I shall here briefly recapitulate what has occurred since
the last mention of political events.
In the first place the South has been developing every day
greater energy in widening the breach between it and the North, and preparing
to fill it with dead; and the North, so far as I can judge, has been busy in
raising up the Union as a nationality, and making out the crime of treason from
the act of Secession. The South has been using conscription in Virginia, and is
entering upon the conflict with unsurpassable determination. The North is
availing itself of its greater resources and its foreign vagabondage and
destitution to swell the ranks of its volunteers, and boasts of its enormous
armies, as if it supposed conscripts well led do not fight better than
volunteers badly officered. Virginia has been invaded on three points, one
below and two above Washington, and passports are now issued on both sides.
The career open to the Southern privateers is effectually
closed by the Duke of Newcastle's notification that the British Government will
not permit the cruisers of either side to bring their prizes into or condemn
them in English ports; but, strange to say, the Northerners feel indignant
against Great Britain for an act which deprives their enemy of an enormous
advantage, and which must reduce their privateering to the mere work of plunder
and destruction on the high seas. In the same way the North affects to consider
the declaration of neutrality, and the concession of limited belligerent rights
to the seceding States, as deeply injurious and insulting; whereas our course
has, in fact, removed the greatest difficulty from the path of the Washington
Cabinet, and saved us from inconsistencies and serious risks in our course of
action.
It is commonly said, “What would Great Britain have done if
we had declared ourselves neutral during the Canadian rebellion, or had
conceded limited belligerent rights to the Sepoys?” as if Canada and Hindostan
have the same relation to the British Crown that the seceding States had to the
Northern States. But if Canada, with its parliament, judges, courts of law, and
its people, declared it was independent of Great Britain; and if the Government
of Great Britain, months after that declaration was made and acted upon,
permitted the new State to go free, whilst a large number of her Statesmen
agreed that Canada was perfectly right, we could find little fault with the
United States Government for issuing a proclamation of neutrality the same as
our own, when after a long interval of quiescence a war broke out between the
two countries.
Secession was an accomplished fact months before Mr. Lincoln
came into office, but we heard no talk of rebels and pirates till Sumter had
fallen, and the North was perfectly quiescent — not only that — the people of
wealth in New York were calmly considering the results of Secession as an
accomplished fact, and seeking to make the best of it; nay, more, when I
arrived in Washington some members of the Cabinet were perfectly ready to let
the South go.
One of the first questions put to me by Mr. Chase in my
first interview with him, was whether I thought a very injurious effect would
be produced to the prestige of the Federal Government in Europe if the
Northern States let the South have its own way, and told them to go in peace. “For
my own part,” said he, “I should not be averse to let them try it, for I
believe they would soon find out their mistake.” Mr. Chase may be finding out
his mistake just now. (When I left England the prevalent opinion, as far as I
could judge, was, that a family quarrel, in which the South was in the wrong,
had taken place, and that it would be better to stand by and let the Government
put forth its [strength] to chastise rebellious children. But now we see the
house is divided against itself, and that the family are determined to set up
two separate establishments. These remarks occur to me with the more force
because I see the New York papers are attacking me because I described a calm
in a sea which was afterwards agitated by a storm. “What a false witness is
this,” they cry; “see how angry and how vexed is our Bermoothes, and. yet the fellow
says it was quite placid.”
I have already seen so many statements respecting my
sayings, my doings, and my opinions, in the American papers, that I have
resolved to follow a general rule, with few exceptions indeed, which prescribes
as the best course to pursue, not so much an indifference to these remarks as a
fixed purpose to abstain from the hopeless task of correcting them. The “Quicklys”
of the press are incorrigible. Commerce may well be proud of Chicago. I am not
going to reiterate what every Crispinus from the old country has said again and
again concerning this wonderful place — not one word of statistics, of corn
elevators, of shipping, or of the piles of buildings raised-from the foundation
by ingenious applications of screws. Nor am I going to enlarge on the splendid
future of that which has so much present prosperity, or on the benefits to
mankind opened up by the Illinois Central Railway. It is enough to say that by
the borders of this lake there has sprung up in thirty years a wonderful city
of fine streets, luxurious hotels, handsome shops, magnificent stores, great
warehouses, extensive quays, capacious docks; and that as long as corn holds
its own, and the mouths of Europe are open, and her hands full, Chicago will
acquire greater importance, size, and wealth with every year. The only
drawback, perhaps, to the comfort of the money-making inhabitants, and of the
stranger within the gates, is to be found in the clouds of dust and in the
unpaved streets and thoroughfares, which give anguish to horse and man.
I spent three days here writing my letters and repairing the
wear and tear of my Southern expedition; and although it was hot enough, the
breeze from the lake carried health and vigor to the frame, enervated by the
sun of Louisiana and Mississippi. No need now to wipe the large drops of
moisture from the languid brow lest they blind the eyes, nor to sit in a state
of semi-clothing, worn out and exhausted, and tracing with moist hand imperfect
characters on the paper.
I could not satisfy myself whether there was, as I have been
told, a peculiar state of feeling in Chicago, which induced many people to
support the Government of Mr. Lincoln because they believed it necessary for
their own interest to obtain decided advantages over the South in the field,
whilst they were opposed totis viribus to the genius of emancipation and
to the views of the Black Republicans. But the genius and eloquence of the
Little Giant have left their impress on the facile mould of democratic thought;
and he who argued with such acuteness and ability last March in Washington, in
his own study, against the possibility, or at least the constitutional
legality, of using the national forces, and the militia and volunteers of the
Northern States, to subjugate the Southern people, carried away by the great
bore which rushed through the placid North when Sumter fell, or perceiving his
inability to resist its force, sprung to the crest of the wave, and carried to
excess, the violence of the Union reaction.
Whilst I was in the South I had seen his name in Northern
papers with sensation headings and descriptions of his magnificent crusade for
the Union in the West. I had heard his name reviled by those who had once been
his warm political allies, and his untimely death did not seem to satisfy their
hatred. His old foes in the North admired and applauded the sudden apostasy of
their eloquent opponent, and were loud in lamentations over his loss. Imagine,
then, how I felt when visiting his grave at Chicago, seeing his bust in many
houses, or his portrait in all the shop-windows, I was told that the enormously
wealthy community of which he was the idol were permitting his widow to live in
a state not far removed from penury.
“Senator Douglas, sir,” observed one of his friends to me, “died
of bad whiskey. He killed himself with it while he was stumping for the Union
all over the country.” “Well,”
I said, “I suppose, sir, the abstraction called the Union, for which by your
own account he killed himself, will give a pension to his widow,” Virtue is its
own reward, and so is patriotism, unless it takes the form of contracts.
As far as all considerations of wife, children, or family
are concerned, let a man serve a decent despot, or even a constitutional
country with an economizing House of Commons, if he wants anything more
substantial than lip-service. The history of the great men of America is full
of instances of national ingratitude. They give more praise and less peace to
their benefactors than any nation on the face of the earth. Washington got
little, though the plundering scouts who captured Andre were well rewarded; and
the men who fought during the War of Independence were long left in neglect and
poverty, sitting in sackcloth and ashes at the doorsteps of the temple of
liberty, whilst the crowd rushed inside to worship Plutus.
If a native of the British Isles, of the natural ignorance
of his own imperfections which should characterize him, desires to be subjected
to a series of moral shower-baths, douches, and shampooing with a rough glove,
let him come to the United States. In Chicago he will be told that the English
people are fed by the beneficence of the United States, and that all the trade
and commerce of England are simply directed to the one end of obtaining gold enough
to pay the Western States for the breadstuffs exported for our population. We
know what the South think of our dependence on cotton. The people of the East
think they are striking a great blow at their enemy by the Morrill tariff and I
was told by a patriot in North Carolina, “Why, creation! if you let the Yankees
shut up our ports, the whole of your darned ships will go to rot. Where will
you get your naval stores from? Why, I guess in a year you could not scrape up
enough of tarpentine in the whole of your country for Queen Victoria to paint
her nursery-door with.”
Nearly one half of the various companies enrolled in this
district are Germans, or are the descendants of German parents, and speak only
the language of the old country; two-thirds of the remainder are Irish, or of
immediate Irish descent; but it is said that a grand reserve of Americans born
lies behind this avant garde, who will come into the battle should there
ever be need for their services.
Indeed so long as the Northern people furnish the means of
paying and equipping armies perfectly competent to do their work, and equal in
numbers to any demands made for men, they may rest satisfied with the
accomplishment of that duty, and with contributing from their ranks the great
majority of the superior and even of the subaltern officers; but with the South
it is far different. Their institutions have repelled immigration; the black
slave has barred the door to the white free settler. Only on the seaboard and
in the large cities are. German and Irish to be found, and they to a man have
come forward to fight for the South; but the proportion they bear to the
native-born Americans who have rushed to arms in defence of their menaced
borders, is of course far less than it is as yet to the number of Americans in
the Northern States who have volunteered to fight for the Union.
I was invited before I left to visit the camp of a Colonel
Turchin, who was described to me as a Russian officer of great ability and
experience in European warfare, in command of a regiment consisting of Poles,
Hungarians, and Germans, who were about to start for the seat of war; but I was
only able to walk through his tents, where I was astonished at the amalgam of
nations that constituted his battalion; though, on inspection, I am bound to
say there proved to be an American element in the ranks which did not appear to
have coalesced with the bulk of the rude, and, I fear, predatory Cossacks of
the Union. Many young men of good position have gone to the wars, although
there was no complaint, as in Southern cities, that merchants' offices have
been deserted, and great establishments left destitute of clerks and working
hands. In warlike operations, however, Chicago, with its communication open to
the sea, its access to the head waters of the Mississippi, its intercourse with
the marts of commerce and of manufacture, may be considered to possess greater
belligerent power and strength than the great city of New Orleans; and there is
much greater probability of Chicago sending its contingent to attack the
Crescent City than there is of the latter being able to despatch a soldier
within five hundred miles of its streets.
SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and
South, Vol. 1, p. 354-9
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