Virginia to the Rescue.
The spirit of the people of Virginia was never more thoroughly aroused than at this moment. The whole population are inflamed to the highest pitch of patriotic resistance, and now is the accepted hour for the Government to take such measures as will bring every man at once into the field, so that by the last of this month at farthest, the whole State may be an embattled host of armed men.Did ever people have such a cause to fight for 7. The Old Dominion, the proudest and the noblest Commonwealth that has ever existed on this continent, is threatened with annihilation. The resplendent volume of her history is to be closed and sealed, and her very name taken away from among the nations. The land of Washington, of Jefferson, of Marshall, of Patrick Henry, and a multitude more of the brightest lights that ever flashed in the firmament of human patriotism and genius, is to become a province of Abraham Lincoln. The State that led the way in the civilization of this continent, and in the battles of America's Independence, and that gave to the country its Saviour, is to be chained to the car of a vulgar despotism, and to be merged in another province, which has itself been subjugated from freedom to slavery. For this is literally the programme that the organs of the Government have indicated. Western Virginia alone is to bear the name of Virginia, and Eastern Virginia is to become a portion of the conquered State of Maryland. The old Mother is to have her head bowed low in the dust, because she would not kiss the tyrant's sceptic, and to become the scoff and by-word of Yankees and Hessians, who are forging the chains for her noble limbs, and preparing the lashes for her back, and the halters for the necks of her children.
Nor is this all. They are making ready to take away from her, not only her national existence, but all that makes existence endurable in any state of society. Our lands, our homes, and all we have and hold dear, are to be swept from us in a flood of confiscation. Those of us who are not sent to the gallows for defending our rights, are to become beggars in the midst of fertile farms that were once their own. They are to wander impoverished amid plenty, strangers in their native land, degraded amid the shrines of their ancestral honors. The blood of their bravest and best is to redden the soil, the shrieks of violated virtue to fill the sir, the very ministers of the Most High God to be torn from the altar, if they do not pray that God will strengthen the hands and aid the wickedness of a tyrant.--This is to be our dismal future as shadowed forth by both the actions and the words of the enemy, a fate more dismal than that of Jerusalem of old, which, amidst all its tribulations, had the divine promise of future restoration, and if it could not take down its harp from the willows and sing the Lord's song in a strange land, could at least meditate in its heart on the promise of His future coming, when He should break the jawbones of the heathen, and make His city and His temple once more the joy of the whole earth.
Yes, this is to be our fate, if we submit to give up all, and look upon our beautiful land, its mighty mountains and lovely valleys, in the hands of Yankee invaders — this is to be our fate, if we submit. But will we submit? From the blue heaven above us look down the man whose mighty souls achieved the glories and the independence of our race — look down to see if the rich price their wisdom and their valor won, and their patriotism and their blood cemented, is to be wrested from their posterity. Descendants of the nobles who wrested Magna Charta from a tyrant, and of nobler men than they — of the immortal champions of American liberty in '76--some to the Rescue of Virginia, and if she must perish let it be in a blaze of martyrdom whose flames shall light up the whole heavens, and carry to every land the illumination of her virtues and the sparks which shall set every human heart on fire with admiration of her name and devotion to the cause of liberty!
