The Daily Dispatch: January 17, 1865., [Electronic resource]

Supposing that New England fanaticism should succeed in the overthrow of slavery in this country, would it be permanently contented and quiescent? --Would its vocation be gone? Let us imagine that to-morrow the universal African race should stand "redeemed, regenerated and disenthralled," would it satiate the morbid appetite of fanaticism?

For a time, as a rich repast appeases the cravings of a hungry dyspeptic, or a stiff glass of grog the longings of a habitual toper; but only for a time. The old appetite would soon revive and require a fresh stimulant. With its fierce passions glutted by the emancipation of the slaves and the extermination of their masters, it would repose like an anaconda who has gorged himself with an . But when the ox is digested, what then? When the South is a land of free blacks, and the white population are slumbering peacefully in their graves, what will remain here to tempt the palate of excited imaginations and vindictive hate?

These questions are not without interest to those conservative classes in the North who have been beguiled by their idolatry of the Union into a war of New England fanaticism. They vainly imagined that by enlisting in the crusade of coercion they were subserving the interests of stability, order and permanent peace and security. But these cardinal objects of good government are not to be gained by placing power in the hands of fanatics, who have dethroned reason, who take counsel only of their passions and imaginations, and whose whole history, from the origin of the Puritan sent in England, proves that they are as restless and insubordinate when not themselves the rulers as they are tyrannical and remorseless when they hold the reins; that they are chronic enemies of all authority except their own; social disorganizers, who will either rule or ruin; monomaniacs, whose brains are incapable of holding more than one idea at a time, and who, as fast as the idea is exploded, supply its place with another, equally lunatic and impracticable. At one time it is prelacy; at another, Romanism; at another, royalty; at another, witchcraft; at another, teetotalism; and at another, slavery. This is the most modern and the latest of their hobbies; for the Puritans were once the most enterprising of slave traders and the most tyrannical of masters. When they have rode that hobby to death, will they consent to go afoot? If they do, it will be the first time in their lives. Their vital breath is agitation; innovation is the law of their existence; progress — the progress of madmen — the first article of their creed. The sworn enemies of kings, they are the most despotic of tyrants; the professed haters of Church and State, they are eternally aiming to unite the two in their own hands; hooting at the altar as at the throne, they would cease to exist if they could not have a victim and a sacrifice. It is slavery and the South which is now to expiate their sins. It is more a matter of interest to Northern conservatives than to us whose brows the sacrificial garlands will next adorn, and over whose heads the knife will next be brandished.

But if we had put a sword in a madman's hands, to set him upon an enemy, we should not be without some misgivings as to what he might next attempt when that little job was finished. Those religionists at the North who were once the select objects of Puritan malevolence, but who have combined with them in a war of sheer fanaticism, may be sure that the knell of Southern slavery will sound the tocsin for an assault upon their own liberty of conscience; those property-holders who have backed up with their influence and money a crusade upon property of all kinds in the South may discover that their own property is not safe from the hands of men who have been schooled to plunder of every kind in a four years war. It is only upon the immutable foundations of justice and reason that the structure of free government and personal rights and security can be so built as to fall nor when the rains descend and the winds blow.--A government based upon rapacity, wrong, and the fluctuating caprices of fanaticism, is built upon the sand; and when the storm comes it will fall: and great will be the fall of it.

If we of the Confederacy perish, we shall neither perish alone nor unavenged. The fair plantations of the South, once the abodes of a cultivated and happy people, may gladden the eye of fanaticism with the spectacle of universal desolation; the productive industry, which supplied the commerce and manufactories of the world, may be helplessly paralyzed; hordes of negro barbarians may bask in the sun of our deserted fields, and the original possessors, the race which produced Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Marshall, Patrick Henry, and which has conducted this war of independence with a heroism that has amazed the world, may sleep in bloody graves. But better thus to sleep than to survive and behold the sad spectacle which will succeed their downfall.--Freedom to the negro will be no such freedom as death will bring to them from vassalage and degradation. Sleeping in soldiers' graves, but without a stain upon their shields, immortal in history and song, liberated forever from human malice and rancor, they may bless the sharp steel that saves them from the living death of shame and subjugation. But if they fall, they will fall like Samson, dragging down with them the pillars of the Philistine temple. Their grave will be the grave of the prosperity and the liberties of their enemies. Their enemies may appropriate their sunny land, but it will only be a Jamaica or St. Domingo. Fanaticism, having worked its work of ruin here, will then turn upon the North and breed social, religious and political convulsions there that will ultimately compel a military despotism. The Puritans will not always be permitted, even in the Northern States, to give the law in politics and morals; and at their own doors the tide of blood, ebbing from the South, will yet crimson every Northern household.