Letter from "oats."
[special Correspondence of the Dispatch.] Camp. Page, near Williamsburg. July 23, 1861.
You have doubtless heard that some of our boys from the neighborhood of Cockletown bagged three Yankees, and made three others run like wild turkeys on Thursday last.
The game captured were one Major killed, one Captain mortally wounded, and a first Lieutenant caught alive.
Quite a little prize in one morning's shooting affair.
Your correspondent has but little in the way of news to communicate, and but for some few sweet faces you meet on the streets, and the presence of the military in their varied costumes, seen at all times of day in little knots, or en route through the town.
Williamsburg would be about the dullest place for a "cit" to rusticate in imaginable.
One can hardly realize (unless he has read "Volney's Ruins,") that here once was a city where vice royalty hold court, and gallant knights and "fayre ladies" figured in the saloons of Patrician entertainers, and wandered in the mazes of the antique dance, to music imported from "home" far, far away over the blue sea. It is pleasant to cherish illusions, and with eye half dreamily closed, to watch the panoramic procession of the past move on, on, onward, till it melts in indistinct distance — all — all — the palace on the green, the stately mansions of the soi disant nobles of the olden time — a few only of which still stand; the queenly looking damsels on their palfreys; the Burgess full of loyalty, and at the same time as independent as broad acres, and a coach and four, and hosts of Ethiopian retainers, can make any man — the buxom wives, "fat, fair and forty-two;" the games on the green; the powdered quenes; the long, broad-pocketed, embroidered vests, and scarlet coats with huge golden or silver buttons; of the beaux with cocked hat and sword at side; the Capitol, the college the renowned Raleigh —— the — but — the illusion vanishes, and the open eye beholds all that the past time has left of memorial in the little church, old and sacred; the old magazine, facetiously called "the powder horn; " the venerable and quaint looking court house; Lord Botetourt's statue in the college yard; and, with the exception of medieval residences, (I call them so because they are connecting links between the past and the present, and, if I may be allowed a pun, are middle aged) and, a few ancient but still neat and handsome houses, and you are led to moralize upon the mutability of earthly grandeur, and to utter with a sigh, "Fuit Itium!"
It is said of one of her distinguished sons, whose love for his native State was that of a fond child's for his mother, that he considered Virginia the whole world, and Williamsburg its capital, and this pleasant fancy seems to have taken possession of many of her citizens.
And indeed the town is beautifully laid off — the main street, if properly built up, has not its equal in any town in Virginia; but it is disfigured with very many small, unsightly frame buildings, and this blemish is hardly atoned for by some neat and pretty residences, and one, at least, large and elegant mansion, recently built.
A few of the ancient and revered names, coeval with the place, are still found here, and these are represented by worth, intelligence, hospitality and refinement; but it cannot be denied that the new element out numbers the old, and when these name-bearers of the old chivalry have gone from this sphere of being, the club of Hercules must remain prone where it has fallen.
Of course they will be aped and imitated--they are--but counterfeit coin can never have the ring of the true metal.
The small shopkeepers are reaping a harvest out of the present state of things, and would make good cavalry, as they are first rate at a charge. The merchants proper are contracting their business, and as they do not replenish their stock, and as soldiers and others are obliged to have articles of necessity, the demand raises the price of the commonest article fifty per cent., and often more, beyond the usual price, and the small venders "make," as Patrick Henry said, "the most of it"
You have read Raymond's testimony to the Vandalic conduct of the Hessians at Hampton.
If there is a righteous God in Heaven — if "justice and judgment are the habitation of His throne"--if hell be not a fiction and a farce, what will be the punishment of these fiends in the hour of death and in the day of judgment, who have desecrated that ancient church in Hampton, and violating the solemn and sacred repose of the dead, have hauled the tombstones from the foundations where the hands of broken-hearted relatives had placed them over dust, which to guard they would have died and have barricaded the church gateway with their fragments?
It is useless for any of his apologists in the Northern papers to say that Butler does not countenance this outrage.
"I tell him, though a clergyman, he lies." Butlers is no man, but a dog!
and a dog's death should be his doom.
It is a little singular, however, that the new-made grave in that churchyard referred to by one of the correspondents of the New York papers — where he saw stakes fixed, and a cross piece above the mound, and the demoralized demons boiling their cauldron — is to my own knowledge the grave of the child of a Yankee, who, having made money out of our people, fled to his cold, unfeeling, creepiness and godless North, as soon as he found an indignant people were preparing to meet the vile invaders of our soil.
The cup is thus presented to his own lips.
Southern men would have guarded the grave of that innocent child, and Southern maidens would have flung wild flowers there; but his own brethren hold hellish orgies above the dust of his dead offspring!
One is almost startled into the wild cry, "is this the 19th century, and is this the great nation to whose example the world was invited?"
I see also an extract from a New York paper, that these miscreants entered the house of a lady in Hampton, and breaking open boxes she had packed away little memorials in, threw the contents in the street; also, pitching into the yard portraits of the family.
The writer states that the lady was a relative of the late Commodore Barron.
If this be so, it may be some gratification to Commodore Pendergrast to know that his friends and admirers, the Lincoln soldiers, offered these indignities to the house of his wife's sister, and that the portrait of Mrs. Pendergrast shared in the fate of the rest.
"Quee Deus Vult, perdere, prius demeutat."
Let the Lincoln dynasty exult, let such men as Winfield Scott, Seward, Chase, Montgomery, Blair, et id omne genus, hold jubilee; their day is short, their doom has teneth, their destruction is swift, their damnation is sure.
I have no more doubt that God (and I write it reverently,) has given the Federal Government in all its departments over to judicial blindness and madness, than I have that the hand-writing on the wall of the Chaldean monarch told of his departed kingdom and his crownless brow.
And the men of the Northern pulpit, from Bishop Whittingham to Ward Bescher, from Oily Pyne to Unctuous Chapin, from the fiendish Tying to Gardner Spring, from the windy Bellows to the wordy Cheeyer —— will, like the priests of Baal, have to meet the reaction of popular sentiment, which must take place and bear to sternal fame the scorn and hissing which shall wrap like a whirlwind their memory.
I am hopeful — it may be, over hopeful of the issue of this present strife; I think not, I believe not. The South will never yield!
Superior numbers may, by the barest possibility, overrun her soil; that I do not believe.--Our best blood may be shed in her defence — that I believe.
But subjugation?
‘ "No, ne'er shall the South such a destiny meet So black with dishonor, so foul with defeat;
Though her perishing ranks should be strewn in their gore.
Like Ocean weeds heaped on the surf-beaten shore:"
The South--"all undaunted by threats or by chains,
While the kindling of life in her bosom remains,
Shall victor exult, or in death be laid low,
With her back to the ground, and her feet to the foe;
And leaving in battle no blot on her name,
Look proudly to heaven from the death bed of fame."
’
oats.
