Wood River Times

THE RIGHT SPIRIT.

What a Texas Editor Has to Say About the Southern People.

"One of the cardinal faults of the American character," writes the editor of the Texas Iconoclast, who appears to have fought on the losing side in the war, "is a propensity to brag. Brother Jonathan's egotism long since passed into a proverb. In no section of this land of the alleged free and the home of the ism does the blowhard blow longer and louder and with less excuse than in the South. We are the people--the nonpareil; there are none like unto us beneath the sun! From the empyrean we look down upon common humanity, talk turgid, and swell up with the vainglory of a young turkey-cock with his first tail feathers!

"Perhaps it were well for us to drop the King Cambyses vein long enough to inquire what we are chanticleering about. What have we ever done that entitles us to assume airs of superiority? Nothing in God's great world; absolutely nothing. We are so far in the rear of civilization that we foolishly imagine ourselves to be in the van, with the whole world behind us struggling desperately to catch up! We speak sneeringly of the 'Yankees,' and yet the same despised Yankees are our guardians and tutors, even our protectors. Without them we were but a lost calf running foolishly about in circles until some political prowler lassoed us and led us to the shambles.

"Take the South proper, south of the 35th parallel--Virginia and Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina are Southern only in name--and how will it compare with New England? Here we have a veritable Eden, broad and fertile savannas, a land of perennial summer, the richest in natural resources in the Western world. New England is a cold and sterile land, where nature is ever at fierce war with man. Yet New England was developed a century ago. Her rocky hill-sides were made to blossom like the Vale of Tempe; her mountains were ransacked for ore; her forests transformed into stately ships or still more imposing buildings; the hum of the factory rose in city and hamlet, and the rich commerce of a world rolled in mighty waves over her wharves.

Now we are stretching out our hands imploringly to that storm-cursed, frost-girt land, praying that she will send brain and brawn to develop our rich mines, utilize our vast forests, build our railways, teach our children the magic art of industry; that she will do for us what we have been too indolent or too inapt to do for ourselves. We look to the Yankees for everything; for our machinery, our very household utensils, our capital, our books, our higher education; for brains to plan and skill to direct our great enterprises.

"While New England has been making reapers and sewing-machines, spinning-jennies and telegraphs, we have been making foolish stump-speeches and moonlight whisky. While New England has been breeding statesmen, scientists and poets, we have been breeding 'yaller niggers' and Cheap John politicians! We cannot boast half a dozen men born south of the 35th parallel in the South proper whom historians a century hence will consider worthy of a dozen lines. We have not produced a dozen books worth burning; in the field of invention we have done little more than to invent the cotton-gin and the wooden nutmeg.

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than the red Indian who so long lurked in our forests.

"But if we can neither work nor think we are at least incomparable fighters! Behold the recent civil war and how we did amaze the world! Amaze it we certainly did, but not in the manner we would like our children to believe. Whenever the civil war is mentioned the South mounts to the top rail of the fence, flaps its wings, and crows lustily--for what reason it were difficult for an unprejudiced critic to discover. It is now more than a quarter of a century since Lee's surrender; high time surely that the foolish falsehood that for four years the South contended against fivefold odds was relegated to desuetude instead of being ostentatiously paraded by 'able editors' and aspiring Ciceros on all occasions.

"Such fables but make us the laughing stock of the world; cause our Northern brethren to feel like thrashing us again instead of helping to develop our country. It is a fact patent to all the world, a fact that no honest man possessing any knowledge of the subject will dispute, that the backbone of the Southern Confederacy was broken, that the 'cause' was hopelessly and irretrievably lost in 1863, when the Confederate armies aggregated between 6,000,000 and 7,000,000 fighting men--almost, if not altogether, equal in point of numbers to the Federal forces. It was in 1863 that Vicksburg fell, that Grant tore the Confederacy in twain, that Lee's magnificent army was rolled back a wreck from Gettysburg. With those reverses the Southern people became discouraged, and thereafter gave to the new Government but a half-hearted support. Naturally the Confederate armies rapidly dwindled, while the Federal Government continued to push men to the front to hold the conquered territory and overawe the people, as well as to speedily crush the decimated legions of Lee and Johnston and end the war. Practically it was man to man in 1863 when the Confederacy received its death blow. Furthermore, we were acting chiefly on the defensive. We were in our mountain passes, behind our own magnificent fortifications. It was the business of the Yankees to dislodge us. How in the devil's name they managed to accomplish it matters not; they did it. Really the wonder, if wonder there be, is not that we held out so long, but that those despised Yankees 'bested' us so quickly, and then magnanimously turned us loose to give to the world our own explanation of how it happened.

"These may be unsavory truths to some of the chanticleering swash-bucklers and fuming Falstaffs, but truths just the same, obvious to all the world. Southern chivalry rolled up against Northern valor and got the worst of it. That is the whole story. It was not that the former lacked courage. No braver men than those who followed the stars and bars ever won the mural crown. But they were opposed to men equally fearless, of superior physical strength, inured to toil and hardship, and who knew how to use tools, to bridge rivers, make roads over the mountains, and crumble bulwark and bastion into dust. It was a contest of a lower with a higher civilization, and the former had to go down. The haughty but indolent slaveholder and the 'possum-hunting poor white struggled desperately but vainly against men whose heads and hands were educated in the exacting school of Northern industry. The men who had outstripped us in the field of labor fairly outfought us on the field of war.

…It were well for us now to cease our foolish boasting, con well the stern lesson taught at the cannon's mouth. The first and greatest of these is that only by honest labor, by earnest endeavor, can a people become truly great. The war swept away the curse that was our weakness--negro slavery. It broke in upon our old exclusiveness, shattered the foolish caste that held us in iron thrall; made labor respectable and progress possible. It brought energetic Northern people among us to teach that the way to greatness lies through the workshop; to incite us to shake off our indolence and enter the race for preferment. Grant's red-throated batteries did more than break the shackles from the wrists of the blacks. They tore the cursed fetters of caste and custom from the minds of the whites--a nobler emancipation! They set the heart of Southern chivalry to beating with a truer, a stronger life. In the mad tempest of battle the new South was born. The crash of arms was the groans of maternity; the deluge of blood her baptismal rite. From the ashes of desolate homes and ruined cities she sprang phoenix-like, and is now mounting the empyrean with strong and steady wing. The emancipation proclamation was a bow of promise that never again while the world stands and the heavens endure will North and South meet in battle shock; that the greatness of the one shall become the proud heritage of the other; that the grandest section of the American Union shall yet, with God's blessing, produce the greatest people that ever adorned the earth.

"The war is long past; we fought and lost. Our triumphant foe extended to us a brother's hand, accorded us the honor due a brave and spirited people. That we should suffer reconstruction pains was to have been expected. That these were unnecessarily severe was due chiefly to the greed of a clique of politicians; partly also to the fact that the North misunderstood us and our black wards, even as we persist in misunderstanding the 'Yankee.' But no gibbet rose in that storm-swept waste; our very leaders now occupy positions of honor and trust under the flag they defied. Let us not requite the generosity of our erstwhile foes by a base attempt to tarnish their well-earned laurels. Rather let us praise and emulate them; strive with them in a nobler field than that of war. When the North and South blend in one homogeneous people, as blend they must; when the blood of the stern Puritan mingles with that of the dashing cavalier, then, indeed, will we be a nation and a people at which the world will stand agaze; for Northern vigor wedded to Southern blood will

"Strike within the pulses like a god's.
To push us forward thro' a life of shocks.
Dangers and deeds, until endurance grow
Sinewed with action, and the full grown will,
Circled thro' all experiences, pure law,
Commeasure perfect freedom."