The Punishment of the South.
By J. Clarke
NEVER did an army enter the field more boastingly than did the army of the confederate States in 1861, and '62; and never was an army more subdued and humbled, than the Southern army was in the final disasters at the fall of Charleston and Richmond. Hoping for an empire, Jefferson Davis inherits a prisoner's cell, and his people who looked forward to the supremacy of the slaveholding aristocracy, now are doomed to behold their former slaves become freedmen; and the profitable human chattels are now transformed into men, and the once rich slave-trader, has become in many instances a pauper; and worst of all, it is their own madness that has done it all. Northern diplomacy labored hard to strengthen the falling fortunes of the South, but hot Southern blood would rule or ruin; and ruin came—that is ruin to the Southern tyrants. Soldiers of the Southern army, after leaving about half a million of their comrades to slumber in their dreamless beds, upon many a battle-field, have gone home ragged, and lean, and hungry, without pay, without money; gone home to share in the poverty their rashness has brought upon their country. With the keen and bitter reflections of men who have baffled themselves they mutter their demoniac rage in curses too fearful to repeat, as they realize the fearful retribution of justice upon traitors, whose hands red with blood, and faces dark with crime, witness against them. This is not the end; for the test oath is a bar against them in congress; and the continuation of martial law in the South, is a sure indication that our government intends to hold the authority still among those faithless States, who would prefer the annihilation of the freedmen to his enlargement. But the act of congress abolishing the "peculiar institution" of slavery, which should take effect Dec.6218, 1865, was the final stunning blow to slavery. Alas who can tell the agony of the statesmen of the chivalric and proud Southern dynasty, as on Christmas the freedmen celebrated the jubilee of freedom. To say that the freedmen can, in all cases, avail himself of the blessings of liberty; to say that he is in all cases fit to govern himself, is more than we can affirm. It is still in the power of the citizen to make the freedman's life a life of misery. But one thing is certain; the proud oppressor has been terribly rebuked. The slave power has been shaken and subdued; and the Southern demagogue who once boasted that he would yet call the roll of his slaves upon Bunker Hill, has ere this, not only ceased his wicked boasting, but has failed to retain his slaves even at home. No more will the philanthropist who hates slavery be stigmatized as fanatical. Northern men with southern sympathies, will no more destroy the printing presses of antislavery men. To God be all the glory; for the North has really done this from necessity, contrary to its own will by the hand of God.