“DEAR MADAM: Your welcome letter of June 18th, came to me here amid the sound of battle, and, as you say, little did I dream, when I knew you, playing as a school-girl on Sullivan’s Island beach, that I should control a vast army, pointing, like the swarm of Alaric, toward the plains of the South. Why, oh why is this? If I know my own heart it beats as warmly as ever toward those kind and generous families that greeted us with such warm hospitality in days long past but still present in memory, and to-day, were Frank and Mrs. Porcher, and Eliza Gilman, and Mary Lamb, and Margaret Blake, the Barksdales, the Quashis, the Pryors, indeed any and all of our cherished circle, their children, or even their children’s children, to come to me as of old, the stern feelings of duty and conviction would melt as snow before the genial sun, and I believe I would strip my own children that they might be sheltered; and yet they call me barbarian, vandal, and monster, and all the epithets that language can invent that are significant of malignity and hate. All I pretend to say, on earth as in Heaven, man must submit to some arbiter. He must not throw off his allegiance to his Government or his God without just reason and cause. The South has no cause; not even a pretext. Indeed, by her unjustifiable course she has thrown away the proud history of the past, and laid open her fair country to the tread of devastating war. She bantered and bullied us to the conflict. Had we declined battle, America would have sunk back, coward and craven, meriting the contempt of all mankind. As a nation, we were forced to accept battle, and that once begun, it has gone on till the war has assumed proportions at which even we in the hurly-burly sometimes stand aghast. I would not subjugate the South in the term so offensively assumed, but I would make every citizen of the land obey the common law, submit to the same that we do—no worse, no better—our equals and not our superiors. I know and you know that there were young men in our day, now no longer young, but who control their fellows, who assumed to the gentlemen of the South a superiority of courage and manhood, and boastingly defied us of northern birth to arms. God knows how reluctantly we accepted the issue, but once the issue joined, like the northern race in other ages, though slow to anger, once aroused are more terrible than the more inflammable of the South. Even yet my heart bleeds when I see the carnage of battle, the desolation of homes, the bitter anguish of families; but the very moment the men of the South say that instead of appealing to war they should have appealed to reason, to our Congress, to our courts, to religion, and to the experience of history, then will I say Peace—Peace; go back to your point of