"For the sake of honor and manhood, we trust no young unmarried man will suffer himself to be drafted. He would become a by-word, a scoff, a burning shame to his sex and his State. If young men in pantaloons will sit behind desks, counters, and molasses-barrels, let the girls present them with the garment proper to their peaceable spirits. He that would go to the field, but cannot, should be aided to do so; he that can go, but will not, should be made to do so."
The Avalanche was a great advocate of what is termed the "aggressive policy," declaring that:
"The victorious armies of the South should be precipitated upon the North. IIerHer chief cities should be seized or reduced to ashes; her armies scattered, her States subjugated, and her people compelled to defray the expenses of a war which they have wickedly commenced and obstinately continued. * * * Fearless and invincible, a race of warriors rivaling any that ever followed the standard of an Alexander, a Cæsar, or a Napoleon, the southerners have the power and the will to carry this war into the enemy's country. Let, then, the lightnings of a nation's wrath scathe our foul oppressors! Let the thunder-bolts of war be hurled back upon our dastardly invaders, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, until the recognition of southern independence shall be extorted from the reluctant North, and terms of peace be dictated by a victorious southern army at New York or Chicago."
General Jeff. Thompson, a literary Missouri bushwhacker, was termed the "Swamp Fox" and the "Marion of the Southern Revolution." I found one of his effusions, entitled "Home Again," in that once decorous journal, The New Orleans Picayune. Its transition from the pathetic to the profane is a curious anticlimax.
"My dear wife waits my coming,
My children lisp my name,
And kind friends bid me welcome
To my own home again.
My father's grave lies on the hill,
My boys sleep in the vale;
I love each rock and murmuring rill,
Each mountain, hill, and dale.
I'll suffer hardships, toil, and pain,
For the good time sure to come;
I'll battle long that I may gain
My freedom and my home.
I will return, though foes may stand
Disputing every rod;
My own dear home, my native land,
I'll win you yet, by ---!"
Inmates of the Union Hospitals.
Our hospitals at Mound City, Illinois, contained fourteen hundred inmates. A walk along the double rows of cots in the long wards revealed the sadder phase of war. Here was a typhoid-fever patient, motionless and unconscious, the light forever gone out from his glazed eyes; here a lad, pale and attenuated, who, with a shattered leg, had lain upon this weary couch for four months. There was a Tennessean, who, abandoning his family, came stealthily hundreds of miles to enlist under the Stars and Stripes, with perfect faith in their triumph, and had lost a leg at Donelson; an Illinoisan, from the same battle, with a ghastly aperture in the face, still blackened with powder from his enemy's rifle; a young officer in neat dressing-gown, furnished by the United States Sanitary Commission, sitting up reading a newspaper, but with the sleeve of his left arm limp and empty; marines terribly scalded by the bursting boiler of the Essex at Fort Henry, some of whose whole bodies were one continuous scar. Sick, wounded, and convalescent were alike cheerful; and twenty-five Sisters of Mercy, worthy of their name, moved noiselessly among them, ministering to their wants.