Probable Commencement of the Civil War at Last
New York Herald,
April 11, 1861
The feverish excitement of the last few days, will probably
have given place, before the lapse of many hours, to that stunned sensation
of horror, which follows every terrible, irreparable catastrophe. The die
has, perhaps, ere this been cast, and the groans of the dying, the shrieks
of the wounded, and the hideous spectacle of mangled limbs, have been invoked
to mark the stage at which [the] “irrepressible conflict” has
arrived, in its infernal downward progress. “Fire, rape and slaughter,”
will be next summoned to the wake of the black flag that has been unfurled,
and the suicidal programme laid down by the Sewards, Lincolns, Wades, Sumners,
Kings, Phillipses, Fessendens, Greeleys, Garrisons, Blairs, and Chases, of
the Massachusetts school of abolitionism, will be carried out, as far as it
is in the power of the incendiarists [sic] at the head of the government to
do so. Craftily and stealthily as the preparations for impending ruin have
been made, it cannot be denied that republican and anti-slavery leaders have
given warning of their intentions. Even Mr. Seward did not hesitate to issue
the fiat, that “battle” should be the resort to which his party
would at last appeal, and to declare that “every one who should resist,
oppose, or stand in the way of” the fruition of abolition labors, during
the last thirty years, should be swept away, “as moths disappear before
the whirlwind.” Mr. Lincoln, a day or two before, had clearly intimated,
at Indianapolis, his intention of “retaking Southern forts and properties,
and of invading South Carolina.” Wendell Phillips, the orator, par excellence,
of Northern sectionalism, one month ago proclaimed his rejoicing and triumph
in the disasters that he foresaw were impending. He exclaimed, “I can
imagine the scenes of blood. They are dreadful; but I do not shrink from the
sentiment ‘that there are scenes of tremendous horror, which I could
smile at by Mercy’s side.’ “ “Weigh out,” he
continued, “the fifty thousand hearts that have beaten their last pulse,
amid agonies of thought, and suffering fancy faints to think of, and the fifty
thousand mothers, who, with sickening senses, watch for the footsteps that
are not wont to tarry long in their coming—add all the misery of cities
sacked and lands laid waste,”—and what then? They cannot “claim
a tear,” when compared with the system of slavery! In order to extinguish
slavery, the dragons[’] teeth of destruction have been carefully and
deliberately sown, and they are beginning to bring forth their fatal crop
of fruit.
Can anything be imagined more atrocious, more heartrending,
than this steady roll onward of the flood, which has begun to devour before
it every trace of our past prosperity as a nation? The stupendous treason,
which has insidiously, slowly, but surely, worked itself into a dividing line
between those who have cherished the institutions of the country, and the
traitors, North and South, who have been resolved to destroy it, is at length
consummated. Brothers are armed against brothers; fathers against sons; a
United States fleet, with every implement of destruction, has been sent to
carry death into the midst of communities bound to us by the most sacred ties,
and the signal for massacre has, in all likelihood, already been given. To
such a depth of degradation have bigotry, fanaticism, and ruthless intolerance,
reduced a country which, a year ago was the wonder and admiration of the civilized
world. A little while longer, and we may see armies springing up in Virginia,
Maryland; the seat of government forcibly driven from Washington; hosts pouring
into the slave States from the North and Northwest, under a dozen different
leaders; hostile arrays of troops wending Northward from the Carolinas, Mississippi,
Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama; the border States swollen with the implements
of wholesale slaughter; commerce, trade, manufactures and agriculture prostrated;
no national capital, no treasury, no country; but everywhere, trained bands
exhausting the resources of localities to elevate some petty leader to power,
and cater to individual demagogueism [sic]! Officers high in rank, in both
the Northern and Southern armies, have already paraded to the world their
readiness to gain distinction in a war of sections, and it is probable that
more than one among them is already calculating the chances of his own ascendency,
in some future military despotism.
Nine out of ten of the people of the Northern and Central
States repudiate the coercive policy which is hurrying the republic to destruction,
and contemplate with terror and dismay the prospect before us. Oceans of blood
and millions of treasure are about to be expended, in order to carry out,
ostensibly, an impracticable theory, with no other conceivable end than to
leave the country exhausted, impoverished and wretched. The ultima ratio which
Mr. Lincoln and his advisers have appealed to, will result, before the lapse
of many months, in the overthrow of the prosperity which it has required over
three-quarters of a century of industry and energy to create, and in exhausting
the means which it has cost so much toil and labor to accumulate. The last
act of the tragedy will be, either that the North and South, after having
drained the land of its resources, burdened it with an immense debt, and expended
the lives of tens of thousands of useful citizens, will find themselves compelled
to negotiate a peace from the very same basis that exists at present; or that
some Western Napoleon will bind the disunited fragments of the confederacy
together under one common yoke; or else that petty generals will extend through
the United States the direful scenes that have been witnessed in Mexico for
over twenty-five years, and that utter anarchy will be the consequence of
the collision which the republican party has so suicidally provoked.
The prospect never was so dark, menacing and desolate as
it is now. The developements of each day are looked forward to with anxiety
and dread. The people shrink aghast from the appeal that has been made to
artillery and the bayonet, and the only certainty in the minds of men, appears
to be, that horrors of every description are about to overwhelm the land.
