A Charming prospect.
Among the letters picked up on the battle field of Shiloh, was one from an Illinois soldier by the name of Donnelly, addressed to his wife, his ‘"dear Sue,"’ as he affectionately calls her, in which he tells her that he has already picked out a fine house and farm and that, after the war is over, he expects he and his ‘"dear Sue,"’ will be supremely happy in their ‘"sweet Southern home."’ The women of that region, he says, can be employed to perform the domestic duties of Mrs. Donnelly's household, and the men to plough and plant corn, while ‘"you and I, dear Sue,"’ exclaims Mr. Donnelly, rapturously, ‘"will be as happy as kings."’ Ah, hopeful Donnelly! He has got his "sweet Southern home" a little sooner than he expected. The men who were to plough his land and plant his corn have performed their duty, we trust, to his entire satisfaction. They have ploughed up his little farm, and planted him in. Like thousands of other Yankees who came in quest of Southern farms, he has secured a small homestead, where no one will ever distress him for rent and taxes. His ‘"dear Sue"’ can have the consolation of reflecting that she is the widow of a Southern landed proprietor.It is not difficult to comprehend the feelings which prompt such ebullitions as those of the lamented Donnelly, in his last letter to the adorable Susan. It is a not uncommon boast among the Yankees that they not only intend to occupy the Southern farms, but that the Southern men shall do the work, and, while ‘"the Northern Marion presides in the mansion, the Southern lady shall bend over the washing tub."’ We care not to enumerate the difficulties which would embarrass the execution of this project. They would be undoubtedly of a some what serious character. The Yankee men and women who would endeavor to play master and mistress over a Southern white family would soon be gathered to their fathers. The hypocritical wretches who profess to be overwhelmed with grief at African slavery, and then propose to make white people their slaves, would soon be disposed of with steel and strychnine. But a menace of this kind, a threat to degrade the men and women of the South to such a condition, could only proceed from natures which are in themselves inherently servile and brutal. It develops in the most unmistakable manner the rankling envy and jealousy which have as much to do as any other cause with this atrocious war. We do not desire to involve in such a charge the whole Northern people. We are well aware that there still exists in that section some remnant of the social worth and excellence of former days. But the great mass of the population is simply the peasantry of the Old World transported to the shores of the new and fighting out that quarrel with their betters in this hemisphere which they had begun and carried on unsuccessfully in another. Like a bull. who has only to be shown a red rag to excite his combativeness, this Old World peasantry, no matter whether it has lived in America two centuries or two years, has only to be shown something that is conservative venerable, and dignified, to make war at once upon it. This was the prompting motive of the antired disturbances in New York, and it lies at the foundation of the whole fierce outcry against slavery very. It is not the sorrows of the slave, but the comfort and dignity of his master which stir to the very bottom their philanthropies bile. They can find no parallel in Southern society to their own condition except that of the negro and lachrymn. The master remind them of the fendal lords to whom their forefathers once paid homage, and whose dominion they were only able to escape by flying like fugitive slaves to America. The idea of gentlemen and ladies in a country where they had never expected to find either, fills them with horror and rage, and hence they determine to exterminate them, or what has always been a favorite scheme of revenge by inferiors towards their superiors, of degrading them, making them exchange places with their subordinates, and be transformed into ‘"servants of servants and slaves of the devil. "’
But the degradation of a people, fortunately, is an achievement beyond any power to effect but their own. A race of men may be beaten in battle; their arms may be taken away; their country subjugated; their political, civil and religious rights sacrificed, but they can never be degraded except by their own hands. Even the French Revolution — that leveling. Irresistible ternade — failed to humble the aristocracy which it hated with such malignant hate. The lineal descendants of houses noble before the Crusaders were chased to the scaffold by a howling mob, let loose upon them by the fierce tyrants of the Convention, but maintained to the last their equanimity and self-respect. The demoniacal exultation of the bloodhounds, in witnessing the uncertainty of human greatness, as exhibited in the death agonies of their superiors in station, sever disturbed the composure of the dying men Even those of them whose frivolity and licentiousness first evoked the storm of popular fury are said to have been the first to display the most chivalric courage in the terrible face of the guillotine. --Beautiful women, too, in all the pride of their loveliness, met the inhuman stare of the mob undismayed. ‘"Nor were these traits,"’ says one who describes these scenes, ‘"without their fruits. This noble spirit — this triumphant victory of the well born and the great — was a continual insult to the populace, who saw themselves defrauded of half their promised vengeance, and they learned that they might kill, but they could never humiliate them. In vain they dipped their hands in their red life blood, and holding up their dripping fingers asked, ‘"How did it differ from that of the Canaille!"’ Their hearts gave the lie to the taunt; for they witnessed instances of heroism, from gray hairs and tender womanhood, that would have shamed the proudest deeds of their new born chivalry."’
It will prove as impossible for Black Republicans in America, as for Red Republicans in Europe to degrade those whom nature and Providence have made their superiors. They may kill, but they cannot humiliate those Southern whom they so envy and hate. We are no admirers of European royalty or European aristocracy, but still less are we admirers of an ignorant mob. Of all tyrants save us from King Demos. And, whatever we may think of European social institutions, one thing is certain, aristocracy, in some form or other, always has existed, and always will exist, till the end of time. The assertion of the Declaration of American Independence, that ‘"all men are born free and equal,"’ is, in its Northern acceptation, the most stupendous and audacious fiction that was ever uttered by human lips. Men are neither born equal nor can they be made so by any process which philosophers or statesmen have yet discovered. Society must have leaders, men who guide it in intelligence, refinement, humanity, and civilization, or it will relapse into barbarism. It is not necessary that these leaders should be hereditary, but leaders there must be. The South has always recognized the fact; it is itself a nation of gentlemen, and so long as the Northern masses were guided politically by Southern statesmen, and socially by their Van Rensselaer, Clinton, and Livingston of their better days, the country prospered, and they were themselves a happy and orderly race. But the coachman is off the box, and the horses have taken the reins in their own keeping. Hatred and vengeance against their betters more intense than that of the French Revolution has seized upon the Yankee mob. With an ex-ball splitter and boatman at their head, they are threatening not only to overrun the fair territories of the South, but to convert the masters and the mistresses into their servants. Let them not lay the flattering unetion to their souls. They may destroy our country, they may exterminates our race, but they cannot humiliate us.
