Chivalric Warriors

It was the chivalry of South Carolina who started the rebellion.  It was they who led off in the drama of secession.  The first company of volunteers against the Union was raised in the Palmetto State.  The first rebel gun was fired on the sacred soil of that wayward and pettish Commonwealth.  From Charleston and Columbia, its only cities, came the original statements of the universal cowardice and poltroonery of the “Yankees,” and those lofty boasts of the invincible courage of the citizens of South Carolina, who “could whip five to one of Lincoln’s mercenaries.”  Well, we have had nearly a year of war.  Where have the South Carolinians distinguished themselves?  They gathered some eight or ten thousand men, with the assistance of North Carolina and Georgia, about the harbor of Charleston, planted miles of batteries, drove out to sea the Star of the West, an unarmed transport, and compelled a garrison of less than one hundred men to evacuate Fort Sumter.  This is the sum of their glorious achievements.  At Bull Run the South Carolina troops were the first to run, whilst the Federals were in the tide of their first successes on that bloody field.  At Port Royal they scampered like sheep at the approach of the Federal fleet.  And this is the whole record of the Palmetto chivalry in the secession war.  Amongst the killed and wounded rebels in the bulletins of the engagements of this year, you look in vain for those belonging to South Carolina regiments.  They do not die in the last ditch.  They fail to offer themselves up as sacrifices for their bleeding country.  They do not exterminate the race of Yankees.  Whilst the record of the rebel Virginians, Tennesseans and others of the more Northern States of Secessia is full of valor and heroic daring, South Carolina, with all her vain-glorious vaunting, presents a page that is densely blank.  So much for barking dogs that will not bite!

The original seceders made a good thing of it when, finding there was going to be fighting to do, they coaxed the border States into their causeless and cruel war.  This explains their anxiety to get Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland into their Confederate concern, after they had succeeded in seducing Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Arkansas. – The brunt of the hard work, the raising of men and means, and the fighting itself, has all fallen on the poor dupes that were cajoled into Secessionism after the rebel government was organized at Montgomery, whilst the aristocratic gentlemen of the cotton States have had comparatively an easy time of it.  These latter congratulated themselves that the horrors of war would be kept far away from their immediate neighborhoods, but they are soon to find out – indeed, they are having a taste of it already – that they reckoned without their host.  We feel exceedingly sorry, of course, for the people of Charleston, whom late reports represent as getting very much frightened. – {St. Louis Republican.

– Published in the Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, April 12, 1862, p. 4