Rebellion Record: a Diary of American Events: Poetry and Incidents., Volume 1.
Frank Moore, Ed.

The furore of war which absorbs the North to that degree that Yankees have ceased to calculate, will not, and cannot, be a long-lived sentiment. Invasion of the South is simply la mode, the fashion, the excitement of the hour. Just as they ran mad after Jenny Lind, the Japanese Tommy, Kossuth, Morus Multicaulis, Spirit Rappings, and every other new bubble, so they now unite in the great delirium of civil war, and intoxicate their brains with thoughts of blood and plunder. When all the individuals of a nation have been occupied from their birth with ledgers and cash-books, dollars and cents, the humdrum existence of trade or traffic, a “sensation” becomes a necessity to their mental constitution. No people on earth need temporary excitement like the Yankees, are more eager to get it, or will pay more for it. Their newspapers, their books, their theatres, their cities, furnish daily illustrations of their thirst after excitement. But it never lasts long. The taste is gratified, the want supplied, and Yankees become Yankees again until the next season. Once used, they never take up the cast-off fashion, and that which ran them mad with coarse and gregarious enthusiasm, becomes in a few weeks mere caputmortuum, stale champagne,--old clothes. Kossuth coming, was greater than Washington; Kossuth leaving, attracted no more attention than the dustcart on which all the filth of the newspaper offices was emptied. The whole city of New York, men, women, and children, the upper ten and the b'hoys, assembled in one dense and shouting multitude, to see an ugly, vulgar, money-loving Swedish opera woman land from a steamboat, to sing to them to the tune of half a million of dollars; but three months later she walked and travelled with as little notice as any other strong-minded woman and unprotected female. As with these trifles, so with mania of a character more serious. The North blazed with rage for war with England in 1812, with Mexico in 1846, and after a few weeks no more soldiers could be gotten out of it for either. The tremendous outburst of ferocity that we witness in the Northern States, is simply the repetition of one of the most common traits of their national character. It is the fashion of the day, the humbug of the hour, and it will cease as suddenly as it has commenced. Like straw on fire, the periodical sensations of the North make a great flame, but to sink to the ashes and the dust of indifference as swiftly as they sprang. It is easy, and to them amusing, to indulge their tastes of this sort in bloody talk about invading the South, in mobbing a few of them hitherto suspected of sympathy with us, in joining volunteer companies, running off to cities like Washington, by way of Annapolis, where no brickbats are on the road; but in three or four weeks the superfluous gas will be gone, and Yankees will be Yankees again.--Richmond Examiner, May 3.