March 15, 1863---Two critiques

MARCH 15, 1863:      

The fire-eating Charleston Mercury, the chief exponent of the secession movement published this editorial and cartoon on this day 150 years ago:     

“The march of events during the last thirty days has done much to dispel the hopes of early peace, so generally entertained at the opening of the year. Since the bloody affair at Murfreesboro, the hostile forces in Tennessee, as well as those upon the Rappahannock and the Mississippi, appear to have been at a dead lock.

But though the military status is, in the main, unchanged, our enemies have not been idle. Never have their preparations to crush us been so active and energetic as during the present lull in the tempest of war. In the desperate resolve to rob us of our rights, they have madly thrown away their own.

With a bankrupt Treasury, with a Constitution trampled in the dust, with an army which has invariably been beaten in every pitched battle by troops inferior in number and equipments, and with a Government derided abroad and despised at home, the Yankees have deemed all that was left to them—the shadow of a free and constitutional Government—not worth preserving, and they have deliberately cast the lives and the liberties of their whole people in the scale against the hitherto invincible sword of the South.

The Northern States have welded together all that remains to them of strength and wealth to form an efficient weapon, in the hands of the vulgar despot at Washington, for our destruction. They have learned already to applaud the tyrannies of their master, and they salute him Dictator. There are some amongst us who hope that the spirit of republican government will yet assert itself at the North and that the people of the Northwest, at least, will ere long rise up to wrest their independence from the grasp of the new Autocrat.

But in vain do we look for any material indication of this counter revolution. The whole Yankee nation, from Cape Cod to the prairies of the far West, is this day substantially a unit in the determination to subjugate these Confederate States, if their subjugation is possible.

Meantime, the dreams of foreign intervention that have so long deluded our people are passing away. England was never so resolute in her policy of non-interference as now; France stirs not in our behalf without the co-operation of her jealous rival.

Thus, to our cost, we have learned the wholesome lesson that upon the blows yet to be struck by our own right arms rests the only hope of peace and independence. Henceforth let our Government bend all its energies to strengthen our armies in the field; and let our planters everywhere, as they desire the salvation of our cause, as they prize the success of our living defenders and the cherished memory of our glorious dead, see to it that the soil is tilled with the single view of feeding the armies, whose breasts are the barriers that protect that soil from the tide of desolation.