Since copying this paragraph, it was recalled to us—within a few hours—by meeting some half-dozen of the 'scum of sewers' in question, in the persons of half-a-dozen young gentlemen, privates in a Massachusetts regiment, several of them college graduates—all of them sons of wealthy citizens and gentlemen. It would be interesting to ascertain, taking man for man, what proportion of the Southern and Northern armies are respectively able to read, or are otherwise personally familiar with the decencies and proprieties of civilized life. From this assumption of superiority Mr. Delony argues victory, asks, 'What about the peace?' and inquires if the Federal Government will offer to negotiate for it?
'We can propose no terms, but we must demand them. We desire nothing that is not right and just, and we will submit to nothing that is wrong. But no peace will be acceptable to the people that permits the Lincoln Government to hold its Abolition orgies and fulminate its vile edicts upon slave territory. Much valuable property of our citizens has been destroyed, or stolen and carried off by the invaders; this should be accounted for, and paid. The Yankees were shrewd enough to cheat us out of the navy, but we must have half of the war-vessels and naval armament in possession of the North at the commencement of this war. We should enter into no commercial alliances or complications with them, but assume the entire control of our commercial policy and regulations with them, to be modified at our own discretion and pleasure. They have closed against us all navigation and trade on the Mississippi, Missouri, and other rivers; it is our right and duty hereafter so to regulate the navigation of these streams as may best conform to our own interests. It can not be expected that we should permit the free navigation of the Lower Mississippi to the West after they have closed it against us above, without the most stringent regulations. There is no palliation in the pretense that the blockade above was a war measure; they can not so claim it unless we had been acknowledged as belligerents, and hence they have forfeited all right to free navigation as a peace measure. If, then, permission be given to the Free States of the West to navigate the Lower Mississippi, it should be under such restrictions as to afford a commensurate revenue to the confederacy, and the strictest rules regulating the ingress and egress of passengers, officers, and hands. The West is learning us how to do without her, and we thank her for it; we shall have but little need of her produce, as we shall soon have a plentiful supply among our own people. An absolute separation from all the North, with the sole and independent control of all regulations with its people, are our best and safest terms of peace.'
What is further hoped for is shown in remarks on the
EXTENT OF THE CONFEDERACY.
'We have conquered an outlet to the Pacific which must be maintained, though we can desire no dominion on the Pacific coast, but such as may be sufficient to secure the terminus of our great Pacific railroad through Texas and Arizona. Toward the north and east, the Maryland and Pennsylvania line, including Delaware, is our true landmark. Kansas, on the other side, must be conquered and confiscated to pay for the negroes stolen from us, abolitionism expelled from its borders, and transformed into a Slave State of the confederacy. Perhaps, after we have done with Lincoln, this arrangement may be very acceptable to a majority in Kansas, without force. We will have no desire to disturb Mexico so long as she conducts herself peaceably toward us, and, as a neighbor, maintains good faith in her dealings with us. Central America must remain as a future consideration; and, instead of the acquisition of Cuba, she has become our friendly ally, identified with us in interests and institutions, and, so long as she continues to hold slaves, connected with us by the closest ties.'
But the strong point of the article consists in a fierce onslaught on foreigners, all of whom, save those now resident in the South, are to be excluded from citizenship and office. 'With the exception of these, and after that time, no more votes should be allowed, and no' more offices be held, except by native-born citizens of the confederacy.'
'The naturalization law of the old Government has proved of little benefit to the Southern States. Whilst our Southern adopted citizens have proven themselves reliable, faithful, and true to our institutions of the South, those of the North, who outnumber them twenty to one, have universally arrayed themselves foremost and in front of Lincoln's hordes in the work of rapine, murder, and destruction against the South. Hereafter then, we can make no distinction between the Yankee and the foreigner, and both must necessarily be debarred of the privilege of citizenship in this confederacy.'
Delony, it seems, has 'viewed this question in all its bearings,' 'foremost and in front' of course included, and deems its adoption eminently essential to the future stability and welfare of the confederacy. The abolition of all impost duties and a system of direct taxation, are of course warmly advocated—meaning thereby the ruin of Northern manufactures by smuggling European goods over our border. In short, he sets forth plainly what is as yet far from being felt or generally understood, that the independence of the Southern confederacy must inevitably bring with it the total ruin of the North, and the entire exclusion from its citizenship and offices of all persons other than native-born Southerners.
'Article V.' is one of those intensely snobbish, sickening, self-conscious essays on 'Gentility,' which none but a Southerner is capable of writing. The innate vulgarity of its author, 'J. T. Wiswall, of Alabama,' is shown in such expressions as 'a pretty Romeo of seventeen, that looks as charming as sweet sixteen, gallused up in tight unmentionables,' and in artless confessions that he—J. T. Wiswall—belongs to a class above the snob, but still to one 'whose conversation stalks as on stilts,' and which is foppish, effeminate, and ostentatious. The conclusion is, of course, the worship of 'aristocracy,' a worship of which, as J.T. Wiswall infers from his own shallow reading and flimsy experience, exists 'in every heart.' The wants of the rich, their 'toys and gauds,' 'were made to relieve the sufferings of the poor,' and the 'ceaseless abuse of aristocracy is therefore absurd.' Without the great truths, based on these relations of rich and poor, J. T. W., the apostle of 'Gentility,' thinks that 'society is a murderous anarchy; without these, revolution follows revolution, and barbarism closes the hideous drama of national existence. On these alone hang all the law and prophets.'
The remaining articles of 'De Bow's Review, Industrial Resources, etc.,' are devoted to Free Trade, the Progress of the War, and the Coal-Fields of Arkansas, none of them, with the exception of the latter, presenting aught like an approach to a useful truth. The magazine is, however, as a whole both curious and characteristic. It shows, as in a mirror, the enormous ambition, the uneasy vanity, the varnished vulgarity of the Southerner, his claims to scrupulous honor, outflanked and contradicted at every turn by an innate tendency to exaggerate and misrepresent, and his imperfect knowledge employed as a basis for the most weighty conclusions. And it is such writers and thinkers who accurately set forth the ideas and principles on which the great experiment of the Southern aristocratic confederacy is to be based—in case of its success. A tremendous Ism, fringed with bayonets! There is strength in bayonets, but what stability is there in the Ism which supports them?