Hilton Head, S.C., July 16, 1862
McClellan’s reverses fell on us with sufficient weight here and 10,000 of our troops are being hurried to the north, destroying all chance of operations here and leaving only artillery to hold these points. For artillery and cavalry they say they do not need, so our poor regiment seems likely to go into garrison duty in the midst of active war, and that too when all the operations of the war in Virginia indicate the vital necessity of good cavalry and this regiment is here considered the best in our volunteer service. However personal considerations don’t amount to much and I want to discuss the news and its effects. How do you look at this terrible fighting in Virginia? Not, I mean, in a military or even immediate point of view, but in its remote bearing on our country’s future? For myself I must confess I begin to be frightened. The questions of the future seem to me too great for us to grapple with successfully and I have really begun to fear anarchy and disorganisation for years to come. If we succeed in our attempt at subjugation, I see only an immense territory and a savage and ignorant populace to be held down by force, the enigma of slavery to be settled by us somehow, right or wrong, and, most dangerous of all, a spirit of blind, revengeful fanaticism in the North, of which Sumner has come in my mind to be typical, which, utterly deficient in practical wisdom, will, if it can, force our country into any position — be it bankrupt, despotic, anarchical, or what not — in its blind efforts to destroy slavery and the South. These men, and they will always in troublous times obtain temporary supreme control, will bankrupt the nation, jeopard all liberty by immense standing armies, debauch the morality of the nation by war, and undermine all our republican foundations to effect the immediate destruction of the one institution of slavery. Do you not think that this is so? . . .
