Rebellion Record: a Diary of American Events: Poetry and Incidents., Volume 1.
Frank Moore, Ed.

We learn from a passenger from Philadelphia, that one day last week at Havre de Grace, three of the Northern volunteers refused to go any further, assigning as a reason that they did not volunteer to go into a war of invasion upon the South. An officer standing by instantly cut and hacked two of the men to pieces. A third, who took the same ground, gave vent to a similar expression for the Union, and cut his own throat from car to ear, rather than allow himself to be hacked to pieces.

Mob law (in New York city) is triumphant, and Southern men, or those known to sympathize with the South, are in constant danger of their lives. Vigilance committees visit the houses of the wealthy, and every man is heavily assessed for the support of the families of those who have volunteered their services to the Administration. Assessments of $5,000, $3,000, and $2,000, on large houses, are said to be very common. Those merchants who refuse, or make the slightest hesitation, are threatened with the cleaning out of their stores, and several already have been emptied by the mob. Three men were set upon in Florence Hotel, New York, and two killed, for expressing sympathy with the South. Merchants are packing off their clerks, and it is said that several large manufactories have been stopped, with a view of forcing the operatives into the ranks of the volunteer soldiery.

The Mobile Advertiser says:--

They may raise plenty of men — men who prefer enlisting to starvation, scurvy fellows from the back slums of cities, whom Falstaff would not have marched through Coventry with — but these recruits are not soldiers, least of all the soldiers to meet the hot-blooded, thoroughbred, impetuous men of the South. Trencher soldiers, who enlisted to war on their rations, not on men, they are — such as marched [71] through Baltimore, squalid, wretched, ragged and half-naked, as the newspapers of that city report them. Fellows who do not know the breech of a musket from its muzzle, and had rather filch a handkerchief than fight an enemy in manly combat. White-slaves, peddling wretches, small-change knaves and vagrants, the dregs and offscourings of the populace — these are the levied “forces” whom Lincoln suddenly arrays as candidates for the honor of being slaughtered by gentlemen — such as Mobile sent to battle yesterday. Let them come South, and we will put our negroes to the dirty work of killing them. But they will not come South. Not a wretch of them will live on this side of the border longer than it will take us to reach the ground and drive them over.--N. Y. Sun, May 8.