Boston, April 27, 1862.
My Dear Motley:
I saw Lowell day before yesterday, and asked him if he had written as you
requested and as I begged him to do. He told me he had, and I congratulated you
on having a new correspondent to bring you into intelligent relations with
American matters, as seen through a keen pair of Boston eyes, and a new channel
through which your intense sympathies can be reached. I trust that between us
you can be kept pretty well supplied with that particular kind of knowledge
which all exiles want, and which the newspapers do not give—knowledge of
things, persons, affairs public and private, localized, individualized,
idiosyncratized, from those whose ways of looking at matters you know well, and
from all whose statements and guesses you know just what to discount to make
their “personal equation” square with your own. The general conviction now, as
shown in the talk one hears, in the tone of the papers, in the sales of
government stocks, is that of fast-growing confidence in the speedy
discomfiture of the rebels at all points. This very morning we have two rebel
stories that New Orleans has surrendered, its forts having been taken after
some thirty hours' attack. At the same time comes the story that the rebels are
falling back from Corinth.
Both seem altogether probable, but whether true or not the
feeling is very general now that we are going straight to our aims, not,
perhaps, without serious checks from time to time, but irresistibly and
rapidly. The great interior communications of the rebels are being broken up.
General Mitchell has broken the vertebral column of the Memphis and Charlestown
Railroad, and while McClellan, with 130,000 men or more, is creeping up to
Yorktown with his mounds and batteries, we see McDowell and Banks and Burnside
drawing in gradually and sweeping the rebels in one vast battue before them. On
the Mississippi, again, and its tributaries, our successes have made us
confident. We do not now ask whether, but when. That truly magnificent capture
of “No. 10” has given us all a feeling that we are moving to our ends as fate
moves, and that nothing will stop us. I think the cutting of that canal through
the swamps and forests ranks with the miracles of this war, with the Monitor
achievement, and with the Burnside exploit, which last was so heroically
carried out in the face of storms such as broke up the Spanish Armada. As for
the canal, no doubt we see things in exaggerated proportions on this side, but
to me the feat is like that of Cyrus, when he drew off the waters of the
Euphrates and marched his army through the bed of the river. So of the Monitor
— “Minotaur,” old
Mr. Quincy said to me, “it should have been” — its appearance in front of the
great megalosaurus or dinotherium, which came out in its scaly armor that no
one could pierce, breathing fire and smoke from its nostrils; is it not the age
of fables and of heroes and demigods over again?
And all this makes me think of our “boys,” as we used to
call our men, who are doing the real work of the time — your nephews, my son,
and our many friends. We have not heard so much of the cavalry, to which I
believe Lawrence is attached. But Burnside! how you must have followed him in
the midst of storm, of shipwreck, of trial by thirst, if not by famine, of
stormy landings on naked beaches, through Roanoke, through Newbern, until at
last we find him knocking at the back door that leads to Norfolk, and read this
very day that the city is trembling all over in fear of an attack from him,
while Fort Macon is making ready at the other end of his field of labor to
follow Pulaski. I have heard of Lewis Stackpole; at one time they said his knee
troubled him, that he was not able to march as he would like; but you must know
more about this than I do. Of course my eyes are on the field before Yorktown.
The last note from my boy was on a three-cornered scrap of paper, and began, “In
the woods, near the enemy.” It was cheery and manly.
Wendell came home in good health, but for his wound, which
was well in a few weeks; but the life he led here was a very hard one, — late
hours, excitement all the time, — and I really thought that he would be better
in camp than fretting at his absence from it and living in a round of incessant
over-stimulating society. I think he finds camp life agrees with him
particularly well. Did you happen to know anything of Captain Bartlett, of the
Twentieth? I suppose not. He was made a captain when a junior in our college; a
remarkable military taste, talent, and air. He lost his leg the other day, when
setting pickets before Yorktown. His chief regret was not being able to follow
the fortunes of the army any longer. I meant to have told you that my boy was
made a captain the other day. He does not care to take the place, being first
lieutenant under his most intimate friend Hallowell. The two want to go into
battle together, like Nisus and Euryalus. How our little unit out of the six or
seven hundred thousand grows in dimensions as we talk or write about it!
I wish I could give you an idea of the momentary phase of
the public mind as I see its manifestations here, which are probably not unlike
those elsewhere. I will tell you one thing which strikes me. People talk less
about what is going on, and more quietly. There is, as I said, a feeling that
the curtain is like to drop pretty soon on the first act of the drama, that the
military part of the play will be mainly over in a few months. Not
extermination, nor pacification, perhaps, but extinction of the hopes of the
rebels as to anything they can do with great armies in the field, and the
consequent essential break-up of the rebellion. But aprรจs? That, of course, is exercising
those who have done croaking about the war. I dined at last week, with the
Friday Club, and sat next –––. He was as lugubrious on what was to come after
the war as he was a year ago with respect to its immediate danger. Then he
could hardly bear to think that so accomplished an officer as General Lee was
to be opposed to our Northern leaders. Yet who troubles himself very
particularly about General Lee nowadays? He thinks there are to be such hatreds
between North and South as have not been since the times of the Greek Republic.
I suppose seventy years must be at the bottom of all this despondency. Not that
everybody does not see terrible difficulties; but let us fight this quarrel
fairly out, not patch it up, and it will go hard but we will find some way of
living together in a continent that has so much room as this. Of the precise
mode no man knoweth. . . .
Yours always,
O. W. H.
SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The
Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition,
Volume 2, p. 252-6
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