The mightiest monarch of all,these men received the President's Proclamation with “derisive laughter,” 3 and for the moment treated the whole affair as a solemn farce.4 The press in the so-called “Confederate States,” inspired by the key-note at Montgomery, in dissonance with which they dared not be heard, more vehemently than ever, and without stint ridiculed the “Yankees,” as they called the people of the Free-labor States. They were spoken of as cowards, ingrates, fawning sycophants; a race unworthy of a place in the society of “Southern gentlemen ;” infidels to God, religion, and morality; mercenary to the last degree, and so lacking in personal and moral courage, that “one Southron could whip five of them easily, and ten of them at a pinch.” 5 The
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talks with the Cabinet,” 1 had assured Davis and his associates that his party would “stand by the South at all hazards,” and that there would be such a “divided North,” that war would be impossible.2 Thus surrounded by an atmosphere of sophistry and adulation, which conveyed to their ears few accents of truth or reason; confident of the support of kings, and queens, and emperors of the Old World, who would rejoice if a great calamity should overtake the menacing Republic of the West, and sitting complacently at the feet of “King Cotton,”
1 Montgomery Correspondence of the Charleston Mercury, April 10, 1861.
2 To impress his new political associates with exalted ideas of his power as a “Democratic leader” in the North, Sanders sent, by telegraph, the following pompous dispatch to his political friends in New York:--
This man, as we shall observe hereafter, was a conspicuous actor in the most infamous work of the conspirators during the war that ensued.
3 First Year of the War: by E. A. Pollard, page 59.
4 The following advertisement is copied from the first inside business column of the Mobile Advertiser of April 16, now before me:--
This was intended as an intimation that the 75,000 men called for by President Lincoln would each need a coffin. It has been alleged, by competent authority,.that Davis, in the folly of his madness, sanctioned the publication of this advertisement, to show contempt for the National Government.
5 The Mobile Advertiser, one of the ablest and most respectable of the Southern newspapers, held the following language:--“The Northern ‘ soldiers ’ are men who prefer enlisting to starvation; scurvy fellows from the back slums of cities, whom Falstaff would not have marched through Coventry with. But these are not soldiers — least of all to meet the hot-blooded, thoroughbred, impetuous men of the South. Trencher soldiers, who enlisted to war upon their rations, not on men. They are such as marched through Baltimore [the Massachusetts Sixth, admirably clothed, equipped, and disciplined, and composed of some of the best young men of New England], squalid, wretched, ragged, and half-naked, as the newspapers of that city report them. Fellows who do not know the breech of a musket from its muzzle, and had rather filch a handkerchief than fight an enemy in manly combat. White slaves, peddling wretches, small-change knaves and vagrants, the dregs and offscourings of the populace; these are the levied ‘forces’ whom Lincoln suddenly arrays as candidates for the honor of being slaughtered by gentlemen — such as Mobile sends to battle. Let them come South, and we will put our negroes to the dirty work of killing them. But they will not come South. Not a wretch of them will live on this side of the border longer than it will take us to reach the ground and drive them off.”
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