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