Boston, December 10,1861.
My Dear Me. Senior, — I have yours
of the 20th ulto. I shall read with much interest your article upon the nature
of our government, and am glad you came to the same conclusion which everybody
here long since arrived at except Calhoun and his gang of conspirators.
I don't blame Lord Russell for being puzzled at any question
which you say has two sides to it; but I do blame him for jumping at his
conclusions in such hot haste that he could not await the arrival of our new
minister, whose explanation might have given him some light.
You don't blame the doctor (Medico) when, called to a
serious case, he happens to take the dark view of it, and sentences the patient
to “dissolution;” but you do think him a blunderer if he hastens to tell the
victim that he has only to make his arrangements for his funeral!
Louis Napoleon, by quietly holding back his opinions and
then uttering them covered up with sugared words, puts himself, with the masses
of our people, where England was a few months since, our natural ally! Of
course it is an enormous humbug, and thinking men are not gulled by it, but
none the less [the situation] operates to inflame the old animosities that had
grown out of two wars and that had been just forgotten.
Another thing must not be forgotten. The French press has
not the chance, even when it has the will, to do the mischief that yours and
ours has. We hardly read anything from the French papers; they still less read
American papers, and this makes the grand difference between our situation as
relating to the two countries.
You read our New York “Herald” edited by a renegade
Scotchman . . . and you take it for the representative of American journalism!
The “Herald” is really the organ of the seceders, it was so openly until after
Sumter surrendered; and only came over nominally to the Northern side under the
terrors of mob law. It has since served its masters still better by sowing the
seeds of dissension between us and England.
We, with perhaps equal blindness, permit the “Times” and
half a dozen other papers to stand for “England.” I look for a grand paper duello
upon the Trent question, and shall be relieved if it goes no further. Should
the questions assume a warlike aspect, we shall only be driven the sooner to
our last desperate resort, emancipation. We are now only divided into two
parties at the North, viz.: those who would use the negro when we can see no
other way of conquering; and secondly, those who would use the negro at once,
wherever he can be used to strengthen us or weaken the enemy! The logic of
events has been from day to day settling this question, and if our talking men
in Congress can only be patient or self-denying in the outpouring of patriotic
words, we shall go on fast enough. . . .
You cannot believe we shall subjugate ten millions of
people. Nor I; but classify these ten millions and all is changed. At least two
are avowed loyalists in the border States; four more are blacks ready to help
us when we will let them; three more are poor whites whose interests are
clearly with us and against their would-be masters. How long will it be before the
avowals of their masters, aided by the suffering of the war, will open their
eyes?
This leaves one million, of all ages and sexes, who, through
owning slaves and connection with slaveholders, may think they have a class
interest in the success of the rebellion. This class we can crush out— or what
will be left of them after the war debt of the rebels reaches its proper value
— whenever we can divide the four million of poor whites, by an operation upon
their eyes!
But if I underrate the difficulty, the necessity for doing
it now is all the greater! If hard now, how much harder will it be after we
shall have, as you desire, permitted them to separate. Now they have no
manufactures, no foreign alliances, no warlike stores except what they stole
from us, and these rapidly diminishing. They have missed their first spring in
which lies the strength of a conspiracy; while our cold Anglo-Saxon blood is
just getting roused from the lethargy of a long peace and of overmuch
prosperity. We are just ready to begin to fight. We all feel that what is now a
war between the people and a small class would, after a separation, become a
war of sections. As for peace, nobody believes it possible; a truce we might
have, to give them time to gather breath! It is only a question between war to
the end now and a chronic state of war with two standing armies, two navies,
two corps of diplomatists seeking alliances in every court in Europe, to end in
another death struggle. There is no peace for us, unless we either conquer the
arrogant slave-owner classes who have so long ruled us and bullied you, or
permit them by a compromise to continue and extend their combination with our
baser class and to drag us into a grand slave empire which shall absorb the
West Indies and Mexico and Central America.
A bold stand at the polls by the North in 1850 would have
given us the victory peacefully; now we must fight for it, or yield to the
basest faction that ever ruled a country. Better a ten years' war than this;
but it will not be a long war.
The conspirators counted upon an early success in arms and a
division of the North. Foiled in this, their only hope is in foreign
intervention. I have no doubt what you tell me is true of Louis Napoleon, still
less that he secretly gave the rebels hopes of aid, nor that they have
construed your course to favor them. Had you squarely taken the same ground
that we did towards your Canadian rebels, this hope would have been
extinguished; and now, if you want cotton, if you want trade, if you want to
pave the way to a real alliance with the only free nation besides yourselves on
the globe, you ought to help us in all legitimate ways. You should encourage
our loan, you should sharpen your police to detect the outfit of hostile
vessels, you should hold the Nashville strictly accountable for her acts of
pillage and destruction, giving her the experience of a long trial in your
courts, if only to discourage other pirates from being their own judges of what
property they may appropriate.
Do this and the war will be short. Four months ago an offer
from you to do what we should have readily done when your Indian empire was
threatened, had it seemed necessary or proper, would have ended the war before
this, — namely, to throw open to us for purchase your armories and your ironclad
shipyards. We might not have accepted the offer, but it would have destroyed
the rebels' last hope. I don't complain of your not doing it, but simply
indicate what for the sake of both countries I wish might have been your
policy!
As for the Sault Ste. Marie, the pine lands must wait for
the prairie farmers to build again; but the developments in our mineral lands
are said to be magnificent, and to promise results next summer.
Very truly yours,
J. M. Forbes.
SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and
Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 253-7
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