[12]. In a work published in London by De Foe, in 1722, one of his characters speaks of the Virginia immigration as being composed either of “first, such as were brought over by masters of ships, to be sold as servants; or, second, such as are transported, after having been found guilty of crimes punishable with death.”
[13]. These passages are from a speech of President Davis at Jackson, Miss., December, 1862. When he gets in a passion, Mr. Davis repudiates the truth even as he would State debts. Notorious facts of history are set aside in his blind wrath. The colonists of New England, he well knows, were the friends and compatriots of Cromwell and his Parliament; and the few prisoners of war Cromwell sent over from Ireland and England as slaves did not constitute an appreciable part of the then resident population of the North. It is a well-known fact, which no genealogist will dispute, that not Virginia, nor any other American State, can show such a purely English ancestry as Massachusetts. The writer of a paper in the New York Continental Monthly for July, 1863, under the title of “The Cavalier Theory Refuted,” proves this statistically. “Let it be avowed,” he says, “that Puritanic New England could always display a greater array of gentlemen by birth than Virginia, or even the entire South. This is said deliberately, because we know whereof we speak.” He gives figures and names. And yet even so judicious a writer as John Stuart Mill has fallen into the error of supposing that the South had the advantage of the North in this respect. The anxious and persistent clamor of the Secessionists on this point, in the hope to enlist the sympathy of the British aristocracy, has not been wholly without effect. We would only remark, in conclusion, that Davis and his brethren, in their over-anxiety to prove that their ancestors were gentlemen, and ours clodhoppers, show the genuine spirit of the upstart and the parvenu. The true gentleman is content to have his gentility appear in his acts.
Mr. Clay of the Confederate Congress has introduced a resolution proposing that the coat of arms of the Slave Confederacy shall be the figure of a cavalier! Would not a beggar on horseback, riding in a certain familiar direction, be more appropriate?
[14]. It afterwards appeared that the Vicksburg “gentlemen,” impatient at their want of success, selected a man who came nearest to the description of Gashface, shot him, and then marked his body in a way to satisfy the expectations of those who had formed an imaginative idea of the personal peculiarities that would identify the celebrated liberator, so long the terror of masters on the Mississippi.
[15]. Afterwards the notorious proslavery guerilla leader in Virginia.
[16]. The dishonesty of Mr. John Slidell’s attempt to expunge from Davis’s history the reproach of repudiation is thoroughly and irrefutably exposed by Mr. Robert J. Walker in the Continental Monthly, 1863.
[17]. This prediction was merely one among many hundred such which every reader of newspapers will remember.
[18]. We subjoin one of the various translations:—
“Yes, it comes at last!
And from a troubled dream awaking,