g angel will pass
over the homes of the many true and loyal men who are still left at the
South, and the thunderbolts of this war will fall only--where they
should fall--on the heads of its blood-stained authors. If this is not
done, after we have put down the whites we shall have to meet the
blacks, and after we have waded knee-deep in the blood of both, we shall
end the war where it began, but with the South desolated by fire and
sword, the North impoverished and loaded down with an everlasting debt,
and our once proud, happy and glorious country the by-word and scorn of
the whole civilized world.
I have all my life long been a true friend to the South. My connections,
my interests, and my sympathies are all there, and there are those now
in the ranks of this rebellion who are of my own blood; but I say, and I
would to God that every lover of his country would say it with me, 'Make
no peace with it until slavery is exterminated.' Slavery is its very
bones, marrow, and life-blood, and you can not put it down till you have
destroyed that accursed institution. If a miserable peace is patched up
before a death-stroke is given to slavery, it will gather new strength,
and drive freedom from this country forever. In the nature of things it
can not exist in the same hemisphere with liberty. Then let every man
who loves his country determine that if this war must needs last for
twenty years, it shall not end until this root of all our political
evils is weeded out forever.
A short half-hour took us to the plantation, where I found the Colonel
on the piazza awaiting me. After our greeting was over, noticing my
soiled and rather dilapidated condition, he inquired where I had passed
the night. I told him, when he burst into a hearty fit of laughter, and
for several days good-naturedly bantered me about 'putting up' at the
most aristocratic hotel in South Carolina,--the 'Mills House.'
We soon entered the mansion, and the reader will, I trust, excuse me, if
I leave him standing in its door-way till another month.
THE LESSON OF WAR.
Lex est, non poena, perire.--_Martial._
Ye warriors of the past, whose flashing swords
Light up with fitful gleams the misty night
Of half-forgotten eld, in fiery words
Ye teach a truth 'twere well we read aright.
God sends the gentle breeze to woo the flower,
And stir the pulses of the ripening corn;
He, too, lets loose the whirlwind's vengeful power
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