Southern privateering.
Commenting upon the prospect of organizing a privateering force in the South, in the event of war between the two nations, a Northern journal says: ‘"The South forgets that privateering is behind the age, unchristian in the estimation of most people, and justifiable only in self-defence. We should hang even those suspected of it to the yard-arms, by Lynch law, without judge or jury."’Of all the cool things this side the North Pole, commend us to this paragraph. The effrontery of it is unparalleled, amazing, sublime. The South forgets that privateering is behind the age! How long is it since the North forgot the same thing? Why, the ink is scarcely dry on Secretary Marcy's flat refusal to the propositions of the Paris Peace Congress to America to give up privateering, a refusal which every paper in the United States applauded to the echo, among them the very one which now talks about privateering being unchristian and behind the age! If privateering is unchristian, it took the Christian world a long time to find out the sin of it, for every Christian, as well as unchristian nation on the face of the earth has practiced it, and none as much as the United States, who, during the Revolution and the late war, made it their main reliance, their "militia of the seas," as the Northern people have delighted to call it, and found it too valuable ever to surrender.--Every one must remember, that when the great powers at Paris artfully proposed to America to surrender privateering, it was universally replied by the Northern journals that, having but a small navy in comparison with those of England, France, &c., we could never surrender such an essential instrument of national self-defence. And it is only in self-defence that the South, which has no navy, will resort to this legitimate mode, fully recognized by Northern practice and defended by Northern argument, of harassing a powerful naval foe. As to the threat of hanging. now so common in coercive circles, let it never be forgotten that hemp grows in the South more abundantly than in the North, and that hanging is a game at which two can play. For every Southern privateersman hung without Judge or Jury, two Sons of the Pilgrims will be swung up like dried codfish at the first convenient lamp-post, oak tree or yard-arm. Let them inaugurate their blockade as soon as they like, and initiate at once the brutalities with which they threaten any attempts at resistance and reprisal. We venture to predict that if they dare to mete out any measure to Southern privateers which they would themselves consider unjust and inhuman if inflicted by European men-of-war upon their own private armed marine, the prisoners of the South will be made to pay an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life, till they are sick to the soul of "hanging Southern privateers without Judge or Jury. "
