the nearest tree, as the whim or caprice of his captors determined; and, being hung, his body was denied the rights of sepulchre and left suspended between heaven and earth, there to become food for the beasts of the forest and fowls of the air. And all this, too, because he was a Union man, and for no other reason.”

SOURCES

Excerpt from article in Unconditional Union, February 19, 1864 (quoted in Powell Clayton, Aftermath of the Civil War in Arkansas (New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1915), 283-284).