“Resolved, That the sooner the separation takes place the more peaceable it will be; but that peace or war is a mere secondary consideration in view of our present perils. Slavery must be conquered; peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.”
To keep before the people of the United States, North and South, the hostility of the then controling spirit of the North towards the South, the above resolutions cannot be repeated too often. Nor were they an isolated example of party fanaticism. The stock and staple of the entire republican press was slander of the Southern people; and like noxious weeds it well nigh rooted out all that was elevating to man, and ennobling to woman. The pulpit became a rostrum from which bitter invective of the South flowed in Niagaran torrents; and the beautiful fields of Poesy were made to yield an abundant crop of briar and bramble and deadly Upas.
The burden of every song, of every prayer, of every sermon, was the “poor down-trodden slave” of the South. What wonder that seed thus constantly and malignantly sown sprang up and bore a crop of discontent which nothing short of “separation” from the enemy could appease. We, too, felt that under the existing circumstances peace or war was a mere secondary consideration in view of our perils in the union, and took measures to withdraw from a sectional union of States that had ceased to respect State sovereignty outside of its own borders.
The insults and taunts and the encroachments of fifty years had welded the people of the South into a compact party organization, animated for all substantial purposes by one sentiment and one glorious principle of patriotism, and never was there a movement in the annals of nations that had a more unanimous support. And when the tocsin of war resounded from one end of the country to the other, and reverberated over hills and through valleys, the sons and sires in the beautiful Sunny South, from the high born and cultured gentleman in whose veins flowed the blue blood of the cavalier, to the humblest tiller of the soil and the shepherd on the mountain sides, buckled on the paraphernalia of warfare and reported for duty. To arms! To arms! was the patriotic appeal of a people who had no other redress; and I repeat with emphasis that never a people responded with more chivalrous alacrity or more earnestness of purpose.
I was too well versed in the politics of the country, too familiar with the underground workings of the enemy, to hesitate. I, too, enlisted in the struggle, and in the glorious efforts to establish “home rule and domestic felicity,” not literally in the ranks of the soldier, but in the great army of women who were willing to toil and to suffer, and to die, if need be, for the cause of the South.
I had but one brother, a darling young half brother, Thomas J. Stokes, who had gone to Texas to practice his chosen profession. With all the intensity of my ardent nature I loved this brother, and would have died that he might live; and yet with all the perils involved, it was with a thrill of pride that I read his long letter breathing, pulsing, with the patriotism illustrated by our ancestry in the revolutionary struggle for American Independence. And now this noble brother and myself, though widely separated, enlisted in aid of the same great cause; the perpetuity of constitutional rights. He to serve on the battle-field, and I to care for the sick and wounded soldiers, or to labor in any capacity that would give greatest encouragement to our cause.
Life in Dixie During the War.