On March 6 Strong wrote that “all New York seemed in the streets, at the windows, or on the housetops” as the city held a seven-mile-long procession to celebrate recent Union victories. “All this extravagant, exuberant rejoicing frightens me,” he noted. “It seems a manifest omen of mishap.” Four days later Strong was encouraged by reports of desertions from Lee’s army and by the Confederate debate over arming slaves.
March 10. . . . Richmond newspapers are in a special spasm of fury beyond any fit they have yet suffered. We must not attach too much weight to what these sensitive, excitable, high-toned, chivalric creatures rave when in nervous exaltation, whether arising from patriotic or from alcoholic stimulus. But this particular paroxysm certainly resembles the death flurry of a whale. The editorial utterances are violent, desperate, incoherent, hurried, and objectless. They amount in substance to this, that there is somewhere a class of “whipped seceders” and “whipped croakers” who desire subjugation and have an appetite for infamy—that these caitiffs want Davis to abdicate, and their pressure is sufficient to make it worthwhile to expend much bad language on them—that they will not succeed in these base designs, because Southerners never, never, never will be slaves, and because “our women” ought to take up their broomsticks and drive these wretches into the James River, and so on. There are certainly signs in Secessia of incipient decomposition. The rebellion has, at the very least, another year’s fight in it, but it may die of inward disease within thirty days. I trust it will not die too soon and that it will be killed, not merely “kilt.” I long for peace, but only for a durable peace, of material that will wear. John Bright writes F. M. Edge that he hopes our war will not end till its work is done, and he sees the case aright.
The rebel hosts continue to be seriously drained by desertion. Not less than fifty deserters have taken refuge within Grant’s lines every day for many weeks past, and their average number is probably nearer one hundred than fifty. Companies come in, led by their company officers. All tell the same story of compulsory service, hardships, failure of pay and of clothing and of rations, and of general despondency. The Confederacy has “gone up,” they say. “We all know it, and we know it is useless to fight any longer.” Lee’s soldiers would throw away their arms and disband tomorrow if they dared, and so on. Such statements made by deserters are worth much “less than their face.” But when made by hundreds, and corroborated by the actual desertion of thousands, at imminent risk of life and with certain and conscious loss of honor, they are worth a great deal. It is likely, moreover, that for every rebel who flees within our lines, two flee the other way and take sanctuary in the hill country or the “piney woods,” supporting themselves by levying contributions on all and sundry as sovereign powers so far as their own personal sovereignty can be made practically available, and thus carrying out the doctrine of secession to its ultimate results. Many counties of Virginia, the Carolinas, and the Gulf States are said to swarm with these banditti, and they are admitted to be even more savage and reckless than the vandal hordes of the North.
The Rebel Congress seems to have reconsidered its refusal to arm the slaves and to have decided, reluctantly, and by a very close vote, that there is no help for it and that Cuffee must be conscripted and made to fight for his chivalric master. So much for the visions of glory the South saw in 1860. This sacrifice of the first principles of the Southern social system is a confession of utter exhaustion; a desperate remedy and a most dangerous experiment. And the experiment is tried at least a year too late. It will take six months to drill and equip any considerable corps d’Afrique, and Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, and Grant are likely, with God’s blessing, to give rebellion its death blow within that time.
But the measure has its immediate effects. It disgusts and alienates many slaveholders and many fanatical theorists about slavery, and it is received as an affront by the rebel rank and file—an affront that justifies desertion. They will feel it not only as an affront, but as a disheartening surrender of the principle for which they have fought. They learn that niggers are now to be armed and put into the field as the allies of Southern gentlemen; “that it will depend on the nigger’s pluck and muscle and endurance how far he is to share with white men the glory of upholding the Southern cause. It will depend on that and nothing else. Moreover, he is to be rewarded for good service by freedom.” But the first of all Southern axioms has been for thirty years past that freedom was a punishment to the slave, servitude his normal condition, and that he loved and looked up to and depended on his owner as a good dog does on his master, and that he despised and rejected emancipation just as a good dog would dislike being discharged from his duty of guardianship and kicked into the street to get his own living as best he could.