The Daily Dispatch: March 29, 1862., [Electronic resource]

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A long War.

We heard an eminent Methodist divine, and one who, by the way, is not less brilliant as a soldier and a statesman then a clergyman, express the opinion that a war of fourteen or fifteen years duration would be far more desirable to the South than a short war; because it will require a long time to wean us from our old habits of commercial and manufacturing dependence, upon the North, and to purge out finally and forever the last moral, social, and political traces and vestige of the old Union.

We differ somewhat from our esteemed friend. It seems to us that a war of about the length of the first Revolution would be time enough to effect the desired object. Already, after only one year of Yankee invasion and butchery, the great mass of our people and alienated from us by a gulf which our feet can never cross: that gulf is made up of the blood of our brothers and children, and we cannot wade through it to make friends with the men by whom they were murdered. It requires along apprenticeship, however, for a nation to learn the art of practical independence, and we fear that an early peace would be fetal to an accomplishment of that object.