Diary of Henry Greville: Tuesday, May 7, 1861

A dower of 30,000l. and an annuity of 6,000l. were voted nem. con. last night for Princess Alice.

An interesting letter from Fanny Kemble of April 20 from Philadelphia says:

'How can I describe the state of things in the midst of which we are living? I am paying a visit to Sarah¹ before returning to Lenox for the summer, and even in this village (a suburb of Philadelphia) we are in the midst of the most furious political and military excitement. It is Sunday, and the drums have been rolling to call the men to drill. Mr. Butler has gone off to swear his allegiance to the Southern Confederacy, taking, in spite of her own and her sister's entreaties, and the remonstrances of all his friends, Fanny² with him, his purpose, I understand, being to establish himself on his plantation again, buying a new force of slaves instead of those he sold two years ago, and thus become a resident Georgian slaveholder. Absolute war has broken out between North and South; all communication by post or telegraph is suspended. Maryland, which has hitherto (though a Slave State) been considered loyal to the Government, has seceded. A murderous onslaught was made in Baltimore, the chief city of Maryland, on the troops going through to Washington. These were New England regiments and a large body of Pennsylvanians—the latter unarmed, expecting to find their accoutrements in Washington. Of course this has excited a tempest of rage and indignation throughout the North. Troops are pouring into Philadelphia night and day, and are now being despatched by sea to Washington instead of through Baltimore. That place is but a hundred miles from hencethree hours and a half by rail, and the excitement here is something of which you can form no notion. The streets of Philadelphia were yesterday swarming with people, great crowds of eager, excited men were gathered at all the newspaper offices, 40,000 men have enlisted in Pennsylvania alone within the last six days. Those who are not ordered South immediately remain here to organise and drill themselves for service. From every house the flag of the United States is hung out, and here in the country, among the early tints of the spring, the Stars and Stripes are seen flaunting through the woods and across the fields from the roof and window of every villa, cottage, and farmhouse. You cannot imagine anything more strange than the suddenness with which we find ourselves in the midst of these disastrous preparations to which your account of public and private theatricals formed a curious contrast. We shall have a furious and fierce conflict now, for both sides of the country are rabid. Is it not too frightful to think of?'

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¹ Sarah, her eldest daughter, married to Dr. Owen Wister. Her son is the author of some remarkable novels lately published in America.

² His younger daughter, now Hon. Mrs. James Leigh.—Ed.

SOURCE: Alice Countess of Stratford, Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville: 1857-1861, p. 373-4

Diary of Henry Greville: June 28, 1861

London, Friday.—Bethell took the oaths yesterday and assumes the title of Westbury.

The Sultan is dead, and is succeeded by his brother, who is said to be a man of much energy, and very superior in all ways to his brother.

The Emperor Napoleon has recognised the King of Italy, but has made it to be understood that this 'recognition is not to be taken as an approval of the past policy of the Cabinet of Turin, or as an encouragement of enterprises of a nature to endanger the peace of Europe.' The French troops will occupy Rome as long as the interests which brought France there are not covered by guarantees. Ricasoli, in replying to this note, says, 'Our wish is to restore Rome to Italy without depriving the Church of any of its grandeur, or the Pope of his independence.' In the meantime His Holiness is ill, and his death may perhaps simplify matters.

There was a Drawing-room yesterday at which the Crown Princess and Prince of Prussia were present.

I have a letter from Fanny Kemble, who says the violence of the language against this country in consequence of our neutral attitude exceeds all bounds, and the nonsense talked upon the subject is quite incredible.

I went last night to Verdi's new opera, 'Un Ballo in Maschera,' which is dramatic and effective.

SOURCE: Alice Countess of Stratford, Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville: 1857-1861, p. 385-6

Diary of Henry Greville: Thursday, January 3, 1861

The King of Prussia¹ died yesterday at Sans-Souci.

The American Secession question now occupies public attention more than any other subject. Mr. Motley, who is here, considers it as certain, but does not think the Northern States will thereby lose any of their importance.

Fanny Kemble writes to me, December 9:

'What can I tell you, except that the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency appears to be precipitating the feud between the Northern and Southern States to immediate and most disastrous issues? The Cotton-growing States declare their purpose of at once seceding from the Union—the Slave-growing States depend upon them for their market, but depend still more upon the undisturbed security of the Union for the possibility of raising in safety their human cattle.

‘The Northern States seem at last inclined to let the Southern act upon their long threatened separation from them—the country is in a frightful state of excitement from one end to the other.

'The commercial and financial interests of all the States are already suffering severely from the impending crisis. It is a shame and a grief to all good men to think of the dissolution of this, in some respects, noble and prosperous confederacy of States. It is a horror to contemplate the fate of these insane Southerners if, but for one day, their slaves should rise upon them, when they have ascertained, which they will be quick enough to do, that they are no longer sure of the co-operation of the North in coercing their servile population. In short, there is no point of view from which the present position of this country can be contemplated which is not full of dismay. Conceive the position of the English in India if they had known beforehand of the murderous projected rising of the natives against them and had been without troops, arms, means of escape, or hope of assistance, and you have something like the present position of the Southern planters. God knows how fervently I bless that Providence which turned the worldly loss of my children's property, by their father's unprincipled extravagance, into so great a gain. Their shares were sold more than a year ago, and it will never be their fate to inflict injustice and oppression, or tremble before impending retribution.'

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¹ Frederick William IV.

SOURCE: Alice Countess of Stratford, Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville: 1857-1861, p. 339-41

Diary of Henry Greville: Wednesday, February 20, 1861

London.—I came here yesterday for the levee to-day. I found a letter from Naples from Lady Holland written before the fall of Gaeta, giving a satisfactory account of the state of affairs there. They are beginning public works and various improvements to the town.

From Paris they write that the King of Naples excites the warmest interest there in all classes, and that the army and navy are all in his favour, and he is looked upon as ‘le digne petit fils de Henri IV.,’ and it is fervently hoped that Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi may go together to the infernal regions—so differently do people look on things on opposite sides of the Channel.

The Italian Parliament was opened by Victor Emmanuel in person on Monday. His speech was

very adroit, and in some degree reassuring to the friends of peace.

The American Secession seems to be almost accomplished, and any compromise to be more and more hopeless. A letter received from Fanny Kemble a short time ago (January 17) says:

I think the secesssion of the Southern States sooner or later inevitable, and I devoutly hope that the cowards on all sides will not be able to poultice up the festering sore which must break out again, and will only have gangrened the whole body of this nation still deeper. Matters have gone so far with South Carolina, that she has seceded-firing upon United States vessels entering Charlestown Harbour is a very pretty intimation of their animus, and it is, moreover, the avowed object of the Southern politicians to embroil some portion of the Slave States so thoroughly with the Federal Government, that all compromise shall be impossible, and that the Southern States least inclined to secede (and there are many, all the border ones, whose interest is decidedly opposed to secession), shall be compelled, as a point of honour, to throw in their lot with the seceders against the North. The election of Lincoln is really and truly a mere pretext; the match that has fired the train long ago prepared for exploding. When I first came to this country, it was convulsed with the threatened secession of South Carolina on the tariff question. Old Andrew Jackson was President then, and compelled her to adhere to her allegiance; but in a letter to a friend he wrote that the South was bent upon a separation, and sooner or later would accomplish it upon one pretext or another; he even foretold it would be on that of the slavery question.

‘The fact is, the Southern States see and feel very bitterly the immense preponderance of wealth, activity, industry, intelligence, and prosperity of the North. They neither see nor believe what is the truth, that slavery, and nothing else, is the cause of their inferiority in all these particulars, and are now acting upon the insane belief that separation from the bond (which alone preserves them in their present state of comparative safety and prosperity) of the Union will turn the scale of national importance in their favour. Meantime they are rushing into an abyss of danger and difficulty—they are on the very verge of civil war. All good men throughout the country look with grief and horror upon the mad career on which they are entering. In the North, many would give up almost everything to avert the horrors of bloodshed on the land, by the hands of Americans fighting against each other. In the South, a majority would willingly endure anything rather than such a result, but they are panic-stricken under a fierce and inexorable reign of terror by which the infatuated men bent upon dividing the country compel them to join the Southern movement. It is hideous and piteous to see the gulf of ruin dug by their own folly and wickedness under the towering fabric of that material prosperity with which, even as it were yesterday, they amazed the world! For my own part, I believe it is not only inevitable, but desirable, that the South should separate from the North. Slave-holding produces a peculiar character which has nothing in common with a Christian republic founded by Englishmen of the eighteenth century.

The Southerners are fond of calling themselves the Chivalry of the South, and verily they are as ignorant, insolent, barbarous, and brutal as any ironclad robbers of the middle ages. They are, in fact, a remnant of feudalism and barbarism, maintaining itself with infinite difficulty by the side of the talent and most powerful development of commercial civilisation. I believe the fellowship to be henceforth impossible; I hope to God it will prove so, for then the Slave States will hasten down into a state of social and political degradation, such that the whole population will abandon them; they will become a wilderness of fertile land, peopled with black savages; the northern men will then reconquer them, and for ever abolish slavery on the continent! This is my theory.'

SOURCE: Alice Countess of Stratford, Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville: 1857-1861, p. 350-3

Diary of Henry Greville: Saturday, March 30, 1861

In a letter I received a few days ago from Fanny Kemble from New York, she says: I suppose if I had been in Boston, I should have heard something like sorrow and mortification expressed for the present disastrous state of the country, but though there is a good deal of excited curiosity here, and commencement of financial anxiety, there does not appear to me to be one particle of genuine patriotic feeling.

The fact is, the material prosperity of the nation has made the people base. They want, and God will send it to them, the salvation of adversity. Olmsted, whose books, by the bye, are the best, the only good authority about the Slave States, dined with me at Mr. Field's the other day, and said the Southern people were really nothing but a collection of children and savages. He, and indeed everybody, the Southerners themselves, consider the secession, if it produces civil war, as the inevitable ruin of the South, and a good deal of the same conviction has hitherto tempered the anger of the North at the folly of their suicidal proceedings, and though one of the oldest and wealthiest of the Boston merchants said the other day (speaking of the Cotton States), "Thank God they are gone, pray that they may never come back," and so speaking spoke the mind of the majority of Massachusetts men, nobody can doubt what one of the Southern men openly declared in the Peace Convention, that civil war would be utter ruin to them, because of their slaves.

SOURCE: Alice Countess of Stratford, Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville: 1857-1861, p. 364-5

Fanny Kemble to John M. Forbes, about July 1863

How I wonder how it fared with those you love in all these late disasters, — with Willy, and Frank Shaw's son, and young Russell, and all the precious, precious lives offered up for sacrifice to redeem your land. Oh, what a country it ought to be hereafter, ransomed at such a cost! I leave my own folks and friends in London immersed in their own amusements and pursuits; and as by far the most serious half of my thoughts and feelings are just now dwelling all but incessantly on your side of the Atlantic, I am not very sorry to go away from England, where I heard constantly opinions and sentiments expressed about your country and its trials that were very painful to me. Our government and our people are, I believe, sound; that is, the latter feel and think rightly about your war, and the former will act rightly. But our upper classes have shown that like will to like, and sympathize (as was perhaps to be foreseen) with the aristocratic element in your constitution. I knew very well that in the abstract they were sure to do so, but the experience of it has been bitterly painful to me.

SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 2, p. 51-2

Mrs. Fanny Kemble to John M. Forbes, before June 9, 1863

I had a long talk with Lord Clarendon on Thursday evening about American affairs, and found him, I am sorry to say, much less just in his notions upon them than that nice man, his dead brother-in-law, Cornwall Lewis, was. I sent him (Lord Clarendon) yesterday morning a fair and accurate account of the whole origin of the quarrel and present state of the struggle; but if one of our cabinet ministers has yet to learn anything upon either subject, it is a shame and a pity! That fellow, ———, the “Times’s” worthy correspondent from the South, who was a defaulter on the turf here, you know, is a nephew of Lord 's, and connected with our great people; and the wicked trumpery he writes, both privately and in the “Times,” is a fruitful source of mischief on the subject. I am happy to say that Lord Clarendon gave the “Times” its deserts for the mischievous course it has pursued towards America in its devilish “leading articles.” That paper will lose its influence, if the feeling once gains ground that it is absolutely dishonest and unprincipled, as well as the cleverest paper in the world.

Good-by. I am glad you are coming back soon; the sight of you carries me to Milton Hill, and refreshes my heart and soul.

Always affectionately yours,

Fanny Kemble.

P. S. Your former friend, formerly captain, now Admiral Charles Elliot, is brother to my friend of the colonial office, and has just been made governor of St. Helena.

SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 2, p. 26-7