Joliet Signal, April 23, 1861

Civil war has now been fairly commenced and the country has entered the maelstrom of unutterable woes into which the malignant fanaticism and vindictism of Northern demagogues and Southern traitors has for years been drifting us. Let the Greeleys, and Giddings[es], and Sumners, and Lovejoys, and Yanceys, and Toombses, take their rest. Their work is accomplished. Political parsons may now sing their Te Deums and give praise and thanks; for the object of their preaching is attained.—Americans are arrayed against Americans—the United States are at war with themselves—and the blood of Americans has already been spilled in the internecine strife.

All that will come of it, it is impossible to tell, as it is shocking to imagine. But it takes no prophet to forsee that let the Administration be ever so successful, the people of the North and the South cannot gain either honor, profit, or advantage of any kind. On the contrary, it is evident that the prosecution of civil war will be the ruin of the present generation.

Americans, unspeakable horrors stare us in the face—the mere apprehension of which has already, in accordance with the well known laws of political economy, paralyzed trade, put a stop to manufactures, deprived thousands of employment, and consigned them to suffering and want.

But the depreciation of stocks, the breaking of banks, and prostration of business which has been already experienced, are only a shadow as compared with what we shall see when hostilities will have progressed a little further. Add to which the oppressive taxation which we shall all have to submit to in order to maintain large standing armies, the rivers of blood which will be spilled, the sacking of cities, towns and villages, the destruction of property, the scenes of robbery, murder and licentious rapine ever inseparable from war, and we may be able to form a faint idea of what is before us in case the Administration persist in coercing and carrying a war into the territories of the seceded States.—And worse than all it is quite likely that the strife will enter into every town and village—nay, every family in the North especially. Then let us consider that after five or six years of fighting, after millions of lives will have been sacrificed—after the country will have been reduced to bankruptcy and commercial ruin, and the property and happiness of every family in the land will have been blasted forever, the quarrel will be no nearer to a settlement than it is at present.

We have really fallen upon evil times when the administration of the country has fallen into such hands as it is at present—an administration who will not look beyond the interests of the fanatical party which placed it in power. It however still rests with the people, who after all are the source of all power, to prevent, in a great measure, the terrible scourge which Lincoln and his cabinet and Jeff Davis and his cabinet would seem determined to bring upon the country.

We believe that the people of the United States will yet make known that they have no wish to involve themselves and the country in a fanatical, devastating civil war to please the malignant fanaticism of the Greeleys, Chases, Lovejoys, Beechers, Yanceys, Toombses, and all that tribe.