orristown revolt, which Washington put down at once by the aid of his
faithful Massachusetts soldiers. But in a rebellious state dissension is
ruin, and the violence of an explosion in a strict ratio to the pressure
on every inch of the containing surface. Now we know the tremendous
force which has compelled the "unanimity" of the Southern people. There
are men in the ranks of the Southern army, if we can trust the evidence
which reaches us, who have been recruited with packs of blood-hounds,
and drilled, as it were, with halters around their necks. We know what
is the bitterness of those who have escaped this bloody harvest of the
remorseless conspirators; and from that we can judge of the elements of
destruction incorporated with many of the seemingly solid portions of
the fabric of the rebellion. The facts are necessarily few, but we can
reason from the laws of human nature as to what must be the feelings of
the people of the South to their Northern neighbors. It is impossible
that the love of the life which they have had in common, their glorious
recollections, their blended histories, their sympathies as Americans,
their mingled blood, their birthright as born under the same flag and
protected by it the world over, their worship of the same God, under the
same outward form, at least, and in the folds of the same ecclesiastical
organizations, should all be forgotten, and leave nothing but hatred and
eternal alienation. Men do not change in this way, and we may be quite
sure that the pretended unanimity of the South will some day or other
prove to have been a part of the machinery of deception which the
plotters have managed with such consummate skill. It is hardly to
be doubted that in every part of the South, as in New Orleans, in
Charleston, in Richmond, there are multitudes who wait for the day of
deliverance, and for whom the coming of "our good friends, the enemies,"
as Beranger has it, will be like the advent of the angels to the
prison-cells of Paul and Silas. But there is no need of depending on the
aid of our white Southern friends, be they many or be they few; there is
material power enough in the North, if there be the will to use it,
to overrun and by degrees to recolonize the South, and it is far from
impossible that some such process may be a part of the mechanism of its
new birth, spreading from various centres of organization, on the plan
which Nature follows when she would fill a half-finished tissue w