March 24, 1863, The Charleston Mercury
The object of this war, on the part of the Confederate States, is the preservation of independence against unjust and vindictive assailants. It is the business of our Government and Generals to wage the war in that manner which will be most effective to the end desired. Throughout the past history of the struggle a practical arrogance and brutality has been exercised by the United States which required prompt and thorough curbing; and, under the garb of chivalry and humanity, on the part of the Confederate States, a short-sighted and unwholesome tenderness, meant for the benefit of mankind and the world at large, which has only encouraged the truculency of the enemy, entailed numberless woes upon our people, and given the appearance of timidity abroad. From all the signs around us, it is time to stop this mistrustful anxiety to toady foreign nations. Experience is teaching us that the exercise of a gingerly gentleness in war has only brought about the systematic and wholesale practice of the inhumanities first perpetrated. Vigor, promptitude and firmness might easily have checked them then. Now it will require more numerous and more signal examples to satisfy the United States of the virtue and power of retribution. We have been drifting steadily into a war without quarter, chiefly from our failure to impose, by examples, a definite, unmistakeable understanding as to the extent of barbarity to which the South would submit.
The recent bloody orders of ROSECRANS, and the diabolical plans set afoot by HUNTER, imperatively call for the infliction of summary, unsparing punishment upon all belonging to those commands. It is a matter of self- preservation, and the cause of humanity is involved. As men whose words proclaim them hostes humani generis, and whose deeds put them beyond the pale of law, it becomes the duty of all charged with the defence of the country to use every effort for checking their brutal career. Practical proofs of the position they occupy as criminals, can alone bring conviction, and restrain, by the penalties affixed to crime. Mercy to murderers and incendiaries is cruelty to those who may become their victims. Are we not satisfied of the folly of longer trifling with this question, and of the unavoidable necessity of meeting this issue boldly and manfully – soldiers, officers and government?