[Marshall] Texas Republican, December 22, 1860
The following letter from a lady, published in the Charleston Mercury, exhibits the determined feeling in South Carolina in favor of secession,
In your paper of yesterday you paid an eloquent, and I would fain believe, a deserved tribute to the patriotic devotion of women.
At this period, our sex at the South have grave duties to perform. We should animate our husbands and sons, strengthen them for the great conflict that is at hand, by every means in our power. Let us, women of Carolina, prove that the same noble spirit which incited the matrons and maidens of ’76, is alive and glowing in the spirits of their descendants. I am myself a widowed mother, but I have said to my three sons, that if any one of them should be craven enough to desert their State now, to temporize in her councils, or be backward if her honor should call them to the field—let him never look upon my face again! In the thrilling words of Volumnia to the wife of Coriolanus, “Here me profess sincerity. Had I a dozen sons—each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine, and my good Marcius—I had rather have eleven die nobly for his country, than one voluptuously out of action.”
A Carolina Mother.
I think I have done all that I can, in writing, to prove to you that the people of South Carolina are in earnest in this secession movement. Do not accuse me of being prolix, if I am compelled to reiterate this statement. For what with the flaming, exaggerated, and, in some cases, false accounts, published in the New York Herald on the one hand, and the deprecating sneers of the Opposition journals on the other, the people of the North have to-day about as accurate a notion of the state of mind of the inhabitants of interior Senegambia, as they have of the popular feeling in South Carolina and the adjacent States.