Tories in East Tennessee.
The assignment of Gen. Zollicopper to the command in East Tennessee, is most judicious and fortunate. He is a true man to the South, and prompt. firm, stern and fearless in the discharge of his duty. He had signalized his entrance upon command, by arresting the demagogue, tory, and traitor, T. A. R. Nelson, and sending him under escort to Abingdon. Nelson was captured while making his way over the Cumberland mountain into Kentucky, on his way to Washington city, where he intended to misrepresent Tennessee in the Rump Congress.The two votes of Tennessee, in favor of Secession and in favor of accepting the permanent Constitution of the Confederate States, have closed the door to all forbearance with the minions of Andrew Johnson in East Tennessee. Sitting in the Senate of the United States, Johnson sits as a traitor, and a reward should be offered for his head. Gen. Zollicoffer is taking measures now with his drill sergeants, which ought to have been taken two months ago, and which will put a speedy and to a defection which would never have had any front, if its few leaders had been properly dealt with at the beginning.
It is intolerable that any indulgence or quarter should be shown to Southern men base enough to take sides with the North while they are marching armies into our country, committing brutalities that even savages would scorn, and boasting their determination to strip us of our lands and homes, turn us out of doors, and set us to work to pay the debt which they are running up by the war for our subjugation. While the question of Union or Secession was a peace question; while it was a topic for the hustings and the stump; while it was yet an issue for the ballot-box, and no blood had been shed, nor invaders and pillagers had marched upon Southern soil; then a difference of opinion upon the abstract policy of Union or Separation could be honorably entertained, and the widest latitude of free discussion tolerated.
But the actual levying of war upon the South by the Yankees, and especially such a war, for the purposes they have avowed, and in the spirit they have manifested, has given a new character to the controversy, and made that treason which before was licentious opinion only. Not only has the truculent conduct of the Yankees fixed the stamp of infamy upon every sympathizer, aider and abettor which they have in the South; but the people of the South, by their solemn votes at the polls, have determined the allegiance of the true citizen and assigned to the category of Tories all who are false to that allegiance.
If, therefore, there ever was an example of treason, clearly defined, flagrant, monstrous in all its circumstances, and infamous, treason in the South in the present emergency is that example. In all after times historians will describe it as the most perfidious that ever blackened human nature. The records of mankind will be searched in vain for a parallel to the case of the Southern Tory. He of 1776 could boast, with some pride, of his loyalty to the king and his affection for the old home country; but the Southern Tory must protest his fealty to the Ape of Illinois and his affection for the land of Greeley, Lovejoy Phillips, Stowe, the Tribune and the Liberator. The man who turns against the South now, has a base heart, incapable of love for his own country or of hatred for an insulting, brutal and beastly enemy. When a white woman, forgetting the decencies of society, rejects her own race and insists upon marrying a negro, then the law interferes and puts its veto upon the monstrous alliance. The perversion of taste and of mind is not more monstrous in the case of such a woman than it is in that of the Southern man, who, while his own land is invaded by fanatics who have reviled us for thirty years, and whose march is attended by every conceivable atrocity of act and avowal, can plot with them for worse than our subjugation and enslavement.
The time has come for the adoption of a vigorous line of policy towards all this class of men. Treason is a weed that grows, flourishes, and spreads by neglect, but which a timely application of the scythe removes forever from the sight. We have seen what the policy of leniency and neglect will do in Northwest Virginia. A whole community has become infected with the baseness of a few self-seeking demagogues. What was the desperate experiment of a few discredited politicians, has become the policy of an entire region. Noxious seeds can never be left unmolested, to germinate and fructify with impunity. The hour of indulgence and toleration has passed for Toryism in the South; and untrue men should nowhere be left free to spread the work of mischief and defection. They should at least be apprehended and deprived of the power of working harm. That is the policy of General Zollicoffer, and that should be the policy of every officer throughout the South.
