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

Ulysses S. Grant to Frederick Dent, April 19, 1862

Galena, April 19, 1S61.

Mr. F. Dent—

Dear Sir:

I have but very little time to write, but, as in these exciting times we are very anxious to hear from you, and know of no other way but by writing first to you, I must make time.

We get but little news by telegraph from St. Louis, but from all other points of the country we are hearing all the time. The times are indeed startling, but now is the time, particularly in the border slave States, for men to prove their love of country. I know it is hard for men to apparently work with the Republican party, but now all party distinctions should be lost sight of, and every true patriot be for maintaining the integrity of the glorious old Stars and Stripes, the Constitution and the Union. The North is responding to the President's call in such a manner that the Rebels may truly quake. I tell you, there is no mistaking the feelings of the people. The Government can call into the field not only 75,000 troops, but ten or twenty times 75,000 if it should be necessary, and find the means of maintaining them, too.

It is all a mistake about the Northern pocket being so sensitive. In times like the present, no people are more ready to give their own time, or of their abundant means. No impartial man can conceal from himself the fact that in all these troubles the Southerners have been the aggressors and the Administration has stood purely on the defensive, more on the defensive than she would have dared to have done but for her consciousness of strength and the certainty of right prevailing in the end. The news to-day is that Virginia has gone out of the Union. But for the influence she will have on the other border slave Slates, this is not much to be regretted. Her position, or rather that of Eastern Virginia, has been more reprehensible from the beginning than that of South Carolina. She should be made to bear a heavy portion of the burden of the war for her guilt.

In all this I can but see the doom of slavery. The North does not want, nor will they want, to interfere with the institution; but they will refuse for all time to give it protection unless the South shall return soon to their allegiance; and then, too, this disturbance will give such an impetus to the production of their staple, cotton, in other parts of the world that they can never recover the control of the market again for that commodity. This will reduce the value of the negroes so much that they will never be worth fighting over again.

I have just received a letter from Fred.¹ He breathes forth the most patriotic sentiments. He is for the old flag as long as there is a Union of two States fighting under its banner, and when they dissolve, he will go it alone. This is not his language, but it is the idea, not so well expressed as he expresses it.

Julia and the children are well, and join me in love to you all. I forgot to mention that Fred has another heir, with some novel name that I have forgotten.

Yours truly,

U. S. Grant.

Get John or Lewis Sheets to write me.

_______________

¹ Frederick Dent, Jr.

SOURCES: John Y. Simon, Editor, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant: Volume 2: April to September, 1861, p. 3-4; Loomis T. Palmer, Editor, The Life of General U. S. Grant, p. 41-2.

Gerrit Smith, August 27, 1859

It is, perhaps, too late to bring slavery to an end by peaceable means, — too late to vote it down. For many years I have feared, and published my fears, that it must go out in blood. These fears have grown into belief. So debanched are the white people by slavery that there is not virtue enough left in them to put it down. If I do not misinterpret the words and looks of the most intelligent and noble of the black men who fall in my way, they have come to despair of the accomplishment of this work by the white people. The feeling among the blacks that they must deliver themselves gains strength with fearful rapidity. No wonder, then, is it that intelligent black men in the States and in Canada should see no hope for their race in the practice and policy of white men. . . . Whoever he may be that foretells the horrible end of American slavery is held both at the North and the South to be a lying prophet, — another Cassandra. The South would not respect her own Jefferson's prediction of servile insurrection; how then can it be hoped that she will respect another's? . . . And is it entirely certain that these insurrections will be put down promptly, and before they can have spread far? Will telegraphs and railroads be too swift for even the swiftest insurrections? Remember that telegraphs and railroads can be rendered useless in an hour. Remember too that many who would be glad to face the insurgents would be busy in transporting their wives and daughters to places where they would be safe from that worst fate which husbands and fathers can imagine for their wives and daughters. I admit that but for this embarrassment Southern men would laugh at the idea of an insurrection, and would quickly dispose of one. But trembling as they would for beloved ones, I know of no part of the world where, so much as in the South, men would be like, in a formidable insurrection, to lose the most important time, and be distracted and panic-stricken.

SOURCE: Franklin B. Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown, p. 544

Diary of John Beauchamp Jones: February 23, 1862

At last we have the astounding tidings that Donelson has fallen, and Buckner, and 9000 men, arms, stores, everything are in possession of the enemy! Did the President know it yesterday? Or did the Secretary keep it back till the new government (permanent) was launched into existence? Wherefore? The Southern people cannot be daunted by calamity!

Last night it was still raining — and it rained all night. It was a lugubrious reception at the President's mansion. But the President himself was calm, and Mrs. Davis seemed in spirits. For a long time I feared the bad weather would keep the people away; and the thought struck me when I entered, that if there were a Lincoln spy present, we should have more ridicule in the Yankee presses on the paucity of numbers attending the reception. But the crowd came at last, and filled the ample rooms. The permanent government had its birth in storm, but it may yet nourish in sunshine. For my own part, however, I think a provisional government of few men, should have been adopted “for the war.”

SOURCE: John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Volume 1, p. 111

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes to John L. Motley, February 3, 1862

BOSTON, February 3, 1862.

. . . We are the conquerors of nature, they¹ of nature's weaker children. We thrive on reverses and disappointments. I have never believed they could endure them. Like Prince Rupert's drop, the unannealed fabric of rebellion shuts an explosive element in its resisting shell that will rend it in pieces as soon as its tail, not its head, is fairly broken off. That is what I think — I, safe prophet of a private correspondence, free to be convinced of my own ignorance and presumption by events as they happen, and to prophesy again; for what else do we live for but to guess the future, in small things or great, that we may help to shape it or ourselves to it? Your last letter was so full of interest by the expression of your own thoughts and the transcripts of those of your English friends, especially the words of John Bright,—one of the two foreigners that I want to see and thank, the other being Count Gasparin, — that I feel entirely inadequate to make any fitting return for it. I meet a few wise persons, who for the most part know little; some who know a good deal, but are not wise. I was at a dinner at Parker's the other day, where Governor Andrew and Emerson and various unknown dingy-linened friends met to hear Mr. Conway, the not unfamous Unitarian minister of Washington, Virginia-born, with seventeen secesh cousins, fathers, and other relatives, tell of his late experiences at the seat of government. He had talked awhile with Father Abraham, who, as he thinks, is honest enough. He himself is an out-and-out immediate emancipationist, believes that is the only way to break the strength of the South, that the black man is the life of the South, that the Southerners dread work above all things, and cling to the slave as a drudge that makes life tolerable to them. He believes that the blacks know all that is said and done with reference to them in the North; that their longing for freedom is unutterable; that once assured of it under Northern protection, the institution would be doomed. I don't know whether you remember Conway's famous “One Path” sermon of six or eight years ago. It brought him immediately into notice. I think it was Judge Curtis (Ben) who commended it to my attention. He talked with a good deal of spirit. I know you would have gone with him in his leading ideas. Speaking of the communication of knowledge among the slaves, he said if he were on the Upper Mississippi and proclaimed emancipation, it would be told in New Orleans before the telegraph could carry the news there.

I am busy with my lectures at the college, and don't see much of the world, but I will tell you what I see and hear from time to time, if you like to have me. I gave your message to the club, who always listen with enthusiasm when your name is mentioned. My boy is here still, detailed on recruiting duty, quite well. I hope you are all well, and free from all endemic irritations such as Sir Thomas Browne refers to when he says that “colical persons will find little comfort in Austria or Vienna.”

With kindest remembrances to you all,

Yours always,

O. W. H.

_______________

¹ The Confederates.

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition, Volume 2, p. 232-4