Shenandoah Herald
May 17, 1882
GEN. MAHONE AND THE EX-CONFEDERATES -- Major Robert Tansill, of Prince William county, Va., formerly an officer in the Federal army and afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, and who during the recent campaign in Virginia, was a pronounced readjuster, has written a letter in which he severely arrains Senator Mahone for his recent vote, the effect of which is to prevent ex-Confederate soldiers from holding commissions in U.S. army and navy.
Major Tansill declares that Senator Mahone by his vote "exhibited a degree and kind of political ingratitude and wrong which equals if it does not transcend any to be found in the history of our fallen race. This strange and cruel act is fatal, as it ought to be, to Gen. Mahone's political prosepcts, so far as Virginia is concerned, unless the people of the State have unfortunately degenerated so as to be capable of the degredation of imitating the servile nature and example of the dog, in licking the hand that smites and degrades them." Before concluding Major Tansill declares that "no imaginable excuse can be advanced for Gen. Mahone's unnatural and detestable treachery to his old friends and companions in arms."
(NOTE: Per Wikipedia, in the post-Civil War years, William Mahone "helped form and lead a coalition of blacks, Republicans, and Conservative Democrats that became known as the Readjuster Party, so-named for a position regarding Virginia's troublesome post-War public debt issues.")
