r part, and without suspicion on the part of those who were
inoculated by their presence, the exact mould and pressure of their own
slaveholding opinion. To this extent, and in this subtile and ethereal
way, the North had imposed upon it, unconsciously, a certain respect,
amounting to veneration, for what may be called the sanctity of slavery,
as it rests in and constitutes the aromal emanation from every Southern
mind. Hence not only did we begin this war with the feeling of
tenderness toward the Southern man and the Southern woman as brother and
sister in the common heritage of patriotism, but, superadded to this,
with a _special_ sentiment of tenderness toward that _special_
institution for which it is known that they, our brethren, entertain
such _special_ regard.

Now all this is rapidly changing; the outrages inflicted on citizens of
the North residing at the South at the opening of the war--hardly
paralleled in the most barbarous ages in any other land;--their reckless
and bloodthirsty methods of war; their bullying arrogance and
presumption; the true exposition, in fine, of the Southern character as
it is, in the place of a high-toned chivalry which they have claimed for
themselves, and which the people of the North have been tacitly inclined
to accord--are all awakening the Government and the people to some
growing sense of the real state of the case. Still, however, we are so
far dominated by these influences of the past, that we are not fighting
the South upon anything like a fair approximation to equal terms. They
have no other thought than to inflict on us of the North the greatest
amount of evil; the _animus_ of deadly war. We, on the other hand, fight
an unwilling fight, with a constant _arriere pensee_ to the best
interests of the people whom we oppose--not even as _we_ might construe
those interests, but, by a curious tenderness and refinement of
delicacy, for those interests as _they_, from their point of view,
conceive them to be. We forbear from striking the South in their most
vital and defenceless point, while they forbear _in nothing_, and have
no purpose of forbearance.

Who doubts for a moment that a thousand mounted men, acting with the
freedom which characterized the movements of the detachment of Garibaldi
in the Italian war, acting with the authorization of the Government,
actuated by the spirit of a John Brown or a Nat Turner, sent, or rather
let go, into the mountains of Virginia, North C