"How many a youthful head we've seen put on its silver crown!
What sudden changes back again, to youth's empurpled brown!
But how to tell what's old or young—the tap-root from the sprigs,
Since Florida revealed her fount to Ponce de Leon Twiggs?"
[ 3] Creole means "native;" but its New Orleans application is only to persons of French or Spanish descent.
[ 4] He never weighed over ninety-six pounds, and, to see his attenuated figure bent over his desk, the shoulders contracted, and the shape of his slender limbs visible through his garments, a stranger would select him as the John Randolph of our time. He has the appearance of having undergone great bodily anguish.—Newspaper Biography of Alexander H. Stephens.
[ 5 ] By the last census report, the whole number of escaping fugitives in the United States, in the year 1860, was eight hundred and three, being a trifle over one-fiftieth of one per cent. upon the whole number of slaves. Of these, it is probable that the greater part fled to places of refuge in the South, the Dismal Swamp, everglades of Florida, southern mountain regions, and the northern States of Mexico.—Everett's New York Oration, July 4, 1861.
[ 6] Dixie's Land is a synonym for heaven. It appears that there was once a good planter named Dixie, who died at some period unknown, to the intense grief of his animated property. They found expression for their sorrow in song, and consoled themselves by clamoring in verse for their removal to the land to which Dixie had departed, and where probably the renewed spirit would be greatly surprised to find himself in their company. Whether they were ill treated after he died, and thus had reason to deplore his removal, or merely desired heaven in the abstract, nothing known enables me to assert. But Dixie's Land is now generally taken to be the Seceded States, where Mr. Dixie certainly is not at the present writing.—Russell's Diary in America.
[ 7] This gentleman went to Charleston openly for The Times, and constantly insisted that a candid and truthful correspondent of any northern paper could travel through the South without serious difficulty. He was daily declaring that the devil was not so black as he is painted, denying charges brought against Charlestonians by the northern press, and sometimes evidently straining a point in his own convictions to say a kind word for them. But, during the storming of Sumter, he was suddenly arrested, robbed, and imprisoned in a filthy cell for several days. He was at last permitted to go; but the mob had become excited against him, and with difficulty he escaped with his life. No other correspondent was subjected to such gross indignities. "Jasper" reached Washington, having obtained a good deal of new and valuable information about South Carolina character.
[ 8] Of course the folly was not all on one side. Few northerners, up to the attack on Sumter, thought the Rebels would do any thing but threaten. And long after this error was exploded, our ablest journals were fond of contrasting the resources of the two sections, and demonstrating therefrom, with mathematical precision, that the war could not last long; that the superiority of the North in men and money would make the subjugation of the South a short and easy task. But they did not commit the egregious blunder of imputing cowardice to any class of native-born Americans.
[ 9] Now (April, 1865), while we are witnessing some of the closing scenes of the war, subscriptions to the popular loan of the Government come pouring in from the West more largely, according to wealth and population, than from any other section.
[10] From the Spanish corral, a yard. Upon our frontier it is used, colloquially, as a verb, to signify surrounded, captured, completely in the power, or at the mercy, of another.
[ 11] Through severest trials, and cruel neglect from our Government, they never swerved a hair's-breadth. Before our troops opened East Tennessee, enough left their homes, coming stealthily through the mountains and enlisting in the Union army, to make sixteen regiments.