quently St. Johns River). Logically, they may have named one of the smaller
streams between San Juan and the Atlantic Rio Matanzas, as site of cattle
butchering. More likely, though, Matanzas got its name from much earlier
butchery—of French soldiers in at the hands of the founder of St. Au-
gustine, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. A French fort had been established
to the north, near the mouth of the St. Johns, to intercept Spanish ship-
ping bound from the Caribbean for home and also to menace if not cap-
ture St. Augustine. The little French force had terrible luck, however. A
storm wrecked their ships and enfeebled survivors, who happened to be
overwhelmingly Protestants and who offered their surrender to Menéndez.
Menéndez seems deliberately to have saved perhaps half a dozen Catholics
among them and then ordered the cold-blooded execution of the rest of the
lot.^13 Today the Matanzas River still flows past the oldest city in the United
States, hard by the restored Castillo de San Marcos, under the Bridge of
Lions, on southward past the restored Fort Matanzas, and through Matan-
zas Inlet. In St. Augustine, Avenida Menéndez, perhaps the most presti-
gious street in the historic district, on the Matanzas waterfront south of the
bridge, honors Don Pedro, the butcher. No one seems to mind; rather the
opposite.
tWhen William Elliott died, in , an enormous slaughter of south-
ern livestock—not to mention men—was well under way, as we have seen.
Another of the war’s lasting contributions to the South was the littering of
the countryside with still-working firearms. The surviving poor, especially
black southerners, likely gained easier access to weapons than ever before.
Inevitably, whites (always of the upper classes) began to describe an epi-
demic of pot-shooting. Pot-shooting (also pot-hunting) meant originally the
taking of wildlife for the pot, at home. Well before the Civil War, though, the
term came also, and more usually, to mean casual, purposeless shooting,
such as idle target practice. Precipitous declines of bird populations were
everywhere attributed to pot-shooters—boys of both colors and drunken
adult white men, especially. As early as , Edmund Ruffin had printed in
hisFarmers’ Registera long, anonymous article protesting the shooting and
poisoning of birds. The author hinted at the instrumental value of birds to
farmers—their consumption of insect pests—but concluded with a Chris-
tian doctrine of birds’ intrinsic worth, an extraordinary suggestion for the
time: ‘‘Every thing, however diminutive it may be, is formed for some end.’’
By theSouthern Planter, published in Richmond and representative of
white elite opinion, printed a long letter from ‘‘C,’’ self-described as a very