Those regiments of foreigners.
The braggart proceedings of the
North only provoke the contempt and resentment of our people; but there are some occurrences there which fall upon the
Southern heart.
Among these is the enlistment of foreign regiments to wage an unrighteous war of aggression upon Southern liberty and independence.
The South cannot help recurring to the events of 1854 and 1855, when the same spirit of malignant and fanatical intolerance which is now let loose upon herself, was waging a cruel and remorseless war upon the foreign exile and the unoffending Catholic.
The fires of proscription swept over the whole of that bigoted section; and in every city, village and hamlet, men met in secret conclave, with stealthy step in the small hours of the night, to swear by their duty to God and country an eternal hostility to the foreigner and the
Catholic.
In the fury of their malignant and proscriptive fanaticism, and with the boldness that a controlling secret organization imparted, they contented themselves not with victories won everywhere by the ballot-box, but they proceeded to violence, in the burning of cathedrals and convents, and in mob attacks upon congregations and individuals.
Nay, under a pretense of public virtue, which thinly disguised a vulgar curiosity and licentious inquisitiveness, they violated the seclusion of schools and the sanctity of convents and sisterhoods.
They sought to degrade the foreigner, however intelligent, to a lower political level than the free negro, and to deny rights and franchises to the exemplary Catholic, which they conceded to the polygamous
Mormon.
The thirsty sands of the desert do not drink up the showers from the clouds with more avidity than the
Puritan bigotry of the
North welcomed the dogmas of Know-Nothingism.
They took root everywhere at the
North, shot up with magic growth, and poisoned the whole atmosphere with their baneful exhalation.
Suddenly the vulgarest skulks of the streets became leaders in politics and the dispensatories of public patronage.
The foreigner felt himself under the ban of the polls and of the
Government, and the
Catholic listened for insult in every sound that came to his ears.
It was while staggering under this thrall of intolerance and proscription that the
Catholic and the foreigner heard of a championship of his cause which he as little expected as a miracle from Heaven.
It was precisely in the section where his religion was least disseminated and his race most sparse, that this championship of free conscience and equal rights arose.
It was in the land of the generous and chivalrous Cavalier, a land where toleration was not only a principle but an emotion, where hospitality was not merely a habit but an inheritance, that the indignant voice of rebuke was raised against the mean and base spirit of Know-Nothingism.
Virginia was then as now, the battle-ground between the champions of constitutional liberty and the fool fiend of bigotry and intolerance.
Then an obnoxious race and faith were to be prostrated; now it is a hated domestic institution that is the object of the same puritanical crusade.
Then the bigot fought as the enemy of the
Catholic and the foreigner; now the same bigot fights as the exterminator of slavery.
Unaided by the foreigner and the
Catholic, we beat the Roundhead on
Virginia soil in 1855.
Will the foreigner and the
Catholic enlist with the Roundhead to fight against us the same battle over upon the same soil in 1861?
A few regiments have enlisted;
Meagher--
et tu Brute — has joined them; but Mitchell has not, and we trust he will be an exemplar to hundreds of thousands.
This war is in fact, only a continuation of the war of 1854 55, somewhat differently directed and but for a period.
It was the
South who beat the
Puritan bigot at that day; and by beating him then, has drawn upon herself the whole brunt of his enmity and hatred.
Since that defeat, he has forgotten, for a time, the race and religion he swore to exterminate in the violence of his onslaught upon slavery.
This institution overthrown, and the
South overrun and humiliated with what force and ferocity would be not turn upon the old victims of whose blood he was for a time disappointed?
Theirs would be only the poor privilege of being the last devoured, by an appetite that no number of holocausts can sate, and by a thirst which no quantity of blood can slake.
But though aided by regiments that should be found only on the side of constitutional liberty, the Roundhead will not win the day. On the same fields whereon we routed him then, we will rout him now, just as completely, just as ignominiously.
The cause being the same, the combatants the same, so will the victory be the same; and as a few unfaithful foreigners did not change the fortunes of the battle then by their treacherous blows, so will the misguided regiments who have now taken up arms for their own worst enemy, avail nothing against that cause which is as dear to the foreigner as it can well be to the Cavalier.
