"History is Constantly Repeating Itself."
The observation is sufficiently trite; but it is none the less true for all that.
The
Yankees, with regard to us, are in the same position that Lord North and the majority in Parliament were with regard to the colonies of 1776, with this difference: that the colonies were
bona fide colonies.
They had been settled by
Great Britain, governed by her, and had always acknowledged her supremacy; whereas, the
State of Virginia was settled ten years before
Plymouth Rock was ever heard of ; never was governed by the
Yankees; never owed them any allegiance, and only united with them in forming a government for certain purposes expressed in the
Constitution creating that Government.
The same may be said of all the States constituting the
Confederacy.
They were settled later, but not by Yankees, and none of them were ever governed by Yankees, or acknowledged any right on the part of the
Yankees to govern them.
It follows that the colonies actually
rebelled when they set the
Government of George III.
at defiance, and that we are not rebels when we deny the right of the
Yankees to govern us. Yet these same Yankees have not only practically denied every right asserted by the
Declaration of Independence, but have adopted the very phraseology habitually employed by the Parliament in speaking of the colonies.
Let us add, that there is not one single enormity which
Yankee Fourth-of-July orators and Yankee historians have been in the habit of ascribing to the ministry and armies of George III.
which their own Congress and their own people have not committed on a vastly extended scale, and with the addition of ten-fold horrors.
We are induced to make these observations by a paragraph in the press telegram of yesterday morning, in which it is stated that four hundred citizens had been killed in a riot in New Orleans, occasioned by
Canby's attempt to enforce the draft.
When
Sir Henry Clinton captured
Charleston in May, 1780, he published a proclamation, in which he called upon the people of
South Carolina to return to their homes and remain quiet, promising all who did so that they should not be disturbed.
His successor, Lord Cornwallis, disregarding this promise, called upon all people capable of bearing arms to come forward and assist in putting down the rebellion, and his agents and emissaries traversed the
State from one end to the other in order to compel obedience.
This proclamation produced results the opposite of those intended.
The people had staid at home under the impression that they would not be compelled to engage in the war; but finding that they were compelled to fight, they determined to fight by the side of their countrymen, and not against them.
Many who had even taken the oath of allegiance, on the condition, either expressed or implied, that they would be allowed to remain quiet at home, considered themselves absolved from their engagements by this new proclamation.
Among others who stood in that category was
Colonel Isaac Hayne, who was afterwards captured and executed by Lord Rawdon, whose name has been held in execution from that day to this by the whole continent of
America.
The
Yankees have written nearly all the books that have been published touching the revolution of 76; and there is not one of these books in which the conduct of Lord Cornwallis is not severely reprobated.
The idea of drafting men against their will to fight against their own countrymen, and probably to kill or be killed by some of them, is too shocking to think of. The Yankee historians were perfectly right in denouncing the atrocity when it was practised by the Myrmidons of Cornwallis; but we hear not a word of censure, now that the executors of
Lincoln's will are doing the same thing.
No men denounced more bitterly than the
Yankees the
English practice of impressing seamen from vessels belonging to the
United States.
This was one among the many causes that conspired to bring on the war of 1812, and during that war the Congress of the United States, in a formal document, denounced as unchristian and inhuman a policy which retained the
American seamen thus impressed, and rendered them liable to fall by the hands of their own countrymen on the deck of an enemy's vessel.
In what do the drafts of the
Yankees at New Orleans and elsewhere differ from this practice of the
English, save that, having been adopted while war is actually raging between the
Yankees and the
Confederacy, it multiplies an hundred-fold the danger of collision between the men thus impressed and their brethren in the Confederate armies, and that it is infinitely more sweeping, more tyrannical, and more inhuman!
There is, indeed, no circumstance which can aggravate the horrors of war that has not been introduced into this contest by the
Yankees.
