Diary of Henry Greville: Monday, November 19, 1860

Hatchford. Came here on Saturday.

Lincoln has been elected President of the United States.

SOURCE: Alice Countess of Stratford, Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville: 1857-1861, p. 333

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: Tuesday, February 5, 1861

Yesterday the Emperor Napoleon opened his Parliament with one of those fine harangues we are now become accustomed to, and which may mean anything or nothing. The upshot of this speech is, that he will not go to war unless it happens to suit his purpose to do so. This is enveloped in fine blarney and plausibility, but is not calculated to remove the general distrust prevailing.

To-day the Queen opened Parliament. It was cold and gloomy, but the crowds in the streets were greater than I ever saw them.

The speech states that our foreign relations are amicable, and expresses the hope that the moderation of the Great Powers will prevent any interruption of the general peace. There is a paragraph upon American affairs, and great concern is expressed at the events which are so likely to affect the happiness and welfare of a people closely allied to us by descent, and closely connected with us by the most intimate and friendly relations. The interest felt by the Queen in the well-being of the United States is all the greater from the kind and cordial reception given by them to the Prince of Wales during his recent visit to the continent of America.

These are the salient points of the speech—a much simpler and more plain-spoken affair than that of our dear ally.

SOURCE: Alice Countess of Stratford, Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville: 1857-1861, p. 346-7

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

Diary of Henry Greville: Saturday, April 20, 1861

There was an interesting debate last night in the House of Lords, brought on by Lord Ellenborough, on the Roman question, in which Clarendon and Lord Derby also took part. He asked whether our Government was engaged in any correspondence with the object of reconciling the spiritual independence of the See of Rome with the exercise of temporal sovereignty by the King of Italy within the Roman territory. He thought Rome was the fitting capital of a united Italy, and that the occupation by the French of that city precluded that unity. He then discussed the Venetian question, and though he admitted the right of Austria to maintain herself in Italy, by virtue of the Congress of Vienna, he considered the time was come when she should reconcile herself with the Italian people. Holding these views, however, he deprecated the interference of the Italians in Hungary. Lord Wodehouse replied that we were not in any correspondence on the Roman question, and that Her Majesty's Government considered it was neither becoming nor desirable for a Protestant country to take the initiative in the matter. The whole question depended upon the withdrawal of the French troops from Rome, and Her Majesty's Government had not disguised their opinion that it was desirable those troops should be withdrawn.

Clarendon thought Rome the proper capital, and believed the Emperor Napoleon to be sincerely desirous of withdrawing his troops whenever it would be safe for him to do so-both as regarded the Pope and his own position in France, where popular opinion was in favour of their remaining. Derby said much the same thing, but expressed his opinion that it would have been far better to establish a northern and southern kingdom of Italy, in which case Rome would have lain between the two countries and the solution of the difficulty would have been easy. As, however, there was only one kingdom, the desire to have Rome for their capital was quite natural; but it was a desire that created the greatest embarrassment.

Dined at Chorley's, met Mr. Brookfield, Holman Hunt the painter, and others, who talked much of Fechter and with great enthusiasm.

Bad news from America-Civil War imminent.

SOURCE: Alice Countess of Stratford, Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville: 1857-1861, p. 369-70

Diary of Henry Greville: Monday, April 29, 1861

The American news continues to be very bad, and all hope of a pacific solution is at an end.

SOURCE: Alice Countess of Stratford, Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville: 1857-1861, p. 371