Friday, September 4, 2009

The Tone of the [Rebels] a Year Ago

The Columbia, (S. C.) Guardian just bout a year ago, had an article which was generally copied and approved by the secesh press, showing how easy it would be for the Confederates to whip and destroy the soldiers of the Union. We quite the following:

Months ago the minds of our people had settled resolvedly to meet any issue. Now the people of the North are in all the wild panic and confusion of war’s first alarms. We confront them, a cool. Collected foe, that will never give them time to recover from their surprise. We are ready for action – they are getting ready to prepare to act. They may raise plenty of men – 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 recruits are not soldiers, least of all the soldiers to meet the hot-blooded, thoroughbred, impetuous men of the South. Trencher soldiers, who enlisted to war on their rations, not on men, they are – such as marched through Baltimore – 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 the muzzle, and had rather filch a handkerchief than fight an enemy in manly open combat. White slaves, peddling wretches, small change knaves and vagrants, the off-scourings 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 sent to battle yesterday. 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 [illegible] on this side of the border longer than it will take us to reach the ground and drive them over.

Mobile is sending forth to wage this war of independence the noblest and bravest of her sons. It is expensive, extravagant to put such material against the riff raff mercenaries whom the Abolition power has called out. We could almost hope that a better class of men would fall into the Northern ranks that our gentlemen might find foemen worthy of their steel, whom it would be more difficult to conquer, and whom conquering would be more honorable. For the present, however, we must not expect to find any foe worth fighting, with the exception of a few regiments, for the North is just getting ready, and will likely be whipped before it is ready.

This was public opinion among the rebels a year ago. They are probably undeceived as to the stuff of which Union soldiers are composed by this time.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, April 26, 1862, p. 2

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