Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/434

 428 Southern Historical Society Papers.

Lee's army and pushed him back across his pontoons at Fredericks- burg:, and returned toward Chancellorsville and struck Hooker on his left flank, drove in his left wing upon his centre, and Lee would have pushed the whole disordered mass through the Wilderness and across the Rapidan. But if Hooker had been a Johnston or a Long- street on the morning of the 2d of May, with 90,000 men at Chancel- lorsville; and had Sedgwick been a Beauregard, a D. H. Hill, or a Hood, with 30,000 men on the hills back of Fredericksburg, a joint, active, closing-in movement would have been made upon Lee, and Lee would have been crushed upon the plank road, and that would have looked like " pulverizing the rebellion." But Sedgwick was not the real Beauregard, or Hill, or Hood; Hooker was not the real John- ston or Longstreet. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson knew their men. They knew the vain and boastful Hooker, and the court- eous and cautious, if not timid, Sedgwick, and upon that knowledge they ventured upon movements that puzzled military science, and by that partial prowess of the "Confederate soldier," that has placed the name of American above all the names of earth, they worked out a result at once glorious to the now prostrate and down-trodden South, and disgraceful to the numerical superiority of the domineer- ing North. But it is easier to criticise than to convince or perform. The Confederate army is now dispersed, the rebellion is pulverized, and the problem is solved. One Dixie cannot whip ten Yankees, and it is no longer " loyal," and, perhaps, no longer safe, for an unpar- doned " rebel and traitor" so called, to tell his thoughts, except in bated breath and whispers. The sun of the Southern Confederacy has gone down in blood forever. The bright orb of " The Union " — that child of destiny, conceived in treason to an established Government, and brought forth in rebellion against a lawful sovereign — is again arising in all its effulgent and aggressive grandeur and glory; and, having shaken from its name the incubus of constitutions and the heresy of rights " reserved to the States and to the people," now sheds its defianc but " rehabilitating " rays over all nations, tongues, and peojiles. " It is finished."

Henceforth let treason become odious; let rebellion stink in the nostrils of the people; let the divine right of " The Union" to rule be acknowledged; let humble, submissive, and silent adoration be given.