February 13, 1863, The Charleston Mercury
There is to be no peace (says JOHN MITCHEL, of the Richmond Enquirer) – there can be none – until LINCOLN’S term shall expire, unless those Northern States break up and collapse, before that time, in a bloody agony of revolution. This may come; but, if so, it will be by and through our victories on land and sea. Not the Democrats in their Congress, not Western politicians on the stump, but our soldiers on the field, our sailors on the quarterdeck, will make that gracious revolution to ripen and burst. By successful defence of Vicksburg and Charleston and Savannah, we shall cast new and bitter elements into their cauldron of anarchy. By ruining the armies of ROSECRANS and HOOKER, we shall break their banks and confound their politics. By sinking their war ships and burning their freighted merchantmen, we shall cause such a revolution in the entire Yankee system, making the whole heart faint and the whole head sick; shall so blister and dose the patient with misery, poverty, mutual rage and universal bankruptcy and disgrace, that he will cry out to be delivered from the active treatment of so fierce a physician.
This is what he wants, and this is all he wants, to cure him forever. Talk of the recuperative energies of nature – that is, the uprising of the Democratic party – restoring vigor to the Constitution! We tell you there would be no Democratic party at all, and no whispers about the Constitution, but for the wholesome lesson at Vicksburg and the bold phlebotomy of Fredericksburg. It is our Generals and soldiers who cause them to remember that they once had a Constitution, and gave them the heart to say so. The gracious black mud of Stafford Hills (we call it Black Jack), miring their troops to the armpits, and swallowing trains of cannon whole, gives rise in the Democratic mind to constitutional scruples – the Palmetto State and Chicora, off Charleston bar, as they wave their avenging flags, with three thundering cheers, over the sinking hulls of the Yankees, are, at the same moment, all unconsciously releasing a Philadelphia editor from his prison.
As to [illegible] or any other action or intention of foreign nations – needless to say all that depends upon us, too. Foreign nations have no opinion upon this war save what we make for them; and we make it not at Paris or at London, but on the Rappahannock or on the Mississippi. To develop their gushing sympathies and kindle their chivalrous friendship, they wait to see whether we shall want those articles, and whether we can every pay for them. So it is also with the ‘Great West.’ The Great West will love us and sympathize with us, and abuse and abandon New England for our sake, if we can but thoroughly scourge them out of Arkansas, and up the whole line of the Mississippi. If not, why the same magnanimous Great West will rob the plantations, confiscate the property, violate the women, and brand us all as base traitors before the world.
What we mean to say, then, is that we have no friends here below but our own army and navy, and that the sole policy and business of the country is to enable that army and that navy more and more diligently to chase, burn, sink, bombard, ride down and cut to pieces everything that flies the Yankee flag afloat or ashore, around all our borders. Would we encourage and take advantage of Kentucky’s revolt against LINCOLN’S Proclamation, let us reinforce JOHNSTON and enable him to destroy ROSECRANS. Would we avail ourselves of the nascent friendship of the chivalrous Northwest, let us leave off appeals and intrigue, and thrash the said Northwest in Arkansas and Mississippi.