698 NortH Carorina Troops, 1861~’65.

withal so hopeful and confident of success that every son of
the old State felt a glow of pride in the reflection that these
grand utterances emanated from his own honored Chief Mag-
istrate.

“Sir, your exposition of the policy of the Federal Govern-
nient, your startling portraiture of the miseries that would be
endured by our unhappy country and the oppressions and in-
dignities that would be heaped upon her in case of submis-
sion, are so forcibly verified by the actions of the dominant
party in this country, that no reasoning man, enjoying, as
we do, an unlimited access to the leading journals of all polit-
ical parties here, can fail to realize the fact that even the most
appalling apprehensions of misery that have presented them-
selves to the minds of our most sagacious statesmen; even
the most hideous pictures of ruin that have been painted by
cur most eloquent countrymen—would fall far short of the
realities of the doom that would await us, ‘should we be so de-
mented as to lay down those arms and disband those armies
that have hitherto protected us from the fury of our enemies.
Those who delude themselves with the hope that there is still
a conservative party here sufficiently strong to restore them
again even to those precarious rights they enjoyed before the
disrrption of the Union, in case they return to that Union,
are indulging in a vain, a dangerous hope. We have it daily
manifested to us here that this party is utterly powerless to
protect even its own rights and liberties from the aggressions
of the administration; their danger is even more imminent
than our own, and their only hope of deliverance is in the
trinmph of our cause; they grow weaker with every defeat of
ours; they grow stronger with every success. At present they
are writhing in helpless wretchedness. The one great idea
of the people of this country is the subjugation of the South,
and so to appropriate its property to the liquidation of their
stupendous debt; and the dominant party is stronger or
weaker in proportion as the prospect of success is nearer or
more remote.

Let our people by any event, either through submission or
subjugation, be thrown on the mercy of this nation, and the
great plan will have been consummated, and this success will

PRISONERS AT JOHNSON IsLAND TO Gov. Vancr. 699

have insured the perpetuity of the Republican party. What
policy this party would pursue in the government of our
country is but too plainly manifested already; we gather it
daily from their congressional actions, from their party con-
ventions, from their leading journals. We hear it even from
their own lips, so to humiliate the South, so to crush her
spirit, so to cripple her resources, so to disarm her, so to
quench her hopes, that never again within her wide borders
shall even a whisper be heard in claim of freedom. They de-
clare that this war must be waged, not only until the rebel-
lion is crushed and the people subjugated, but that it must be
prosecuted until the possibility of its recurrence is forever
gone. To accomplish this design they declare that it is both
the right and the duty of Congress to confiscate the property
of our people, both real and personal, and to apportion it
among their soldiers and freedmen; (slaves whom they have
liberated) ; they propose to take the arms from the whites
and put them in the hands of the negroes; they propose to
extend the right of suffrage to the blacks, while among the
whites it is to be restricted to those who have been hostile to
their country throughout the war. In short, in their blind
vindictive rage they would make of our country one vast ruin,
so hideous that far down into the coming ages of mankind it
may stand as a ghastly warning to deter the rash patriot that
would claim freedom as his birthright or republican govern-
ment as a heritage. War may cover the land with sorrow
and mourning, but peace on the terms of submission would
cover it with the blackness of the shadow of death. War has
still the blessing of hope, but in such a peace there is only
the darkness of despair. In such a state of existence the or-
der of nature would be reversed. Life would be the king of
terrors and death its only solace. In final, eternal separation
lies our only hope, our only safety. Other terms were dis-
honorable, were dangerous. As soldiers of North Carolina,
as citizens of our young Confederacy, we can be content with
no peace that does not recognize us as a free and independent
people.

So long sir, as you tread the path of duty with the same
manly, unfaltering step as heretofore, so long will our hearts

Fa PRM MEM AMEN OAS