John Hay to Mrs. Frances Campbell Eames, August 19, 1861

Executive Mansion,

Aug. 21, 1861.

DEAR MRS. Eames:

If the events of the last few days were to be taken as an earnest of the future, I would invest my surplus shekels in a cheap tombstone, write “Miserrimus” on it, and betake myself to Prussic acid glacé I have been like Poe's Raven's “unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster, till he thought all life a bore.” It is not a particularly hilarious chronicle, but here it is.

Finding it hideously dull at Long Branch (the gay and festive Jenkins of the Herald is paid by the line for making the world believe that the place is not ghastly and funereal, the crowd a sort of queer half-baked New Jersey confectionery, with a tendency to stammer when spoken to and to flatten its nose against our windows while we ate), I determined to go up to New York and accept a most kind invitation from Col. Hamilton to come to him Saturday. Arriving there I found there was no telegraph to Irvington or Dobb's Ferry. I could not apprize him of my coming or arrange for him to meet me. I blasphemed at this a little, and went quietly down town and was busy for an hour or two. Coming back I found Mr. Hamilton's card at the Hotel. He had been and gone.

My rage transcended grief. I was so mad at myself that I was uncivil to everyone else. Mr. Dennison came in with brilliant plans for the next day. I mildly but firmly requested him to mobilize himself for an instant trip to the Court of His Most Sulphurous Majesty. I concluded to take a royal revenge on myself by ordering myself back to Washington.

I came and found the air like a damp oven. They are painting the White House, and the painters from their horrid hair (I mean their brushes) shake pestilence and things. The people in the streets are stupid or scared. It is a bad neighborhood.

I can do nothing but wish it were “not me but another man.”

Let me tell you a fact which proves me insane or Washington preternaturally dull. Yesterday I went to dinner at Willard's late, and after taking my seat I saw a solitary diner at a distance. I took up my soup and walked. I sat down and ate dinner with

BING.

I was so dull he was almost endurable.

I have not seen Mr. Eames since I returned. I have not felt like proper company for a gentleman and a Christian. I have felt as outlawed as a hasheesh eater.

There is another offshoot of English nobility coming over in a day or two, a son of the Earl

of Mayo, Hon. Robert Bourke. I hope Willis will find it out, and by way of showing him a delicate attention, take him to the observational settee whence, on clear afternoons is to be seen, windows favoring, the Presidential ensarking and bifurcate dischrysalisizing. In view of his late letter, I would mildly inquire "What next?" Please make your brother and sister remember me, and give my love to F .

SOURCES: Clara B. Hay, Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary, Volume 1, p. 35-8; Michael Burlingtame, Editor, At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings, p.11-2.

Diary of William Howard Russell: March 20, 1861

The papers are still full of Sumter and Pickens. The reports that they are or are not to be relieved are stated and contradicted in each paper without any regard to individual consistency. The “Tribune” has an article on my speech at the St. Patrick's dinner, to which it is pleased to assign reasons and motives which the speaker, at all events, never had in making it.

Received several begging letters, some of them apparently with only too much of the stamp of reality about their tales of disappointment, distress, and suffering. In the afternoon went down Broadway, which was crowded, notwithstanding the piles of blackened snow by the curbstones, and the sloughs of mud, and half-frozen pools at the crossings. Visited several large stores or shops — some rival the best establishments in Paris or London in richness and in value, and far exceed them in size and splendor of exterior. Some on Broadway, built of marble, or of fine cut stone, cost from £6,000 to £8,000 a year in mere rent. Here, from the base to the fourth or fifth story, are piled collections of all the world can produce, often in excess of all possible requirements of the country; indeed I was told that the United States have always imported more goods than they could pay for. Jewellers' shops are not numerous, but there are two in Broadway which have splendid collections of jewels, and of workmanship in gold and silver, displayed to the greatest advantage in fine apartments decorated with black marble, statuary, and plate

New York has certainly all the air of a “nouveau riche.” There is about it an utter absence of any appearance of a grandfather — one does not see even such evidences of eccentric taste as are afforded in Paris and London, by the existence of shops where the old families of a country cast off their “exuviӕ” which are sought by the new, that they may persuade the world they are old; there is no curiosity shop, not to speak of a Wardour Street, and such efforts as are made to supply the deficiency reveal an enormous amount of ignorance or of bad taste. The new arts, however, flourish; the plague of photography has spread through all the corners of the city, and the shop-windows glare with flagrant displays of the most tawdry art. In some of the large booksellers' shops — Appleton's for example — are striking proofs of the activity of the American press, if not of the vigor and originality of the American intellect. I passed down long rows of shelves laden with the works of European authors, for the most part, oh shame! stolen and translated into American type without the smallest compunction or scruple, and without the least intention of ever yielding the most pitiful deodand to the authors. Mr. Appleton sells no less than one million and a half of Webster's spelling-books a year; his tables are covered with a flood of pamphlets, some for, others against coercion; some for, others opposed to slavery, — but when I asked for a single solid, substantial work on the present difficulty, I was told there was not one published worth a cent. With such men as Audubon and Wilson in natural history, Prescott and Motley in history, Washington Irving and Cooper in fiction, Longfellow and Edgar Poe in poetry, even Bryant and the respectabilities in rhyme, and Emerson as essayist, there is no reason why New York should be a paltry imitation of Leipsig, without the good faith of Tauchnitz.

I dined with a litterateur well known in England to many people a year or two ago — sprightly, loquacious, and well informed, if neither witty nor profound — now a Southern man with Southern proclivities, — as Americans say; once a Southern man with such strong anti-slavery convictions, that his expression of them in an English quarterly had secured him the hostility of his own people — one of the emanations of American literary life for which their own country finds no fitting receiver. As the best proof of his sincerity, he has just now abandoned his connection with one of the New York papers on the republican side, because he believed that the course of the journal was dictated by anti-Southern fanaticism. He is, in fact, persuaded that there will be a civil war, and that the South will have much of the right on its side in the contest. At his rooms were Mons. B–––, Dr. Gwin, a Californian ex-senator, Mr. Barlow, and several of the leading men of a certain clique in New York. The Americans complain, or assert, that we do not understand them, and I confess the reproach, or statement, was felt to be well founded by myself at all events, when I heard it declared and admitted that “if Mons. Belmont had not gone to the Charleston Convention, the present crisis would never have occurred.”

SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 24-6