The spirit of the people.
If a people as numerous as those of the
Southern States desire to be free, they cannot be subjugated by any power on earth.
The thing is an impossibility.
All depends upon the spirit and temper of the people; for, even if their Government should prove incompetent, it would not destroy the vitality or impair the recuperative energies of a people determined to be free.
Again we say, all depends upon the people.
If they will not be subjugated, they cannot be subjugated.
If they still thirst after the fleshpots of
Egypt and demand of their
Moses and Anron to know why they brought them out to perish in the wilderness, then they may expect Pharaoh to come again and reclaim them to his services.
Less fortunate than the Jews, they will not the in the desert, but may return to make brick without straw from Pharaoh, and to bow down their necks to the taskmasters and to give up their substance to his tax gatherers, to wander impoverished beggars from their own estate, henceforth occupied by Yankees from Cape Cods and
Wethersfield, and to realize the triumphant of a Yankee journal that ‘"the
Northern matron will preside in the
Southern mansion and the
Southern lady bend over the washing tub."’
To support that the people of the
South are willing to succumb to Lincolnism, after the murders, definement, confiscation, and overthrow of all constitutional, political, and civil rights, which have thus far marked this stro war, would be to reduce them to a degradation below anything that Yankeedom itself has ever reached — an abyss of shame to which even
China and
Mexico have never discarded.
At this very moment
Mexico, a little, miserable, impoverished nation of half bre ds, is harmonizing its intestine fends and uniting its discordant factions to resist the combined armies of
England,
France, and
Spain, whereas, if the
South should succumb to Yankeedom, it would yield to a power which has just proved itself beneath
Mexico in honor and public spirit, having ingloriously backed out from a fight with only one of the three empires whose combined power
Mexico gallantly de Such a spirit would sink the
South below the contempt of mankind, and alienate from her the sympathies of all the world.
She would indeed be unworthy of sympathy; she would be worthy only the position to which her own inferiority of will and baseness of spirit had consigned her — that of being a menial of Yankeedom; literally, a ‘"servant of servants and slave of the devil."’ We hesitate not to say that, instead of such being the spirit and temper of the
Southern people, it is just the last people on the face of the earth which, individually or collectively, can be forced to do even that which is right, much loss that which is wrong, low, bass, and contemptible.
Therefore, we again reiterate what we have a hundred times said, that the subjugation of the
South is impossible, and we would hold the same conviction if every Southern city in the
Mississippi Valley and on the
Atlantic seaboard were in Yankee hands.
Not only cities, but whole States were in the possession of the
British for years during the Revolution — New York for six years, and only given up when peace was declared; and yet, it never affected the determination of either the
Northern or Southern patriots of the Revolution.
The South is an agricultural people, not dependent upon its cities, and its vitality and strength would be untouched if each of them should fall at once into Yankee hands, or be swallowed up by an earthquake.
We are not quite sure but that if the
Government should take the proper precautions to remove the munitions of war from its cities, and to keep the public stores from falling into the enemy's hands, it would even so much as weaken in any considerable degree its military operations, if the enemy should be permitted to seize and occupy a dozen of those imagined centres of trade and power, the cities of the
South, not one of which happily has any more influence on the power, prosperity, and the morals of the country, than a wart on the face of a giant.
In the darkest hour of the Revolution,
Washington declared that he would unfurl the standard of liberty, if necessary, in the mountains of
Augusta, and there secure the independence of his country.
We need not resort to these mountains for any such purpose, though the sons of these men of 76, whose inexhaustible constancy and invincible determination elicited from
Washington that declaration, have proved themselves in the ‘"Stone-Wall Brigade"’ of
Jackson, worthy sons of those valiant sires But we would simply say, in these the darkest hours of Southern fortunes, if the men of the
South should fail here, we would place her flag and her cards in the hands of the women and feel sure that they would never yield in battling for their dear native land till they yielded life itself.
If they could not avenge our quarrels with their gentle hands, they would teach their children and their children's children, to sack in rebellion with their mother's milk, and avenge their mother's cause.
The sons and brothers of such women cannot be subjugated, nor can they be even overrun if the
Government is as wise and energetic as the people are brave and resolved.
