Belligerence

“ Without such particularity of procedure, an army going into an enemy's country would soon become a rabble or mob—war would soon become rapine—officers would soon lose all control of their men, and from thenceforth plundering, spoliation, and pillage would become the order of the day. ”

“ The people whom they affect to call contemptible124 rebels, but whose growing power has at last obtained the name of enemies; the people with whom they have engaged this country in war, and against whom they now command our implicit support in every measure of desperate hostility—this people, despised as rebels, or acknowledged as enemies, are abetted against you, supplied with every military store, their interests consulted, and their embassadors entertained, by your inveterate enemy! and our ministers dare not interpose with dignity or effect. Is this the honor of a great kingdom? ”

“ All would have been silenced, while crying that the country, right or wrong, must be carried through the war.
Here is a gross confusion of opposite duties in cases of defence and of offence. When a country is invaded, its soil pressed by hostile footsteps, its churches desecrated, its inhabitants despoiled of homes, its national life assailed, then the indignant spirit of a free people rises to repel the aggressor. Such an occasion challenges all the energies of self-defence. It has about it all that dismal glory [379] which can be earned in scenes of human strife. ”

“ One man—alone, dismounted, inadequately armed—in the vast heart of an unknown country, tracked down by fleet-footed pitiless destroyers, stung to a frenzy of massacre by a twofold incentive—blood feud for a comrade slain, and the fanatical dictates—or supposed dictates—of the most merciless religion in the world. ”

“ Today force is called violence, and is being brought to judgment, he said. War has been put on its trial. At the plea of the human race, civilization arraigns warfare, and draws up the great list of crimes laid at the charge of conquerors and generals. ”

“ Is it any wonder that soldiers flushed with victory, after one of the hardest campaigns ever endured by men, should indulge—some of them—in unwarranted atrocities after finding such evidence of barbarism, and while more than forty of their comrades were weltering in their own blood upon the field? ”

“ Beneath the shade of our own vines are we attacked; in our own houses, and on our own lands, is the violence committed against us. We view our enemies in the character of Highwaymen and Housebreakers, and having no defence for ourselves in the civil law, are obliged to punish them by the military one, and apply the sword, in the very case, where you have before now, applied the halter—Perhaps we feel for the ruined and insulted sufferers in all and every part of the continent, with a degree of tenderness which hath not yet made its way into some of your bosoms. ”

“ Yet guests but ill-entreated; for they lack their shields of war, No spear in the hand they carry and with no sax are girt. Lo, these are the dreaded foemen, these once so strong to hurt; The men that all folk fled from, the swift to drive the spoil, The men that fashioned nothing but the trap to make men toil. ”

“ It is as if they [85] could not, even for one evening, forget the struggle for existence, and as if they regarded a dinner or a dance as an engagement with the enemy; a brisk assault to carry by storm some place that has long stood a regular siege—a lively skirmish in which everything that comes to hand is a weapon for either attack or self-defence. ”

“ Shall the sight of armed men avail to prove violence, and shall their onset and attack not avail? Shall a man who departs quietly find it more easy to prove that violence has been offered to him, than a man who has fled from it? ”

“ Aroused in Thunder, awful they appear, With proud Deliverance stalking in their rear: While Tyrant Foes their pallid Fears betray, Shrink from their Arms, and give their Vengeance way; Sec, in the unequal War, OPPRESSORS fall, The Hate, Contempt, and endless Curse of all. ”

“ I cannot forbear to wish, that this commotion may end without bloodshed, and that the rebels may be subdued by terrour rather than by violence ; and therefore recommend such a force as may take away, not only the power, but the hope of resistance, and by conquering without a battle, save many from the sword. ”

“ You will feel it in that sad, haughty anger which will drive the blood to your brow when you hear insults to your country from the mouth of a stranger. You will feel it in more proud and vigorous measure on the day when the menace of a hostile race shall call forth a tempest of fire upon your country, and when you shall behold arms raging on every side, youths thronging in legions, fathers kissing their children and saying, “Courage!” ”

“ Better die as warriors bold, Than be hunted, tracked and sold; Living days in misery rife, For the coward’s bounty—life! Warriors, rally to the field; Teach the lordly foe to yield; Spurn his counsels—spurn his laws; Strike alone for freedom’s cause ”

“ No agitation for the development of national defences, no beating of drums to awaken the military spirit, no anti-foreign clamour or invasion panic, no parading of uniforms and futile clash of arms, are necessary to entice the groundling and the bumpkin into the service. ”

“ It is enough to say, that the daring of our men and their heroic deeds upon this field, wiped out forever, in Rebel blood, the disgrace and foul stain cast upon our arms in the momentous military blunders and defeats which have followed us since the beginning of this great American conflict. ”

“ In other countries, how often has a war far less bloody and protracted left in its wake evils far greater than the original one, in guerilla warfare, murders, ceaseless revolt, and smouldering hatred lasting for centuries on one side, and centuries of tyranny, oppression, executions, confiscations, on the other! ”

“ Jaded systems are regularly recuperated by massacre. Men arm themselves—men who roar about ‘rights,’ and even ministers of mercy—and go out on killing expeditions with as little compunction as savages put on war-paint. ”

“ Civilized belligerents do all in their power to help themselves or hurt the Enemy, except a few things regarded as barbarous or cruel. Among the exceptions are the massacre of vanquished foes and non-combatants, male and female. ”

“ We do hereby declare unto all that whosoever stretcheth forth their hands against us ... by shedding our blood actually, either by authoritative commanding, such as bloody counsellors ... especially that so-called justiciary, generals of forces, adjutants, captains, lieutenants, and all in civil and military power, who make it their work to embrue their hands in our blood, or by obeying such commands, such as bloody militia men, malicious troopers, soldiers, and dragoons; likewise such gentlemen and commons who, through wickedness and ill-will, ride and run with the foresaid persons ... ”

“ An idea seemed to be entertained that all that was necessary to constitute a war was organized hostility in the district of country in a state of rebellion — that conflicts on land and on sea — the taking of towns and capture of fleets — in fine, the magnitude and dimensions of the resistance against the Government — constituted war with all the belligerent rights belonging to civil war. ”

“ And now if all mobs are properly frenzies, and work frenetically with mad fits of hot and of cold, fierce rage alternating so incoherently with panic terror, consider what your military mob will be, with such a conflict of duties and penalties, whirled between remorse and fury, and, for the hot fit, loaded fire-arms in its hand! To the soldier himself, revolt is frightful, and oftenest perhaps pitiable; and yet so dangerous, it can only be hated, cannot be pitied. An anomalous class of mortals these poor Hired Killers! ”

“ Every one who had expressed a sentiment of loyalty; every one who had a friend who was an emigrant or a loyalist; every one who had uttered a word of censure in reference to the sanguinary atrocities of the Revolution; every one who inherited an illustrious name, or who had an unfriendly neighbor or an inimical servant, trembled at the swift approach of the impending doom.
Scenes of terror.
Bands of men, armed with pikes, brought into power from the dregs of society, insolent, merciless, and resistless, accompanied by martial music, traversed the streets in all directions. ”

“ Living in this condition of continual warfare—their hand against all men, and, with rare exceptions, all men against them, the gallows or the bullet their certain doom—it is not to be wondered at that crimes of violence shocked and aroused the community. ”

“ By hearth and wayside lurking, waits to throw,
Oppression taught his helpful arm to wield
The slayer's weapon: on the murderous field
The fiery bolt he challenged laid him low,
Seeking its noblest victim. Even so
The charter of a nation must be sealed! ”

“ From beneath their feet rose always the subterranean rumbles of revolt. Violent death ever stalked in their midst; bomb and knife and bullet were looked upon as so many fangs of the roaring abysmal beast they must dominate if humanity were to persist. ”

“ Advancing into a hostile country, among a people whom they knew to be reckless in courage and of a proud spirit, the generals and high officers were obsessed with the thought of peasant warfare, rifle-shots from windows, murders of soldiers billeted in farms, spies everywhere, and the peril of franc-tireurs, goading their troops on the march. ”

“ Wherefore the general is angered, his patience exhausted, his men surge like ants against the ramparts before the time is ripe, and one-third of them are killed to no purpose. Such are the misfortunes that sieges entail. ”

“ To overrun with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms—never, never, never! ”

“ It was a dangerous mood for one who had sworn allegiance to the King, and taken service under his standard: but I found myself beginning to wonder whether the people whom we were harrying so mercilessly and putting to death with as little compunction as though they had been reptiles instead of hard-working and thrifty folk--as their little farms and houses proved--were rebels in any real sense. ”

“ People in England who knew these things, not unnaturally asked themselves the question, Why, with our eyes open, should we forge against ourselves a weapon similar to that, whose sharp point has goaded our neighbours till they were driven to set alight the torch of revolution and to destroy the whole fabric of government? ”

“ Behold, then the policy, or rather the madness and folly of oppressive rulers: if they are successful in their injurious measures, they are exposing themselves and their subjects an helpless prey to the ravages of some ambitious neighbour: if they are not; they are raising up enemies against themselves at home, and, as it were, setting fire to their own habitations. ”

“ Our rebellion has lasted four years. Government has exchanged prisoners and acknowledged its belligerent rights. After that, gibbets are out of the question. A thousand men rule the rebellion,—are the rebellion. A thousand men. We cannot hang them all. We cannot hang men in regiments. ”

“ The soldiers felt distinctly that this was a double stain upon their uniform—the outrage upon the Representatives of the People—which was treason, and the slaughter of unarmed men, which was cowardice. Now treason and cowardice are two epaulets to which a general sometimes becomes reconciled, the soldier—never. ”

“ No imagination can conceive the uproar and din of such an assault upon a populous city—a horrid mingling of the vociferated commands of the officers, and the shouts of the advancing and victorious enemy, with the screams of terror from affrighted women and children, and the dreadful groans and imprecations from men dying maddened with unsatisfied revenge, and biting the dust in agony of despair. ”

“ Like the Paris mobs that followed shouting, in the wake of the tumbrels bound for the guillotine, these men came trooping back to the scene of execution, and as they came they bellowed hoarsely and they waved their arms.
Men react powerfully to environment; they put on rough ways with rough clothes. ”

“ But the civilians who are outside the combat, who do not fight, but talk, who write and embroil themselves in a factitious and lunatic agitation and are never exhausted; these are delivered over to the winds of feverish violence. ”

“ Tyranny, conquest, militarism, lawlessness, mobmindedness, riot, persecution, oppression, rebellion—these are the words that describe the long-continued panorama of unsuccessful efforts and experimental failures in government for approximately seven thousand years. ”

“ The people, in a state of wild anarchy, set law and order at defiance, and with the cry, 'Viva la Santa Fede!' wild hordes ran through the streets plundering and burning the houses of the nobles, who they thought had sold them to the enemy. ”

“ In their terror of thy coming vengeance they might oppose thy coming, and such is the temper of the people just now that all the strength of thy legions—half-spent in this last expedition—might be powerless against it; thy chosen soldiers even might turn against thee. ”

“ And now these parricidal hosts stand arrayed against that paternal Government to which they owe loyalty, defence, and affection. Never in history did rebellion assume such front. Call their number 400,000 or 200,000,—what you will,—they far surpass any armed forces ever before marshalled in rebellion; they are among the largest ever marshalled in war. ”