it’s a shame Southern people aren’t doing anything about it
From The New-York Times February 14, 1865:
The Present Fatuity of the South.
Was there ever such infatuation as that which now possesses the South? Did any people, on the face of the earth, ever show such an utter lack of reason and of self-respect? In the other years of the war, they could be admired for much; and with all their errors, we were not ashamed to claim them as our fellow-countrymen. It was a crime in them to lend themselves to the treason of their leaders; but nobody can deny that once having committed themselves to this bad cause, they have fought for it with a gallantry seldom exceeded in human history. Nor have we, heretofore, been able to charge them with the folly of struggling for the impossible. There were, at the commencement of the war, large chances that it would end in Southern triumph and independence. Even the most sagacious men could reckon with much confidence on foreign intervention in favor of the South; or on a North so divided that President LINCOLN’s administration would be paralyzed, and be succeeded by another which would take peace from the South at any price. There was during the first three years of the war no time in which the patriot had not reason to tremble for the final result; and no time in which the rebels could not reasonably look forward with at least some degree of hope. But the period in which it was possible for the higher qualities of manhood to serve the rebellion has passed. It now lives only through the absurd and contemptible.
The whole Confederate Government, as it now stands, is but an enormous sham, with the single exception of the power wielded by JEFF. DAVIS. A majority of its Congress is made up of men either never regularly elected at all, or representing territory which is no longer under Confederate dominion. Its Vice-President seldom or never appears in the body over which it, is his official duty to preside. Its Secretary of the Treasury has treasure neither in hand nor in expectancy; he is hopelessly bankrupt, and his only business is to print and scatter rags, which he owns to be worthless. Its Secretary of State has no foreign relations to look after; in his speech just made at Richmond he confesses openly that there is no longer any hope that any foreign Power will recognize the Confederacy. Its Secretary of the Navy has no navy to regulate; his last available vessel of any account has been sent to the bottom, and there is none building. Its Postmaster-General has hardly a single unbroken route left to superintend; the greater part of his nominal jurisdiction is as much beyond his reach as if it lay beyond the ocean. Its Supreme Court has never been even nominally organized; it is a pure myth.
The rebel Government is a mockery throughout. We have just seen it, in the persons of DAVIS and BENJAMIN, mouthing great words about independence with the very same breath that it acknowledges that all is lost unless slaves are brought to its rescue. Every proposition to return to the old Government it styles an insult; and yet deliberately courts that insult by sending agents to confer with President LINCOLN, who had just averred that he had nothing else to offer. It croaks by the hour concerning its desperate straits, and winds up with the cool assurance that “croakers should be hanged.”
But the infatuation of the South does not lie so much in the conduct of its rebel rulers as in the behavior of its people. The rulers have staked their every earthly interest and hope upon the success of the rebellion which they planned and started. It is not strange that in their present extremity they should act without regard to reason or consistency. Men who are at their wits’ end naturally act wildly. But why do the Southern people continue to submit to such guidance? It is daily sinking them deeper in ruin, and they cannot help knowing it. There is not a sane Southern man who is not by this time convinced that the “Confederacy” has no chance under heaven. Nobody, not even the warmest partisan of JEFF. DAVIS, now claims the possibility of again getting possession of the Mississippi, of again opening any Confederate port to foreign commerce, or of driving the national armies from Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, and the other portions of the “Confederacy” now held by them. Nobody claims that there is any possibility of a foreign intervention, or of a Northern division, which can save the Confederacy. Meantime SHERMAN is daily making his way upon Charleston and Columbia without experiencing any serious resistance. The fall of these places, which will sever all connection of the Confederate capital with the Gulf States, is already accepted as a foregone conclusion. GRANT is pressing upon Richmond itself with a grasp that compells even the Richmond press to acknowledge that LEE’s army may, any month, be obliged to leave it. To what more tenable position this army is to go, nobody declares; and for the very good reason that there is none. LEE’s retreat from Richmond would leave him a foothold nowhere. It would only force him to go into an irregular piece-meal warfare, which would have no other effect than to make the South more a prey than ever to license, anarchy and ruin.
It is amazing that the Southern people do not reassert their manhood and shake off the leaders who, because they see no safety for themselves, are bent upon dragging the whole South with them to destruction. Had the Southern people the spirit of true freemen they would resist this miserable fate. By separate State action, or by a general uprising, they would for themselves clear the way for their honorable return to the Union of their fathers.
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Harper’s Weekly didn’t forget Valentine’s Day as you can see in its February 18, 1865 issue at Son of the South
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c1883
