Belmont chronicle. [volume] (St. Clairsville, Ohio) 1855-1973, 1861-08-08
Mercy to the Merciless.

The New York Evening Post sketches,
with master hand, the contrast between
the humane course Of our Government and
the inhuman policy of that of the rebels:
We restrain our soldiery from treading the
soil Of State that wears the mask of peace
and protests her loyalty, until she casts aside
her pretense and reveals her hills covered
and her forests and defles lined with
batteries. We spare the lives of traitors,
relying on their honor and their oaths, and
soon after find the subjects Of our mercy in
the ranks of our foes. We have respected
in all cases the usual signals of truce; but
they confound the hospitalities of war by
carrying our banner as a decoy, and having
won, by so base and cowardly an act, an ad-
vantage of position, they pour their mur-
derous fire on our soldiers about to embrace
enemies water, and with reviving strength
they plunge the bayonet to the heart of their
benefactors. We give free access to our
military posts and our prisoners of war, even
to Congressional traitors, and perpetual
truce to unarmed rebels, but Northern men
are imprisoned or shot, all over the South
We CALAMITY permit the wives of rebels in
arms to boast their family disloyalty in the
circles of our Capital, and indirectly live from
the public treasury, and at the same time
complacently hear of Nothern women, So
journing in the South, stripped to the waist
and whipped with the knout, for no crime
but love of the Government of their fathers
We withhold, nay suppress the stampedes
and Instructions of a servile race, while
they force their slaves to throw up the breast
works behind which they may in compara-
tive safety deal death to the defenders of the
Constitution. We decline the services of men
whose color, as well as whose occupation
might be Objectionable to our fastidious foe
men, and send our white citizens alone to do
the parallel entrenching and to fall under the
fire of negro battalions. We discourse feel
ingly of our recent fraternal relations, and
hope that the rebels will lay down their arms
and return to obedience to the Constitution
and the laws of peace they point us to their
newly-formed alliances with the pirates of
the seas and the Indian savages of our from
tiers. The world will judge which side of
this national struggle glows with that glory
Of ''chivalry" that accounts it honor to give
the odds to your enemy in deadly contest.
We do not wonder that the Post should,
in view of these facts, doubt the policy of
further showing mercy to the merciless. 1T
warns the Rebels to beware and says:
A people who, in defense of their govern
ment, are assailed by all the Internal enginery
of both civilized and savage warfare; who
meet a foe that like the stealthy Indian fights
by ambuscades, rewards mercy with treach-
cry, and makes his name terrible by reason
of his atrocities after the battle, cannot re-
strain their wilder impulses forever. They
will be at length goaded into revenge, and
the contest will then be turned from war
to butchery. Worse than that, the various
considerations which have hitherto withheld
the North from warning upon the domestic
system of the South will lose their force, and
a servile iusurrection add its horrors to civil
war. Freemen will not long consent to see
their brothers fall before batteries constructed
by the labors of slaves Ifnegroes are to be
used against us, it will not be long before
they are used against the enemy. When
northern homes are made desolate by weap
ons placed in the hands of the African race,
it cannot be expected that Southern homes
will be sheltered from the same hostility.