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Here in Louisiana--and I am told that it is the same in the other states--everyone is
rushing to the defense. Everyone old enough to bear arms, from the age of fourteen to
seventy-five, is enlisting in the various companies. The young men are at the disposition
of the President of the Confederate States, to be sent wherever the service of the state
requires. The old men remain in the cities, to defend their hearths against any
unforeseen
attack.
The young men of the better families, accustomed to a soft and idle existence, are
enlisting as privates and, with knapsacks on their backs, are leaving with their company
to defend Pensacola, to attack Fort Pickens, or to fight in Virginia. All conversation is
about battles, armament, and attack. The women themselves, who without hesitation have
given their sons and their brothers to the common cause, work all day sewing sandbags and
making cannon-cartridges. Miss Eustace herself made 140 hoods to protect the soldiers
against mosquitoes. One company which had just been formed had no time to get its uniforms
made; it had received orders to proceed immediately to Pensacola. The governor's wife and
twenty other ladies bought cloth, took their sewing machines, embarked with the troops,
and when the company arrived at Mobile, it was fitted out. The first ladies of the
city--and there are some very pretty ones--have organized to care for the wounded.
In short, there is a strong will here to resist a foreign invasion to the last breath.
And, as I say, it is not here only. In Texas, for example, they seized all the forts and
several ships of the United States, and they sent here fifty or sixty men who had been
captured. These were treated perfectly and sent back to the North.
With the border states, the seceding states would have a population of from ten to
twelve million inhabitants; this is almost half of the population of the United states.
[Actually it was about one-third.]
Leaving aside the discussion of the federal law which permits or refuses the right of
secession, a discussion which each side, with a little quibbling, can turn to its own
profit, it seems to me that when America stretched forth its hand to all the peoples who
wanted to revolt against their sovereigns, when it upheld with its promises and its
writings the rather contested rights of Hungary and of Italy, when its legists and its
orators proved that in a case of oppression revolution and rebellion were not a right but
a duty, when it declared a hundred times that the states were sovereign and that no state
had the right to encroach on the interests of another, how can the North stop thirteen
states from seceding when it is in their interest? And even if they didn't have this legal
right, there is the natural law which Congress has proclaimed a hundred times. If twelve
million want to secede, you won't stop them from it. So the was which the North is going
to wage against the South is an impious, barbarous, fratricidal war. In order to save a
few pennies for those arrogant manufacturers, members of one and the same family are going
to find themselves opposed to each other, old friends will cut each other's throats, and
rivers of blood will be shed. The North and the South are going to hurl themselves upon
each other like two locomotives driven at full steam and meeting on the same track. There
will be no gratification except the brutal passion of vengeance, no result except death
and destruction. When the two sides have exhausted all their resources, when they have
seen the flower of their youth perish, when they have squandered millions in that
bottomless abyss, the Civil War, they will find themselves right back where they started
and, furthermore, with a gulf between them.
The war will have to end. They will have to make a treaty; they will have to make
mutual concessions, for regardless of who conquers, there will be no conquered, with each
side fighting up to the very last moment for the rights it claims to have.
Again, all that the South is asking is that it be left alone and permitted to govern
itself as it sees fit. It will not attack except in its own defense; it is therefore
senseless to believe that the South can be subdued. Besides, the North's blindness has
reached such a point that it wants to fight the South regardless, and hopes to conquer it
by blockading its ports. But it is not the South alone that it will harm; it is all
Europe, which needs its cotton and its other products.
It is therefore for the sake of its own interests, as well as for those of humanity and
civilization, that Europe ought to intervene in one manner or another. It should exert all
its efforts to stop this desperate and useless war. The sooner the great European states
recognize the Southern Confederacy, which can invoke in its favor the theory of faits
accomplis, the sooner they will have fulfilled a mission of peace and humanity.
Furthermore, it is in their interest, for the independence of the South brings with it
free trade and an immense market for all our products as well as England's. Besides, the
longer the war lasts, the more embittered the hatreds will become and the more difficult
it will be to reconcile these inimical brothers.
I therefore entreat you to use all your influence to get the Southern Confederacy
recognized as soon as possible. I speak in this way with the greatest impartiality, for I
do not permit myself to be influences by any other consideration than that of humanity and
that of good sense; and if my former ideas have been modified a little, it is because
circumstances have changed. Events have moved forward, and personally, and by my own
efforts, I have been able to convince myself of everything that I propose.
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