A New Lesson on Dying in the Last Ditch, September 15, 1864

Why didn’t Denmark die in the last ditch? Plucky as she has been she happens to be made of flesh and blood, and this sort of dying is not a thing for flesh and blood to do.  It may be talked about; all mankind has a weakness that way; but it never has happened, and never will.  Of course we refer to people collectively, and not to individuals.  A person here and there, seized with some sublime phrenzy may take death sooner than yield.  A people never dies thus, not even the bravest.  A man my commit suicide; a people cannot.  “Give me liberty, or give me death,” is a very fine sentiment, and ought, we suppose, to be universally adopted, and either lived, or died, up to.  But it isn’t done.  Men in general, somehow can’t overcome the instinct of self-preservation.  They’ll take any measure of wrong sooner than death.  “Better a living dog than a dead lion,” is a maxim that, we are afraid, commends itself to our pour nature now as much as ever.  Are there braver men on earth than Hungarians, or the Poles, or the Cireassians?  And yet have we not lately seen them all, as we now see the brave Danes, bow themselves to their conqueror, sooner than to fight to extermination?  They did this not in any want of courage.  They had courage enough.  It was precisely that no courage could help them that they stopped fighting.  Courage is of no avail without strength; and when their strength had been broken up by their enemies, submission came. Cowards yield because they won’t help themselves.  Brave men yield because they can’t help themselves.  That is just the difference between them.

The Danes never protested so loudly that they would fight to the death, as for a week or two before they gave in.  Nothing is more common than this.  We saw it in the late Crimean war.  When the reverses and discomfitures of two campaigns culminated in the overthrow of Sebastopol itself, Russia had nothing to answer but an order for a new levy of 100,000 men.  From the Czar to the lowest serf, there was an outburst of continued defiance, so imposing that even the cool Richard Cobden who had once declared in Parliament that “Russia might be crumbled up like a sheet of brown paper,” issued a pamphlet maintaining that Russia was unconquerable, and that peace must be made with her own terms.  Yet a month did not collapse before the Czar made known his readiness to accept terms which not only conceded all the points originally in dispute, but others of a yet more humiliating character.  Just so did the Mexicans.  One of their last acts before submission was to create a Dictator, with absolute power for everything except submission; and a proclamation to the provinces, declaring resistance to the death.  This access of new defiance just before succumbing is perfectly natural.  The pride of the worsted party is always the last quality to yield.  It rallies when the strength no longer can.  It is the return of the spirit upon itself when the arm droops—a self-assertion, or self-protest of the soul, Necessarily incident, perhaps to its superiority over the flesh, but for all that, perfectly useless.  We don’t call such exhibitions mere bravado.  They are not.  On the contrary, they are the most apt to be seen in those who are most truly brave.  The higher in the spirit, the sharper the recoil.  At no time have our rebels protested stronger that they will never submit than they are now doing.  Jeff. Davis said the other day with unusual emphasis that “We will have extermination or independence.”  He felt so, undoubtedly; but the truth is, he neither.  His people will not take the one, and we have no intentions to give the other.  Precisely as Tennessee and Louisiana, and Arkansas have neither extermination of independence, so will it be with all the remaining eight States of the so-called Confederacy.  The twenty five millions of loyal states have the ability to overcome the remaining strength of this rebellion.  They mean to do it.  When it is done these people will do precisely what every other people at war have done when their strength was gone—they will submit.  They will yield when exhausted—will stop fighting when they can fight no longer.  All this talk about “extermination” is natural enough, and, after a fashion, credible, but it amounts to nothing.  It will not give these rebels on breath the more or less.  “The thing which hath been, it is that which shall be, and there is no new thing under the sun”—not even under this remarkable southern sun of ours.  We attempt no prediction when this submission will come through it sometimes seems to us that it cannot be far at farthest.  If it is certain that the rebellion has been greatly weakened in fighting material, and that the disparity between its available force and our own is daily becoming greater.  There are those who believe that even now it is sustained only by the hope the last draft ordered by President Lincoln will not be sustained by the Northern people and that he himself will be repudiated at the election in November.  It is expected by some who call themselves close observers, that the rebels will give up the fight next Winter, if this hope of theirs is not realized.  The submission my occur than, and it may not.  It is impossible to tell.  But the particular time is of no essential consequence.  It is enough to know that it must come sooner or later: and just as soon as the warning strength of the rebels comes to the point of exhaustion.  It would appear that we ought to expect an earlier submission than in the other wars we have averted to, because that submission involves no hard terms—nothing but a resumption of equal rights under the same broad Constitution.  But perhaps this rational inducement may have no such effect.  We do not calculate upon it.  We simply affirm that these rebels will succumb sooner than be exterminated, and that this yielding will be preceded by strong talk, and be sudden when it comes.  N. Y. Times.

SOURCES: “A New Lesson on Dying in the Last Ditch,” Janesville Daily Gazette, Janesville, Wisconsin, Thursday, September 15, 1864, p. 2; “A New Lesson on Dying in the Last Ditch,” The Tiffin Tribune, Tiffin, Ohio, Thursday, September 22, 1864, p. 1, “Highly Pertinent,” Detroit Free Press, Detroit, Michigan, Saturday, August 27, 1864, p. 2.