There is to be no
fight — no assault on Pickens. But we are beginning to send troops forward in
the right direction — to Virginia. Virginia herself ought to have kept the
invader from her soil. Was she reluctant to break the peace? And is it nothing
to have her soil polluted by the martial tramp of the Yankees at Alexandria and
Arlington Heights? But the wrath of the Southern chivalry will some day burst
forth on the ensanguined plain, and then let the presumptuous foemen of the
North beware of the fiery ordeal they have invoked. The men I see daily keeping
time to the music of revolution are fighting men, men who will conquer or die,
and who prefer death to subjugation. But the Yankee has no such motive to fight
for, no thought of serious wounds and death. He can go back to his own country;
our men have no other country to go to.
SOURCE: John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's
Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Volume 1, p. 42
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