Chapter 13:
- Rapid work -- seven prizes in two days. -- the Sumter makes her first port, and what occurred there.
We burned the Golden Rocket, as has been seen, on the 3d of July. The next day was the ‘glorious Fourth’— once glorious, indeed, as the day on which a people broke the chains of a government which had bound them against their will, and vindicated the principle of self-government as an inalienable right; but since desecrated by the same people, who have scorned, and spat upon the record made by their fathers, and repudiated, as a heresy fraught with the penalties of treason, the inalienable right for which their fathers struggled. The grand old day belonged, of right, to us of the South, for we still venerated it, as hallowed by our fathers, and were engaged in a second revolution, to uphold, and defend the doctrines which had been proclaimed in the first, but we failed to celebrate it on board the Sumter. We could not help associating it with the ‘old flag,’ which had now become a sham and a deceit; with the wholesale robberies which had been committed upon our property, and with the villification and abuse which had been heaped upon our persons by our late co-partners, for a generation and more. The Declaration of Independence had proved to be a specious mask, under which our loving brethren of the North had contrived to draw us into a co-partnership with them, that they might be the better enabled, in the end, to devour us. How could we respect it, in such a connection? Accordingly, the Captain of the Sumter was not invited to dine in the ward-room, on the time-honored day, nor was there any extra glass of grog served to the crew, as had been the custom in the old service. The weather still continued cloudy, with a few rain squalls
