|
|
A. Lincoln Published in The Virginian on January 2, 1863The Wilmington Journal says: During the recent raid of the enemy towards Goldsboro,' their conduct was gratuitously evil and wantonly barbarous. They committed outrages which seemed to have neither sense nor object, and which could nave no military reason nor justification. The poor as well as the rich were plundered, and little objects of female attire, and even children's toys were torn up or burned out of mere deviltry. Many plantations were stripped of servants, horses, pigs, cattle, meat, cloth, meal, and, in fact of everything that could be carried off or destroyed. The number of negroes taken off estimated at 500 to 600, and all of them working hands. Female attire and children's tops, destroyed out of mere deviltry -- by christian warriors and gentlemen soldiers? But here is an excerpt from a Yankee account of what was done at Fredricksburg, before the vengeance of Heaven fell on them from the batteries and muskets of Gen. Lee: A letter in the Tribune, dated Fredericksburg, December 12th says: The old mansion of Douglas Gordon -- perhaps the wealthiest citizen in the vicinity -- is now used as the headquarters of General Howard, but before he occupied it, every room had been torn with shot, and then all the elegant furniture and works of art broken and smashed by the soldiers, who burst into the house after having driven the rebel sharpshooters from behind it. When I entered it early this morning, before its occupation by Gen. Howard, I found the soldiers of this fine division diverting themselves with the rich dresses found in the wardrobes; some had on bonnets of the fashion of last year, and were surveying themselves before mirrors, which, an hour afterwards, were pitched out of the window and smashed to pieces upon the pavement; others had elegant scarfs bound round their heads in the form of turbans, and shawls around their waists. We destroyed by fire nearly two whole squares of buildings, chiefly used for business purposes, together with the fine residences of O. McDowell, Dr. Smith, J.H. Kelly, A.S. Cott, William Slaughter, and many other smaller dwellings. Every store, I think, without exception, was pillaged of every valuable article. A fine drugstore which would not have looked badly on Broadway, was litersally one mass of broken glass and jars. Of a former raid by the Yankees in North Carolina, a correspondent of the Boston Traveller wrote. Of Williamston, he said: This is a small town, having before the war from 500 to 700 inhabitants. We found it almost entirely deserted, one or two white men being all we saw in the place. Our halt there was about three hours, and at the end of that time the town was thoroughly pillaged. Not only were useful and ornamental articles taken from houses, and horses, harness and carriages from barns, but stores were entered and sacked, and with the applejack discovered and the whiskey dealt out by order, not a few were dead drunk, and many more partially frenzied. When we moved a considerable number had to be urged almost at the point of the bayonet, while others were loaded into ambulances and baggage wagons. Of their arrival near Hamilton, a town of from 300 to 400 souls, he says: But, instead of marching into the town, we were encamped in a corn-field just outside of it. The order was that two or three men be sent out to forage provisions for each company, and no others allowed in town. but whether by open disobedience, or by the connivance of those who should have enforced the order, the town was soon, in camp language "cleaned out," even more completely than Williamston. -- Not only were houses sacked, and eerything portable and desirable carried off, but valuable furniture dashed to pieces, beds dragged into the streets and burned -- in one field I myself counted eight or ten -- but nearly or quite a dozen houses were needlessly, carelessly, barbariously burned. It is little winder, if such be the conduct of our forces everywhere, that we should acquire an unenviable reputation. From The Sunday Mercury" It is fashionable to say that the South, in arming for resistance to Lincoln's election, inititated the revolution. So she did in one sense, and we do not pretend to hold her guiltless. But is the North entirely blameless of any participation in the crimes of a civil war which has been precipitated by events which were seen by the prescience of men far wiser than ourselves, and of which we were forewarned with awful emphasis by the Father of his Country, and by a long line of eminent and illustrious statesmen? If we would desire to know the common sources of all our political ills, let us cast our eyes Eastward to New England, that hotbed of isms, schisms, heresies, and fanaticisms. We boldly assert that she has kept the whole North -- and may we not say the whole South? -- in a state of revolution for years. What were her Slades, her Hales, her Garrisons, her Phillipses, and her Wilsons, but so many teachers of disunion, and her churches but so many magazines to scatter fire-brands, sorrow and death around and through the nation? When the Kansas-Nebraska bill was passed, and when it was hoped that the question was settled forever, these men and their debauched followers openly proclaimed that sleep should not visit their eyelids until it was repealed. Then commenced an agitation and convulsion scarcely paralleled in history. With Jacobinical zeal and phrenzy [sic], the worst passions were invoked, and faction reared its Medusa's head, shook it's snaky locks, and started on its career of madness and of ruin. Then the "Bloody Kansas work" commenced. -- Then Massachusetts and other Eastern States were ready for civil war, and Emigrant Aid Societies, fitted out in Boston, were dispatched to the devoted Territory of Kansas, to make her a free State at all hazards, to overawe the peaceable settlers and tillers of the soil and reduce them to servitude, under the domination of blue-light New England Federalism of the Hartford Convention school. Then subscriptions were openly taken at a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Abolition Society, held at Buffalo, N.Y., to carry out these nefarious and revolutionary purposes, and to set at defiance the authority of the Federal Government in a Territory she was bound to protect and to sustain in all her legal and constitutional rights. But these are not a tithe of the wrongs perpetrated by New England, and her allies in other States, against the Constitution of the country, and revolutionary and factious in their character and tendency. The administrations of both Mr. Pierce and Mr. Buchanan were assailed from their beginning to their end, with a bitterness and unrelenting hostility worthy only of men and a party totally lost to every particle of principle and of honor. Their motives were impeached, their integrity questioned, and their policy embarrassed at every step by these ghouls and harpies, who aimed at power through "free speech," "free wool," and "free Kansas," that they might carry out their damnable purposes of dissolving the Union and gorging their rapacious and hungry maws with the spoils and plunder of the Government. And now they have succeeded, and what is the result? Precisely what any sane man would have predicted from the beginning. The John Brown raid -- the logical result of the teachings of such men as Garrison and Giddings, who were proven to have been the instigators and co-workers -- has culminated in revolution and civil-war on Southern soil, and the blood of the thousands of Northern men that has drenched the sodden ground of many a battle-field, and the bones that lie bleaching in the sun, cry aloud for vengeance and retribution on the heads of the guilty authors and abettors of this "gigantic rebellion." Let us take all these truths home to ourselves. Let us take the beam out of our own eye before we discover and find fault with the mote in that of our neighbor's. -- Before God, and in the light of history; we of the North will not be held blameless for the curse of the civil war that is upon us with all its countless evils. We should bow ourselves in deep humiliation, and cover ourselves with 'sackcloth and ashes,' for our transgressions have been many and grievous. |
A Love Letter Civil War Poetry A Horse Soldier 6th Iowa Cavalry Fun Stuff Links Contact |
JAC - 2003