The Daily Dispatch: December 18, 1861., [Electronic resource]

The Yankee Officers imprisoned in retaliation for the treatment of our privateers, represent themselves horribly misused, and the Yankee Congress forth with orders Messrs, Mason and Slidell to felon's cells, because the South has retaliated for the vile treatment of its own captive sons. We wonder what these Yankees think they are made of, when they imagine that it is all right that our gallant ‘"militia of the seas"’ should be shut up in felon's cells and condemned to a felon's death, and that it is all wrong to treat their militia of the land in the same manner, even though they are only treated so for the purpose of bringing about the proper treatment of our ‘ "militia of the seas!"’ If they consider themselves superior beings, in anything that constitutes a man, to the people of the South, we should like to see some better evidence of the fact than their piratical invasion of our inoffensive country, and the ‘"beauty and booty"’ banner which was flaunted in the broad light of noon-day in New York! The ‘"militia of the seas"’ is a thing originated, and a term invented by themselves, to describe privateering, which they begun and vindicated both in practice and argument. And now, whilst the ink is scarcely dry on Maray's elaborate defence of privateering, a defence which was applauded to the echo by every newspaper in the United States, they have the supreme audacity to denounce as pirates, to try for their lives, to condemn to death Southern privateers, and then the hypocrisy and unmanliness to which in the most injured manner because we treat in the same way the piratical invaders who have entered our country to deprive us of all that man holds dear! We advise the Yankees to rest assured that they will be treated as our own militia are treated; better treatment they cannot expect us to think that they deserve.

It is a fact illustrative of the superior manliness of Southern character that our Southern privateers, though incarcerated in prison cells and under sentence of death, write no whining letters to their friends complaining of their fate.