EFFECTS OF THE BATTLE OF BULL RUN.
PARALYSIS OF THE UNION CAUSE--FORTIFYING THE APPROACHES TO THE
CAPITAL--WHY THE CONFEDERATES DID NOT ATTEMPT THE CAPTURE OF
WASHINGTON--EFFECT OF UNION DEFEAT IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE--SLIDELL AND
MASON--CAPTURE OF THE "TRENT"--HENRY WARD BEECHER IN ENGLAND--SYMPATHY
OF THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT FOR THE NORTH.
The battle of Bull Run was undertaken with precipitation, fought with
much valor on both sides, and terminated with present ruin to the
Federal cause. For the moment the Union seemed to stagger under the
blow. On the Confederate side there was corresponding exultation; a
spirit of defiance flamed up throughout the South.
It is in the nature of things that the initial battle of a war
consolidates and crystallizes the sentiments of both the contestants.
After Bull Run there was no further hope of peaceable adjustment, but
only an increasing and settled purpose to fight out with the sword the
great issue which was dividing the Union. For a brief season after the
battle there was a paralysis of the Union cause. It was as much as the
authorities at Washington could do to make themselves secure against
further disaster. Indeed, the Potomac River now gave positive comfort
to the Government, since it furnished in some measure a natural
barrier to the northward progress of the exultant Confederates.
Immediate steps were taken to fortify the approaches to the capital;
but while this work was in progress the Government seemed to stand,
like an alarmed sentry, on the Long Bridge of the Potomac.
[Illustration: EXAMINING PASSES AT THE GEORGETOWN FERRY.]
[Illustration: FORT IN FRONT OF WASHINGTON.]
In the South as well as in the North there was much surprise that the
Confederates did not pursue the routed Union forces at the battle of
Bull Run and capture Washington. Perhaps Gen. Joseph E. Johnston is
the best witness on this subject on the Southern side. He says: "All
the military conditions, we knew, forbade an attempt on Washington.
The Confederate army was more disorganized by victory than that of the
United States by defeat. The Southern volunteers believed that the
objects of the war had been accomplished by their victory, and that
they had achieved all their country required of them. Many, therefore,
in ignorance of their military obligations, left the army--not to
return.... Exaggerated ideas of the victory, prevailing among our
troops, cost us more than the Federal army lost by defeat." In writing
this passage General Johnston probably took no account of the effect
produced in Europe. The early narratives sent there, in which the
panic of retreat was made the principal figure, gave the impression
that the result arose from constitutional cowardice in Northern men
and invincible courage in Southerners. They also gave the impression
that the Confederates were altogether superior in generalship; and the
effect was deep and long-enduring. The most notable of these was by a
correspondent of the London _Times_, who had apparently been sent
across the Atlantic for the express purpose of writing down the
Republic, writing up the South, and enlisting the sympathies of
Englishmen for the rebellion. In his second letter from Charleston
(April 30, 1861) he had written that men of all classes in South
Carolina declared to him: "If we could only get one of the royal race
of England to rule over us, we should be content." "The New Englander
must have something to persecute; and as he has hunted down all his
Indians, burnt all his witches, persecuted all his opponents to the
death, he invented abolitionism {63} as the sole resource left to him
for the gratification of his favorite passion. Next to this motive
principle is his desire to make money dishonestly, trickily, meanly,
and shabbily. He has acted on it in all his relations with the South,
and has cheated and plundered her in all his dealings, by villanous
tariffs." Many an Englishman, counting his worthless Confederate
bonds, and trying to hope that he will yet receive something for them,
knows he would never have made that investment but for such writing as
this, and the accounts from the same pen of the battle of Bull Run.
At the North the spectacle of McDowell's army streaming back in
disorder to the national capital produced first a shock of surprise,
then a sense of disgrace, and then a calm determination to begin the
war over again. It was well expressed by a Methodist minister at a
camp-meeting in Illinois, the Rev. Henry Cox. The news of the battle
came while he was preaching, and he closed his sermon with the words:
"Brethren, we'd better adjourn this camp-meeting and go home and
drill."
The effect of this over-discussed battle upon the more confident and
boastful of the Southerners was perhaps fairly expressed by an
editorial utterance of one of their journals, the Louisville, Ky.,
_Courier_: "As our Norman kinsmen in England, always a minority, have
ruled their Saxon countrymen in political vassalage up to the present
day, so have we, the 'slave oligarchs,' governed the Yankees till
within a twelvemonth. We framed the Constitution, for seventy years
moulded the policy of the government, and placed our own men, or
'Northern men with Southern principles,' in power. On the 6th of
November, 1860, the Puritans emancipated themselves, and are now in
violent insurrection against their former owners. This insane holiday
freak will not last long, however; for, dastards in fight and
incapable of self-government, they will inevitably again fall under
the control of a superior race. A few more Bull Run thrashings will
bring them once more under the yoke, as docile as the most loyal of
our Ethiopian chattels."
[Illustration: THE "SAN JACINTO" STOPPING THE "TRENT."]
{64} [Illustration: FORTIFICATION IN FRONT OF WASHINGTON.]
France and England had made all haste to recognize the Confederates as
belligerents, but had not granted them recognition as an established
nation, and never did. There was a constant fear, however, that they
would; and the Confederate Government did its utmost to bring about
such recognition. Messrs. James M. Mason, of Virginia, and John
Slidell, of Louisiana, were sent out by that Government, as duly
accredited ministers to London and Paris, in 1861. They escaped the
blockaders at Charleston, reached Havana, and there embarked on the
British mail steamer _Trent_ for Europe. But Capt. Charles Wilkes (who
had commanded the celebrated exploring expedition in Antarctic waters
twenty years before) was on the watch for them with the United States
steam frigate _San Jacinto_, overhauled the _Trent_ in the Bahama
Channel (November 8), took off the Confederate commissioners, and
allowed the steamer to proceed on her way. He carried his prisoners to
Boston, and they were incarcerated in Fort Warren. This action, for
which Wilkes {65} received the thanks of Congress, was denounced as an
outrage on British neutrality. The entire British public bristled up
as one lion, and their Government demanded an apology and the
liberation of the prisoners. The American public was unable to see any
way out of the dilemma, and was considering whether it would choose
humiliation or a foreign war, when our Secretary of State, William H.
Seward, solved the problem in a masterly manner. In his formal reply
he discussed the whole question with great ability, showing that such
detention of a vessel was justified by the laws of war, and there were
innumerable British precedents for it; that Captain Wilkes conducted
the search in a proper manner; that the commissioners were contraband
of war; and that the commander of the _Trent_ knew they were
contraband of war when he took them as passengers. But as Wilkes had
failed to complete the transaction in a legal manner by bringing the
_Trent_ into port for adjudication in a prize court, it must be
repudiated. In other words, by his consideration for the interests and
convenience of innocent persons, he had lost his prize. In summing up,
Mr. Seward said: "If I declare this case in favor of my own
Government, I must disavow its most cherished principles, and reverse
and forever abandon its most essential policy.... We are asked to do
to the British nation just what we have always insisted all nations
ought to do to us." The commissioners were released, and sailed for
England in January; but the purpose of their mission had been
practically thwarted. This was a remarkable instance of eating one's
cake and keeping it at the same time.
[Illustration: CHARLES A. DANA, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR.]
[Illustration: JAMES MURRAY MASON.]
[Illustration: CAPTAIN CHARLES WILKES. (Afterward Rear-Admiral.)]
[Illustration: JOHN SLIDELL.]
But though danger of intervention was thus for the time averted, and
the relations between the British Government and our own remained
nominally friendly, so far as moral influence and bitterness of
feeling could go the Republic had no more determined enemies in the
cotton States than in the heart of England. The aristocratic classes
rejoiced at anything that threatened to destroy democratic government
or make its stability doubtful. They confidently expected to see our
country fall into a state of anarchy like that experienced so often by
the Spanish-American republics, and were willing to do everything they
safely could do to bring it about. The foremost English journals had
been predicting such a disaster ever since the beginning of the
century, had announced it as in progress when a British force burned
Washington in 1814, and now were surer of it than ever. Almost our
only friends of the London press were the _Daily News_ and _Weekly
Spectator_. The commercial classes, in a country that had fought so
many commercial wars, were of course delighted at the crippling of a
commercial rival whom they had so long hated and feared, no matter
what it might cost in the shedding of blood and the destruction of
social order. Among the working classes, though they suffered heavily
when the supply of cotton was diminished, we had many firm and devoted
friends, who saw and felt, however imperfectly, that the cause of free
labor was their own cause, no matter on which side of the Atlantic the
battlefield might lie.
To those who had for years endured the taunts of Englishmen who
pointed to American slavery and its tolerance in the American
Constitution, while they boasted that no slave could breathe on
British soil, it was a strange sight, when our country was at war over
the question, to see almost everything that had power {66} and
influence in England arrayed on the side of the slaveholders. A few
famous Englishmen--notably John Bright and Goldwin Smith--were true to
the cause of liberty, and did much to instruct the laboring classes as
to the real nature and significance of the conflict. Henry Ward
Beecher, then at the height of his powers, went to England and
addressed large audiences, enlightening them as to the real nature of
American affairs, concerning which most of them were grossly ignorant,
and produced an effect that was probably never surpassed by any
orator. The Canadians, with the usual narrowness of provincials, blind
to their own ultimate interests, were in the main more bitterly
hostile than the mother country.
Louis Napoleon, then the despotic ruler of France, was unfriendly to
the United States, and did his utmost to persuade the English
Government to unite with him in a scheme of intervention that would
probably have secured the division of the country. How far his plans
went beyond that result, can only be conjectured; but while the war
was still in progress (1864) he threw a French force into Mexico, and
established there an ephemeral empire with an Austrian archduke at its
head. That the possession of Mexico alone was not his object, is
suggested by the fact that, when the rebellion was subdued and the
secession cause extinct, he withdrew his troops from Mexico and left
the archduke to the fate of other filibusters.
The Russian Government was friendly to the United States throughout
the struggle. The imperial manifesto for the abolition of serfdom in
Russia was issued on March 3, 1861, the day before President Lincoln
was inaugurated, and this perhaps created a special bond of sympathy.
[Illustration: FORT MONROE.]
[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL BENJAMIN F. BUTLER.]
[Illustration: COMMODORE S. H. STRINGHAM. (Afterward Rear-Admiral.)]