From the Richmond Daily Dispatch March 7, 1864:
In Press, and will be out in a few days,
the two Nations: a Key to the History of the American
War. by the author of the first and second years of the War.
The publishers announce from the prolific pen of Mr. Edward A Pollard one of the most attractive political pamphlets of the times — a psychological review of the war, with a new theory of the Yankee character.
Price, one dollar.
Dealers should send in their orders at once.
The usual discount to the trade.
Ayres & Wade,
Publishers.
Richmond, Va.
The beginning of the pamphlet:
THE TWO NATIONS.
It has been a sentimental regret with certain European students of American History that the colonies of America, after acquiring their independence, did not establish a single and compact nationality. The philosophy of these optimists is that the State institutions were perpetual schools of provincialism, selfishness and discontent, and that they were constantly educating the people for the disruption of that Union which was only a partial and incomplete expression of the nationality of America. These men indulge the idea that America, as a nation, would have been colossal; that its wonderful mountains and rivers,
its vast stretch of territory, its teeming wealth, and the almost boundless military resources, which the present war has developed and proved, would then have been united in one picture of grandeur, and in a single movement of sublime, irresistible progress.
These are pretty dreams of ignorance. …
Mr. Pollard went on to give credit to John C. Calhoun for his espousal of States’ Rights, but that did not mean that there were really 35 “nations”. North and South were distinct and separate cultures that could support two united nations. As for the Yankee character, the author objected to the Lincoln administration’s apparent reversal on the question of whether the war was just to keep the states united: ‘the South could keep its slaves’. The Emancipation Proclamation changed that. Furthermore, the war encouraged the love of Union and the flag in the North, but Yankees were mostly fighting a materialistic war – as could be seen by the atrocities they committed. The Confederate government was bereft of good, new ideas, but it was early days in the revolution. The heroes of the war were the Southern privates of all white classes who were united in defending their country. The Confederate army was a socialist’s dream realized:
We have put into the field soldiers such as the world has seldom seen — men who, half-clothed and half- fed, have, against superiour numbers, won two- thirds of the battles of this war. The material of the Confederate army, in social worth, is simply superiour to all that is related in the military annals of mankind. Men of wealth, men accustomed to the fashions of polite society, men who had devoted their lives to learned professions and political studies, have not hesitated to shoulder their muskets and fight as privates in the ranks with the hard-fisted and uncouth labourer, no less a patriot than themselves. Our
army presents to the world, perhaps, the only example of theoretical socialism reduced to practice it has ever seen, and realizes, at least in respect of defensive arms, the philosopher’s dream of fraternal and sympathetic equality.
To get a little ahead of the story, as the Park Service link above points out, Mr. Pollard was captured by the Union blockade in May 1864 and spent three months in Fort Warren before being paroled.
