Southern Chivalry

Some months ago, how long we cannot exactly tell, but presume it was before the strongly contested battle of Bull Run was fought, at all events at a time when the Southern chivalry entertained the most absurd ideas of Northern bravery and classed its soldiers among the very mudsills of society; that the New Orleans Picayune boasted that one Southerner was equal to five Northern soldiers, and proposed in order to settle the contest, that one hundred thousand of the Southern chivalry be opposed to one hundred and fifty thousand northern soldiers and that the Governments accept the result as final!  It was a glorious idea and very befitting the brain that hatched it.  We think by this time that these Southern gentry have learned that if the people of the North have made less pretension to the use of firearms they know quite as well as their neighbors how to use them; and that if they have boasted little of their bravery, it is never wanting when called into requisition.  When peace is once more established in our country, for this generation at least, there will be less bullying of the South over the North; they will feel so cowed by the awful thrashing we have given them, that a prima facie Yankee will be enabled to pass from one end of Dixie to the other without fear of insult.

The idea of physical supremacy knocked out of a bully makes him one of the most obsequious of individuals, compliant as putty in the hands of his superior.  It may not have exactly this effect upon all the chivalry, but they will be very apt to speak a little more courteously when they allude to Yankees and give them a wider berth when they meet them.  Certainly it will raise Yankee prowess in the eyes of the Southern gentlemen, and that to them is the most god like virtue possessed by fallen humanity.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Friday Morning, February 21, 1862, p. 2