A Scrap of history.
--The language as well as the spirit of the North, in the present war, seems to be borrowed from that of the British invaders during the war of independence.--Lord Cornwallis issued, in 1780, in regard to the State of South Carolina, which was then assumed to be a British ‘"province,"’ as it is now deemed to be a province of Lincoln's empire, the following order. It sounds like an editorial in some New York paper in 1861, and in the very vein of the champion of Northern supremacy:‘ "I have given orders that all the inhabitants of this province, who have subscribed and taken part in this revolt, should be punished with the greatest rigor; and also those who will not turn out, that they may be imprisoned, and their whole property taken from them and destroyed. I have also ordered that compensation should be made out of their estates to the persons who have been injured and oppressed by them. I have ordered, in the most positive manner, that every militia man who has borne arms with us and afterwards joined the enemy, shall be hanged. I desire you will take the most rigorous measures to punish the rebels in the district which you command."
’ This letter fell into the hands of Washington, and was made, with the similar orders issued by Lord Rawdon, the topic of indignant remonstrance with Sir Henry Clinton, their superior officer, to whom some modifying letters were written by these officers, to mitigate the enormity of their acts.
They would need no mitigation in order to make them conform to the bloody minded counsels of the Lincoln press of this day.--On the contrary, the tone and almost the very words are renewed every day through their columns.
It is another part of history that, in little more than a year after this letter was written, Cornwallis himself was a prisoner to these same ‘"rebels,"’ and as a retribution which his fallen pride deserved, his sword was surrendered to the very General who had been forced to capitulate at Charleston.
We are reenacting history. What has been, will be.--New Orleans Picayune.
