Battalion
Banned
- Joined
- Dec 30, 2005
I have found nothing in the writings of Southerners to match what I read this week in a file of unpublished letters of Thaddeus Stevens. The words are echoed in plenty of published correspondence, of course. On Sept. 5, 1862, Stevens hoped the leadership in Washington had "a sufficient grasp of mind, and sufficient moral courage, to treat this as a radical revolution, and remodel our institutions .... It would involve the desolation of the South as well as emancipation; and a re-peopling of half the Continent. This ought to be done but it startles most men."
http://www.etymonline.com/cw/apologia.htm
~~~
There could never be a doubt with any sane man of the ability of the North to march over the South....If it were necessary, we could clear off the thousand millions of square miles so that not a city or cultivated field would remain; we could exterminate the nine millions of white people and re-settle--re-people the lands. There is no want of ability; and if such a work was demanded, there would be no want of a will.
Daily Herald (Newburyport, Mass.) 24 May 1861
(Supported Lincoln in 1860 election.)
~~~
No one possessed of a single sentiment of humanity, can read the malignant, bloodthirsty tirades which appear, from day to day, in the columns of some of the republican journals of this city, without being filled with horror and disgust....The wishes of the terrorist newspapers...express a vindictive malice, and revengeful cruelty, which exhaust the whole vocabulary of execration and menace. The daily calls for carnage, during the French revolution, by Marat...were not more savage and brutal in their spirit, than many articles that have recently appeared in the portion of the press we refer to.
The charitable aspirations of one of our abolitionist contemporaries, broke forth, days ago, in the words:--"When the rebellious traitors are overwhelmed in the field, and scattered like leaves before an angry wind, it must not be to return to peaceful and contented homes. They must find poverty at their firesides, and see privation in the anxious eyes of mothers, and the rags of children." Another paper calls, virtually for the punishment of all individuals at the South, by hanging, and the confiscation of everybody's property in the seceding States. "Richmond," says another, "must be laid in ashes," and as for Baltimore, "it must become a heap of cinders and ashes," and its inhabitants ought either to be slaughtered, or scattered to the winds, because of the mob ascendancy that recently prevailed there. Virginia and Maryland deserve to be "laid waste and made desolate," and "five hundred thousand troops" should "pour down from the North," "leaving a desert track behind them," to avenge the injured majesty of the Marats and Robespierres of the press. Submission on the part of the South, would not satisfy these bloody journalists of the republican party. Far from it. They cry out: "We mean not merely to conquer, but to subjugate."
New York Herald, 5 May 1861
http://www.etymonline.com/cw/apologia.htm
~~~
There could never be a doubt with any sane man of the ability of the North to march over the South....If it were necessary, we could clear off the thousand millions of square miles so that not a city or cultivated field would remain; we could exterminate the nine millions of white people and re-settle--re-people the lands. There is no want of ability; and if such a work was demanded, there would be no want of a will.
Daily Herald (Newburyport, Mass.) 24 May 1861
(Supported Lincoln in 1860 election.)
~~~
No one possessed of a single sentiment of humanity, can read the malignant, bloodthirsty tirades which appear, from day to day, in the columns of some of the republican journals of this city, without being filled with horror and disgust....The wishes of the terrorist newspapers...express a vindictive malice, and revengeful cruelty, which exhaust the whole vocabulary of execration and menace. The daily calls for carnage, during the French revolution, by Marat...were not more savage and brutal in their spirit, than many articles that have recently appeared in the portion of the press we refer to.
The charitable aspirations of one of our abolitionist contemporaries, broke forth, days ago, in the words:--"When the rebellious traitors are overwhelmed in the field, and scattered like leaves before an angry wind, it must not be to return to peaceful and contented homes. They must find poverty at their firesides, and see privation in the anxious eyes of mothers, and the rags of children." Another paper calls, virtually for the punishment of all individuals at the South, by hanging, and the confiscation of everybody's property in the seceding States. "Richmond," says another, "must be laid in ashes," and as for Baltimore, "it must become a heap of cinders and ashes," and its inhabitants ought either to be slaughtered, or scattered to the winds, because of the mob ascendancy that recently prevailed there. Virginia and Maryland deserve to be "laid waste and made desolate," and "five hundred thousand troops" should "pour down from the North," "leaving a desert track behind them," to avenge the injured majesty of the Marats and Robespierres of the press. Submission on the part of the South, would not satisfy these bloody journalists of the republican party. Far from it. They cry out: "We mean not merely to conquer, but to subjugate."
New York Herald, 5 May 1861
Bringing the