THE MASSACRE AT LAWRENCE.

Southland Times, Volume III, Issue 5, 18 November 1863, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE MASSACRE AT LAWRENCE.

(From the Post.) The following additional particulars of the inhuman conduct of the Confederate guerilla chief Quantrell, in his raid at the village of Lawrence (Missouri), are given hy the New York journals : — " The massacre of Cawnpore, which so startled the world some few years since, and introduced the terrible scenes of the late East India war, has just had its counterpart on our own soil. The massacre of Lawrence will henceforth take rank beside it in history; and when the name of Nana Sahib awakens feelings of hate and indignation, that of Quantrell, the Missouri border ruffian, will be accociated with it. We are as yet without the details of this last fearful episode. The telegraph conveys, however, a sufficient impression of its horror. The massacre took place at the noon of night, and the startled peaceful citizens were sent to their last account by the bullets of murderers in the glare of their burning houses, and in the agonized embraces *of their wives and children. 180 persons are said to have fallen victims. These comprise the principal citizens, with the major and his son at the head of the list. There does not appear to have been any . resistance whatever offered. It was asudden incursion o fiendish guerillas — a repetition of the scenes that used to be enacted on our borders by the savage Indians, when villages were given to the flames by some 'Monster Brant, with all his howling desolating band.' One incident is related .of twelve men having been driven into a building,, and there shot, and the house burned over them; Another is reported, where twenty-five negro Tecruits were shot dead. The bodies of the murdered people were thrown into wells and cisterns. There was but one hotel left standing, which was spared, by Quantrell because he had. been entertained" there some years ago without expense. Its proprietor, however, was shot. The principal part of the city has been reduced to ashes, the loss being set down roughly at 2,000,000dol."

"<T. C." AND THE SLAVES. - - (From the Spectator, Bth August.) ' - ".Plot, murder, and* conflagration," writes the .Richmond Enquirer, " have begun in New York. It is a world's wonder that this good ,work did not commence long ago ; and this excellent outbreak may be the, opening scene of the inevitable revolution which . . is to leave the Northern half of the old American Union a desert of blood-soaked ashes. . We bid it good speed !'' An outbreak of singular brutality, though suppressed in three -days, and carried on principally by thieves while it lasted has been enough to call forth from Southern chivelry and refinement those philanthropic hopes aftd aspirations; When her armies are being beaten back, and every mail tells of another fortress fallen, the South is ready to mistake a fire in her neighbor's chimney for universal conflagration. The Richmond ■ Enquirer exults over the $ew York riots in the strain of a Red- Indian who anticipates the pleasure of Wearing a fresh girdle of scalps. Qur^ own Times receives the news of "this good work " in a spirit of more temperate but scarcely less decided complacency, and draws from it, in rhore civilised terms, the same conclusions.; adding to these, however, another favorite conclusion, which is peculiar to advocates of Southern independence on this side of the Atlantic. The Richmond press does not venture to tell us that, because the acts of the Northern Government have excited a riot against that' class which those acts have been supposed to befriend, the North is, therefore a friend of slavery. It is waste, of time and patience to argue with men whose reasonings and assertions are daily refuted and disavowed by those most closely concerned in the issue- of the great conflict, and who are likely to be well informed regarding its motives. Why have the Government, and the free negroes, and the respectable citizens of New York been simultaneously attacked, if not from the sense that their interests are likely to become identified? The prejudice that everywhere exists between one inferior grade of society and another derives intensity in America from jealousies of race and competition. The mean whites in the South are warm supporters "of slavery, because they feel that slavery is the on y barrier between themselves and the negroes; themob Irish in the North dread the increase and elevation of a class likely to compete successfully with them in the lower forms of labor. The Times, no longer able to discredit the capture of Vicksburg, or to claim for Lee the honor of a strategic victory at Gettysburg, again seeks aid of- its oracle, and re-summons Mr Spence to make more false prophecies ; but the organs of Confederate opinion have publicly taken from that gentleman his hardly earned diploma as their representative. Mr Spence's opinions must henceforth be regarded as those of a private individual, about which the mass of Englishmen need trouble themselves very little. The cause of the South has found a more formidable, as well as a more consistent champion in the person of a writer whose greatness gives consequence even to his random words. " T.C.s " dealings with the •'Nigger Question" have not been fortunate. Some years have passed since he favored us with a pamphlet under that title, in which the most defective side of his philosophy came uppermost, asserting, under cover of questionable facts and theories, the inherent right of the white man to force from the black man an amount of work satisfactory to the white man's mind. He now professes to give in a nutshell the gist of the war which h3S for three years been rending the Western continent, and, according to his account, the gist of the whole matter is slavery. Peter of the North, who hires his servants by the week or the day, wishes forcibly to prevent Paul of the South from hiring them for life, which " T.C." evidently thinks the preferable method. It seems to us, too, as it seems to the leaders of the Southern Confederacy, that, making allowance for a verbal fallacy which lurks in the form of statement, this is the gist of the question, that whatever may be the various motives inspiring the Northern armies, the tendency of their victories is to incline the balance towards the one, the' tendency of their defeats to incline the balance towards the other, of two opposed civilisations. But we differ from "T. C. 1 ' and the South in preferring a society which is in -the main "for freedom of discussion" to a society which "represses freedom of discussion with the tar-brush and the pine faggot." We prefer the clamor of a badly organised democracy to the silence of a well organised despotism, arguments in bad grammar to the argu-* ment of bowie.knives and loaded canes, a " national palaver " to bonfires of human beings ; the things that the South hate to the things that the South love. When "T. C." published his nigger pamphlet, the question of slavery seemed far from us ; the West Indian struggle was fast becoming a tradition of an earlier- generation. Denunciations which had to travel 30b0 miles to find an object, were naturally regarded as outlets for a cheap and somewhat tiresome philanthropy ; everybody condemned that which nobody felt to be personally- profitable. We pride ourselves on being a superabundantly antislavery® nation ; but our convictions passed, like old coins, without scrutiny. The crisis of the last three years has made it necessary to rub the rust off their surfaces. Even in politics those who can give no reason for their faith cannot carry it safely through a storm Were it possible to accept " T. O.'&*' last " authentic utterance as altogether serious, we should be driven to conclude that there were some amongst us who had never very clearly ~ealised

the nature <Sf the institution" of which they are jbe modified apologists. It' may be questioned whether hiring forlife is in many cases to be recommended • whether the possibility of changing" their relations is not generally desirable as a check and incentive to master uhcLservant. But slavery is not hiring forjife, the first objection to it being that while the laborer is 'worthy* of his hire the slave has no hire. In all cases of free service there is a compact voluntarily entered into on both sides, work to be pc/formed 5 and wages to be received^ Now in slavery there is no voluntarily compact, nor any w/:ges to be received ; the slave is merely kept in existence to . perform the work, the amount and nature of which -are defined solely by the master's will and the slave's physical : powers. "Waiving for the present all ideas of morality irrespective of results, all theories of inalienable rights, we are content to rest pur condemnation of slavery on the 'ground that those two . methods have been tried, and the superiority of the former estabtished by history. Slavery, only tolerable as a transition from barbarism, played out its true part in that old age which was the youth of the world ; like other blots of civilisation it has been compelled either to pass away by degrees, of' to assume at every stage a more repulsive form. American slavery is worse than classic slavery in almost the same measure as the slavery of Greece and Rome was worse than the mild and guarded form of ssavery which existed among the Jews, and for, this among other reasons, that an evil which is out of date is doubly evil. The excrse of ancient is no excuse for modern times, when other forms of labor more noble and more lastingly productive have been discovered, and Christianity has taught that every man has been horn to know and to think, as weil as to toil, that being as well as doing is a part of his. destiny, and that no race has been brought upon the earth solely to minister to the luxury or to increase the wealth of another race. These are the fundamental facts which the Southern planters and " T.C.," in his sullen moods, seem to ignore, and which convert their speculations into anachronisms as glaring as the institution which they practically or theoretically uphold. In an age of the world which impl ; citly believed in slavery, Aristotle had the honor of being the Hrst to rest its defence on what seemed to him philosophic grounds ; let us hope that no Englishman will be its last defedenr in an age which believes in freedom.