Shreport La. Jany 5^th 1861

 

My dear Nole

                        I wish you had a boy—a great big boy—a boy that would wigh 11 1/2 lbs & I wish you could have received such a son on Christmass day as a christmass gift. And as you did not get such a gift I wish you could see mine.

 

You all can form no idea how proud Jane is & Mr & Mrs Harper realy make themselves perfect guys about him. Mr. Harpers horses have et up all the corn I had as he cant stay away from his grandson & he says it would be poor economy to bring corn down to Shreveport when he will have some 500 Bushels or more to haul back. This is good economy for him but I cant see how I save by the arrangement. They are all foolish about my boy even our friends take on as though it were strange we should have a boy at our house.

 

Jane & William Harper are doing well, very well You all must come now & see the boy this spring.

 

            Nole about the mode of secession we differ some. I take it you and I are of one mind as to the thing itself. we both want the present or late Confederacy disrupted. We are unwilling for the old unjust & unequal Union to continue. But how best shall the Southern states accomplish this end. / Co-opperation & Seperate state action.

 

Now aside from the abuse of that word Co-opperation, being in many instances a cloak for submission, I object to honest Co-opperation on the ground that it is impracticable. Do you seriously think you could have convoked a convention of 15? 11? 8? Southern states & got them to have agreed to go out of the Union by the time Lincoln will be inaugerated—do you think they could have been brought to the point ever to have done so, had public sentiment been cool & placid enough to have deliberately gone to work they would not be ripe for the step we are now taking. It would have ended as our Southern [?] have hitherto ended in bluster & contemptable gasconade. Nole, no people ever yet resolved themselves into a revolution, & cecession is nothing else. There is no doubt now of a southern Confederacy is there? Dont you believe that the Seperate action of South Carolina & the other cotton states caused it. do you believe it would have been if outraged public sentiment had not precipitated revolution. I believe further than that. I believe a southern convention, if you could have ever got one together would have defeated the very purpose contemplated. Timid & interested policy would have decided the border states to remain & patch up a peace, this influence / would strengthen the submission party with us to such a degree that we might loose several cotton states. Now we have co-operation following as the necissary consequence of state action—a common danger & a common interest

 

            From every indication the border states are slowly & reluctantly making up their minds to secede & join us, I believe. I rather think now it would be better, best, for the 8 cotton, homogenius plantation states to form a union among themselves, obliterate state soverignty from among them & form a cosolidated separate State Soverignty & State rights in the old Confederacy of unfriendly & hostile interests of lawless majorities was the aegis of protection to the small Southern states But such a confederacy is too much a rope of sand & contains in itself the seeds of destruction to too great a degree to insure a safe govermment.

 

            I have not enquired whether Kernan & my Clinton friends are with us or not. My feelings are so warm politicaly that the knowledge that a friend of mine was derelict now to his duty, would affect my personal feelings towards him. The reason I have not asked I see Benny is a Union man & Kernan was a Douglassite & from this & that I have been apprehensive. /

 

In your sense I have no doubt I too am a Co-operational—Were it possible to obtain perfect unanimity among all the Southern states—& concert of action by the 4^th March, no southern man but would be rejoiced. But Nole, you know from actual observation that they the border states are all more or less abolitionised, that slavery is scarcely remunerative to them, & that white labor could be quite as well & more profitably used with them than slave. They are not with us heart & soul. their very existence is not wraped up in the institution & if republicanism did gradualy effect negroe emancipation, they would not be injured. on the contrary—rather benefitted—for by the time the south had become asphyxiated or sufficated, the border states woud have sold out to us. No sir the only way we could safely trust those people was to have draged them out as we did or as we will.

 

            We all & especialy our son send greetings to you all & especialy to dear old grandmother God bless her—                                          Yours very truly

                                                                                                Winans

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