Can the wound ever be Healed?
There are some people, only a few we trust, who believe, or affect to believe, that fraternal feeling will again be restored between the North and the South. It seems to us that the man must be demential who would entertain the idea, even for a moment. He that does so has not seen or felt the effects of the war. He has been far removed from the enemy's hostilities, and the wall of the widow, the orphan, and the childless parent, has never been heard in his home. The tears that fell like torrents, after the bloody battle at Shiloh, and the cries of distress which still break the silence of desolate homes, will ring through a hundred years to come. Hate, deep, deathless lives with grief and despair; and whether people are free or slaves, they will ever hold in eternal execration the very Yankee name. If the North and South make treaty, and our doors are thrown open to the Yankees to come and settle with us, or even to trade with us, this Revolution will have been inaugurated in vain. In vain the oceans of blood spilled in vain the sufferings and hardships of our brave troops; in vain the loss of time, property and health, in vain all the money expended, and all the untold and unwritten sacrifices and labors of love bestowed upon our bleeding country be the noble women of the land. We may be mistaken, but we believe that every day this war digs wider and deeper the gulf between the North and the South, which Time, the great Architects as well as Destroyer, can never bridge. God grant we may not be mistaken. But if we could be induced to believe that the South would ever again restore the laws of trade and intercourse with the North or permit the Yankee to among us and enjoy the rights of citizenship, we would rather make our home in revolutionary Mexico or in despotic Austria, than dwell in these States with the trell of the serpent around us and over us all. Better that every man, woman and child in the Confederacy were dead and resting from life's fitful fever, than live in the chains which Yankee commerce and would forge for our limbs. The wound that has been made is like that between Roland and Sir Leoline, so beautifully and forcibly expressed by Coleridge in his incomparable Christs bell. ‘ "They stood aloof, the scorn remaining,Like cliffs which has been
A deadly sea now flows between,
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been."
As the separation between us has been final and eternal, let the barriers between us be raised so high and impassable that friendly intercourse shall not be revived, or the morals of the new Republic be contaminated by association with the off-scouring of the old. [We commend the foregoing, from the Milledgeville Union, to the candid attention of every reader.] ’
