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