I tried to write, as I have taken my place in the steamer to
Mobile to-morrow, and I was obliged to do my best in a room full of people,
constantly disturbed by visitors. Early this morning, as usual, my faithful
Wigfall comes in and sits by my bedside, and passing his hands through his
locks, pours out his ideas with wonderful lucidity and odd affectation of logic
all his own. “We are a peculiar people, sir! You don't understand us, and you
can't understand us, because we are known to you only by Northern writers and
Northern papers, who know nothing of us themselves, or misrepresent what they
do know. We are an agricultural people; we are a primitive but a civilized
people. We have no cities — we don't want them. We have no literature — we
don't need any yet. We have no press — we are glad of it. We do not require a
press, because we go out and discuss all public questions from the stump with
our people. We have no commercial marine — no navy — we don't want them. We are
better without them. Your ships carry our produce, and you can protect your own
vessels. We want no manufactures: we desire no trading, no mechanical or
manufacturing classes. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and
our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from those nations
with which we are in amity, and to lay up money besides. But with the Yankees
we will never trade — never. Not one pound of cotton shall ever go from the
South to their accursed cities; not one ounce of their steel or their
manufactures shall ever cross our border.” And so on. What the Senator who is
preparing a bill for drafting the people into the army fears is, that the North
will begin active operations before the South is ready for resistance, “Give us
till November to drill our men, and we shall be irresistible.” He deprecates
any offensive movement, and is opposed to an attack on Washington, which many
journals here advocate.
Mr. Walker sent me over a letter recommending me to all
officers of the Confederate States, and I received an invitation from the
President to dine with him to-morrow, which I was much chagrined to be obliged
to refuse. In fact, it is most important to complete my Southern tour speedily,
as all mail communication will soon be suspended from the South, and the
blockade effectually cuts off any communication by sea. Rails torn up, bridges broken,
telegraphs down — trains searched — the war is begun. The North is pouring its
hosts to the battle, and it has met the paeans of the conquering Charlestonians
with a universal yell of indignation and an oath of vengeance.
I expressed a belief in a letter, written a few days after
my arrival (March 27th), that the South would never go back into the Union. The
North think that they can coerce the South, and I am not prepared to say they
are right or wrong; but I am convinced that the South can only be forced back
by such a conquest as that which laid Poland prostrate at the feet of Russia.
It may be that such a conquest can be made by the North, but success must
destroy the Union as it has been constituted in times past. A strong Government
must be the logical consequence of victory, and the triumph of the South will
be attended by a similar result, for which, indeed, many Southerners are very
well disposed. To the people of the Confederate States there would be no terror
in such an issue, for it appears to me they are pining for a strong Government
exceedingly. The North must accept it, whether they like it or not.
Neither party — if such a term can be applied to the rest of
the United States, and to those States which disclaim the authority of the
Federal Government — was prepared for the aggressive or resisting power of the
other. Already the Confederate States perceive that they cannot carry all
before them with a rush, while the North have learned that they must put forth
all their strength to make good a tithe of their lately uttered threats. But
the Montgomery Government are anxious to gain time, and to prepare a regular
army. The North, distracted by apprehensions of vast disturbance in their
complicated relations, are clamoring for instant action and speedy consummation.
The counsels of moderate men, as they were called, have been utterly overruled.
The whole foundation on which South Carolina rests is cotton
and a certain amount of rice; or rather she bases her whole fabric on the
necessity which exists in Europe for those products of her soil, believing and
asserting, as she does, that England and France cannot and will not do without
them. Cotton, without a market, is so much flocculent matter encumbering the ground.
Rice, without demand for it, is unsalable grain in store and on the field.
Cotton at ten cents a pound is boundless prosperity, empire, and superiority,
and rice or grain need no longer be regarded.
In the matter of slave-labor, South Carolina argues pretty
much in the following manner: England and France (she says) require our
products. In order to meet their wants, we must cultivate our soil. There is
only one way of doing so. The white man cannot live on our land at certain
seasons of the year; he cannot work in the manner required by the crops.
He must, therefore, employ a race suited to the labor, and that is a race which
will only work when it is obliged to do so. That race was imported from Africa,
under the sanction of the law, by our ancestors, when we were a British colony,
and it has been fostered by us, so that its increase here has been as great as
that of the most flourishing people in the world. In other places, where its
labor was not productive or imperatively essential, that race has been made
free, sometimes with disastrous consequences to itself and to industry. But we
will not make it free. We cannot do so. We hold that slavery is essential to
our existence as producers of what Europe requires; nay more, we maintain it is
in the abstract right in principle; and some of us go so far as to maintain
that the only proper form of society, according to the law of God and the
exigencies of man, is that which has slavery as its basis. As to the slave, he
is happier far in his state of servitude, more civilized and religious, than he
is or could be if free or in his native Africa. For this system we will fight
to the end.
In the evening I paid farewell visits, and spent an hour
with Mr. Toombs, who is unquestionably one of the most original, quaint, and
earnest of the Southern leaders, and whose eloquence and power as a debater are
greatly esteemed by his countrymen. He is something of an Anglo-maniac, and an
Anglo-phobist — a combination not unusual in America — that is, he is proud of
being connected with and descended from respectable English families, and
admires our mixed constitution, whilst he is an enemy to what is called English
policy, and is a strong pro-slavery champion. Wigfall and he are very uneasy
about the scant supply of gunpowder in the Southern States, and the difficulty
of obtaining it.
In the evening had a little reunion in the bedroom as
before. — Mr. Wigfall, Mr. Keitt, an eminent Southern politician, Col. Pickett,
Mr. Browne, Mr. Benjamin, Mr. George Sanders, and others. The last-named
gentleman was dismissed or recalled from his post at Liverpool, because he
fraternized with Mazzini and other Red Republicans à ce qu’ on dit. Here he is a slavery man, and a
friend of an oligarchy. Your “Rights of Man” man is often most inconsistent
with himself, and is generally found associated with the men of force and
violence.
SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and
South, p. 179-82
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