A Southern take on the North’s coming celebration of July 4th and the Declaration of Independence: the United States was abrogating all the principles of the Declaration except for its one mistake – the idea that “all men are created equal”. This editorial’s last paragraph echoes Alexander Stephens’ Cornerstone speech from way back in March 1861.
American eagle attacking the CSA
From the Richmond Daily Dispatch July 2, 1864:
The Fourth of July.
The great national festival of the United States will be celebrated this year with uncommon spirit. On the last anniversary Grant occupied Vicksburg; this Fourth, crowning glory of all, he is to take Richmond. With the capture of Richmond, the war is to end, the principal rebels be executed, the plantations and negroes of the South pass to Northern proprietors, its mighty States dwindle into subjugated territories, and the Republic move on with a momentum and majesty which will astonish and overawe the world. The American eagle, with one wing overshadowing the Atlantic and the other the Pacific, and with the Southern Confederacy struggling helplessly in his talons, will soar aloft, giving a scream that will scare the British Lion out of his wits, and make the Gallic cock “skedaddle” like a Shanghai. Oh, puissant and irresistible Ulysses! Oh, memorable and immortal 4th of July, 1864!
We consider it an unfortunate thing that the 4th of July does not occur in December. The thermometer ought to indicate the freezing point when a man reads the Declaration of Independence to a Northern audience at such a time as this. He must be a cool man naturally, and ought to have a refrigerator for a rostrum, who has the face to go through that document before a public assembly, from the clause which asserts that “all governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed,” down to the final article in the long list of royal outrages– “he has excited domestic insurrection among us.” There is not a wrong alleged nor a grievance enumerated in that instrument which Lincoln has not perpetrated and surpassed. To denounce a defunct king of England for deeds which an American President is eulogized for performing, is an enterprise which no ordinary mortal would undertake in this weather.
Moses was a Virginian, of course
These are the circumstances which must add to the difficulty of such a performance. Such for example as the fact the “the day they celebrate” dawned from the sky of that Virginia which they are now seeking to rend and devious [devour?]; that it was Richard Henry Lee, delegate from Virginia, who, by instructions from his constituents, rose in that dreadful hour, and moved the resolution of Independence; that it was Thomas Jefferson of Virginia who drafted the Declaration whose anniversary they celebrate; that it was George Washington, of Virginia, whose mighty chieftainship made that Declaration good. To add, new glories to the 4th of July by crushing Virginia forever to the dust, is a conception which could enter none but the brains of a “peculiar people.” To carry among their trophies on the 4th, a shattered lamp, whose golden light illumined the midnight that blackened between Bunker Hill and Yorktown, a triumph that no hearts but theirs could glory in.
Nix that equality idea, gentlemen
Happily for us, they can enjoy that feast only in imagination. Their demigod Ulysses has failed to furnish their populace the promised entertainment. The capture of Richmond on the 4th of July has not come off according to the programme. Nevertheless, let the Northern patriots be content. If they have not taken the capital, they have burned the farm-houses, devastated the fields, and plundered the defenceless population of a State which gave them the Aaron, whose lips pronounced the Declaration of their freedom, and the Moses whose valor led them through the desert.
The only doctrine of the whole Declaration which the North can consistently rejoice in, is that which asserts the equality of man, and which is the solitary blunder in that great document. That all men are created equal; that they are equal politically, morally or socially; that they are equals in any other than a religious sense, is too evident an absurdity gravely to discuss. But this single falsity has swallowed up in the Northern mind all the great truths and principles of constitutional liberty. It is this, as applied specially to the ignorant and debased Africans, which is the mainspring of the most infernal war known in modern times. It is this which blinds the North to the supreme folly of celebrating their own freedom by endeavoring to enslave others; of degrading themselves to the level of the black and endeavoring to produce by miscegenation that uniformity which the God of Nature had forbidden, and of glorying in their shame.
