Juniata sentinel. [volume] (Mifflintown, Pa.) 1846-1873, 1865-10-18
sJW THE REBELS WENT TO SCHOOL
- WHAT THEY LEARNED.

WHAT IH6I LEAhNEU.
The Washington correspondent of the
Philadelphia Press, in his latest letter has
the following amusing remarks:
No oiti,eu of the New England States
could have gone more pro6tably to school
than havs these same chivalrie sons of the
South during the rebellion. Their e1pe-
rience is about as follows:
"Yes, we saw the tiger and the ele-
phan., and the whole menageris, orches-
ira and all. Yes, We have been educated.
Considering that We started out on sort
of picnic in 1851, it is astonishing how
from trolic it ran into tight, from
fiht into var, and from q war into an
almighty defeat, leaving the whols Con-
federacy in heap, precisely as if we had
hitched all the seeding States into one
train Of cars, and then put all our best
men, our speakers our preachers too, at
the head for engineers, and SO r'gsed AID
fillsd, and full of glory and gas, had gone
L--s a. alnut two miles minute. Till We
got on the long bridge between the des-
potism Of our old Union and blessed In.
dependence of our new heaven Of mon
archy. when the bridge broke, and-here
". are at your service! But we went to
school for all that. Let US see what we
learned Well, We FIRST found uot that
the Northerners could fight; then the
darlies would fight for the Yanks; then
they would not work; then they would
tell our secrets; and, finally, tha: they
liked the strangers better than old nassa.
Our women had to cook, Hash, cut wood,
and make their own clothes. Having no
calico and little to wear save what the
blockade-runnera brought US, we had to
learn, By rude machinery, by hand, to
weave our own fabrics. In this way quite
large business was carried on in the
cotton States. When We stopped grow
ing cotton We greS sorghum, and for :vo
years fed thousand with the molasses
m.dr Of thut tropical plant. Our rebel.
lion made Us adopts in arms, in their use
and manufacture-also in all the military
arts-in the management Of ships-of.war
and in the handling of coastwise craft
Our marcher gave US new knowledge Of
our own section, thus making Us geo.
graphers. IL moral sense We found Sc
cession to be destructive dogma our
leaders false prophets and our hopes of
foreign aid fallacious. We soon discov-
cred that the morale Of the Federal army
stood it instead Of an additional element
that in fact it was REINFORCED oy the
schools, churches, newspapers, mighty
charities, and well-fed people behind it
We had no such rock to rest on. We had
almost no homes to 50 back to. Toward
the last We had no place to go to but the
army, and so We staid in it, and many of
US never left tho battlefield. Two hun
dred thousand are still there, sound asleep
in their graves! In fact, the war left us
almost without spot on which to rest our
living bodies. But the greatest lesson
was that no American ought ever to fight
the Union. And We advise you never to
60 to school for such an experience. We
give it to you second hand, but gratis
You might succeed in perpetual motion
you might try to bottle the surbeams you
get out of cucumbers; you might take 6
daguerreoty2e OF the sun in the light Of
the moon; 7ou might prove that a Cop.
perhead was genuine patriot-btt you
could never ges the upper hand of that
quiet old man kaown as Uncle Samuel
We tried it, and We are here !"