The Times-Picayune New Orleans, Louisiana Friday, May 16, 1879 — “As regularly as new moons come, Northern papers state regularly that Paul Morphy is reported insane. Mr. Morphy is a quiet little gentleman, engaged in minding his own business, which fact is perhaps sufficient reason for meddling correspondents to call him crazy.”
Friends, family, associates were aware the onslaught of false defamatory allegations of “madness” and “asylums” were generated from NORTHERN… FEDERAL UNION… CIVIL WAR PROPAGANDA… grudges and bitter animosities that would not rest until Morphy was dead. Some publications amidst the bitter defamation campaign over the years had literally incorporated the word “death,”. The North had a yearning desire to remove Paul Morphy from his status of an immortal icon of American greatness. How could a “son of the South” be permitted even a glimmer of his former status as a shining star?
The Northern newspapers have worked diligently to erase how they violently abused Paul Morphy in 1861, falsely accusing him of being a “rebel” and a “bitter secessionist” while he was on his way to Havana, Cuba and Paris, France to remove himself from a war between the North vs. South factions, neither of which he supported! Their wild rumors steeped in paranoia, pegged Morphy as supposedly working on the staff of not one General, Johnstone, but the staffs of TWO Generals! including Bureaugard.
Morphy's closest friends and associates set Morphy's history correct at the end of the war. Papers were then flooded with reports those rumors were false, but bitter union fanaticism die hard. Former Chess associates in Washington, DC and New York blackballed Morphy, swearing their intent of “cutting (Paul Morphy) so dead”. Decades of bitter, cruel and petty slander, defamation and ostracization followed, till the day of Morphy's death. It is no secret in New Orleans, Louisiana that “Northern Newspapers” are the source behind the campaign of slander.
I welcome everyone to read the public outcry from Mr. Morphy's network of supporters; family; one submission even suspected by The Ottawa Free Trader Ottawa, Illinois Saturday, May 12, 1877, to be a letter in the New York Sun, “…apparently written by Paul Morphy himself, flatly contradicting the reports which had such a wide circulation in the newspapers, that Mr. Morphy, through his intense devotion to the game of chess, had become insane…”, friends and associates came forward in written protest to newspapers, from 1865-1884, to vouch for Mr. Morphy health and mind, by an outpouring of written defense against the flood of libel. But the North, the U.S. Federal Power and its fanatics, do not listen to “reason” nor has it ever been “reasoned” in its unyielding conquest for absolute power!
https://century-in-chess.blogspot.com/p/1877.html
Mr. Morphy is a quiet gentleman, which fact is perhaps sufficient reason for meddling correspondents 16 May 1879, Fri The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana) Newspapers.com
