The situation.
There are people who are never so happy as when they look upon the dark side of affairs.
It is a luxury to them to be discontented, and it becomes in time a necessity.
They are not content with an April day of alternate showers and sunshine.
To be perfectly blessed, life must be a perpetual equinoctial storm.
It must be confessed that, of late, these birds of darkness have had much to solace their taste for gloom, and that the heavens are still overcast with low hanging clouds, which presage a continued storm.
We would not deprive those who love to be unhappy of a drop of refreshment that the prospects afford, and yet things are not as bad as they might be, and it will pain them to discover, even better than they were a year ago.
What was the situation of the
South at that time?
It was literally at the mercy of the enemy, if the enemy had possessed the enterprise to take advantage of his superior power.
At the time of the
Pawnee panic in
Richmond, this city could have been taken almost without striking a blow.
There were not two thousand men of all arms to protect our capital.
If the
Pawnee alarm had been a reality, instead of a fiction, and if
Lincoln had then sent half-a-dozen gunboats and ten thousand men up
James river, the city would at once have become his prey.
He could then have advanced his columns without obstruction to every part of
Virginia, and with the loss of the
State, the campaign against the
South could have been carried on with facilities that might have produced the most embarrassing results.
Even at a later period, before the
battle of Manassas, our condition was far more precarious than at the present moment.
We had but one army, and that army outnumbered three to one by the enemy.
Everything hung upon the fate of that one army.
If we had been defeated at
Manassas,
Richmond would have fallen, and the
South had no other army upon which to depend.
But
Providence interposed in behalf of that little army, and when it was almost borne down by the heavy masses of the foe, brought up at the very nick of time reinforcements whose appearance struck terror to the enemy and caused their overwhelming rout.
We have confidence in the same protesting hand which defended us then; and, although we have not availed ourselves as we ought of the golden opportunity.
then vouchsafed us, our condition is not hopeless, but, in many respects, gives better augury of ultimate success than it did before that battle.
It is true that, by our own negligence, we have permitted the enemy to raise and discipline large forces; but we are ourselves no longer dependent upon a single army.
The spirit of the
South has been raised by those very reverses which threatened to overwhelm it. The whole
South has become a great camp.
We have armies and camps of instruction throughout the whole of our borders.--The soul of the
South, like the Æolian harp, gives forth a stronger strain with the increase of the tempest.
Not only has our military efficiency become enhanced, but the determination of the people never to be subdued has become intensified by the rapacity and cruelty of our vindictive foe. The winter, which he confidently looked to as destined to witness the subjugation of the
Gulf States, has passed, and the time is approaching when his armies will find an enemy in the climate more deadly and terrible than any human adversary.
In the meantime, his debt is enormously increasing, being already swelled to over one thousand millions, and is rising higher and higher every day. Well may he make frantic and desperate exertions to retrieve his fortunes; but he will be opposed by a firmness as solid and immovable as the rocks present to the foaming waves.
He will find every step of his progress resisted to the death, and learn, when it is too late to derive any advantage from the lesson, that a people who are determined to be free cannot be conquered.
