With the coming of winter and in the wake of months of battlefield losses and home front economic hardships, despair has descended upon the Confederate States of America. Is there any hope of winning the terrible war waged against the abolitionist North?
A brief commentary in the Georgia Baptist Christian Index , entitled “The Delusive Phantom of Hope,” laments the loss of hope among southerners.
“The Delusive Phantom of Hope”
Graphic words! And yet this is the shadow men of the South are hugging to their bosoms. They are hoping that the government, or that fortune, or that other men will accomplish that deliverance, which each should think no arm but his even can achieve. Each is shuttling his eyes to the fearful fate impending, and hopes that yet something will be done to stay the mighty tide of invasion, while he remains idle and indifferent! O Southerners, not thus are your liberties to be won! Not thus are you to achieve independence! Your hope lies in the strong right arm of each man who can wield a sword or shoulder a gun! And while so many are holding back, and so few are advancing to meet the foe, all hope for success is but an illusion. Would to God that the eyes of our people were opened, and that the fearful brink on which we stand were realized by all!
Meanwhile, a commentary in the Confederate Union newspaper of Milledgeville, Georgia charges that recent battlefield loses are due to soldier demoralization. During the Battle of Chattanooga, the author contends, soldiers
did not fight as they were wont to do, in the better days of the Confederacy. They were demoralized … by a weakened faith in their own people at home. Why should they suffer want, wounds and death, to protract the time for speculators and extortioners, who were smugly ensconced at home, to pile still higher their ill-gotten gains!
All this, and winter is just now beginning.
Sources: “The Delusive Phantom of Hope,” Christian Index, December 11, 1863; “Who is to Blame?”, Confederate Union, December 15, 1863 (link)
