Writing under the pen name “Agate,” Reid was the Washington correspondent for the Cincinnati Gazette, a Republican newspaper aligned with the party’s Radical faction. Amid reports of widespread food shortages in the South, Reid considered the prospects for an early victory over the Confederacy.
1863, April 4
Now, with opening buds and stiffening roads, we are ready again, and such another spring and summer’s work will bear our banners to the Gulf.
But, like the victim of lunatic periods, we begin to return to the old delusion. In bulletins from the army headquarters, speculations of the army correspondents, reasonings of the editors, speeches of Generals, declarations at Union meetings we have the old madness revived: “The rebels are nearly exhausted. Millionaires are having dealt out to them the rations of the private soldier. Four months yet must pass before they can have a new crop—before that time they must succumb.”
Let us be warned in time by the experiences of eighteen months ago. The starvation theory proved folly then; it can be no less foolish now. The rebels have improved the intervening time by developing their agricultural resources. If, taken at every disadvantage, with fields sown in cotton instead of corn, and without accumulated supplies, they were able to go through the first year, each succeeding one must grow easier and easier. It is not impossible that the lack of labor has produced some inconvenience on Southern plantations and has somewhat decreased their production. Lax discipline among the slaves, consequent on the absence of their masters in the army, has doubtless tended to the same result. But on the other hand, a much greater breadth of cereals must have been sown, and much more general attention paid to the growing of live stock.
It cannot, therefore, but be as fatal a delusion now as it was in 1861, to base hopes upon the miseries produced by the blockade instead of the bayonet; or to depend upon subduing the rebels by starving them in their homes instead of routing them on the battlefield. There can be no more dangerous symptom than the recurring expressions of belief that if we “can now only hold our own a few months longer,” the rebellion must fall of its own weight. A People that has accomplished what the South has in the last two years, is not to be starved out—is not likely to succumb merely from being severely let alone—is not to be subdued, in short, save by equal pluck and superior endurance on the battlefield. Fighting, not starving, is to win the battle and end the war, if the victory and the end are to come at all.