A QUESTION OF ENDURANCE.
HARPER'S WEEKLY.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1863.


"THE war has now reached a point at which the continued resistance of the rebels is a mere question of endurance. They are suffering privations as severe as were ever borne by a belligerent people, Their currency is depreciated in the ratio of 12 to 1, and while the soldiers and civil employes of Government are paid in this depreciated currency on the scale which was fair when that currency was at or near par, provisions, clothing, and all the necessaries of life have adjusted themselves to the depreciation, so that it takes a soldier's wages for a month to support his family for a day. Of manufactured articles—boots, shoes, dry goods, hardware of all kinds, agricultural implements, etc. —the stock has fallen so low that fabulous prices are asked and obtained by its fortunate possessors. The capture of Morris Island has nearly closed the port of Charleston, and within a month the blockade of Wilmington—the only port at which any considerable blockade running is now done—will also be sealed. When this happens, no more foreign goods will enter the Confederacy till the peace. On the other hand, the loss of the Mississippi Valley has cut off the chief supply of beef, as the advance of Burnside has curtailed the supply of cereals, and the occupation of Chattanooga has deprived the rebel foundries of the coal which was essential to their existence. Famine is so imminent at Richmond that the rebel journals confess their inability to feed the Union prisoners, and it is seriously proposed that our Government should send them beef and bread from Washington. The Governor of Georgia admits that the stock of provisions in that once opulent State is insufficient for the wants of the population; and General Bragg proposes a general seizure of all the lands in the Confederacy with a view to their being exclusively used to raise food for the army.


This picture is not exaggerated. Yet it is hardly possible to conceive a more complete aggregate of wretchedness. Without food, without clothes, without coal, without hope of succor from abroad, and with the ever-present Federal anaconda tightening its grip round them week by week and month by month, sometimes moving fast, sometimes slowly, but never losing an inch of ground once occupied, can it be possible to conceive a people in more cruel straits than the rebels? Hew long can they endure such a complication of miseries? To which side shall they look for relief?


Not to Europe, for there the rebel rams have just been seized, and public opinion seems to be once more turning against them. Not to General Lee, for his second attempt to invade the North and menace Washington has proved only less disastrous than his first, and he is now barely able to cover Richmond by making more fertile acres in Virginia a barren desert. Not to Bragg, for he, notwithstanding the victory of Chickamauga, has been unable to wrest the key of the Southwest—Chattanooga—from the grasp of Grant, and he knows full well that the next move in the game will be a resistless "unconditional surrender" movement on Atlanta. Not to cavalry raids and guerrillas, for they—though annoying to us—do no good to the rebels, and, on the whole, are probably more troublesome to Southern planters than to Northern armies. Not to the Peace Democrats of the North, for


the fall elections have squelched them out pretty thoroughly. There is not a man, or a principle, or a point in the horizon to which these despairing rebels can look with the least hope of aid, comfort, or succor in their hour of misery.


They may burn a few trains, "gobble up" a few commissaries, surprise a few helpless detachments of Union troops—nay, even win a pitched battle or two here or there; but what then? In the truthful language of the Richmond Examiner, "Our [rebel] victories are somehow always fruitless and unproductive of results; they leave the great question of the war where they found it." How long will the rebels continue to struggle under such privations, against such odds, in so hopeless a cause?


The time has not come yet for an honest Northerner to express his opinion of the courage and fortitude which the rebels have displayed in this wretched contest. So long as the red hand of battle is uplifted they are our enemies, whom it is our duty to destroy—nothing more. When the time does come—as come it must—that failure and disappointment and privation and despair compel these poor people to abandon the struggle into which a blind and brutal oligarchy precipitated them, they may rely upon it that, in the words of that great and good man, Henry Ward Beecher, they will find the fatted calf ready for them throughout the North, and none more ready to relieve their wants than the very soldiers who are now crushing in the sides of the pasteboard Confederacy."

((This is an extract from a real 1863 Newspaper, the "Harper's Weekly". The full journal can be seen here:
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/civil-war/1863/winslow-homer-russian-ball.htm ))