“Just see how it is,” said a Mississippian one day; “we expected to whip you without the slightest trouble.  We threw the war into the Border States to keep it off our soil.  Mississippi was very earnest for the Rebellion when Kentucky was the battle-ground.  We no more expected you would come here, than that we should get to the moon.  It is the fortune of war that you have driven us back, but it is very severe upon the cotton States.”

I ventured to ask about the possibilities of repudiation of the Rebel debt, in case the Confederacy was fairly established.

“Of course we shall repudiate,” was the response.  “It would be far better for the Confederacy to do so than to attempt to pay the debt, or even its interest.  Suppose we have a debt of a thousand millions, at eight per cent.  This debt is due to our own people, and they have to pay the interest upon it.  In twelve years and a half they would have paid another thousand millions, and still be as deeply in debt as ever.  Now, if they repudiate the whole, the country will be a thousand millions richer at the end of twelve years and a half, than it otherwise would.”

In Mississippi, as well as in other Southern States, I frequently heard this argument.  It is not surprising that the confidence of the people in their currency was shaken at a very early period.

In its days of prosperity, Holly Springs boasted of two rival papers, each of them published weekly.  One of these died just as the war broke out.  The proprietor of the other, who was at the same time its editor, went, with his two sons, into the Rebel army, leaving the paper in charge of his wife.  The lady wielded the pen for nearly a year, but the scarcity of printing-paper compelled her to close her office, a few months before our arrival.

One afternoon, I accompanied Mr. Colburn, of The World, on a visit to the ex-editress.  The lady received our cards and greeted us very cordially.  She spoke, with evident pride, of her struggles to sustain her paper in war-time and under war prices, and hoped she could soon resume its publication.  She referred to the absence of her husband and sons in the Rebel service, and was gratified that they had always borne a good record.  She believed in the South and in the justness of its cause, but was prompt to declare that all the wrong was not on one side.  She neither gave the South extravagant praise, nor visited the North with denunciation.

She regretted the existence of the war, and charged its beginning upon the extremists of both sides.  Slavery was clearly its cause, and she should look for its complete destruction in the event of the restoration of national authority.  Through justice to itself, the North could demand nothing less, and the South must be willing to abide by the fortune of war.

This woman respected and admired the North, because it was a region where labor was not degrading.