Matters Settled, So Far

After the great disasters with which the war opened there was a very general and natural disposition at the North to attribute superior skill to the rebel commanders, if not better fighting qualities to the rank and file of their armies.  And they were not at all modest in arrogating to themselves the largest military superiority in every respect.  The boast that one southern man was equal to any half-dozen Yankees was not mere brag; the southerners believed it, and it was this noting that gave them such confidence of easy success in the rebellion.  The war has corrected these errors of opinion.  The rebels no longer talk of the superiority of their generals, or the more soldierly qualities of their men.  Indeed, they are very free to depreciate some of their ablest commanders and to disparage the courage of their soldiers, since the recent unexpected defeats.

It needs no great amount of military science to see that in the matter of strategy the southern leaders have been completely out-generaled.  Napoleon’s three conditions of success – to keep our forces united, to leave no weak point unguarded, and to seize with rapidity on important points – have been admirably adhered to on our side, while the enemy has been most thoroughly misled as to the general plan of the campaign, and has been compelled by superior strategy to abandon his most important and best fortified positions.  We may search the records of the most brilliant campaigns for a more admirable military movement than that up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, by which the evacuation of Bowling Green, Nashville and Columbus by the rebel armies was compelled, simply by the reduction of the forts on these two rivers.  And it was a genuine surprise to the rebel leaders, notwithstanding their general success in ferreting out the plans of the government.  They believed their western line impregnable, and the whole country looked to see it broken only by direct assault upon their strongholds.  With such an astounding record of defeats and retreats in a single month, it is not strange that the southern people begin to distrust the alleged superiority of their military commanders.

Their conceit as to the better fighting qualities of their men has collapsed with equal suddenness.  Indeed the fighting at Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff had opened their eyes with astonishment as to the courage of northern soldiers. – Fort Henry, Fort Donelson and Roanoke Island have settled that matter, and the secession papers now concede that we are at least their equals in courage and endurance.  It is true that at Fort Donelson some desperate fighting was done by the rebels, but it was in the attempt to break through our lines and escape, under the inspiration of Pillow’s lie that if they were captured they would all be hung or shot.  At Roanoke Island the rebels did not fight well; they trusted wholly to the protection of their entrenchments, and when these were assaulted they fled as far as they could and then surrendered.  The southern papers justly reproach Wise’s army with cowardice.  But it has been true every where that the rebels have relied on their strong positions and defences rather than on the courage of their men, and when driven from their strongholds they have nowhere yet made a stand and encountered the Yankees in a fair and open fight.

Another boast of the Southerners has been that their armies were composed of gentlemen, and they really seemed to think themselves degraded by fighting with the “northern mudsills.”  We have seen something lately of the material of the rebel armies, and we find the officers vastly inferior to our own in intelligence and gentlemanly qualities, and the common soldiers for the most part ignorant and degraded to an extent scarcely conceivable at the north. – Thanks to our common schools, such ignorance and brutality as is general among the rebel rank and file is impossible in the free states.  In this ignorance lies the strength of the rebellion.  The conspirators have found these untaught men easy dupes; they have believed the false stories told them of the evil designs of the General Government and the Northern people, and their astonishment at the kind and generous treatment they have received as prisoners is manifestly sincere.  The correction of the false prejudices of the Southern people by the presence of our invading armies is one of the most important gains of the campaign, because it destroys they animus of the rebellion, so far as the Southern people are concerned, and prepares the way for a radical restoration of the Union.  It is impossible that they shall not forever discard the leaders who have deceived them to their hurt, just as soon as they come to understand the true state of the case.  But the fact that the rebellion is a fraud on the part of the leaders and delusion on the part of the Southern people does by no means preclude the necessity of fighting the thing out.  On the contrary, that is the only way to reach the evil and correct it.  It is impossible to undeceive the people of the South by any other process than the defeat and destruction of the rebel armies and the re-establishment of the authority of the government in every State.  Successful fighting will dissipate all error and prejudices and settle all vexed questions.  Talk about amnesty, conciliation, compromise, or any indirect method of adjustment, is only a waste of time and strength. – The thing is to be fought through; the disease is too radical to be cured in any other way, and when the last rebel army is dispersed, and the last rebel conspirator hung or banished, it will be time enough to take up the political problems growing out of the rebellion – and then we shall probably find that the war itself has solved the most difficult and important of them. – {Springfield Republican.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 15, 1862, p. 2