How pregnant with events, swelling the annals of our country, have been the last two weeks? First the most complete victory of which modern history gives us any account, has occurred at Island No. 10. After a siege of twenty-three days, the enemy strongly entrenched on an almost inaccessible island, has surrendered, seven thousand in number, prisoners of war, with all his ordnance and stores, without the loss of a single man on the Federal side, other than what occurred by casualty. Then after the hardest fought battle ever known on the American Continent, in which perhaps as large force was engaged and more lives were lost, the enemy was driven into his entrenchments and our troops remained in possession of the field. Again, what promises to be the most lengthy and bloody siege of the whole war, has been commenced on the Chesapeake. When it will end, or whether the Federal forces will be victorious, remains to be seen, but of the latter no one familiar with the prowess of the North can have a reasonable doubt. Lastly, the first stride toward ridding our country of the incubus of slavery, that so long has cast a stigma on our nation, paralyzing its mental and physical energies and at length culminating in war, has been taken.
The flag of the union floats over the dome of the National Capitol, proclaiming freedom to all. The animus of the institution that has so cursed our country, is removed from the seat of the National Government, and our legislators, after the lapse of so many years, can sit down to make laws in a free State. No more will intelligent foreigners, visiting our Capital as ministers from other countries, have their ears insulted by the crack of the whip and the shrieks of men and women, whose only crime is that have having skin a shade darker than unmixed Caucasian.
In view of the last great battle fought, were it not that Beauregard remains in command of the rebel forces in Mississippi, we might safely predict no more hard fighting in the west; but so long as that General – to whom all must concede great military talent, schooled as he was by the Government he seeks to overthrow – remains in command, we must expect another severely contested engagement.
– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Wednesday Morning, April 16, 1862, p. 2
The flag of the union floats over the dome of the National Capitol, proclaiming freedom to all. The animus of the institution that has so cursed our country, is removed from the seat of the National Government, and our legislators, after the lapse of so many years, can sit down to make laws in a free State. No more will intelligent foreigners, visiting our Capital as ministers from other countries, have their ears insulted by the crack of the whip and the shrieks of men and women, whose only crime is that have having skin a shade darker than unmixed Caucasian.
In view of the last great battle fought, were it not that Beauregard remains in command of the rebel forces in Mississippi, we might safely predict no more hard fighting in the west; but so long as that General – to whom all must concede great military talent, schooled as he was by the Government he seeks to overthrow – remains in command, we must expect another severely contested engagement.
– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Wednesday Morning, April 16, 1862, p. 2
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