The Confederates are vastly our superiors in the art of spreading
plausible reports. Acting together 'like one man,' a falsehood from
head-quarters is at once disseminated from Richmond to New-Orleans, and
the North is promptly victimized. At present their game is to make us
discredit their own forces, having learned that our belief in the extent
of their army is only a stimulus to Northern exertions. The truth is,
that the Confederacy never had so large an army as at present, or in
such excellent condition. They have been gathering up the odds and ends;
they have learned day by day to make better soldiers of them; they have
abundant food, are on the whole well armed, and it is rank folly in us
to rely on their weakness. Only an overwhelming force--the entire force
of the North--can now conquer them, and to make even this available, our
Government must have recourse to the most determined and daring
measures. It is no longer a question of suppressing rebellion, but of
defense; of conquering or being conquered. Were we at this instant to
consent to the independence of the Confederacy, it would not be
accepted. The Southerner, easily depressed by defeat, becomes arrogant
in the hour of victory, and would exact such conditions as we could
never endure.
The South, by successful secession, would take with it all our
prosperity and all our power. It would take the Border States and the
control of the Mississippi, and worse than this, it would _establish_ a
war which would rage without intermission until we should be crushed,
perhaps into literal tribute and vassalage. Every dispute arising from
our entangled neighborhood--and these would be innumerable--would be
determined with an insolence and a cruelty far surpassing any thing
which we have heretofore experienced; and at every manifestation of
unwillingness on our part to submit, we should have the sword tauntingly
thrown in the balance. With foreign aid and foreign allies they could
soon make our condition more galling than death. We should be the butt
of every nation, humiliated and trampled on in every international
dispute, and in every such difficulty the South would become the great
power of America, and its rising sun would easily find means to abuse us
still further.
Is this picture exaggerated? Let the reader shake off the fetters of old
custom and see the literal truths of life and what it is capable of
becoming. The South seriously proposes to establish itself as a
permanently military nation. The blacks are to do all the labor, raise
all the food, perform all the menial labor, and, in fact, literally
support all the white men. The aristocracy are to govern and fill all
higher civil and military functions; the 'mean whites' are to be
incorporated in the army. Year by year they will, it is hoped, become
more and more identified with their cause and their calling, and firmer
in their hatred of the North. Long ago this programme was published,
this scheme of a great negro-supported military nation, and it is not
difficult to see that recent events have rendered the leaders of the
Confederacy sanguine of its success. The whole South is full of crops
raised by the slaves--and the Virginia press triumphantly proclaims the
success of the first part of the great experiment, a success well worth
to them far greater sacrifices than they have already undergone. The
negro, it seems, as a slave, _can_ support the Southern
Confederacy--feed and clothe it. One year of war has proved this.
'One year ago we might have prevented this,' some furious 'radical' may
urge. Let such men be silent. On every hand there are cries for their
blood, and it is boldly commended in conservative journals and meetings
that they be hanged. However, the question is not now, what might have
been done a year ago. It is, what the enemy hope for and what they are
yet capable of doing.
By proving, undisturbed, the fact that the slaves can support them, the
Confederates have gained a greater victory than the North dreams of. By
forming a permanently military nation, they go a step further, and
relieve their communities from the weight of a non-productive, idle,
dangerous class of poor whites. When every 'bush-whacker,'
'sand-hiller,' 'Arab,' and other hanger-on shall have become a soldier,
with his settled place in society, a few new troubles may be incurred,
but much greater ones can not fail to be avoided. The leaders in a
military government may preserve that unity which could never be hoped
for under other conditions. We already know what unanimity prevails
among them; we may imagine what this would become when further
experience shall have still more coordinated and consolidated them.
It is not proposed in the South that other than military manufactures
shall be encouraged. European goods are to flow in untaxed, and the
'military nation' proposes to do all in its power to smuggle them over
the Northern frontier. To effect this darling scheme of vast profits to
themselves and of ruin to us, any sacrifice will be made. It is urged
that direct taxation will not prove sufficiently profitable to enable
the South to dispense with a revenue tariff; but those who urge this, do
not know the South. They do not know the infinite depths of hatred to
the North and to everything Northern--the venom and vindictiveness with
which they would pursue us. They forget that as a _military_ nation
whatever the rulers will, must and shall be done. The great
planters--and Southern policy of capital tends to develop none save
great planters and their adherents--will undoubtedly be taxed, but then
they will on the other hand be directly interested in sustaining the
government, and share in its power and patronage. Let the reader
remember that after all, there are only _at present_ in the South some
two hundred thousand slaveholders, or men holding slaves sufficient to
fairly rank among those whose interests are seriously allied to 'the
institution.' Possibly the chances of war have still further diminished
this number; it would be strange indeed, if between runaways and the
sacrifices which adversity brings, and which fall most heavily on men of
moderate means, the number of slaveholders has not been reduced. In such
times negroes are sold at _any_ price. This small number of slaveholders
will understand their own political interests sufficiently well to admit
foreign goods duty free, and to use every effort to smuggle them into
the North.
We, on the other hand, who have no negroes to plant for us, who must pay
our farmers far more than the wretched black earns, have no 'mud-sill'
whereon to rest. We are manufacturers, and can not form a permanent
military nation. We hold in horror the idea of a standing army, and of
having our young men who might grow up wealthy and learned--and what
Northern youth is there who has not his 'chances'?--become
garrison-soldiers for life. We love learning, culture, independence,
progress. Year by year sees noble schools rising among us--schools in
which every man's son may obtain an excellent free education, and
qualify himself for any position in any society. Year by year sees our
manufacturers demanding fresh labor, more talent, more youth, more
energy, and with them sees the condition of the mechanic becoming more
and more ameliorated. Year by year finds the public lecture and library
more used by the workman, and the masses rising little by little above
their post. In short, we belong to a community whose conditions are
those of refinement and of peace; ours is an advanced stage of
civilization, and it is our duty to maintain this advance.
'The South' cares nothing for all these things. It 'loathes the very
name of free schools,' despises industry and ingenuity, scorns the
mechanic, and is altogether, as a community, behind us: as a merely
agricultural and would-be merely military government, must essentially
be. There are predicaments when the shrewd brute and cunning brigand has
his superior at a disadvantage. Let the South prolong this contest till
its military social system acquires sufficient strength, and it will
drag us down to its own wretched lord-and-serf level. 'To its level!'
rather let us say beneath it; yes, beneath its iron heel, to endless
shame and ruin.
It can never be. The man who believes in peaceable secession must be an
idiot. Secession means a military nation living side by side with a
non-military nation, which it hates and will do its best to crush. It
means a successful rebel flashing the sword in our face at every fancied
insult, and all the work of war perennially renewed. It means
conservative traitors and doughface scoundrels stirring up riot and ruin
among us at every corner, with no man to make them afraid; nourishing
the South in our faces and intriguing to bring us into the Confederacy.
It means the breaking up of the Union into many fragments--for who
supposes that Southern hatred will not intrigue to this effect, and that
the pro-slavery Northern men of the present day who have worked so hard
to secure to the South the successful solution of the first part of its
problem will not be found laboring heart and soul to aid their old
masters?
_Væ victis!_ If we do not rise in our might and crush this rebellion
root and branch, we shall be crushed--and no honest, observant man can
deny it. Fire and water may as well mingle as we two hope to inhabit the
same continent. It is hammer or anvil with us now, and no escape. They
realize with delight that our year of procrastination has been to them
more than two years of preparation, and so confident are they of success
as to even wish to conceal their numbers.
Reader, this is not an emergency whose evil results may fall on others
and not on yourself. There is not one loyal American to whom Southern
success does not portend misery, poverty, degradation. We have not yet
felt the foot of the enemy on our soil, but if we pour away the
life-blood of the nation little by little, why, a day will come when the
blood will be exhausted, and the enemy, grown to fearful strength, will
come ravaging over the border. Do not fold your hands in fancied
security and say of that day: 'It is far off.' When it comes, you will
say, as you _now_ say of the past year, that there was time lost and sad
negligence. A year ago we 'progressives' cried aloud in bitter
earnestness for one great, overwhelming effort, for decisive measures,
and after debating, and delaying, and plucking all the feathers from our
bird, they threw him, half-starved, at Bull Run, and then cried: There
is your victory! A year ago we urged expediency and boldness; but
'Democracy' quibbled at every thing, hindered everything, and then laid
the fault on us--as its friend Jeff Davis does when accusing the Federal
Government of waging barbarous warfare--so as to excuse his own
iniquities. But now we have come to the bitter need, and the country
must choose between bold measures and measureless disgrace.
Lo! the country is responding heart and soul. From every township comes
the cry of Union or death! What was the waking of Sumter, compared to
this of the summer and autumn of eighteen hundred and sixty-two? At last
the truth has gone home--we _must_ conquer. Conquer or be conquered, it
is, O friends! but if you _will_ it, you _shall_ have victory. You have
the strength: in God's name put forth your hand and grasp the golden
crown.