THE following letter we cheerfully publish. It is self-explanatory:—
Marshalltown, Iowa, February 17, 1890.
Editor “AMERICAN SENTINEL.”
Dear Sir: Your article in the SENTINEL of January 3 “Was it Orthodox?”—has just come to my notice and I thank you for publishing the facts. But you have been misinformed in one particular. The following is a mistake: “Although a majority [of the veterans at the Soldiers’ Home] sanctioned the arrangement of the orthodox ministers [to exclude me from preaching at the Home], a large minority were decidedly outspoken against it,” etc. The fact is that the protest against the arrangement was almost unanimous, not only among the veterans located there but also among the people at large.
The number of veterans located in the Home is three hundred and twenty-five, and when the arrangement with the “Ministerial Expulsion Association,” as it is called here, became known at the Home before the arrangement was completed, a petition was circulated among them asking that the Universalist minister should not be debarred from his appointment, which was signed by over two hundred of the veterans and more would have signed it but the commandant gave them the assurance that the proposition of the so-called “orthodox” ministers would not be accepted and I would not be excluded. Receiving this promise they ceased circulating the petition.
In justice to the noble veterans of the late war, removing from them the slanderous implication that a majority of them would be in favor of any arrangement so much opposed to the spirit of our country’s Constitution, I have written this letter. [81]
Hoping you will receive this in the same kind spirit in which it is written.
I am truly,
T. W. WOODROW.
Pastor Universalist Church. [77]
The source of our information was a leading, if not the leading, Sioux City paper (the name of which has slipped our memory) and we simply reported the case as it was stated there. Our attention was attracted more particularly to the “orthodox” injustice, than to any other feature of the case. That seemed to us to be bad enough in all conscience, even though a much smaller minority than was reported had protested. Now that our attention is directed more fully to the other side, we are happy to do justice to the manly spirit of the veterans, and of “the people at large.” And as this noble defense of Mr. Woodrow’s rights redounds the more to the credit of the veterans, the action of that ministers’ association is caused to approach the more nearly to organized meanness.
A. T. J.