p. 131 | Southern Terrorism

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 24, 1861

Southern Terrorism.

DR. RUSSELL writes from New Orleans to the London Times :

As to any liberty of opinion or real freedom here, the boldest Southerner would not dare to say a shadow of either exists. It may be as bad in the North for all I know, but it must be remembered that in all my communications I speak of things as they appear to me to be in the place where I am at the time. The most cruel and atrocious acts are perpetrated by the rabble, who style themselves citizens. The national failing of curiosity and prying into other people’s affairs is now rampant, and assumes the name and airs of patriotic vigilance.

Every stranger is watched; every word is noted; espionage commands every key-hole and every letter box; love of country takes to eavesdropping, and freedom shaves men’s heads, and packs men up in boxes for the utterance of “abolition sentiments.” In this city, there is a terrible substratum of crime and vice, violence, misery, and murder, over which the wheels of the cotton king’s chariot rumble gratingly, and on which rest in dangerous security the feet of his throne.

The same correspondent says it is impossible to resist the conviction that the Southern Confederacy can only be conquered by means as irresistible as those by which Poland was subjugated. There is a determination evinced to resist the North as long as they can command a man or a dollar.