Gunboat captured on the Santee. So much the worse for us. We
do not want any more prisoners, and next time they will send a fleet of boats,
if one will not do. The Governor sent me Mr. Chesnut's telegram with a note
saying, “I regret the telegram does not come up to what we had hoped might be
as to the entire destruction of McClellan's army. I think, however, the
strength of the war with its ferocity may now be considered as broken.”
Table-talk to-day: This war was undertaken by us to shake
off the yoke of foreign invaders. So we consider our cause righteous. The
Yankees, since the war has begun, I have discovered it is to free the slaves
that they are fighting. So their cause is noble. They also expect to make the
war pay. Yankees do not undertake anything that does not pay. They think we
belong to them. We have been good milk cows — milked by the tariff, or skimmed.
We let them have all of our hard earnings. We bear the ban of slavery; they get
the money. Cotton pays everybody who handles it, sells it, manufactures it, but
rarely pays the man who grows it. Second hand the Yankees received the wages of
slavery. They grew rich. We grew poor. The receiver is as bad as the
thief. That applies to us, too, for we received the savages they stole from
Africa and brought to us in their slave-ships. As with the Egyptians, so it
shall be with us: if they let us go, it must be across a Red Sea — but one made
red by blood.
SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 200-1
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