A fellow Richmond editor has died. The Dispatch has evidence from occupied Charleston to contradict President Lincoln’s second inaugural address: victorious Yankees would really act with malice toward all white Southerners. The paper also found evidence from General Sheridan’s recent raid that Virginia farmers were lying when they said they had no victuals for the army or the poor city dwellers.
From the Richmond Daily Dispatch March 31 1865:
Friday morning…March 31, 1865.
Death of John M. Daniel.
We regret to learn that John M. Daniel, Esq., the widely-renowned editor of the Richmond Examiner, expired at his residence, in this city, at ten o’clock yesterday morning. His illness has been long and tedious, the complaint being typhoid pneumonia. His loss, at this particular time especially, may be regarded as a public calamity.
Mr. Daniel was a man of uncommonly fine genius, which appeared in everything he ever wrote from the first day he appeared before the public in print. …
Mr. Daniel, we should have mentioned, served on the staff of Governor Floyd in his Western campaign, and afterwards as volunteer aid to General A. P. Hill at the battle of Gaines’s mill, on which last occasion he was wounded.
The object of the Yankees in waging the kind of war they are now engaged in carrying on against us, could not be mistaken … [complete subjugation because of hatred and with malice]
Such being the treatment our people receive while we have large armies still in the field, what are we to expect when resistance shall have ceased altogether? The Yankees themselves tell us a part of what we are to look for, but they do not tell us all. We must look for it in their acts. In Charleston, they have not only set the negroes free, but, as far as they have been able, have compelled the whites to associate with them. They do this because they know that the whites consider such association as degrading to them; and they are determined to make them drink the cup to the dregs. There are probably among us Southern people who are tired of the war, and who hope that, by submission, they may obtain a little mercy at the hands of their masters. Never were people more woefully deceived. The Yankee will have no mercy upon them. He is only for bearing when he finds his proposed victim in a condition and disposition to resist. Let him but once be at his mercy — completely in his power — incapable of farther resistance — and he might as well hope for mercy from a tiger, or compassion from a wolf, or forbearance from any other cruel and cowardly wild beast of the forest. The Yankee will not only strip his victim of everything he has in the world, down to the very clothes upon his back, but he will take every other means to make him feel his situation. Is it not better to continue to resist even unto death than to accept such a peace as this?
There is a material tendency in the human mind to superstition. …
We may as well premise a precise statement of the facts which have wrought this change of sentiment by reference to the impossibility which has, till lately, existed of providing an adequate supply of provisions for the army and the people. There has been great privation here — we need not deny it,–and even the noble army of General Lee–that army which has so long stood as a wall of fire between our homes and the enemy — was in danger of suffering. In these straits, earnest appeals were made, from time to time, for gifts of provisions to support the army and to keep the poor from starvation. A good many farmers in the interior responded nobly to these calls, and a good many more were equally ready to respond, but had barely sufficient to support their own families. No one could doubt the correctness of the assertion, for, in some cases, when they were asked to sell, they declared that they had nothing; and even Confederate money could not create provisions. The poor would have to starve and the soldiers to suffer.–Their hearts ached to think of it; but they had nothing, and must look in helpless anguish upon the dismal scene. Well, thus much premised, we come to the supernatural part of the subject.
A party of Yankee spiritualists, under the direction of that famous wizard, Sheridan, left the mountains of Virginia a few weeks ago, and, in the course of their travels, exhibited a series of wonders never surpassed in the days of witchcraft. They made a few raps with their electrical knuckles at the farm-houses they visited, where previously there was nothing that could, by possibility, be given away or sold, and potatoes, bags of meal, barrels of flour, and endless hams of bacon, came to the light of day. This was no mere illusion of the senses, but a solid and savory reality, which would have gladdened the souls of many a hungry citizen of Richmond and many a worn out soldier in the trenches. Sheridan boasts, in his account of these miraculous transactions, that he caused provisions enough to appear in this way to “feed Lee’s army for the three months.” It is ridiculous to suppose that these provisions existed before his arrival, and had been ingeniously concealed from public observation. There was no motive for any such deception, and it is repugnant to the patriotism of those who were subject to these manipulations; who were, no doubt, as much astonished as anybody at the apparition of objects whose existence they were in profound ignorance of till the tappings and rappings of Sheridan’s spiritualists compelled their manifestation.
We can only regret that our own commissaries and other agents for obtaining provisions do not possess this supernatural power. It is to be hoped that General Lee will establish a school of spiritualism in the army, and have its disciples thoroughly trained in the mysteries of that productive art. We feel perfectly satisfied that there are a good many districts yet in the country, where there is now, positively, nothing that could be made to yield abundance of food for man and beast, if we only knew how to do it.
…
Our “Northern brethren” of the Puritan persuasion are happily endowed with the felicitous quality of always looking at the bright side of their own character and actions. …
