Rebels.
We confess that, in inventing opprobrious epithets or the people of the
Confederacy, the
Yankees have succeeded in selecting one which has ignominy enough in the idea to satisfy even their demoniac malice.
Can a more contemptible condition be imagined in the world than one which implies allegiance to Yankees?
Rebels to
them! What must we have been if we were their vassals!
There is nothing in the term itself which would cause any American mortification.
Our forefathers of the Old Revolution were all rebels.
George Washington was a rebel.
The
Yankees of '76 were the greatest of rebels.
They acknowledged the fact and gloried in the title.
They were the seed of English rebels, of men who dethroned Charles the First, and cut off his head, although he was a better man than their saints, and less of a tyrant than
Cromwell.--The rebellion of
America was in fact, gotten up by Yankees for the benefit of Yankee trade and of the
Puritan religion.
Virginia had no particular interest; and it would be better for her now if she had never embarked in it.
But a man might acknowledge himself a rebel in the war of '76 without any personal degradation. --If it implied that George the Third was our lawful master, George the Third was at least a gentleman.
We were his lawful subjects, beyond a doubt; we never denied it. But under what law, or what constitution, or what compact, did we ever exchange our allegiance to the
British king for allegiance to a Yankee runaway?
When and where did we off the sovereignty of a gentleman for that of a blackguard?
We gave our sovereignty to no man or set of men; least of all, to the refuse of the
British isles who "left their country for their country's good" and came to
America for freedom to worship God by hanging Quakers, drowning witches, and alternately cheating and persecuting mankind generally.
Rebels we were in the Revolution; but we came out of the Revolution free and independent States, acknowledged and recognized as such by our former sovereign, George the Third, and so declared by the
American Constitution.
How can these sovereign and independent communities rebel against any power on the face of the earth?
We are not rebels.
Not that we would blush to assume the title if it were true; for if our fathers were not ashamed of it when they had comparatively little reason for revolution, much less should we blush to own it under such intolerable grievances as we have suffered.--But, in the first place, it is not true, and in the next, the idea of being rebels to Yankees is a degradation which we will never sanction by any word or act of ours.
Their eager and glib application of the term, when it is not warranted by the facts, is in keeping with the true character of political and social pretensions in all ages of the world.
The man or the party that is always railing out against aristocracy is sure to be the greatest aristocrat at heart, as is always proved when they get the power.
The Puritans of
England, eaten up with envy of a social rank which they did not possess, and refractory under every species of authority, no sooner got to
America than they set up as masters — socially, politically and religiously.
When a menial is translated from the servants' hall to the parlor, he is ready to imagine that all the gentlemen in the neighborhood belong to him. It is in just such a spirit that the
Yankee descendants of the Puritans are lavish in the application of the term rebel to the
Southern descendants
of the Cavillers.
They imagine they elevate themselves to the dignity of the
English Royalists of '76 by a parrot-like repetition of that phrase.
But it will not do. It is impossible for any creature in the world to be so low as to be a rebel against them.
Any thing that ever could be low enough to owe allegiance to the Sons of the Pilgrims could never, under any possible provocation, have the spirit to resist them.
That is not our case.
We never had them for our masters, and would not accept them as our slaves.
