CHAPTER V.

I imagine, that, if one went into any of the numerous places, in this or

any other city, where numbers of women are assembled as workers, or to

any of the charitable institutions where orphan children are taken in

and cared for, and were to institute a general examination of the

inmates as to their personal history, he would find few of them but had

experiences to relate of a kind to make the heart ache. From my own

incidental inquiry and observation of these classes, it would appear

that they afford representatives of every phase of domestic and

pecuniary suffering. I read of kindred sufferings which occasionally

happen to the high-born and wealthy, but here I have come in personal

contact with those in humble life to whom such trials seem to be a

perpetual inheritance.

In our factory there was one operator on a machine with whom I never

could gain an acquaintance beyond the usual morning salutation which

passed between most of us as we came in to our daily employment. To me

she was reserved and taciturn, and it was evident that there was no

disposition on her part to be sociable. But somehow she fell in with my

sister's gay, open, and prepossessing manner, and there grew up a sort

of passionate intimacy between them that I could not account for, as she

was much older than Jane. When we stopped work at noon, they always

dined together by themselves, in a corner of the room, and a close and

incessant conversation was carried on between them, for an hour at a

time, as if they had been lovers. There must have been great mutual

outpourings of confidence, for my sister soon became acquainted with the

minutest particulars of her new friend's singular life.

This woman's name was Vane. Who her father was no one knew but her

mother. When a child, she had lived with the latter in what was at that

time the remains of a wooden hut, that must have been among the very

first buildings erected in the forest which covered the northwestern

portion of what is now the suburbs of the great city around us. In this

little obscure home the two lived entirely alone. They had neighbors, of

course, but none of them could tell how they contrived to subsist. The

mother did no work, except for herself and her child; she had but a

small garden in front of the house, the embellishment of which was her

particular care; and she was surrounded with books, in the reading of

which she spent all her leisure time, having little intercourse with her

neighbors. The gossips that exist everywhere in society, if curious

about her affairs, could discover nothing as to how she lived so

comfortably without any visible means.

When the daughter, Sabrina, grew up to sixteen, her beauty, the

character she developed, and her general conduct were the topic of quite

as much rural conversation and remark as had been the mystery that hung

around the mother. Gradually drawn out into the neighboring society, her

great personal attractions, added to her shrewdness and good sense, made

her so much admired as to collect around her a train of suitors, who

seemed to consider her being fatherless as of no more consequence to

them than it was to herself.

But there was in her temperament an undercurrent of ambition so strong

as to cause her to receive their advances toward tender acquaintance

with a freezing coldness, while at the same time it rendered her

positively unhappy. She felt superior to her condition, and she longed

to rise above it. Her mind had attained to a premature development while

feeding almost exclusively on its own thoughts,--for she had never been

fond of books, though there were many around her. Her sole occupations

had been the school, the needle, and assisting her mother in the

management of their flower-garden. For this last she had a decided

taste, and they had concealed the time-worn character of the old house

they occupied by covering it with a luxuriance of floral wealth, so

tastefully arranged, and so profuse and gorgeous, that travellers on the

dusty highway on which it stood would stop to admire the remarkable

blending of the climbing rose, the honeysuckle, and the grape.

Thus filled with indefinite longings, she grew up to womanhood without

any proper direction from her mother. She had no sympathy with her

uncultivated suitors. She sighed for something higher, an ideal that was

far off, indistinct, and dim. Good offers of marriage from neighboring

workmen of fair character and prospects she stubbornly declined,

sometimes with a tartness that quite confounded the swain whom her

well-known character had half-intimidated before he ventured on the

dangerous proposal. Love had not yet unsealed the deep fountain of her

singularly constituted heart. But I suppose that there must somewhere be

a key to every woman's affections, and that it is generally found in but

few hands,--sometimes in safe ones, sometimes in very dangerous ones. It

was so with Sabrina.

One evening, at a party, she became acquainted with a young sprig of the

medical profession, who was captivated by her beauty. The fellow was

loquacious, prepossessing, and bold, with an air of high life and

fashion about him to which Sabrina had not been accustomed. But though

unsteady, insincere, and wholly unworthy of her, yet the glitter of his

style and manner won her heart, and an engagement of marriage took place

between them, which he, for some unexplained reason, required of her to

keep secret. She was young and inexperienced, and so happy in her

prospects as to give but little thought to the obligation to

concealment. A future was opening to her such as she had longed for; her

ambitious aspirations for a higher destiny were about to be realized.

Somehow the neighborhood became possessed of her secret,--not, however,

from her, but by that intuition which reveals to lookers-on the sure

finale of an intimacy such as every one saw had grown up between her and

the young physician. Her future was said to be a brilliant one; she was

to be rich, and a great lady. There were absurd and wide-spread

exaggerations of an almost every-day occurrence. Some sneered while they

repeated them, as if envious of her elevation, while others went so far

as to suggest surmises unworthy of her virtue. But Sabrina heard nothing

of what the little world around her said or thought. Happy in her own

heart, she was unconcerned as to all beyond.

Months passed away, when all at once her lover ceased his visits. This,

too, was immediately observed by all the gossips of the neighborhood. It

was said that she had been cruelly deceived, even ruined. But she no

more than others was able to account for this unexpected abandonment.

The truth eventually came out, however. The father of her lover had

heard the common rumor, that his son was about marrying an obscure and

fatherless girl, questioned him, and warned him of the consequences. It

was the first serious intimation the young man had received that his

secret was known, and he resolved to cast off the poor girl, seeking to

pacify the reproaches of his conscience by accusing her of having

divulged it. There was not a manly impulse in his bosom; he gave her no

opportunity for explanation, but forsook her on the instant.

For a time the victim of this faithlessness sunk under the weight of her

disappointment. To her proud spirit the mortification was almost beyond

endurance. And if Divine Providence had not mercifully given to us, to

woman especially, strength according to our day, tempering the wind to

the shorn lamb, the world would be peopled with perpetual mourners. But

there is

"No grief so great but runneth to an end;

No hap so hard but will in time amend."

She bore up bravely, and in time her strong mind recovered in a good

degree its equilibrium. But she was now a subdued and thoughtful woman.

Four years passed away, during which her former admirers gradually

gathered around her again, solicitous, as before, to win her favor. To

one of them she gave her hand,--her heart was yet another's. Years of an

unhappy married life went over her, brightening no cloud above her head,

admitting no sunshine into her heart. All her ambitious aspirations had

been blasted, all her early hopes wrecked. Marriage had proved no

blessing to a mind so ill-regulated. Her mother died, and then her

husband. The secret source from which the mother had been supplied with

means was unknown to the daughter, and she had still pride enough to

refrain from all endeavor to solve the mystery. No one was able to do so

during the lifetime of the former,--who was there to do it after her

death?

Thus thrown upon herself when only twenty-six years of age, she went to

work; and when we came to the factory, we found her there, the most

industrious and skilful of all the operators. Employment gave a new turn

to her thoughts. New associations opened other and more hopeful views to

her mind. She became cheerful, sometimes animated, and, with my sister,

intimate and confiding.

But if interested in what my sister thus learned of her history, I was

to be still more surprised by the subsequent portion of it to which I

was myself a witness.

One day a gentleman came into the room where we were at work, and

obtained from the proprietor permission to examine the mode in which it

was carried on. His age was probably fifty, and his dress and manner

evinced polish and acquaintance with society: if dress was ever an index

of wealth, his also indicated that. He went slowly round among the

machines, stopping before each, and courteously addressing and entering

into a brief conversation with the several operators in turn. Sabrina

was working a machine between my sister and myself. When he came to her,

he had more to say than to any of the others; and while conversing with

her, the proprietor came up, and, speaking to her on some business

matter, addressed her by name, "Sabrina."

The stranger heard it. He gazed on her long and silently. Sabrina was

his own child, for whose discovery he had come among us! There could be

no mutual recognition by face and feature, because neither had ever seen

the other before,--the heartless parent had never kissed or fondled his

own child!--they had lived total strangers. There was no excitement at

the moment, nothing that could be called a scene,--no symptom of remorse

on the part of the one, nor of affectionate recognition by the other. I

could know nothing, therefore, of their relations to each other, even

though I saw them at the very moment the parent was identifying his

daughter. All these curious facts were communicated to us afterwards.

That very evening Sabrina quitted her employment at the factory, and was

taken to her father's house, acknowledged as his child, her future to be

made by him as cloudless as in the past his own shameless neglect had

caused it to be gloomy.

If in such a refuge as this factory there were gathered many examples of

the ups and downs of life, it was a blessing that such an establishment

existed. Here was a certainty of employment at wages on which a woman

could live. But, generally, such factories accommodated only what might

be called the better order of workers,--that is, the least necessitous.

The press had been for years exalting the character and attainments of

the working-women of New England, celebrating their thrift, their

intelligence, their neatness, even their personal loveliness, until the

fame of their numerous virtues has overshadowed, at least on paper, that

of all others, extending even to European circles, and becoming a theme

for foreign applause. But from what I have seen of the working-women of

my native city, I am satisfied that their merits have been undervalued

as much as their numbers have been underestimated. Both in the

sewing-school and in the factory, there were girls who were patterns of

all that is modest, beautiful, and womanly, many of them graduates of

the public schools, and worthy to be wedded to the best among the other

sex. No Lowell factory could turn out a larger or more interesting army

of young and virtuous girls than some of the establishments here in

which the sewing-machine is driven by steam.

Then, as regards numbers, this city has a female manufacturing

population to which that of the largest manufacturing towns in New

England can bear no comparison. To particularize.

The book-binderies reckon three thousand in their various

establishments, who fold and sew the sheets, and work the

ruling-machines. I have seen in one of these establishments a collection

of young women whose manners and deportment could not be excelled in any

assembly of their fashionable and wealthy sisters: the proprietor never

came in among them without removing his hat. As the work they do is

light and cleanly, so the dress of the workers is neat and tidy. These

earn two dollars and upward per week. Some hundreds of others are

employed in printing-offices, feeding the paper to book-presses: these

are able to earn more. Another class are employed in coloring maps and

prints, and among these are some who exhibit taste and skill fitted to a

much higher department of the arts. Thus the business of publishing, in

nearly all its branches, is largely aided by the labor of intelligent

women,--and it might be still more so, if they were taught the truly

feminine, as well as intellectual art, of type-setting.

Thousands among us are engaged in binding shoes, some by machinery, and

some by hand; but the wages they receive are miserably small. The

clothing-stores employ some six thousand, but also paying so little that

every tailor's working-woman seeks the earliest opportunity of changing

her employment for something better. The hat-trimmers probably number

two thousand, while the cap-makers constitute a numerous body, whose

wages average three dollars per week. Several hundred educated girls,

possessed of a fine taste, are employed in making artificial flowers.

The establishments in which umbrellas and parasols are made depend

almost exclusively on the labor of women, while the millinery and

straw-goods branches owe most of their prosperity and merit to the

handiwork of female taste and skill. There are many who work for the

dentists, manufacturing artificial teeth. Even at the repulsive business

of cigar-making, in a close, unwholesome atmosphere continually loaded

with tobacco-fumes, there are many hundred women who earn bread for

themselves and their families.

There is a lower class of workers who find employment in the

spinning-mills and power-loom factories that abound among us, and these

number not less than two thousand. They are the children of weavers who

came from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. They have been

brought up from childhood to fill the bobbin or attend the spindle or

the loom, and are therefore skilled hands, young as many of them are. I

have known more than one affecting instance of aged parents having been

comfortably maintained by daughters belonging to this class.

It has been one of the plumes in the cap of New England factory-girls,

that they kept themselves genteel on factory-wages, educated their

brothers, supported their parents, and yet had something over when they

came to be married. I never could understand how such financial marvels

could be accomplished on the wages of a mill-girl. But I have seen great

things in the same line done among the untidy girls of foreign parentage

who work in the cotton and woollen factories of our city. These,

however, have toiled on silently and in obscurity, with no poet to

celebrate their doings, no newspaper to sound their praises, no magazine

to trumpet forth their devotion, their virtue, or even their beauty.

I cannot give, with either fulness or accuracy, the industrial

statistics of a city like this; nor would I volunteer thus to increase

the dulness of my narrative, if it were in my power to do so. But it

will be seen, that, wherever a door stands open into which woman may

enter and obtain the privilege to toil, she is sure to ask for

admission. Wages are always a consideration, but employment of some

kind, whether remunerative or not, is a greater one. Of the thousands

thus toiling at all kinds of labor, some descriptions of which are

necessarily unhealthy, there are many whose once robust frames have

become attenuated and weary unto wearing out, whose midnight couch,

instead of being one of repose, is racked with cough and restlessness

and pain. The once brilliant eyes have lost their lustre, the once rosy

cheeks their fresh and glowing bloom. The young girl fades under

unnatural labor protracted far into the night. If she should fail to

toil thus, some infirm parent would go without food. The sick widow,

older in years, and farther travelled round the long circuit of human

sorrow, dares not indulge in the rest that is necessary even to life,

lest hungry children, as well as herself, should be even more severely

pinched by famine. No wonder that they knock at every door where a

little money may be had for a great amount of labor.

But it must be granted, that, if the employments to which American women

are compelled to resort are often severe, and less remunerative than

they ought to be, they are by no means so unsuited to the sex as some

which women are forced into in other countries. Only a few years ago

many thousands of females were working under-ground in the English

coal-mines. When laws were enacted to abolish this unsuitable

employment, they still continued to work at the mouth of the mine, and

are thus employed at this moment. They labor in the coke-works and

coal-pits; they receive the ores at the pit's mouth, and dress and sort

them. The hard nature of the employment may not be actually injurious to

health, yet it quite unsexes them. Their whole demeanor becomes as

coarse and rude as their degrading occupation. As they labor at men's

work, so they wear men's clothing. A stranger would feel sure that they

were men, and it would be by their conversation alone that he could

identify them as women. He would think it strange to hear persons

dressed like men conversing together about their husbands, unless he had

been informed who they were.

A celebrated English author speaks thus particularly of these unhappy

women:--"Some few months since, happening to be in Wigan, my attention

was directed to the, to me, unwonted spectacle of one of those female

colliers returning homewards from her daily labor. It was difficult to

believe that the unwomanly-looking being who passed before me was

actually a female; yet such was the case. Clad in coarse, greasy, and

patched fustian unmentionables and jacket, thick canvas shirt, great

heavy hob-nailed boots, her features completely begrimed with coal-dust,

her hard and horny hands carrying the spade, pick, drinking-tin, sieve,

and other paraphernalia of her occupation, her not irregular features

wearing a bold, defiant expression, and nothing womanly about her except

two or three latent evidences of feminine weakness, in the shape of a

coral necklace, a pair of glittering ear-rings, and a bonnet, which, as

regards shape, size, and color, strongly resembled the fan-tail hat of a

London coal-heaver,--she proceeded unabashed through the crowded

streets, no one appearing to regard the degrading spectacle as being

anything unusual."

Some work in the potteries at the laborious task of preparing the clay,

and others in the brick-yards, in open weather, and on the wet clay with

naked feet. At other times the same women are forced, by the nature of

their employment, to walk over hot pipes, obliging them to wear heavy

wooden shoes to protect their feet from being burned. Every stranger who

sees these women at their work is shocked at the impropriety and

dangerous nature of their occupation.

So far exceeding masculine strength and endurance are the tasks imposed

on thousands of English dairy-women, that they constitute a special

class of patients with the medical faculty,--pining and perishing under

maladies arising entirely from over-fatigue and insufficient rest.

There are multitudes of women in Liverpool who work daily on the farms

around that city. They walk four or five miles to the scene of their

toil, where they are required to be by six in the summer months and

seven in the winter. They work all day at the severest agricultural

labor, wielding a heavy, clumsy hoe, digging potatoes, grubbing up

stones from the soil, stooping on the ground in weeding, and compelled

even to the unfeminine and offensive employment of spreading manure. For

a day's work at what men alone should be required to do, they receive

but a shilling! Then, worn out with fatigue, having eaten little more

than the crust they brought with them,--for what more can be afforded by

one who earns only a shilling a day?--they drag themselves back at

nightfall over the increasingly weary miles which they traversed in the

morning. What comforts can fall to the lot of such? What a domestic life

must such unhappy creatures lead!

There are yet others, in that land which boasts of its high

civilization, who live by carrying to the city immense loads of sand for

sixpence a day,--harder work than carrying a hod. Other women may be

daily seen collecting fresh manure along the streets and docks of

Liverpool.

In certain rooms of the great English cotton-mills, the high temperature

maintained there compels the women to work in a half-naked condition.

This constant exposure of one half the body speedily destroys all

feminine modesty. Added to this is an extreme, but unavoidable,

filthiness of person. These poor creatures part with their health almost

as quickly as with their modesty. They become hollow-cheeked and pale,

while their coarse laugh and gestures indicate a deep demoralization.

There are many English women engaged in the occupation of nail-making.

They work in glass-houses, glue-works, nursery-gardens, at ordinary

farm-work. On some of the canals they manage the boats, open the locks,

drive the horses, and sometimes even draw the boats with the line across

their shoulders. In short, wherever the lowest and dirtiest drudgery is

to be done, there they are almost invariably to be found. For wages,

they sometimes get tenpence a day, sometimes only sixpence. If they

perform overwork, they get a penny an hour,--a penny for the hauling of

a canal-boat for an hour! Here is poverty in its most abject condition,

and hard work in its most killing form. Their victims are necessarily

toilworn, degraded, and hopelessly immoral.

It is such extreme destitution that drives women to crime. In an English

paper-mill, where the girls worked at counting the sheets in a room by

themselves, and made good wages, they were all well-behaved and

respectable. In another department of the same mill, where the work was

dirty and the wages only a shilling a day, they were almost uniformly of

bad character. The base employment degraded them,--the starvation wages

demoralized them. Philanthropy has not been deaf to the cries of these

unhappy classes, and has made repeated and herculean efforts to improve

their condition and reform their morals. But the stumbling-block of

excessively low wages was always in the way. It was found, that, until

the physical condition was improved, the ordinary wants of life

supplied, the moral status was incapable of elevation.

I grant that no one item of this long catalogue of calamities has yet

overtaken the women of our own country. It would seem that the fact must

be, that in other lands the sex is not more degraded than it was

centuries ago, but that it has never been permitted to rise to its true

level. Once put down, it has always been kept down.

The contrast between the condition of women in foreign countries and

their condition here is too striking to be overlooked. We have our

hardships, our trials, our privations; but what are they to those of our

European sisters? If we get low wages, they are in most cases sufficient

to enable us to maintain a respectable position and a decent appearance.

If the influence of caste is felt among us, if by some it is considered

ungenteel to work, this prejudice is not of American growth, but was

transferred to our shores from the very people with whom woman is

degraded to the level of the brutes. The first settlers brought it with

them, and it has descended to us as an inheritance. While it is our

province to confront it, we should do so bravely.

But as yet, no woman here is compelled to engage in labor that involves

the necessity of dressing like a man. The law itself forbids such change

of dress; and when it was proposed, some years ago, to so alter our

costume as to make it half male and half female, not for working

purposes, but for mere personal convenience, the public sentiment of the

nation ridiculed and frowned it down. The other sex has been educated to

regard us with a respect and deference too sincere to permit these

foreign degradations to overtake us; while the spirit of independence

infused by the nature of our government, the unrestricted intercourse of

all classes with each other, and that robust training of thought which

it is impossible that any American woman should fail to receive, will

forever place us above the shocking contingencies to which the poor

laborious Englishwoman is exposed. If, in common with her, we are

compelled to work, our labor will keep us respectable, though it fail to

make us rich.

These are some of the compensations which fall to the lot of the

American working-woman. There are many others,--too many, indeed, to be

recited here. Chief among them is the respect and courtesy accorded to

us by all classes. A public insult to a well-behaved woman is never

heard of. We may travel unattended over the vast network of railroads

that traverse our country, and passenger and conductor will vie with

each other in paying us not only respect, but attention. The former

instinctively rises from his seat that we may be accommodated. It is the

same in all public places,--in the streets, in churches, and in places

of public entertainment. At table we are served first. In short, as we

respect ourselves, so will others respect us. The laws have been

modified in our favor. The property of a woman is her own, whether

married or single. It is subject to no invasion by her husband's

creditors, yet her dower in his estate remains good.

These are substantial concessions to our sex, and they are prime

essentials to personal comfort. For my part, I am content with them,

asking no other I have never slept uneasily because the law did not

permit me to vote or to become a candidate for office. The time was, as

I have heard, when women voted, all who were eighteen years old being

entitled to deposit their ballots. They mingled in the crowds about the

polls, and became as violently agitated by partisan excitements as the

men. Those who would have been quiet home bodies, had no such foolish

liberty been allowed them, became zealous politicians; while others, to

whom excitement of some kind was a necessity of life, turned to this,

and became so wild with political furor as to unsex themselves,--if

throwing aside all modesty be doing so. They carried placards in their

hands among the crowd to influence voters, distributed handbills and

tickets, entered into familiar conversation with total strangers, many

of them persons of infamous character, and pleaded and wrangled with

them to secure their votes. They obeyed literally the injunction of

modern political managers to "vote early,"--so many mere girls swearing

that they were of legal age, when they were in reality much younger,

that the singular statistical dislocation became apparent, that there

were no women in the country under eighteen years old. With so loose a

morality on this point, it cannot be doubted that the other injunction,

to "vote often," was as generally obeyed. I have no positive information

as to how the married women who thus devoted themselves to

electioneering managed their domestic concerns,--who prepared the

dinner, who rocked the cradle, who tended the baby,--or whether these

cards were thrust upon the husbands. History is silent on this subject;

but the more practical minds of the men of this generation can readily

conceive how inconvenient it would be for them to be transformed into

cooks and dry-nurses.

I have had no ambition to parade in Bloomer costume, or to be otherwise

eccentric, even where it happened to be more comfortable. Neither have I

figured as the chairman or secretary of a woman's convention, nor had my

name ringing through the newspapers as an impatient struggler after more

rights than I now possess. I do not think that I should be happier by

being permitted to vote, and am sure there is no office I can think of

that I would have for the asking. But I was never one of the

strong-minded of my sex. I know that there are such, and that even in

this noisy world they have made themselves heard. How attentively they

have been listened to I will not stop to inquire. I have always believed

that the truest self-respect lies, not in the exaction of questionable

prerogatives, but in seeking to attain that shining eminence to which

the common sentiment of our fellow-beings will concede honor and

admiration as its rightful due.

Yet the picture which represents the true condition of our working-women

has undeniably its harsh and melancholy features. It shows a daily,

constant struggle for adequate compensation. There is everywhere a

discrimination against them in the matter of wages, as compared with

those of men. It looks, in some cases, indeed, as if women were employed

only because they can be had at cheaper rates.

Probably the gay ladies covered with brilliants that flash out

accumulated lustre from the footlights of the theatres they nightly

visit have no suspicion that the delicate and graceful girls they see

upon the stage are victims of this same unjust discrimination as regards

compensation. I have never been inside a theatre, and know nothing of

the stage, or of the dancing-girls, except what I hear and read. But I

can readily imagine how beautiful these young creatures must appear,

dressed in light and graceful attire, bringing out by all the well-known

artifices of theatrical costume the most captivating charms of face and

figure. As they crowd upon the stage in tableaux, which without long and

toilsome rehearsal would become more confused and aimless groupings of

gayly dressed dancers, they take their appointed places, and with a

symmetrical unity repeat the graceful combinations of attitude and

movement they have so laboriously acquired in private. The crowded house

is electrified by the complicated, yet truly beautiful display. All is

fair and happy on the outside. No step in painful, no grief shows

itself, no consciousness of wrong appears, no face but is wreathed in

smiles. The show of perfect happiness is complete.

But do the crowd of rich men who occupy box and pit bestow a thought on

the domestic life of these young girls? Do their wives and daughters,

lolling on cushioned seats, clothed in purple and fine linen, and waited

on by a host of obsequious fops, ever think whether the dancing-girls

have a domestic life of any kind or not? They came to the theatre to be

amused,--not to meditate; why should they permit their amusement to be

clouded by a single thought as to whether any others but themselves are

happy?

Sometimes, in the evolutions of the dance, the gossamer dresses of these

ballet-girls are caught in the blaze of the footlights, instantly

enveloping them in fire, and burning them to a crisp,--and they are

borne from the theatre to the grave. Yet these girls, thus nightly

exposed to so frightful a death, are paid a third to a half less than

men employed in the same vocation, and who by dress are exempt from such

hazards. Moreover, the wardrobe of the men is furnished by the

theatrical manager,--while the girls, those even who receive but five

dollars a week, are compelled out of this slender sum to supply their

own. They must change it also at every caprice of fashion or of the

manager, sometimes at very short notice, and are expected, no matter how

heavy the heart or how light the purse, to come before the public the

impersonation of taste and elegance and happiness. A single dress will

at times consume the whole salary of a month; and to obtain it even at

that cost, the ballet-girl must work on it with her own hands day and

night. She must submit to these impositions, or give up her occupation,

when perhaps she can find nothing better to do.

The star-actor, the strutting luminary of the theatre, whether native or

imported,--he who receives the highest salary for the least work,--when

the performance is closed, unrobes himself and departs, with no care or

oversight of the drapery in which he charmed his audience. He leaves it

in the dressing-room,--it is the manager's tinsel, not his,--and the

owner may see to it or not. Not so the poor ballet-girl, whose elaborate

performances have been an indispensable feature of the evening's

entertainment. Her gossamer dress, her costly wreaths of flowers, her

nicely fitting slippers, are carefully packed up,--for they are her own,

her capital in trade, and must be taken care of. The well-paid actor

goes to the most fashionable restaurant, gorges himself with rich dishes

and costly wines, then seeks his bed to dream blissfully over his fat

salary and his luxurious supper. The ballet-girl takes up her solitary

walk for the humble home in which perhaps an infirm mother is anxiously

waiting her return, exposed to such libertine insults as the midnight

appearance of a young girl on the street is sure to invite. It is many

hours since she dined; she is fatigued and hungry, but she sups upon a

crust, or the cold remains of what was at best a meagre dinner, with

possibly a cup of tea, boiled by herself at midnight,--then goes wearily

to bed, and sleeps as well as one so hard-worked and so poorly paid may

be able to.

The gay crowds who spend their evenings at the theatres are permitted to

see but one side of this tableau. The curtain lifts upon the group of

smiling ballet-girls, but it never unveils their private life. The

theatre is intended to amuse, not to excite commiseration for the

realities of every-day life around us. Why should anything disagreeable

be allowed? If it sought to make people unhappy, it would soon become an

obsolete institution.

With all these impositions, actresses and ballet-girls are proverbially

more tractable than actors, less exacting, more uncomplaining, more

unfailingly prompt in their attendance and in the discharge of their

arduous duties. Why, then, are they subjected to such grinding

injustice, except because of their weakness? And who will wonder, that,

thus kept constantly poor, they should sometimes fall away from virtue?

Their profession surrounds them with temptations sufficiently numerous

and insidious; and when to these is added the crowning one of promised

relief from hopeless penury, shall Pity refuse a tear to the unhappy

victims?

CASTLES.

There is a picture in my brain

That only fades to come again:

The sunlight, through a veil of rain

To leeward, gilding

A narrow stretch of brown sea-sand;

A light-house half a league from land;

And two young lovers hand in hand

A-castle-building.

Upon the budded apple-trees

The robins sing by twos and threes,

And even at the faintest breeze

Down drops a blossom;

And ever would that lover be

The wind that robs the bourgeoned tree,

And lifts the soft tress daintily

On Beauty's bosom.

Ah, graybeard, what a happy thing

It was, when life was in its spring,

To peep through Love's betrothal ring

At Fields Elysian,

To move and breathe in magic air,

To think that all that seems is fair!--

Ah, ripe young mouth and golden hair,

Thou pretty vision!

Well, well,--I think not on these two,

But the old wound breaks out anew,

And the old dream, as if 't were true,

In my heart nestles;

Then tears come welling to my eyes,

For yonder, all in saintly guise,

As 't were, a sweet dead woman lies

Upon the trestles!

FAIR PLAY THE BEST POLICY.

It is said that Lord Eldon, the typical conservative of his day, shed

tears of sincere regret on the abolition of the death-penalty for

five-shilling thefts. The unfortunate Lord Eldons of our own day must be

weeping in rivers. Slavery is dead, and the freedmen are its bequest.

Through a Red Sea which no one would have dared to contemplate, we have

attained to the Promised Land. By the sublimest revenge which history

has placed on record, we have returned good for evil, and have punished

those who wronged us by requiring them to cease from doing wrong. The

grand poetic justice by which Maryland, the first State to shed her

brothers' blood, has been the first to be transformed into a condition

of happy liberty, only symbolizes a like severity of kindness in store

for all. Five years of devastating war will have only rounded the

sublime cycle of retribution predicted so tersely by Whittier long

ago:--

"Have they chained our free-born men?

Let us unchain theirs."

The time has come to put in practice that fine suggestion of the wise

foreign traveller, Von Raumer, which some of us may remember to have

read with almost hopeless incredulity twenty years ago. "The European

abolition of the dependent relations between men of one and the same

race was an easy matter, compared with the task which Americans have to

perform. But if, on the one part, this task carries with it many cares,

pains, and sufferings, on the other hand, the necessary instruction and

guardianship of the blacks, and their final reconciliation with the

whites, offer an employment so noble, influential, and sublime, that the

Americans should testify with awe and humility their gratitude to

Providence for intrusting them with this duty also, in addition to many

others of the greatest importance to the progress of the race. Were its

performance really impossible, it would not have been imposed."

In important periods, words are events; and history may be read in the

successive editions of a dictionary. The transition from the word "serf"

to the word "citizen" marked no European epoch more momentous than that

revealed by the changes in our American vocabulary since the war began.

In the newspapers, the speeches, the general orders, one finds, up to a

certain time, a certain class recognized only as "slaves." Suddenly the

slaves vanish from the page, and a race of "contrabands" takes their

place. After another interval, these, too, gradually disappear, and the

liberated beings are called "freedmen." The revolution is then virtually

accomplished; and nothing remains but to rectify the details, and drop

the _d_. When the freedmen are lost in the mass of freemen, then the

work will be absolutely complete; and the retrospect of its successive

stages will be matter for the antiquary alone.

Corresponding with these verbal milestones, one may notice successive

stages of public sentiment as to the class thus variously designated. It

was usually considered that the "slaves" were a vast and almost hopeless

mass of imbruted humanity. It was generally feared that the

"contrabands" would prove a race of helpless paupers, whose support

would bankrupt the nation. It is almost universally admitted that the

"freedmen" are industrious, intelligent, self-supporting, soldierly,

eager for knowledge, and far more easily managed than an equal number of

white refugees.

There is no doubt that these last developments were in some degree a

surprise to Abolitionists, as well as to pro-slavery prophets. They

compelled the admission, either that slavery was less demoralizing than

had been supposed, or else that this particular type of human nature was

less easy to demoralize. It is but a few years since anti-slavery

advocates indignantly rejected the assertion that the English peasantry

were more degraded than the slaves of South Carolina. Yet no dweller on

the Sea Islands can now read a book like Kay's "Social Condition of the

English People," without perceiving that the families around him,

however fresh from slavery, have the best of the comparison. In the one

class the finer instincts of humanity seem dead; in the lowest specimens

of the other those instincts are but sleeping. I have seen men and women

collected from the rice-fields by the hundred, at the very instant of

transition from slavery to freedom. They were starved, squalid, ragged,

and ignorant to the last degree; but I could not call them degraded, for

they had the instincts of courtesy and the profoundest religious

emotions. There was none of that hard, stolid, besotted dulness which

seems to reduce the English peasant below the level of the brutes he

tends.

And what is surprising, above all, in the freedman's condition, is, not

that it shows a recuperative power, but that it has such a wonderful

suddenness in the recoil. It is not a growth, but a spring. It reverses

the _nihil per saltum_ of the philosophers. In watching them, one is

constantly reminded of those trances produced by some violent blow upon

the head, from which the patient suddenly recovers with powers intact.

One looks for a gradual process, and beholds a sudden illumination. This

abates a little of one's wrath at slavery, perhaps, though the residuum

is quite sufficient; but it infinitely enhances one's hopes for the race

set free. It shows that they have simply risen to the stature of men,

and must be treated accordingly.

And, indeed, when one thinks how unexampled in our tame experience is

the event which has thus suddenly raised them from their low estate, one

must expect to find something unexampled in the result. This is true

even where liberty has come merely as a thing to be passively received;

but in many cases the personal share of the freedman has been anything

but passive. What can most of us know of the awful thrill which goes

through the soul of a man, when, having come over a hundred miles of

hourly danger out of slavery to our lines, with rifle-bullets whizzing

round him and bloodhounds on the trail behind, he counts that for a

preliminary trip only, and, having thus found the way, goes back through

that hundred miles of peril yet again, and brings away his wife and

child? As Hawthorne's artist flung his hopeless pencil into Niagara, so

all one's puny literary art seems utterly merged and swept away in the

magnificent flood of untaught eloquence with which some such nameless

man will pour out his tale. Two things seem worth recording, and no

third: the passionate emotions of the humblest negro, as they burst into

language at such a time,--and the very highest triumph of the very

greatest dramatic genius, if perchance some Shakespeare or Goethe could

imagine a kindred utterance. Anything intermediate must be worthless and

unavailing.

Now there is no doubt, that, under this great stimulus, the freedmen

will do their part; the anxious question is, whether we of the North are

ready to do ours. Our part consists not chiefly in money and old

clothes, nor even in school-books and teachers. The essential thing

which we need to give them is justice; for that must be the first demand

of every rational being. Give them justice, and they can dispense even

with our love. Give them the most exuberant and zealous love, and it may

only hurt them, if it leads us to subject them to fatal experiments, and

to fancy them exceptions to the universal laws.

Cochin well says,--"To have set men at liberty is not enough: it is

necessary to place them in society." That American emancipation should

be a success is more important to every one of us than the whole

sugar-crop of Louisiana or the whole rice-crop of Georgia. Secure this

result, and the future opens for this nation a larger horizon than the

most impassioned Fourth-of-July orator in the old times dared to draw.

Fail in this result, and the future holds endless disorders, with civil

war reappearing at the end. If, therefore, there be any general

principle to assert, any essential method to inculcate, its adoption is

the most essential statesmanship. Twenty millions of white men, with

ballots and school-houses, will be tolerably sure to thrive, whatever be

the legislation: legislation for them is secondary, because they are

assured in their own strength. But four millions of black men, just

freed, and as yet unprovided with any of these tools,--the fate of the

nation may hinge on a single error in legislating for them.

Now there are but two systems possible in dealing with an emancipated

people. All minor projects are modifications of these two. There is the

theory of preparation, under some form, and there is the theory of fair

play. Preparation is apprenticeship, prescription,--the bargains of the

freedman made for him, not by him. Fair play is to remove all

obstructions, including the previous monopoly of the soil,--to recognize

the freedman's right to all social and political guaranties, and then to

let him alone.

There is undoubtedly room for an honest division of opinion on this

fundamental matter, among persons equally sincere. Even among equally

well-informed persons there may be room for difference, although it will

hardly be denied that those who favor the theory of "preparation" are in

general those who take a rather low view of the capacities of the

emancipated race. The policy pursued in Louisiana, for instance, was

undoubtedly based at the outset, whatever other reasons have since been

adduced, on the theory that the freedmen would labor only under

compulsion. I have seen an elaborate argument, from a leading officer in

that Department, resting the whole theory on precisely this assumption.

"The negro, born and reared in ignorance, could not for years be taught

to properly understand and respect the obligations of a contract. His

ideas of freedom were merged in the fact that he was to be fed and

clothed and supported in idleness." Whatever excuses may since have been

devised for the system, this was its original postulate. To suppose it

true would be to reject the vast bulk of evidence already accumulated,

all demonstrating the freedmen's willingness to work. Yet if the

assumption be false, any system founded on it must be regarded by the

freedmen as an insult, and must fail, unless greatly modified.

In organizing emancipation, one great principle must be kept steadily in

mind. All men will better endure the total withholding of all their

rights than a system which concedes half and keeps back the other half.

This has been admirably elucidated by De Tocqueville in his "Ancien

Regime," in showing that the very prosperity of the reign of Louis XVI.

prepared the way for its overthrow. "The French found their position the

more insupportable, the better it became.... It often happens that a

people which has endured the most oppressive laws without complaint, and

as if it did not feel them, throws them off violently the instant the

burden is lightened,... and experience shows that the most dangerous

moment to a bad government is usually that in which it begins to mend.

The evil which one suffers patiently as inevitable seems insupportable

as soon as he conceives the idea of escaping it. All that is then taken

from abuses seems to uncover what remains, and render the feeling of it

more poignant. The evil has become less, it is true, but the sensibility

is keener."

Every one who is familiar with the freedmen knows that this could not be

a truer description of their case, if every word had been written

expressly for them. The most timid laborer on the remotest plantation

will not bear from his superintendent or his teacher the injustice he

bore from his master. The best-disciplined black soldier will not take

from his captain one half the tyranny which his overseer might safely

have inflicted. Freedom they understand; slavery they understand. When

they become soldiers, they know that part of their civil rights are to

be temporarily waived; and as soon as they can read, they study the

"Army Regulations," to make sure that they concede no more. Neither as

citizens nor as soldiers do they retain the faculty of dumb, dead

submission which sustains them through every conceivable wrong while

enslaved. Before a blow from his master the slave helplessly cowers, and

takes refuge in silent and inert despair. He draws his head into his

shell, like a turtle, and simply endures. Liberate him, he quits the

shell forever, and the naked palpitating tissue is left bare.

Afterwards, every touch reaches a nerve, and every nerve excites a whole

muscular system in reflex action.

I remember an amusing incident which took place while I was on picket at

Port Royal. Complaints began to come in against a certain neighboring

superintendent, an ex-clergyman, whose demeanor was certainly not

creditable to his cloth, but whose offences would have seemed slight

enough in the old plantation times. Still they were enough to exasperate

the people under his charge, and the ill feeling extended rapidly among

the black soldiers, many of whom had been slaves on that very island. At

last their captain felt it necessary to interfere. "Has it ever occurred

to you, my dear Sir," he one day asked the superintendent, "that you are

in some danger from these soldiers whom you meet every day with their

guns in the picket paths?"--The official colored and grew indignant. "Do

you mean to say, Sir, that your men are forming a conspiracy to murder

me?"--"By no means," returned the courteous captain. "I trust you will

find my soldiers too well disciplined for any such impropriety. But you

may not have noticed that the regiment has at present exceedingly poor

guns which often go off at half-cock, so that no one can be held

responsible. It was but the other day that one of our own officers was

shot dead by such an accident,"--which was unhappily true,--"and

consider, my dear Sir, how very painful"----"I understand you, I

understand you," interrupted the excited divine, putting spurs to his

horse. It was a remarkable coincidence that we never heard another

complaint from that plantation.

It was this new-born sensitiveness that brought to so sudden a close the

attempted apprenticeship of the British West Indies. Cochin, the wisest

recent critic, fully recognizes this connection of events. "Either the

regulations were incomplete, or the masters failed in their observance,

or such failures were not repressed, so that the slaves were in many

places maltreated and mutinous. In proportion as the moment of freedom

approached, some broke loose prematurely from their duties, others

aspired prematurely to their rights. Patience long delayed is easier

than patience whose end is approaching; it is at the last moment that

one grows weary of waiting."

The best preparation for freedom is freedom. It is of infinite

importance that we should avail ourselves of the new-born self-reliance

of the freedmen while its first vigor lasts, and guard against

sacrificing those generous aspirations which are the basis of all our

hope. It is not now doubted (except, perhaps, in Louisiana) that the

first eager desire of the emancipated slave is to own land and support

his own household. I remember that one of the ablest sergeants in the

First South Carolina Volunteers, when some of us tried to convince him

that the colored people attached too much importance to the mere

ownership of land, utterly refused all acquiescence in the criticism.

"We shall still be slaves," he said, in an impassioned way, "until eb'ry

man can raise him own bale ob cotton, and put him brand upon it, and

say, _Dis is mine_." And it was generally admitted in the Department of

the South, that the freedmen on Port Royal Island, who had mostly worked

for themselves, had made more decided progress, and were more fitted

for entire self-reliance, than those who had remained as laborers on the

plantations owned by Mr. Philbrick and his associates upon St. Helena

Island. Yet it would be impossible to try the system of tenant-industry

more judiciously than it was tried under those circumstances; and if

even that was found, on the whole, to retard the development of

self-reliance in the freedmen, what must it be where this is a part of a

great system of coercion, and where the mass of the employers are still

slaveholders at heart?

It is a fact of the greatest importance, that King Cotton turns out to

be a thorough citizen-king, and adapts himself very readily to changed

events. The great Southern staple can be raised by small cultivators as

easily as corn or potatoes; and difficulty begins only when sugar and

rice are to be produced. Yet it will not be long before these also will

come within reach of the freedmen, if they continue their present

tendency towards joint-stock operations. In the colored regiments of

South Carolina there are organizations owning plantations, saw-mills,

town-lots, and a grocery or two: they even meditate a steamboat. A few

of these associations no doubt will go to pieces, through fraud or

inexperience. Indeed, I knew of one which was nearly broken asunder by

the president's taking a fancy to send in his resignation: no other

member knew the meaning of that hard word, and they were disposed to

think it a declaration of hostilities from the presiding officer. But

even if such associations all fail, for the present, the training which

they give will be no failure; and when we consider that there are

already individuals among the freedmen who have by profitable ventures

laid up twenty or thirty thousand dollars within three years, it seems

no extravagant ambition for a joint-stock company to aim at a rice-mill.

The Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, where, from the very

beginning, under the limited authority of General Saxton, the most

favorable results of emancipation have been attained, are now to be the

scene of a larger experiment, still under the same wise care. The

objections urged by General Butler, with his usual acuteness, against

some details of the project of General Sherman, must not blind us to its

real importance. Its implied exclusions can easily be modified; but the

rights which it vests in the freedmen are a substantial fact, which,

when once established, it will require a revolution to overthrow. The

locality fixed for the experiment is singularly favorable. There is no

region of the country where a staple crop can be grown so profitably by

small landholders. There is no agricultural region so defensible, in a

military aspect. So difficult is the navigation of the muddy

tide-streams which endlessly intersect these islands,--so narrow are the

connecting causeways,--so completely is every plantation surrounded and

subdivided by hedges, ditches, and earthworks, long since made for

agricultural purposes, and now most available for defence,--that nothing

this side of the famous military region of La Vendee (which this

district much resembles) can be more easily held by peasant proprietors.

The mere accidents of the war have often led to the experiment of

leaving small bodies of colored settlers, in such favorable localities,

to support and defend themselves. This was successfully done, for

instance, on Barnwell Island, a tract two or three miles square, which

lies between Port Royal Island and the main, in the direction of

Pocotaligo, and is the site of the Rhett Plantation, described in Mr. W.

H. Russell's letters. This region was entirely beyond our picket lines,

and was separated from them by a navigable stream, while from the Rebel

lines it was divided only by a narrow creek that would have been

fordable at low water, but for the depth of mud beneath and around it.

On this island a colony of a hundred or thereabouts dwelt, in peace,

with no resident white man, and only an occasional visit from their

superintendent. There were some twenty able-bodied settlers who did

picket duty every night, by a system of their own, and for many months

there was no alarm whatever,--the people raising their cotton and

supporting themselves. This went on, until, by a fatal error of

judgment, the men were all conscripted into the army. This was soon

discovered by the Rebels, who presently began to make raids upon the

island, so that ultimately the whole population had to be withdrawn.

Extend such settlements indefinitely, and we have the system adopted by

General Sherman. It is a system which, like every other practicable

method, must depend on military authority at last, and for which the

army should therefore be directly responsible. The main argument for

intrusting the care of the freedmen to a bureau of the War Department

is, that it must come to be controlled by that Department, at any rate,

and that it is best to have the responsibility rest where the power

lies. On conquered territory there can be but one authority, and no

conceivable ingenuity can construct any other system. If authority is

apparently divided, then either the military commander does not

understand his business, or he is hampered by impracticable orders and

should ask to be relieved. This is what has paralyzed the action of

every military governor, a title which implies a perfectly anomalous

function, certain to lead to trouble. Almost all the great good effected

by General Saxton has been achieved in spite of that function, not by

means of it; and it was not until he was placed in military command of

the post of Beaufort that he was able, even in that limited region, to

establish any satisfactory authority. All else that he did was by

sufferance, and often he could not even obtain sufferance.

While the war lasts, martial law must last. After martial law ceases,

civil institutions, whatever they may then be, must resume control. It

is therefore essential that all the rights of the freedmen should be put

upon a sure basis during the contest; but, whatever method be adopted,

the real control must inevitably rest with the War Department. It cannot

be transferred to civilians; nor is there reason to suppose it desirable

for the freedmen that it should. Whatever be the disorder resulting from

military command, it has the advantage of being more definite and

intelligible than civil mismanagement; there is always some one who can

be held responsible, and the offender is far more easily brought to

account. On this point I speak from personal experience. In South

Carolina I have seen outrages persistently practised among the freedmen

by civilians, for which a military officer could have been cashiered in

a month. I have oftener been appealed to for redress against civilians

than against officers or soldiers. I have been compelled to post

sentinels to keep superintendents away from their own plantations, to

prevent disturbance. I have been a member of a military commission which

sentenced to the pillory an eminent Sunday-school teacher who had been

convicted of the unlawful sale of whiskey,--and this in a community into

which the majority of the civilians had come with professedly benevolent

intent.

The truth is, that abuses, acts of oppression towards the freedmen, do

not proceed from mere antecedent prejudice in the army or anywhere else.

They proceed from the temptations of power, and from that impatience

which one is apt to restrain among his equals and to indulge among his

inferiors. The irritability of an Abolitionist may lead him to outrages

as great as those which spring from the selfishness of a mere soldier.

It is becoming almost proverbial, in colored regiments, that radical

anti-slavery men make the best and the worst officers: the best, because

of their higher motives and more elevated standard; the worst, because

they are often ungoverned, insubordinate, impatient, and will sometimes

venture on high-handed acts, under the fervor of their zeal, such as a

mere soldier would not venture to commit. Yet in an army such

aberrations, like all others, yield to discipline. But on a solitary

plantation the temptations and immunities of the slave-driver recur; and

I have seen men yield to these, who had safely passed the ordeal of

persecution and mobs at home.

It was thus, perhaps, that General Sherman and his advisers felt

justified in adopting the theory of absolute separation, on the Sea

Islands,--seeing that the companionship of Southern white men would be

an evil, and that of Northern men by no means an unmixed good. Yet it

seems altogether likely that the system is so far wrong, and will be

modified. Separation is better than "preparation," and is a good

antidote to it. It is better to assume the freedmen too self-reliant

than too feeble,--better to exclude white men than to give them the

monopoly of power. Nevertheless, the principle of exclusion is wrong,

though it is happily a wrong not fundamental to the system, and hence

easily corrected. If the people of any village desire to introduce a

white teacher, the prohibition would become an obvious outrage, which

hardly any administration would risk the odium of maintaining. The

injury, in a business point of view, done by separation would perhaps

strike deeper, and be harder to correct. Here, for instance, is the

flourishing negro village of Mitchellville, just outside of the

fortifications of Hilton Head. All that is produced in the numerous

garden-patches of the suburb is to be sold in the town; all the clothing

that is to be worn in the suburb must be obtained in exchange for the

garden-products. Yet, if newspaper correspondents tell truth, the

temporary commander of that post has taken it on himself to forbid white

men from trading in Mitchellville, or black men at Hilton Head. How,

then, is business to be transacted? Are the inhabitants of the town to

be allowed to come to the sally-port of the fortifications, hand out a

yard of ribbon and receive two eggs in return? If the entire exchanges

are to be intrusted to a few privileged favorites, black or white, then

another source of fraud is added to those which lately, in connection

with the recruiting bounties, have been brought to bear upon the

freedmen of that Department, and, if the truth be told, under the same

auspices from which this order proceeds. Be this as it may, it seems a

pity that these poor people, who are just learning what competition

means, and will walk five miles farther to a shop where dry goods are

retailed a little cheaper, should be checked and hampered in their

little commerce by an attempt to abolish all the laws of political

economy in their favor.

If the freedmen were a race like the Indians, wasting away by unseen

laws through the mere contact of the white man, the case would be very

different. Or if they were a timid and dependent race, needing to be

thrust roughly from the nest, like young birds, and made self-dependent,

the difference would be greater still. But it is not so. The negro race

fits into the white race, and thrives by its side; and the farther

South, the greater the thriving. The emancipated slave is also

self-relying, and, if fair play be once given, can hold his own against

his former master, whether in trade or in war. He is improvident while

in slavery, as is the Irishman in Ireland, because he has no opportunity

to be anything else. Shift the position, and the man changes with

it,--becoming, whether Irishman or negro, a shrewd economist, and rather

formidable at a bargain. Almost every freedman is cheated by a white man

once after his emancipation, and many twice; but when it comes to the

third bargain, it is observed that mere Anglo-Saxon blood is not

sufficient to secure a victory.

It is claimed that this principle of separation was adopted after

consultation with the leading colored men of Savannah, and that the only

dissenter was the Rev. James Lynch, a Northern colored man. But it also

turns out that Mr. Lynch was the only man among them who had ever seen

the experiment tried of the mingling of the races in a condition of

liberty. He is a man of marked energy and ability, and has been for two

years one of the most useful missionaries in the neighborhood of Port

Royal. Some weight is, no doubt, to be attached to the opinions of those

who had known white men only as masters; but we should not wholly ignore

the judgment of the only delegate who had met them on equal terms. In

restoring men from the trance of slavery, the instincts of the patient,

though doubtless an important fact, are not the only point to be

considered. It may be true, as Hippocrates said, that the second-best

remedy will succeed better than the best, if the patient likes it best.

But it is not safe to forget that those who have never known their

brother-men except in the light of oppressors may have some crude

notions on political economy which a milder experience might change. At

any rate, the more exclusive features of General Sherman's project may

be changed by a stroke of the pen; and so far as it tends to secure the

freedmen in permanent possession of the Sea Islands, it is almost an

unmingled good.

The truth is, that, in these changing days, none of these specific

"systems" are very important. "Separation" is interesting chiefly

because it is the last project reported; "preparation," because it was

the last but one. What is needed is not so much a "system" as the

settled resolution to do daily justice. Let any military commander

merely determine to treat the emancipated black population precisely as

he would treat a white population under the same circumstances,--to

encourage industry, schools, savings-banks, and all the rest, but not

interfere with any of them too much,--and he will have General Saxton's

method and his success. The question what to do with the soil is far

more embarrassing than what to do with the freedmen; and happily the

soil also can be let alone, and the freedmen will take care of that and

of themselves too. We must say to the cotton lords, as Horne Tooke said

to Lord Somebody in England,--"If, as you claim, power should follow

property, then we will take from you the property, and the power shall

follow." And fortunately for us, the same logic of events points to the

political enfranchisement of the black loyalists, as the only way to

prevent Congress from being replenished with plotting and disloyal men.

Fair play to them is thus fair play to all of us; and, like Tony

Lumpkin, in Goldsmith's comedy, if we are indifferent as to

disappointing those who depend upon us, we may at least be trusted not

to disappoint ourselves.

The lingering caste-institutions in the Free States,--as the exclusive

street-cars of Philadelphia, the separate schools of New York, the

special gallery reserved for colored people in Boston theatres,--must

inevitably pass away with the institution which they merely reflect. The

perfect acquiescence with which abolition of these things is regarded,

so soon as it takes effect, shows how little they are really sustained

by public opinion. These are local matters, mere corollaries, and will

settle themselves. They are not upheld by any conviction, and scarcely

even by prejudice, but by an impression in each citizen's mind that

there is some other citizen who is not prepared for the change. When it

comes to the point, it is found that everybody is perfectly prepared,

and that the objections were merely traditional. Who has ever heard of

so much as a petition to restore any of the unjust distinctions which

have thus been successively outgrown?

But in our vast national dealings with the freedmen, we still drift from

experiment to experiment, and adopt no settled purpose. Did this proceed

from the difficulty of wise solution, in so vast a problem, one could

blame it the less. But thus far the greatest want has been, not of

wisdom, but of fidelity,--not of constructive statesmanship, but rather

of pains to discern and of honesty to observe the humbler path of daily

justice. When we consider that the order which laid the basis for the

whole colored army--the "Instructions" of the Secretary of War to

Brigadier-General Saxton, dated August 25, 1862--was so carelessly

regarded by the War Department that it was not even placed on file, but

a copy had to be supplied, the year following, by the officer to whom it

was issued, it is obvious in what a hap-hazard way we have stumbled,

into the most momentous acts. A government that still repudiates a duty

so simple as the payment of arrears due under its own written pledges to

the South Carolina soldiers can hardly shelter itself behind the plea of

any complicated difficulties in its problem. Let us hope that the

freedmen, on their part, will be led by some guidance better than our

example: that they will not neglect their duties as their rights have

been neglected, and not wrong others as they have been wronged.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Autobiography, Correspondence, etc., of Lyman Beecher, D. D._

Edited by CHARLES BEECHER. With Illustrations. In Two Volumes.

New York. Harper & Brothers.

Reading this life of Dr. Beecher is like walking over an ancient

battle-field, silent and grass-grown, but ridged with graves, and

showing still by its conformation the disposition of the troops which

once struggled there in deadly contest,--and while we linger, lo! the

graves are graves no more. The dry bones come together,--sinew and flesh

form upon them,--the skin covers them about,--the breath enters into

them,--they live and stand upon their feet, an exceeding great and

mighty army. Drums beat, swords flash, and the war of the Titans rages

again around us.

The life of Dr. Beecher is closely inwoven with the ecclesiastical

history of New England. Ecclesiastical, like civil history, is chiefly a

military record; and through both these volumes a sound of battle is in

the land, and of great destruction. We who have fallen on comparatively

quiet days can hardly conceive the intensity and violence of the

excitement that glowed at our theological centres, and flamed out even

to their circumferences, when the great Unitarian controversy was at its

height,--when Park-Street Church alone of the Boston churches stood firm

in the ancient faith, and her site was popularly christened "Hell-Fire

Corner,"--when, later, the Hanover-Street Church was known as "Beecher's

Stone Jug" and the firemen refused to play upon the flames that were

destroying it. There were giants on the earth in those days, and they

wrestled in giant fashion.

All this conflict Dr. Beecher saw, and a large part of it he was. In

Connecticut he had drawn his sword against intemperance, "Toleration,"

and other forms of what he considered evil, and had been recognized as a

mighty man of valor in his generation; but it was in this Unitarian

controversy that he leaped to the battlements of Zion, sounded the alarm

through the land, and took his place henceforth as leader of the hosts

of the elect. "I had watched the whole progress," he says, "and read

with eagerness everything that came out on the subject. My mind had been

heating, heating, heating. Now I had a chance to strike." And strike he

did, blows rapid and vigorous, whose echoes ring even through these

silent pages. It was to him a real warfare. His speech ran naturally to

military phrase. He saw the foe coming in like a flood. "The enemy,

driven from the field by the immortal Edwards, have returned to the

charge, and now the battle is to be fought over again." "The time has at

length fully come to take hold of the Unitarian controversy by the

horns." "The enemies ... are collecting their energies and meditating a

comprehensive system of attack, which demands on our part a

corresponding concert of action." "Let the stand taken be had in

universal and everlasting remembrance, and we shall soon get the enemy

out of the camp." "Wake up, ministers, form conspiracies against error,

and scatter firebrands in the enemy's camp." "A schism in our ranks,

with the enemy before and behind us, would indeed be confusion in the

camp." "It is the moment to charge as Wellington did at Waterloo." "Will

Walker and his friends feel as if my gun was loaded deep enough for the

first shot, and will the Orthodox think I have done so far sufficient

execution?... As the game is out of sight, I must depend on those who

are near to tell me what are the effects of the first fire." "My sermons

on Depravity ... are point-blank shot."

Nor was the fight between Unitarian and Orthodox alone. Even within the

ranks of the faithful dissensions arose, and many a time and oft had Dr.

Beecher to defend himself against the charges, the insinuations, and the

suspicions of his brethren. To the eyes of the more cautious or the more

inert his adventurous feet seemed ever approaching the verge of heresy.

Just where original sin ceases to be original and becomes

acquired,--just where innate ill-desert meets voluntary

transgression,--just where moral government raises the standard of

rebellion against Absolutism,--just where New Haven theology branches

off from ultra Orthodoxy on the debatable ground, the border-land of

metaphysics and religion, Dr. Beecher and his brethren were engaged in

perpetual skirmishing.

It is not our province to decide or even to discuss the points at issue.

Uninitiated laymen may perhaps be pardoned for hearing in all this din

of battle but the echo of the Schoolmen's guns. Whether the two-year-old

baby who dashes his bread-and-butter on the floor, in wrath at the lack

of marmalade, does it because of a prevailing effectual tendency in his

nature, or in consequence of his federal alliance with Adam, or from a

previous surfeit of plum-cake, is a question which seems to bear a

general family likeness to the inquiry, whether there is such a thing as

generic bread-and-butter, or only such specific slices as arouse infant

ire and nourish infant tissue. But around both classes of questions

strife has waxed hot. Both have called out the utmost strength of the

ablest minds, and both, however finespun they may seem to the

uninstructed eye, have contributed in no small measure to the mental and

moral health of the world. But while we would not make so great a

mistake as to look with a supercilious smile either upon the conflict

between Nominalism and Realism or on that between the Old and the New

School theology, (notwithstanding we might find countenance in Dr. Pond

of Bangor, who writes to Dr. Beecher, "In Maine we do not sympathize

very deeply in your Presbyterian squabbles, except to look on and laugh

at you all!") it may be permitted us as laymen to confess a greater

interest in the phenomena than in the event of the struggle. We leave

it, therefore, to our ecclesiastical contemporaries to descend into the

arena and fight their battles o'er again, content ourselves to stand

without and give thanks for the Divine voice that rises above the clash

of contending creeds, saying alike to wise and foolish, "God so loved

the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth

in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

Spite of all the truculence of his language, and through all his

strenuous thrust and parry, Dr. Beecher's sincerity, integrity, and

piety shine forth unclouded. Looking at this memorial in one aspect, he

seems to have assumed a charge which Mr. Lincoln has professed himself

unable to undertake, namely, to "run the churches." He evidently

believed that the Lord had committed to the clergy, of whom he was

chief, the building up of a great ecclesiastical edifice, whose

foundation should be laid in New England, but whose wings should

presently cover the whole land. Individual churches were the pillars of

this edifice. Now in Boston, now in New Haven, now at Cincinnati, he

watched its progress, noting a fault, praising an excellence, repairing

mistakes, strengthening weaknesses. It was the business and the delight

of his life. He had his agents throughout the country. The churches

might be many, but the cause was one. Ever watchful, ever active, he

spoke of his measures and his plans in just such terse, homely phrase as

any house-carpenter would use. Doubtless the fragile reverence of many a

clerical cumberer of the ground was shocked by his familiar use of their

sacred edge-tools. One can imagine the thrill of horror with which the

Reverend Cream Cheese, of the Church of the Holy (Self-) Assumption,

would hear the assertion, that "it was as finely organized a church as

ever trod shoe-leather." Our elegant Unitarian friends have probably

quite forgotten, and will hardly thank us for reminding them, that there

ever was a time when they "put mouth to ear, and hand to pocket, and

said, _St-boy!_" Our decorous Calvinistic D.D.s would scarcely recognize

their own dogmas at the inquiry-meeting, where "language of simplicity

came along, and they'd see me talking 'way down in language fit for

children.... And then the language of free agency and ability came along

... and they'd stick up their ears.... But next minute came along the

plea of morality and self-dependence, and I took them by the nape of the

neck and twisted their head off." There must have been great inertness

in New England at the time of his first visit to Boston, when "nobody

seemed to have an idea that there was anything but what God had locked

up and frozen from all eternity. The bottom of accountability had fallen

out. My first business was to put it in again." The coldness and

indifference of the Church, which ministers usually employ the vivid

language of the Bible regarding the ways of Zion to portray, he

described in the equally vivid, but less dignified New England

vernacular. "What did I do at Litchfield but to 'boost'? They all lay on

me, and moved very little, except as myself and God moved them. I spent

sixteen of the best years of my life at a dead lift in boosting." And we

greatly fear that the reverend seigniors in Synod and Presbytery,

notwithstanding their firm faith in Total Depravity, will be sadly

scandalized at hearing it announced, "That was a scampy concern, that

Old School General Assembly, and is still."

But he would make a great mistake who should infer, that, in thus busily

and energetically building up the temple, Dr. Beecher forgot the glory

of the Lord which was to dwell in it. He treated it, indeed, as a

business matter, but it was the business of immortal souls and of the

Most High God. No merely professional attachment bound him to it; there

was no contemplating it from a public and a private point of view; but

his whole inner and outer life was enlisted. Not only the religious

public, but, what is even more rare, his own family, were vitalized with

his spirit and drawn into his train. The doctrines that he preached from

the pulpit had been discussed over the woodpile in the cellar. His

public teachings had first been household words. The Epistles, death, a

preexistent state, were talked over by the fireside. Theology took

precedence even of the baby in the family letters. One breath announces

that he could not find any trout at Guilford, and the next that he has

preached his sermon on Depravity. Catharine writes, that the house needs

paper and paint very much, father's afternoon sermon perfectly

electrified her, and his last article will make all smoke again. Harriet

records, with great inward exultation, that, on their Western journey,

father preached, and gave them the Taylorite heresy on Sin and Decrees

to the highest notch, and what was amusing, he established it from the

"Confession of Faith," and so it went high and dry above all objections,

and delighted his audience, who had never heard it christened heresy. He

sets forth to attend the Synod, accompanied by his son Henry, with one

rein in the right hand, and one in the left, and an apple in each,

biting them alternately, and alternately telling Tom how to get the

harness mended, and showing Henry the true doctrine of Original Sin. His

fatherly heart yearned over his children; with voice and pen and a

constant watchful tenderness, he knew no rest till the whole eleven had

adopted the faith for which he so earnestly contended. The genius of

Napoleon elicited almost a personal affection, and he read every memoir

from St. Helena with the earnest desire of shaping out of those last

conversations some hope for his future. He mourned for Byron as for a

friend, lamenting sorely that wasted life, and was sure, that, if Byron

"could only have talked with Taylor and me, it might have got him out of

his troubles." Indeed, he evidently considered "Taylor and me," not to

say me and Taylor, the two pillars of Orthodoxy,--in no wise from

vanity, but in the simplicity of truth. He spoke of his own feats with

an openness that could proceed only from a guileless heart. The work of

the Lord was the one thing that absorbed him, to the oblivion of all

lesser interests. He was as absolutely free from vanity on the one side

as from envy on the other. Lyman Beecher as Lyman Beecher had no

existence. Lyman Beecher as God's servant was the verity. He rejoiced in

the prosperity of the sacred cause: if it was Beecher's hand that

furthered it, he exulted; if another than Beecher's, it was all the

same. There was no room in his mind for any petty personal jealousy. He

stood in nobody's way. He enjoyed every man's success. So the building

rose, it was of small moment who wielded the hammer. Ever on the watch

for indications of the mind and will of God, it was from zeal, not

ambition, that he waited for no precedence, but pushed through the

opened door, opened it never so narrowly. In doubt as to what is the

true meaning of some "providence," he advises "to take hold of the end

of the rope that is put into your hand, and pull it till we see what is

on the other end."

Yet, with all his electric enthusiasm, he was wise in his generation

and beyond his generation, and in some respects beyond our own. He

watched for souls as one that must give account. He adapted means to

ends. He was careful not by fierce opposition to push doubt into error.

When a drunkard died, he remembered that "his mother was an habitual

drinker, and he was nursed on milk-punch, and the thirst was in his

constitution"; so he hoped "that God saw it was a constitutional

infirmity, like any other disease." He reduced the dogma of Total

Depravity to the simple proposition, "that men by nature do not love God

supremely, and their neighbor as themselves." He stoutly resisted the

attempt to overawe belief, either his own or another's. He refused to

expend his strength in contending with the friends of Christ, when there

was so much to be done against his foes. Yet he was as far as possible

from that narrow sectarianism, which sees no evil in its own ranks and

no good in those of its adversaries. He denounced the faults of the

Orthodox as heartily as those of the Unitarians. Standing in the

forefront of Calvinism, he did not hesitate to say, "It is my deliberate

opinion that the false philosophy which has been employed for the

exposition of the Calvinistic system has done more to obstruct the march

of Christianity, and to paralyze the saving power of the Gospel, and to

raise up and organize around the Church the unnumbered multitude to

behold and wonder and despise and perish, than all other causes

beside.... Who of us are to suffer the loss of the most wood and hay by

the process [of purging out this false philosophy] I cannot tell; but

all mine is at the Lord's service at any time; and if all which is in

New England should be brought out and laid in one pile, I think it would

make a great bonfire."

Unfortunately, there was something worse in the Church than false

philosophy, unless this book very grievously falsifies facts. Her

bitterest foe would hardly dare charge upon Zion such iniquity as the

friendly unbosoming in these pages reveals. Wily intrigue, reckless

perversion of language, rule or ruin, such things as we regret to see

even in a political caucus, are to be found in abundance in the counsels

of men who profess to be working only for the glory of God and the good

of souls. Insinuations of craft and cowardice are set on foot, where

direct charges fail for want of evidence. Rumor is made to do the work

which reason cannot accomplish. Private letters are surreptitiously

published, the publication defended as done with the permission of the

writer, and testimony to the contrary refused a hearing. Extracts are

taken out of their connection and made to carry a different meaning from

that which they originally bore. What cannot be put down by evidence is

to be put down by odium. There is a "cool and deliberate determination

on the part of one half the Presbyterian Church to inflict upon the

other half all the injury possible." Dr. Beecher's son, himself a

prominent clergyman, is forced to confess, that, "for a combination of

meanness and guilt and demoralising power in equal degrees of intensity,

I have never known anything to exceed the conspiracy in New England and

in the Presbyterian Church to crush by open falsehood and secret

whisperings my father and others, whom they have in vain tried to

silence by argument or to condemn in the courts of the Church." And yet,

as Dr. Beecher stands forth in this biography, in native honor clad, so,

undoubtedly, does Brother Nettleton stand forth in his biography, and

Brother Woods in his, and Brother Wilson in his, and all the brethren in

theirs,--all honorable men. We venture to say that not one of these

reverend traducers and mischief-makers was "dealt with" by his church

for his evil-doing. We make no doubt he went through life without loss

of prestige or diminution of sanctity, and was bewailed at his death by

the sons of the prophets in tenderest phrase, "My father! my father! the

chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof."

We do not attribute these shameful proceedings to Orthodoxy, still less

to Christianity. "Perhaps it is a fact of our fallen nature, as Dr.

Beecher asserted, that "Adam and grace will do twice as much as grace

alone." But surely all these things happened unto them for ensamples,

and they are written for our admonition. Seeing how unlovely is the

spectacle of bickering and bitterness, let Christians of every name look

well to their steps, saying often one to another, and especially

repeating in concert, at the opening of every council, conference,

synod, and assembly,--

"Let dogs delight to bark and bite,

For God hath made them so;

Let bears and lions growl and fight,

For 't is their nature, too.

"But bretheren, we will never let

Our angry passions rise:

Our little hands were never made

To tear each other's eyes."

This biography, as the title-page asserts, is edited rather than

written. By familiar talk and private letters, the subject is made, as

far as possible, to tell his own story. What remains is supplied by the

pens of different members of the family and of old friends. The result

is a composite, the connections of whose parts we do not always readily

discern. But what the book lacks in coherence is more than made up in

accuracy and vividness. We obtain, by glimpses of the man, a far more

exact knowledge of his character and work than we should by ever so

steady a contemplation of some other man's symmetrical rendering of his

life. We feel the beating of his great, fiery heart. We delight in his

large, loving nature. We partake in his honest indignation. We smile,

sometimes not without tears, at his childlike simplicity. We sit around

the household hearth, join in the theological disputation, and share the

naive satisfaction of the whole Beecher family with themselves and each

other. We see how it was that the father set them all a-spinning each in

his own groove, but all bearing the unmistakable Beecher stamp. We feel

his irresistible energy, his burning zeal, his magnetic force yet

thrilling through the land and arousing every sluggish power to come to

the help of the Lord-against the mighty. For such a life there is indeed

no death.

_Engineer and Artillery Operations against the Defences of

Charleston Harbor in 1863._ Comprising the Descent upon Morris

Island, the Demolition of Fort Sumter, the Reduction of Forts

Wagner and Gregg. With Observations on Heavy Ordnance,

Fortifications, etc. By L. A. GILLMORE, Major of Engineers,

Major-General of Volunteers, and Commanding General of the Land

Forces engaged. Published by Authority. New York: D. Van

Nostrand.

Just after Major-General Hunter was removed--or, as the delicate

military phrase went, "temporarily relieved"--from the command of the

Department of the South, there was a report current in those parts of a

conversation, perhaps imaginary, between President Lincoln and the

relieved General, on his arrival at Washington. The gossip ran, that on

General Hunter's inquiring the cause of his removal, the good-natured

President could only say that "Horace Greeley said he had found a man

who could _do the job_." The job was the taking of Charleston, and the

"coming man" was Brigadier-General (now Major-General) Gillmore. The

so-called "siege of Charleston," after being the nine-days'-wonder of

two continents, dwindled to a mere daily item in the dingy newspapers of

that defiant city,--an item contemptuously sandwiched between the

meteorological record and the deaths and marriages. The "coming man"

came and went, being in his turn "temporarily relieved," and consigned

to that obscurity which is the Nemesis of major-generals. He is more

fortunate, however, than some of his compeers, in experiencing almost at

once the double resurrection of autobiography and reappointment. Whether

his new career be more or less successful than the old one, the

autobiography is at least worth printing, so far as it goes. Had an

instalment of it appeared when the siege of Charleston was at its

height, it would have been translated into a dozen European languages,

and would have been read more eagerly in London and Paris than even in

Washington. Even now it will be read with interest, and with respect to

rifled ordnance will be a permanent authority.

The total impression left behind by General Gillmore, in his former

career in the Department of the South, was that of an unwearied worker

and an admirable engineer officer. Military gifts are apt to be

specific, and a specialist seldom gains reputation in the end by being

raised to those elevated posts which require a combination of faculties.

If the object of General Gillmore's original appointment was to silence

Fort Sumter and to throw shell into Charleston, he was undoubtedly the

man who could "do the job." If the aim was to take Charleston with a

small military force, or even a large one, the wisdom of the choice was

less clear. If the intent was to govern an important Department, without

reference to further conquests,--to regulate trade, organize industry,

free the slaves, educate the freedmen,--then the selection was still

more doubtful. For this sphere of action, which had seemed so important

to Mitchell and to Hunter, was foreign to Gillmore's whole habits and

temperament, and he never could galvanize himself into caring for it.

His strong point, after all, was in dealing with metal rather than with

men, white or black. And as (since the disaster at Olustee) he can

hardly be charged with any squeamish unwillingness to throw upon others

the chief responsibility of any seeming failures of his own, it is

perhaps fortunate that in this book he is able to keep chiefly upon the

ground where he is strongest.

Yet, after all, the work is historical as well as scientific. And there

is in it such a mingling of great questions of philanthropy with mere

questions of grooving, and black soldiers jostle so inextricably with

black guns, that the common reader and the mere student of human nature

will find an interest in the book, as well as that intelligent lady of

our acquaintance, who, having heard of the brilliant ornithology of the

tropics, was eager to read about the hundred-pound "Parrotts" of South

Carolina.

As to the guns, the contributions of this superbly illustrated volume

are of the very greatest value. Nothing in print equals it, except Mr.

Holley's recent great treatise, some of whose tables are here also

employed by permission. Here we find the most authentic statements, both

as to the work done by the large rifled guns, and as to that trick of

bursting which is their gravest weakness. But for this, the heavy

ordnance of Parrott would be a magnificent success. And when we consider

that six two-hundred pounders and seventeen one-hundred pounders were

burst during the siege of Charleston, as recorded in this volume,--that

five one-hundred pounders are said to have been burst in a single week

on Morris Island at a later period, and that Admiral Porter reports six

similar instances during the first attack on Fort Fisher,--it was

certainly worth while in the publisher of this work, with his usual

liberality, to devote a long series of admirable plates, prepared under

the direction of Captain Mordecai, to the details of these dangerous

fractures.

It is generally admitted that the smaller "Parrott" guns, including the

thirty pounders, approach very near perfection. The large calibres have

precisely the same merits, as respects range, accuracy, and simplicity

of construction and manipulation. This their work against Fort Sumter

shows. But the deficiency of endurance belongs to the large guns alone;

since the smaller, after an immense amount of service, have shown no

sort of weakness. Yet, if the principle be correct, on which the latter

are strengthened, there seems no reason why the same degree of endurance

may not yet be secured for the larger. It is simply a mechanical

problem, whose solution cannot be far off.

The guns have burst both longitudinally and laterally, and in quite a

variety of position and service. General Turner's suggestion, that an

important secondary cause of bursting is the presence of sand within the

bore, among the ever-blowing sand-hills of the Sea Islands, seems

justified by the fact that in the naval service the accidents have been

far less frequent,--a thing in all respects fortunate, by the way, as

such explosions on board ship involve far greater sacrifice of life than

on land. Another secondary cause is the premature explosion of shell

within the bore, a defect which should be also remediable. Indeed, the

"Parrott" shell were at first notoriously defective, often bursting too

soon or not at all, and thus losing much of their usefulness; though

this defect has now been, in a great degree, remedied. The discussion of

the whole subject in this book seems reasonable and unprejudiced, and a

letter from the maker of the guns, at the end, gives with equal candor

his side of the question.

General Gillmore's narrative of his military operations is exceedingly

interesting, and generally clear and simple. The descent upon Morris

Island from Folly Island was undoubtedly one of the most skilful

achievements of the war. Under the superintendence of Brigadier-General

Vogdes, forty-seven pieces of artillery, with two hundred rounds of

ammunition for each gun, and provided with suitable parapets,

splinter-proof shelters, and magazines, were placed in position, by

night, within speaking distance of the enemy's pickets, and within view

of their observatories. And yet all this immense piece of work was done

with such profound secrecy, that, when the first shot from these

batteries fell among the enemy, it astounded them as if it had come from

the planet Jupiter. At the time, this brilliant success was merged in

the greater prospective brilliancy of the expected results. Now that the

results have failed to follow, we can perhaps do more justice to the

remarkable skill displayed in the preliminary movements.

So far as this report is concerned, General Gillmore shows no

disposition to do injustice to other officers. In reprinting the daily

correspondence with Admiral Dahlgren it might have been better to omit

or explain some hasty expressions of censure,--as where a young naval

lieutenant is charged (on page 333) with defeating an important measure

by acting without orders, though the fact was, that the officer was not

under General Gillmore's orders at all, and simply followed the

instructions of his immediate commander. But in dealing with officers of

higher rank he is more discreet, and his implied criticisms on Admiral

Dahlgren are not so severe as might have been expected. They are not

nearly so sharp as those which were constantly heard, during the siege,

from the officers of the navy; and the Admiral's telegraphic note on

page 327, "My chief pilot informs me a gale is coming on, and I am

coming into the creek," was the source of very unpardonable levity on

board some of the gun-boats.

In the few passages relating to the colored troops, in the main report,

the author shows evident pains in the statement, with rather

unsatisfactory results. The style suggests rather the adroitness of the

politician than the frankness of the soldier. This is the case, for

instance, in his narrative of the unsuccessful assault upon Fort Wagner,

where he uses language which would convey the impression, to nine

readers out of ten, that it was somehow a reproach to the Fifty-Fourth

Massachusetts that it was thrown into disorder, and that this disorder

checked the progress of the rest. Of course this was so,--because it led

the charge. It is not usual to say, in preparing a very brief narrative

of some railway collision, that the leading car "was thrown into a state

of great disorder, which reacted unfavorably upon, and delayed the

progress of, those which followed." Yet it is hardly less absurd to say

it of the leading battalion in a night attack on a fortress almost

impregnable. The leading car takes the brunt of the shock precisely

because it is in that position, and so does the leading regiment. How

well the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts bore the test is recognized by its

being apparently included in the final admission, that "the behavior of

the troops, under the circumstances, was unexceptionable." But a

fractional share in a line and a half of rather chilly praise is hardly

an equivalent for three lines of implied individual censure. Had

Brigadier-General Strong lived to tell the story of that night, it would

have been stated less diplomatically than by Major-General Gillmore.

The report of Major Brooks on the working qualities of the colored

troops is far more discriminating and more valuable, as are the appended

statements of Captain Walker and Lieutenant Farrand. Major Brooks, as

chief of engineering, sent circulars to six different officers who had

superintended fatigue parties in the trenches, covering inquiries on

five points relating to efficiency and courage. The report may be found

at page 259 of the book, constituting Appendix XIX. (misprinted XIV.) to

the Journal of Major Brooks.

The statement is probably as fair as the facts in the compiler's

possession could make it; yet it is seriously vitiated by the scantiness

of those facts. In answer to one question, for example, we are told that

"all agree that the colored troops recruited from Free States are

superior to those recruited from Slave States." But only two regiments

of the latter class appear to have come under Major Brooks's observation

at all. One of these was a perfectly raw regiment, which had never had a

day's drill when it was placed in the trenches, but which was kept

constantly at work there, although an order had been issued forbidding

white recruits from being so employed. The other was a regiment composed

chiefly of South Carolina _conscripts_, enlisted in utter disregard of

pledges previously given, and of course unwilling soldiers. It was

absurd to institute a comparison between these troops and a regiment so

well trained and officered as the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. Longer

experience has shown that there is no great choice between the Northern

and Southern negro, as military material; and the preferences of an

officer will usually depend upon which he has been accustomed to

command. Many, certainly, are firm in the conviction that the freed

slave makes the best soldier.

In other points the report carries with it some of the needful

corrections, at least for a careful reader. For instance, Major Brooks's

general summary is, that "the black is more timorous than the white, but

is in a corresponding degree more docile and obedient, hence more

completely under the control of his commander, and much more influenced

by his example." But when we read on the previous page that the white

soldiers were allowed to take their arms into the trenches, and that the

black soldiers were not, it makes the whole comparison nearly worthless.

It is notorious that the presence or absence of manhood in the bravest

soldier often seems to be determined by the mere fact that he has a gun

in his hand; and had the object been to annihilate all vestige of

military pride in the colored troops, it could not have been better

planned than by this and other distinctions maintained during a large

part of the siege of Charleston. That, while smarting under the double

deprivation both of a soldier's duty and of a soldier's pay, they should

have so behaved as to merit a report so favorable as that of Major

Brooks, is one of the greatest triumphs they have yet achieved. This

volume contains the record of what they did. The story of what they

underwent is yet to be told; for even of his two famous "orders" General

Gillmore judiciously makes no mention here.

Thus mingled, in this superb work, are the points of strength and

weakness. It remains only to add that the typographical and artistic

execution is an honor to our literature, and adds to the laurels

previously won in the same department by the publisher. Where all else

is so admirable, it seems a pity to have to lament the absence of an

index. The division of the work among several different authors makes

this defect peculiarly inconvenient.

_General Todleben's History of the Defence of Sebastopol,

1854-5._ A Review. By WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL. New York: D. Van

Nostrand.

It does not yet appear whether our great civil war will leave behind it

materials for debate as acrimonious as that which has gathered round the

affair in the Crimea. If General Butler and Admiral Porter live and

thrive, there seems a fair chance that it may. In that case it will be

interesting to read how General Todleben, in a parallel case,

substitutes the Russian bear for the monkey in the fable, pats each

combatant on the shoulder, and presents each with a shell, while

extracting for himself the oyster.

Mr. Russell's "Review" is rather a paraphrase and a condensation,--the

original work of the Russian General being too costly even for the

English market. The task of the English editor is done with his usual

spirit, and with all the more zest from an evident enjoyment of finding

Mr. Kinglake in the wrong. Between his sympathies as a Briton and his

sympathies as a literary man there is sometimes a struggle. But we

Americans can do more justice to Mr. Russell than in those days of

national innocence when we knew not Mackay and Gallenga and Sala; and it

must be admitted that the tone of the present book is manly and

impartial.

Kinglake's description of the Battle of the Alma will always remain as

one of the masterpieces of literature in its way; but it is noticeable

that Todleben entirely ignores some of the historian's most dramatic

effects, and also knocks away much of his underpinning by demolishing

the reputation of General Kiriakoff, his favorite Russian witness.

Kinglake says that Eupatoria was occupied by a small body of English

troops, and tells a good story about it: Todleben declares that the

Allies occupied it with more than three thousand men and eight

field-guns. Kinglake represents Lord Raglan as forcing the French

officers, with great difficulty, to disembark the troops at a spot of

his own selection: Todleben gives to Canrobert and Martinprey the whole

credit of the final choice and of all the arrangements. And so on.

On the side of the Russians, the most interesting points brought out by

Todleben are their fearful disadvantage as regarded the armament of the

infantry, (these being decimated by the rifles of the Allies long before

the Russians were near enough to use their smooth-bores,) and the

popular enthusiasm inspired by the war in Russia. "The Czar was aided by

the spontaneous contributions of his people. Great supplies were

forwarded by private individuals of all that an army could need." "From

all parts of the empire persons sent lint, bandages, etc., by post to

the army." These are phrases which bring us back to the daily experience

of our own vaster struggle.

As respects the Allies, Todleben uniformly credits the French army with

more of every military quality than the English, save personal courage

alone. From the commanding general to the lowest private, every

technical detail of duty seems to have been better done by the French.

At the height of the siege, it became "a war of sorties" on the part of

the Russians, and Todleben says,--"_Apropos_ of those sorties, it is

indispensable to make the remark here, that the French guarded their

trenches with much more vigilance, and defended them with incomparably

more tenacity, than the English. It frequently happened that our

volunteers approached the English trenches without being perceived, and

without even firing a single shot, and found the soldiers of the guard

sitting in the trench in the most perfect security, far from their

firelocks, which were stacked in piles. With the French, matters were

quite different. They were always on the _qui vive_, so that it rarely

happened we were able to get near them without having been remarked, and

without having to receive beforehand a sharp fire of musketry."

This, however, as Russell remarks, was when the English army was at its

lowest condition of neglect; but that simply transfers the indictment to

another count. And it is interesting to observe, that Russell's claim

for the English army and Todleben's claim for the Russian army come at

last to about the same point, namely, that the individual soldier is in

each case tough and resolute to the last degree. But this is only the

beginning of the merits of the French array, which to individual courage

superadds all that organization can attain.

As to the poor Turks, they are dismissed with much the same epitaph

which might long since have been written for our colored troops, if some

of our Department commanders had been suffered to have their way:--"As

to the Turks, the Allies despised them, and the English used them as

beasts of burden; in short, they lost three hundred men a day, till they

almost perished out, and the remains of their army were sent away."

In view of the grander issues of our own pending contest, with its

vaster scale of munitions and of men, one cannot always feel the due

interest in successive pages about battles like "Little Inkermann,"

where the total of Russian killed and wounded comprised twenty-five

officers and two hundred and forty-five men. But it is not numbers which

make a contest memorable. Even the mere contemplation of the Crimean War

had an appreciable influence on the military training of the American

people; and the clear narratives of Todleben, written "in his usual

elaborate engineering way, in which every word is used like a gabion,"

form a good sequel to that unconscious instruction.

_Vanity Fair._ A Novel without a Hero. By WILLIAM MAKEPEACE

THACKERAY. With Illustrations by the Author. New York: Harper &

Brothers. 3 vols. 12mo.

In the novels of Thackeray, essay is so much mixed up with narrative,

and comment with characterization, that they can hardly be thoroughly

appreciated in poor editions. The temptation to skip is almost

irresistible, when wisdom can be purchased only at the expense of

eyesight. We are therefore glad to welcome the commencement of a new

edition of his writings, over whose pages the reader can linger at his

pleasure, and quietly enjoy subtilties of humor and observation which in

previous perusals he overlooked. The present volumes, published by the

Harpers, are among the most tasteful and comely products of the

Cambridge University Press. Printed in large type on tinted paper,

elegantly bound in green cloth, and with a fac-simile of the author's

autograph on the cover, every copy has the appearance of being a

presentation copy. No English edition of "Vanity Fair" is equal to this

American one in respect either to convenience of form or beauty of

mechanical execution. The illustrations are numerous, well engraved, and

embody the writer's own conceptions of his scenes and characters, and

are often deliciously humorous.

"Vanity Fair," though it does not include the whole extent of

Thackeray's genius, is the most vigorous exhibition of its leading

characteristics. In freshness of feeling, elasticity of movement, and

unity of aim, it is favorably distinguished from its successors, which

too often give the impression of being composed of successive

accumulations of incidents and persons, that drift into the story on no

principle of artistic selection and combination. The style, while it has

the raciness of individual peculiarity and the careless ease of familiar

gossip, is as clear, pure, and flexible as if its sentences had been

subjected to repeated revision, and every pebble which obstructed its

lucid and limpid flow had been laboriously removed. The characterization

is almost perfect of its kind. Becky Sharp, the Marquis of Steyne, Sir

Pitt Crawley and the whole Crawley family, Amelia, the Osbornes, Major

Dobbin, not to mention others, are as well known to most cultivated

people as their most intimate acquaintances in the Vanity Fair of the

actual world. It has always seemed to us that Mr. Osborne, the father of

George, a representation of the most hateful phase of English character,

is one of the most vividly true and life-like of all the delineations in

the book, and more of a typical personage than even Becky or the Marquis

of Steyne. Thackeray's theory of characterization proceeds generally on

the assumption that the acts of men and women are directed not by

principle, but by instincts, selfish or amiable,--that toleration for

human weakness is possible only by lowering the standard of human

capacity and obligation,--and that the preliminary condition of an

accurate knowledge of human character is distrust of ideals and

repudiation of patterns. This view is narrow, and by no means covers

all the facts of history and human life, but what relative truth it has

is splendidly illustrated in "Vanity Fair." There is not a person in the

book who excites the reader's respect, and not one who fails to excite

his interest. The morbid quickness of the author's perceptions of the

selfish element, even in his few amiable characters, is a constant

source of surprise. The novel not only has no hero, but implies the

non-existence of heroism. Yet the fascination of the book is

indisputable, and it is due to a variety of causes besides its mere

exhibition of the worldly side of life. Among these, the perfect

intellectual honesty of the writer, the sad or satirical sincerity with

which he gives in his evidence against human nature, is the most

prominent. With all his lightness of manner, he is essentially a witness

under oath, and testifies only to what he is confident he knows. Perhaps

this quality, rare not only in novel-writing, but in all writing, would

not compensate for the limitation of his perceptions and the

repulsiveness of much that he perceives, were it not for the peculiar

charm of his representation. It is here that the individuality of the

man appears, and it presents a combination of sentiments and powers more

original perhaps than the matter of his works. Take from "Vanity Fair"

that special element of interest which comes from Thackeray's own

nature, and it would lose the greater portion of its fascination. It is

not so much what is done, as the way in which it is done, that surprises

and delights; and the manner is always inimitable, even when the matter

is common.

_Seaside and Fireside Fairies._ Translated from the German of

George Blum and Louis Wahl. By A. L. WISTAR. Philadelphia:

Ashmead & Evans.

These pretty fairy stories peep at us out of German-land through a

pleasant, clear translation, and they remind us how easily the

supernatural and loves to dwell in airborn castles. The beautiful

instinct of reverence common to child-life is readily taken advantage of

by writers for the young; but where in England we find in stories some

angel-mother who discovers the treachery of her governess and teaches

her own children, or a rotund uncle who tips the boys, providentially,

as it seems, in Germany the protectors of children possess no nearer

abode than the land of Fairy, and their presence is as rare as that of

the Indian "Vanishers." Perhaps, even among American children, the tales

which approximate more nearly to their experience hold the strongest

attractive power; yet, in the wide range of the commingled races of the

United States, there must be many children who long for stories of that

dear Dream-land familiar to their thoughts, and to whom these stories

would be a happy era in childhood's experience.

RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS.

Lectures on the Science of Language, delivered at the Royal Institution

of Great Britain, in February, March, April, and May, 1863. By Max

Mueller, Fellow of All-Souls College, Oxford; Correspondent de l'Institut

de France. Second Series. With Thirty-One Illustrations. New York. C.

Scribner. 12mo. pp. 622. $3.00.

Meditations on the Essence of Christianity, and on the Religious

Questions of the Day. By M. Guizot. Translated from the French, under

the Superintendence of the Author. New York. C. Scribner. 12mo. pp. 356.

$1.75.

The Beautiful Widow. By Mrs. Percy B. Shelley. Philadelphia. T. B.

Peterson & Brothers. 12mo. pp. 244. $2.00.

The Differential Calculus: with Unusual and Particular Analysis of its

Elementary Principles, and Copious Illustrations of its Practical

Application. By John Spare, A. M., M. D. Boston. Bradley, Dayton, & Co.

12mo. pp. xx., 244. $2.00.

Vest-Pocket Lexicon. An English Dictionary of all except Familiar Words;

including the Principal Scientific and Technical Terms, and Foreign

Moneys, Weights, and Measures. By Jabez Jenkins. Philadelphia. J. B.

Lippincott & Co. 18mo. pp. 563. 62 cts.

The American Conflict. A History of the Great Rebellion. By Horace

Greeley. Volume One. Hartford. O. D. Case & Co, 8vo. pp. 648. $5.00.