Standard [Clarksville], Tx, August 10, 1861
Our observation has taught us that, since hostilities began between the North and the South, the foreign population in our midst have done as much, in proportion to numbers and wealth, to sustain the cause of the South, as the native population have.
These people came from the land of oppression, tyranny, and wrong, and cast their fortunes among us. They are here from the sunny hills of France–from the “Green Isle of the Ocean”–from the land of Goethe and Schiller–from every country, race, and clime! They were invited here; our fathers told them that “here the tree of liberty shot its top to the sun–its boughs hung out over all the earth, and wearied nations might come and lay down beneath its shades, and rest!”–They have come; they have lived with us, and are of us. They have felt the heel of the oppressor, and they have tasted the sweets of liberty; and appreciating more keenly the blessings of the latter, because they have been galled by the yoke of the former, there are no sacrifices that may be demanded of them, that they are not ready to make in this great struggle for liberty and independence.
Wherever the flag of freedom has been unfurled upon this continent, there men, born on foreign soil, and reared to the admiration of institutions adverse to our own, have been found laying down their lives to sustain the cause it represented; — their bones now lay bleaching along side of the native-born citizens, on every battlefield from Bunker Hill to Manassas Junction. They have ever been true to us, in the darkest hour of our peril; and now, when adverse winds have driven us upon the rock of civil war–when the gates of the temple of Janus are thrown wide open, and events pregnant with meaning presage the coming of a most tearful future, they have made new earnest of their devotion, and have gone forward with a zeal and enthusiasm worthy to succeed those of their countrymen who fought for us in other days, upon other fields.
It is their duty of course, to do all and everything in their power to sustain the cause of their adopted country; because it has given them a home, free thought, free speech, and free action, which their native land denied them; and the alacrity with which they have responded to the call of the country, shows that they know their duty, and are willing to discharge it.
These people are exceedingly sensitive to imputations against their patriotism; and it is natural for them to be so; but they may rest assured that the great mass of the Southern people have the most implicit confidence in their loyalty to the South, and their attachment to her institutions. The exceptions to the rule are the radical men, who have more zeal than good sense, and who are doing the cause they advocate more harm than good.