We have chosen a guarded and passionless wording for a topic on which
we wish to offer a few frankly spoken, but equally passionless remarks.
With the bitterness and venom and exaggeration of statement which both
English and American papers have interchanged in reference to matters of
opinion and matters of feeling connected with our national troubles we
do not now intermeddle. We would not imitate it: we regret it, and
on our own side we are ashamed of it. We have read editorials and
communications in our own papers so grossly vituperative and stinging in
the rancor of their spirit, that it would not have surprised us, if some
Englishmen, of a certain class, had organized a hostile association
against us in revenge for our truculent defiance. The real spirit of
bullyism, of the cockpit and the pugilistic ring, has been exhibited in
this interchange of newspaper opinion. The more is the reason why we
should not overlook or be blind to the real grievances in the case, nor
fail to give expression to them in the strongest way of which their
emphatic, but unembittered, statement will admit. Whether the London
"Times" is or is not an authoritative vehicle for the utterance of
average English opinion, and an index, in its general tone, of the
prevailing sentiment of that people, is a question which, so far from
wishing to decide, we must decline to entertain, as mainly irrelevant to
our present purpose. As a matter of fact, however, if we did accept that
print as an authority and a standard in English opinion, we should throw
more of temper than we hope to prevent escaping through our words into
the remarks which are to follow. That paper evidently represents the
opinion of one class, perhaps of more than one class of Englishmen. An
intelligent American reader of its comments on our affairs can always
read it, as even the best-informed Englishman cannot, with the skill and
ability to discern its spirit, often covertly mean, and to detect its
misrepresentations, some of the grossest of which are made the basis of
its arguments and inferences. From the very opening of our strife to the
last issue of that print which has crossed the water, its comments and
records relating to our affairs have presented a most ingenious and
mischievous combination of everything false, ill-tempered, malignant,
and irritating. It is at present exercising itself upon the financial
arrangements of our Government, and uttering prophecies, falsified
before they have come to our knowledge, about the inability or the
unwillingness of our loyal people to furnish the necessary money.
But enough of the London "Times." We have in view matters not identified
with the spirit and comments of a single newspaper, however influential.
We have in view graver and more comprehensive facts,--facts, too, more
significant of feelings and opinion. Stating our point in general terms,
which we shall reduce to some particulars before we close, we affirm
frankly and emphatically, that the North, we might even say this Nation,
as a government standing in solemn treaty relations with Great Britain,
has just cause of complaint and offence at the prevailing tone and
spirit of the English people, and press, and mercantile classes, towards
us, in view of the rebellion which is convulsing our land. That tone
and spirit have not been characterized by justice, magnanimity, or
true sympathy with a noble and imperilled cause; they have not been in
keeping with the professions and avowed principles of that people; they
have not been consistent with the former intimations of English opinion
towards us, as regards our position and our duty; and they have sadly
disappointed the hopes on whose cheering support we had relied when the
dark hours which English influence had helped to prepare for us should
come.
Before we proceed to our specifications, let us meet the suggestion
often thrown out, that we have been unduly and morbidly sensitive to
English opinion in this matter; and let us gratefully allow for the
exceptions that may require to be recognized in the application of our
charges against the English people or press as a whole. It has been
said that we have shown a timid and almost craven sensitiveness to the
opinions pronounced abroad upon our national struggle, especially those
pronounced by our own kinsfolk of England. It is urged, that a strong
and prosperous and united people, if conscious of only a rightful cause,
and professing the ability to maintain it, should be self-reliant,
independent of foreign judgment, and ready to trust to time and the sure
candor and fulness of the expositions which it brings with it, to set us
right before the eyes of the world. But what if another nation, supposed
to be friendly, known even to have recommended and urged upon us
the very cause for which we are contending, represents it in such a
contumelious and disheartening way as to show us that we have not even
her sympathy? Further, what if there is a spirit and a tone of treatment
towards us which suggests the possibility that at some critical moment
she may interfere in a way that will embarrass us and encourage our
enemies? The sensitiveness of a people to the possible power of mischief
that may lie against them in the hands of a jealous neighbor, ready to
be used at the will or caprice of its possessor, may indicate timidity
or weakness. But Great Britain, knowing very well what the feeling is,
ought to understand that it may consist with real strength, courage, and
right purposes. It is notorious now to all the civilized world, as
a fact often ludicrously and sometimes lugubriously set forth, that
millions of sturdy English folk have lived for many years, and live at
this hour, in a state of quaking trepidation as to the designs of a
single man of "ideas" across their Channel. What bulletin have the
English people ever read from day to day with such an intermittent pulse
as that with which they peruse quotations from the "Moniteur"? The
English people, whatever might have been true of them once, are now
the last people in the world--matched and overawed as they are by the
French--to charge upon another people a timid sensitiveness for even the
slightest intimations of foreign feeling and possible intentions.
We must allow also for exceptions to the sweep of the specific charges
under which we shall express our grievances at the general course of
English treatment towards us. There have been messages in many private
letters from Englishmen and Englishwomen of high public and of dignified
private station, there have been editorials and communications in a few
English papers, there have been brief utterances in Parliament, and
from leading speakers at political, mercantile, literary, and religious
assemblies, which have shown a full appreciation of the import of our
present strife, and have conveyed to us in words of most precious and
grateful encouragement the assurance that many hearts are beating with
ours across the sea. That the truculence and venom of some of our own
papers may have repressed the feeling and the utterance of this same
sympathy in many individuals and ways where it might otherwise have
manifested itself is not unnatural, and is very probable. We acknowledge
most gratefully the cheer and the inspiration which have come to us from
every word, wish, and act from abroad that has recognized the stake of
our conflict; and we will take for granted the real existence and the
glowing heartiness of much of the same which has not been expressed, or
has not reached us. Farther even than this we will go in tempering or
qualifying the utterance of our grievances. We will take for granted
that very much of the coldness, or antipathy, or contemptuousness, or
misrepresentation which we have recognized in the general treatment of
us and our cause by Englishmen is to be accounted to actual ignorance
or a very partial understanding of our real circumstances and of the
conditions of the conflict, and of the relations of parties to it. De
Tocqueville is universally regarded among us as the only foreigner
who ever divined the theoretical and the practical method of our
institutions. Englishmen, English statesmen even, have never penetrated
to the mystery of them. Many intelligent British travellers have seemed
to wish to do so, and to have tried to do so. But the study bothers
them, the secret baffles them. They give it up with a gruff impatience
which writes on their features the sentence, "You have no right to have
such complicated and unintelligible arrangements in your governments,
State and Federal: they are quite un-English." Our foreign kinsfolk seem
unwilling to realize the extent of our domain, and the size of some
of our States as compared with their own island, and incapable of
understanding how different institutions, forms, limitations, and
governmental arrangements may exist in the several States, independently
of, or in subordination to, the province and administration of the
Federal Government. Nearly every English journal which undertakes
to refer to our affairs will make ludicrous or serious blunders,
if venturing to enter into details. The "Edinburgh Review" kindly
volunteered to be the champion of American institutions and products in
opposition to the extreme Toryism of the "Quarterly." Sydney Smith took
us, our authors and early enterprises, under his special patronage,
and he wrote many favorable articles of that character. One would have
supposed, that, in the necessary preparation for such labors, he would
have acquired some geographical, statistical, and other rudimentary
knowledge about us, enough to have kept him from gross blunders.
Unluckily, for him and for us, for the sake of getting here on his money
double the interest which he could get at home, and not considering
that the greater the promised profit the greater the risk, he made
investments in some of our stock companies and bonds. When these
investments proved disastrous, he raved and fumed, calling upon our
Government--which had nothing more to do with the matter than had the
English Parliament--to make good his losses.
We are tempted for a moment to drop the graver thread of our theme to
relate an anecdote in illustration of our present point. It happened a
few years ago that we had as a household guest for two or three weeks an
English gentleman, well-informed, courteous, and excellent, who had been
for several years the editor of a London paper. On the day after his
domestication with us, which was within the first week of his arrival
at New York, sitting where we are now writing, after breakfast, he
announced that "he had a commission to execute for a friend, with a
person residing in Springfield." Opening his note-book, he handed us a
slip of paper bearing the gentleman's name and address, "Springfield,
Ohio." Furnishing him with writing-materials, we were about turning to
our own occupation, when, suddenly, with a quick exclamation, as if
recalling something, he said, "Sure, I have been in Springfield. I
remember a short, a very short time was allowed for dinner, as I came
from New York." We explained, or tried to explain to him, that the
Springfield through which he had passed and the Springfield to which he
was writing were in different States widely separated, and that there
were also several other "Springfields." To this he demurred, protesting
that it made matters quite confusing to foreigners to have the same
names repeated in different parts of the Country. In vain did we suggest
that all confusion was avoided by adding the abbreviated name of the
State. No! "It was very confusing." Suddenly, a thought occurred to
us, and, refreshing our memory by a glance at the Index of our English
"Road-Book," we suggested triumphantly that names were repeated for
different localities in England: thus, there are four Ashfords, two
Dorchesters, six Hortons, seven Newports, etc., etc. Our guest, with an
air and vehemence that quite outvied our triumph, exclaimed,--"Oh! but
they are in different shi_rrr_hes, in different shi_rrr_hes!" Sure
enough, one of his own _shires_ is a larger thing to an Englishman than
one of our States. He lives on an island which is to him larger than all
the rest of the world, though any one starting from the centre of it, on
a fast horse, unless he crossed the border into Scotland, could scarcely
ride in any direction twenty-four hours without getting overboard.
To the actual ignorance or obfuscation of mind of the majority of the
English people, as regards our country and its institutions, we are
doubtless to refer much of the ill-toned and seemingly unfriendly
comments made upon our affairs in their organs. Thus, it is intimated
to us by many English writers, that they regard the North now as
simply undertaking to patch up a Union founded and sustained by mean
compromises, an object which has already led us into many humiliating
concessions,--and that the moment we announce that we are striking a
blow for Liberty, we shall have their sympathy without stint or measure.
No Englishman who really understood our affairs would talk in that way.
One of the chief lures which instigated and encouraged the Southern
rebellion was the assurance, adroitly insinuated by the leading traitors
into their duped followers, that opposition by the rest of the country
to their schemes would take the form of an anti-slavery crusade, in
which form the opposition would be put down by the combined force of
those who did not belong to the Republican party. They were deceived.
Opposition to them took the form of a rallying by all parties to the
defence of the Constitution, the maintenance of the Union. For any
anti-slavery zeal to have attempted to divert the aroused patriotism of
the land to a breach of one of its fundamental constitutional provisions
would have been treacherous and futile. The majority of our enlisted
patriotic soldiers would have laid down their arms. If the leadings of
Providence shall direct the thickening strife into an exterminating
crusade against slavery, doubtless our patriots will wait on Providence.
But we could not have started in our stern work avowing that as an
object of our own. And as to the meanness of our concessions and
compromises for Union, we have to consider what woes and wrongs that
Union has averted. Has England no discreditable passages in her own
Parliamentary history? Have her attempts at governing large masses of
men, Christian and heathen, Roman Catholic and Protestant, and of all
sects, privileged and oppressed, never led her into any truckling or
tyrannical legislation, any concessions or compromises of ideal or
abstract right?
But we must come to our specifications, introducing them with but a
single other needful suggestion. We have not to complain of any acts or
formal measures of the English Government against us,--nor even of the
omission of any possible public manifestation which might have turned
to our encouragement or service. But it will be admitted that we have
grievances to complain of, if the tone and the strain of English opinion
and sentiment have been such as to inspirit the South and to dispirit
the North. If English comments have palliated or justified the original
and the incidental measures of the Rebellion,--if they have been zealous
to find or to exaggerate excuses for it, to overstate the apparent or
professed grounds of it, to wink at the meannesses and outrages by which
it has thriven,--if they have perverted or misrepresented the real
issue, have ridiculed or discouraged the purposes of its patriotic
opponents, have embarrassed or impeded their hopes of success, or have
prejudged or foreclosed the probable result,--it will be admitted, we
say, that we have grievances against those who have so dealt by us in
the hour of our dismay and trial. And it is an enormous aggravation of
the disappointment or the wrong which we are bearing, that it is visited
upon us by England just as we have initiated measures for at least
restraining and abating the dominant power of that evil institution for
our complicity in the support of which she has long been our unsparing
censor. We complain generally of the unsympathizing and contemptuous
tone of England towards us,--of the mercurial standard by which she
judges our strife,--of the scarcely qualified delight with which she
parades our occasional ill-successes and discomfitures,--of the baste
which she has made to find tokens of a rising despotism or a military
dictatorship in those measures of our Government which are needful
and consistent with the exigencies of a state of warfare, such as the
suspension, on occasions, of the _habeas corpus_, the suppression of
disloyal publications, the employment of spies, and the requisition of
passports,--and finally, of the contemptible service to which England
has tried to put our last tariff, and of her evident unwillingness to
have us find or furnish the finances of our war. Not to deal, however,
with generalities, we proceed to make three distinct points of an
argument that crowds us with materials.
Foremost among the grievances which we at the North may allege against
our brethren across the water--foremost, both in time and in the harmful
influence of its working--we may specify this fact, that the English
press, with scarce an exception, made haste, in the very earliest stages
of the Southern Rebellion, to judge and announce the hopeless partition
of our Union, as an event accomplished and irrevocable. The way in which
this judgment was reached and pronounced, the time and circumstances of
its utterance, and the foregone conclusions which were drawn from it,
gave to it a threatening and mischievous agency, only less prejudicial
to our cause, we verily believe, than would have been an open alliance
between England and the enemies of the Republic. This haste to announce
the positive and accomplished dissolution of our National Union was
forced most painfully upon our notice in the darkest days of our opening
strife. Those who undertook to guide and instruct English opinion in
the matter had easy means of informing themselves about the strangely
fortuitous and deplorable, though most opportune and favoring
combination of circumstances under which "Secession" was initiated and
strengthened. They knew that the Administration, then in its last days
of power, was half-covertly, half-avowedly in sympathy and in active
cooperation with the cause of rebellion. The famous "Ostend Conference"
had had its doings and designs so thoroughly aired in the columns of the
English press, that we cannot suppose either the editors or the readers
ignorant of the spirit or intentions of those who controlled the policy
of that Administration. Early information likewise crossed the water to
them of the discreditable and infamous doings and plottings of members
of the Cabinet, evidently in league with the fomenting treachery. They
knew that the head of the Navy Department had either scattered our
ships of war to the ends of the earth, or had moored them in helpless
disability at our dockyards,--that the head of the War Department had
been plundering the arsenals of loyal States to furnish weapons for
intended rebellion,--that the head of the Treasury Department was
purloining its funds,--and that the President himself, while allowing
national forts to be environed by hostile batteries, had formally
announced that both Secession itself and all attempts to resist it were
alike unconstitutional,--the effect of which grave opinion was to
let Secession have its way till _Coercion_ would seem to be not only
unconstitutional, but unavailing. Our English kinsfolk also knew that
our prominent diplomatic agents abroad, representing solemn treaty
relations with them of this nation as a unit, under sacred oaths of
loyalty to it, and living on generous grants from its Treasury, were
also in more or less of active sympathy with traitorous schemes. So far,
it must be owned, there was little in the promise of whatever might grow
from these combined enormities to engage the confidence or the good
wishes of true-hearted persons on either side of the water.
But whatever power of mischief lay in this marvellous combination of
evil forces, so malignly working together, the Administration in which
they found their life and whose agencies they employed was soon to yield
up its fearfully desecrated trust. A new order of things, representing
at least the spirit and purpose of that philanthropy and public
righteousness to which our English brethren had for years been prompting
us, was to come in with a new Administration, already constitutionally
recognized, but not as yet put into power. It was asking but little of
intelligent foreigners of our own blood and language, that they should
make due allowance for that recurring period in the terms of our
Government--as easily turned to mischievous influences as is an
interregnum in a monarchy--by which there is a lapse of four months
between the election and the inauguration of our Chief Magistrate. A
retiring functionary may work and plan and provide an immense amount of
disabling, annoying, and damaging experience to be encountered by his
successor. That successor may at a distance, or close at hand, be an
observer of all this influence; but whether it be simply of a partisan
or of a malignant character, he is powerless to resist it, and good
taste and the proprieties of his position seem to suggest that he make
no public recognition of it. Every Chief Magistrate of this Republic,
before its present head, acceded to office with its powers and dignities
and facilities and trusts unimpaired by his predecessor. We have thought
that among the thorns of the pillow on which a certain "old public
functionary" lays his head, as he watches the dismal working of elements
which he had more power than any other to have dispelled, not the
least sharp one must be that which pierces him with the thought of the
difference between the position which his predecessors prepared for him
and that which he prepared for his successor. Not among the least of
the claims which that successor has upon the profound and respectful
sympathy of all good men everywhere is the fact that there has been no
public utterance of complaining or reproachful words from his lips,
reflecting upon his predecessor, or even asking indulgence on the score
of the shattered and almost wrecked fabric of which we have put him in
charge. We confess that we have looked through the English papers for
months for some magnanimous and high-souled tribute of this sort to the
Man who thus nobly represents a sacred and imperilled cause. If such
tribute has been rendered, it has escaped our notice.
Now, as we are reflecting upon the tone and spirit of the English press
at the opening of the Rebellion, we have to recall to the minds of our
readers the fact, that in all its early stages, even down to and almost
after the proclamation of the President summoning a volunteer force to
resist it, we ourselves, at the North, utterly refused to consider the
Seceders as in earnest. We may have been stupid, besotted, infatuated
even, in our blindness and incredulity. But none the less did we, that
is, the great majority of us, regard all the threats and measures of the
South as something less formidable and actual than open war and probable
or threatening revolution. We were persuaded that the people of the
South had been wrought up by artful and ambitious leaders to wild alarm
that the new Administration would visit outrages upon them and try to
turn them into a state of vassalage. Utterly unconscious as we were of
any purpose to trespass upon or reduce their fullest constitutional
rights, we knew how grossly our intentions were misrepresented to them.
We applied the same measure to the distance between their threats and
the probability that they would carry them out which we knew ought to be
applied to the difference between our supposed and our real
intentions. In a word,--for this is the simple truth,--we regarded the
manifestations of the seceding and rebelling States--or rather of the
leaders and their followers in them--as in part bluster and in part a
warning of what might ensue, though it would not be likely to ensue when
their eyes were open to the truth. We were met by bold defiance, by
outrageous abuse, and with an almost overwhelming venting of falsehoods.
There was boastfulness, arrogance, assured claims of sufficient
strength, and daring prophecies of success, enough to have made any
cause triumphant, if triumph comes through such means. Still we were
incredulous, perhaps foolishly and culpably so,--but incredulous, and
unintimidated, and confident, none the less. We believed that wise,
forbearing, and temperate measures of the new Administration would
remove all real grievances, dispel all false alarms, and at least leave
open the way to bloodless methods of preserving the Union. Part of our
infatuation consisted in our seeing so plainly the infatuation of the
South, while we did not allow for the lengths of wild and reckless folly
into which it might drive them. We could see most plainly that either
success in their schemes, or failure through a struggle to accomplish
them, would be alike ruinous to them; that no cause standing on the
basis and contemplating the objects recognized by them could possibly
prosper, so long as the throne of heaven had a sovereign seated upon it.
Full as much, then, from our conviction that the South would not insist
upon doing itself such harm as from any fear of what might happen to
us, did we refuse to regard Secession as a fixed fact. At the period of
which we are speaking, there was probably not a single man at the North,
of well-furnished and well-balanced mind--who stood clear in heart
and pocket of all secret or interested bias toward the South--that
deliberately recognized the probability of the dissolution of the Union.
Very few such men will, indeed, recognize that possibility now, except
as they recognize the possibility of the destruction of an edifice of
solid blocks and stately columns by the grinding to powder of each large
mass of the fabric, so that no rebuilding could restore it.
This was the state of mind and feeling with which we, who had so much at
stake and could watch every pulsation of the excitement, contemplated
the aspect of our opening strife. But with the first echo from abroad of
its earliest announcements here came the most positive averments in the
English papers, with scarcely a single exception, that the knell of this
Union had struck. We had fallen asunder, our bond was broken, we had
repudiated our former league or fellowship, and henceforth what had been
a unit was to be two or more fragments, in peaceful or hostile relations
as the case might be, but never again One. It would but revive for us
the first really sharp and irritating pangs of this dismal experience,
to go over the files of papers for those extracts which were like
vinegar to our eyes as we first read them. Their substance is repeated
to us in the sheets which come by every steamer. There were, of course,
variations of tone and spirit in these evil prognostications and these
raven-like croaks. Sometimes there was a vein of pity, and of that kind
of sorrow which we feel and of that other kind which we express for
other people's troubles. Sometimes there was a start of surprise, an
ejaculation of amazement, or even profound dismay, at the calamity which
had come upon us. In others of these newspaper comments there was
that unmistakable superciliousness, that goading contemptuousness
of self-conceit and puffy disdain, which John Bull visits on all
"un-English" things, especially when they happen under their unfortunate
aspects. In not a few of these same comments there was a tone of
exultation, malignant and almost diabolical, as at the discomfiture of
a hated and dangerous rival. We have read at least three English
newspapers for each week that has passed since our troubles began; we
have been readers of these papers for a score of years. In not one of
them have we met the sentence or the line which pronounces hopefully,
with bold assurance, for the renewed life of our Union. In by far the
most of them there is reiterated the most positive and dogged averment
that there is no future for us. We are not unmindful of the manliness
and stout cheer with which a very few of them have avowed their wish and
faith that the Rebels may be utterly discomfited and held up before the
world in their shame and friendlessness, and have coupled with these
utterances words of warm sympathy and approval for the North. But these
ill-wishes for the one party and these good wishes for the other
party are independent of anything but utter hopelessness as to the
preservation or the restoration of the Union.
Now some may suggest that we make altogether too much of what so far
is but the expression of an opinion, and, at worst, of an unfavorable
opinion,--an opinion, too, which may yet prove to be correct. But the
giving of an opinion on some matters has all the effect of taking a
side, and often helps much to decide the stake. On very many accounts,
this expression of English opinion, at the time it was uttered and with
such emphasis, was most unwarranted and most mischievous. It is very
easy to distribute its harmful influence upon our interests and
prospects into three very different methods, all of which combined to
injure or obstruct the Northern cause,--the National cause. Thus, this
opinion of the hopelessness of our resistance of the men of our
Union was of great value to the Rebels as an encouragement under any
misgivings they might have; it was calculated to prejudice our position
in the eyes of the world; and it had a tendency to dispirit many among
ourselves. A word upon each of these points.--How quickening must it
have been to the flagging hopes or determination of the Rebels to read
in the English journals that they were sure of success, that the result
was already registered, that they had gained their purpose simply by
proposing it! Nor was it possible to regard this opinion as not carrying
with it some implication that the cause of the Rebels was a just one,
and was sure of success, if for other reasons, for this, too, among
them, namely, that it was just. Why else were the Rebels so sure of a
triumph? Was it because of their superior strength or resources? A very
little inquiry would have set aside that suggestion. Was it because
of the nobleness of their cause? A very frank avowal from the
Vice-President of the assumed Confederacy announced to liberty-loving
Englishmen that that cause was identified with a slavocracy. Or was
the Rebel cause to succeed through the dignity and purity of the means
enlisted in its service? It was equally well known on both sides of the
water by what means and appliances of fraud, perfidy, treachery, and
other outrages, the schemes of the Rebellion were initiated and pursued.
If, in spite of all these negatives, the English press prophesies
success to the Rebels, was not the prophecy a great comfort and spur
to them?--Again, this prophecy of our sure discomfiture prejudiced us
before the world. It gave a public character and aspect of hopelessness
to our cause; it invited coldness of treatment towards us; it seemed to
warn off all nations from giving us aid or comfort; and it virtually
affirmed that any outlay of means or life by us in a cause seen to be
impracticable would be reckless, sanguinary, cruel, and inhuman.--And,
once more, to those among ourselves who are influenced by evil
prognostications, it was most dispiriting to be told, as if by cool,
unprejudiced observers from outside, that no uprising of patriotism, no
heroism of sacrifice, no combination of wisdom and power would be of any
avail to resist a foreordained catastrophe.--In these three harmful
ways of influence, the ill-omened opinion reiterated from abroad had
a tendency to fulfil itself. The whole plea of justification offered
abroad for the opinion is given in the assertion that those who have
once been bitterly alienated can never be brought into true harmony
again, and that it is impossible to govern the unwilling as equals.
England has but to read the record of her own strifes and battles and
infuriated passages with Scotland and Ireland,--between whom and herself
alienations of tradition, prejudice, and religion seemed to make harmony
as impossible as the promise of it is to these warring States,--England
has only to refresh her memory on these points, in order to relieve us
of the charge of folly in attempting an impossibility. So much for the
first grievance we allege against our English brethren.
Another of our specifications of wrong is involved in that already
considered. If English opinion decided that our nationality must
henceforth be divided, it seemed also to imply that we ought to divide
according to terms dictated by the Seceders. This was a precious
judgment to be pronounced against us by a sister Government which
was standing in solemn treaty relations with us as a unit in our
nationality! What did England suppose had become of our Northern
manhood, of the spirit of which she herself once felt the force? There
was something alike humiliating and exasperating in this implied advice
from her, that we should tamely and unresistingly submit to a division
of continent, bays, and rivers, according to terms defiantly and
insultingly proposed by those who had a joint ownership with ourselves.
How would England receive such advice from us under like circumstances?
But we must cut short the utterance of our feelings on this point, that
we may make another specification,--
Which is, that our English critics see only, or chiefly, in the fearful
and momentous conflict in which we are engaged, "a bursting of the
bubble of Democracy"! Shall we challenge now the intelligence or the
moral principle, the lack of one or the other of which is betrayed
in this sneering and malignant representation--this utter
misrepresentation--of the catastrophe which has befallen our nation?
Intelligent Englishmen know full well that the issue raised among us
does not necessarily touch or involve at a single point the principles
of Democracy, but stands wide apart and distinct from them. We might
with as much propriety have said that the Irish Rebellion and the Indian
Mutiny showed "the bursting of the bubble of Monarchy." The principles
of Democracy stand as firm and find our people as loyal to them in every
little town-meeting and in every legislature of each loyal State in the
Union as they did in the days of our first enthusiastic and successful
trial of them. Supposing even that the main assumption on which so many
Englishmen have prematurely vented their scorn were a fact; we cannot
but ask if the nation nearest akin to us, and professing to be guided
in this century by feelings which forbid a rejoicing over others' great
griefs, has no words of high moral sympathy, no expressions of regretful
disappointment in our calamities? Is it the first or the most emphatic
thing which it is most fitting for Christian Englishmen to say over the
supposed wreck of a recently noble and promising country, the prospered
home of thirty millions of God's children,--that "a bubble has burst"?
We might interchange with our foreign "comforters" a discussion by
arguments and facts as to whether a monarchy or a democracy has about it
more of the qualities of a bubble, but the debate would be irrelevant
to our present purpose. We believe that Democracy in its noblest and
all-essential and well-proved principles will survive the shock which
has struck upon our nation, whatever the result of that shock may yet
prove to be. We believe, further, that the principles of Democracy will
come out of the struggle which is trying, not themselves, but something
quite distinct from them, with a new affirmation and vindication. But
let that be as it may, we are as much ashamed for England's sake as
we are aggrieved on our own account that from the vehicles of public
sentiment in "the foremost realm in the world for all true culture,
advanced progress, and the glorious triumphs of liberty and religion,"
what should be a profoundly plaintive lament over our supposed ruin
is, in reality, a mocking taunt and a hateful gibe over our failure in
daring to try an "un-English" experiment.[A]
[Footnote A: The following precious utterances of John Bull moralizing,
which might have been spoken of the Thugs in India, or some provincial
Chinese enterprise, are extracted from the cotton circular of Messrs.
Neill, Brothers, addressed to their correspondents, and dated,
Manchester, Aug. 21. We find the circular copied in a _religious_
newspaper published in London, without any rebuke. "The North will have
to learn the limited extent of her powers as compared with the
gigantic task she has undertaken. One and perhaps two defeats will be
insufficient to reverse the false education of a lifetime. Many lessons
will probably be necessary, and, meantime, any success the Northern
troops may obtain will again inflame the national vanity, and the
lessons of adversity will need to be learned over again. More effect
will probably be produced by sufferings at home, by the ruin of the
higher classes and pauperization of the lower, and by the general
absorption of the floating capital of the country"! There, good reader,
what think you of the cotton moralizing of a comfortable factor,
dwelling in immaculate England, dealing with us in cotton, and with the
Chinese in opium?]
The stately "Quarterly Review," in its number for July, uses a little
more of dignity in wording the title of an article upon our affairs
thus,--"Democracy on its Trial"; but it makes up for the waste of
refinement upon its text by a lavish indulgence in scurrility and
falsehood in its comments. As a specimen, take the following. Living
here in this goodly city of Boston, and knowing and loving well its
ways and people, we are asked to credit the following story, which the
Reviewer says he heard from "a well-known traveller." The substance of
the story is, that a Boston merchant proposed to gild the lamp over his
street-door, but was dissuaded from so doing by the suggestion of a
friend, that by savoring of aristocracy the ornamented gas-burner would
offend the tyrannical people and provoke violence against it! This, the
latest joke in the solemn Quarterly, has led many of its readers here to
recall the days of Madame Trollope and the Reverend Mr. Fiddler, those
veracious and "well-known travellers." There are, we are sorry to say,
many gilded street-lamps, burnished and blazing every night, in Boston.
But instead of standing before the houses of our merchants, they
designate quite a different class of edifices. Our merchants, as a
general thing, would object, both on the score of good taste and on
grounds of disagreeable association with the signal, to raise such an
ornament before the doors of their comfortable homes. The common people,
however, so far from taking umbrage at the spectacle, would be rather
gratified by the generosity of our grandees in being willing to show
some of their finery out of doors. This would be the feeling especially
of that part of our population which is composed of foreigners, who have
been used to the sight of such demonstrations in their native countries,
which are not democracies. In fact, we suspect that the reason why
English "flunkeys" hate American "flunkeyism," with its laced coachmen,
etc., is because mere money, by aping the insignia of rank, its gewgaws
and trumpery, shows too plainly how much of the rank itself depends upon
the fabrics and demonstrations through which it sets itself forth. We
can conceive that an English nobleman travelling in this country, who
might chance in one of our cities to see a turn-out with its outriders,
tassels, and crests, almost or quite as fine as his own, if he were
informed that it belonged to a plebeian who had grown vastly rich
through some coarse traffic, might resolve to reduce all the display
of his own equipage the moment he reached home. The labored and
mean-spirited purpose of the writer of the aforesaid article in the
Quarterly, and of other writers of like essays, is to find in our
democracy the material and occasion of everything of a discreditable
sort which occurs in our land. Now we apprehend, not without some means
of observation and inquiry, that the state and features of society in
Great Britain and in all our Northern regions are almost identically the
same, or run in parallelisms, by which we might match every phenomenon,
incident, prejudice, and folly, every good and every bad trait and
manifestation in the one place with something exactly like it in the
other. During a whole score of years, as we have read the English
journals and our own, the thought has over and over again suggested
itself to us that any one who had leisure and taste for the task might
cut out from each series of papers respectively, for a huge commonplace
book, matters of a precisely parallel nature in both countries. A simple
difference in the names of men and of places would be all that would
appear or exist. Every noble and every mean and every mixed exhibition
of character,--every act of munificence and of baseness,--every
narrative of thrilling or romantic interest,--every instance and example
of popular delusion, humbug, man-worship, breach of trust, domestic
infelicity, and of cunning or astounding depravity and hypocrisy,--every
religious, social, and political excitement,--every panic,--and every
accident even, from carelessness or want of skill,--each and all these
have their exact parallels, generally within the same year of time in
Great Britain and in our own country. The crimes and the catastrophes,
in each locality, have seemed almost repetitions of the same things on
either continent. Munificent endowments of charitable institutions, zeal
in reformatory enterprises and in the correction of abuses, have shown
that the people of both regions stand upon the same plane of humanity
and practical Christian culture. The same great frauds have indicated
in each the same amount of rottenness in men occupying places of trust.
Both regions have had the same sort of unprincipled "railway kings" and
bankers, similar railroad disasters, similar cases of the tumbling
down of insecure walls, and of wife-poisoning. A Chartist insurrection
enlists a volunteer police in London, and an apprehended riot among
foreigners is met by a similar precaution in one of our cities. An
intermittent controversy goes on in England about the interference of
religion with common education, and Boston or New York is agitated at
the same time with the question about the use of the Bible in the public
schools. Boston rowdies mob an English intermeddler with the ticklish
matters of our national policy, and English rowdies mob an Austrian
Haynau. England goes into ecstasies over the visit of a Continental
Prince, and our Northern States repeat the demonstration over the visit
of a British Prince. The Duke of Wellington alarms his fellow-subjects
by suggesting that their national defences would all prove insufficient
against the assaults of a certain terrible Frenchman, and an American
cabinet official echoes the suggestion that England may, perhaps, try
her strength in turn against us. There are evidently a great many
bubbles in this world, and, for all that we know to the contrary, they
are all equally liable to burst. Some famous ones, bright in royal
hues, have burst within the century. Some more of the same may, not
impossibly, suffer a collapse before the century has closed. So that,
for this matter, "the bubble of Democracy" must take its chance with the
rest.
We have one more specification to make under our general statement
of reasons why the North feels aggrieved with the prevailing tone of
sentiment and comment in the English journals in reference to our great
calamity. We protest against the verdict which finds expression in all
sorts of ways and with various aggravations, that, in attempting to
rupture our Union, and to withdraw from it on their own terms, at their
own pleasure, the seceding States are but repeating the course of the
old Thirteen Colonies in declaring themselves independent, and sundering
their ties to the mother country. There is evidently the rankling of an
old smart in this plea for rebels, which, while it is not intended to
justify rebellion in itself, is devised as a vindication of rebels
against rebels. There is manifest satisfaction and a high zest, and
something of the morally awful and solemnly remonstrative, in the way in
which the past is evoked to visit its ghostly retribution upon us. The
old sting rankles in the English breast. She is looking on now to see us
hoist by our own petard. These pamphlet pages, with their circumscribed
limits and their less ambitious aims, do not invite an elaborate dealing
with the facts of the case, which would expose the sophistical, if not
the vengeful spirit of this English plea, as for rebels against rebels.
A thorough exposition of the relations which the present Insurrection
bears to the former Revolution would demand an essay. The relations
between them, however, whether stated briefly or at length, would be
found to be simply relations of difference, without one single point
of resemblance, much less of coincidence. We can make but the briefest
reference to the points of contrast and unlikeness between the two
things, after asserting that they have no one common feature. It might
seem evasive in us to suggest to our English critics that they should
refresh their memories about the causes and the justification of our
Revolution by reading the pages of their own Burke. We are content to
rest our case on his argument, simply affirming that on no one point
will it cover the alleged parallelism of the Southern Rebellion.
The relations of our States to each other and to the Union are quite
unlike those in which the Colonies stood to England. England claimed by
right of discovery and exploration the soil on which her Colonies here
were planted, though she had rival claimants from the very first. A
large number of the Colonists never had any original connection with
England, and owed her no allegiance. Holland, Sweden, and other
countries furnished much of the first stock of our settlers, who thought
they were occupying a wild part of God's earth rather than a portion of
the English dominions. The Colonies were not planted at public charge,
by Government cost or enterprise. The English exiles, with but slender
grounds of grateful remembrance of the land they had left, brought with
them their own private means, subdued a wilderness, extinguished the
aboriginal titles, and slowly and wearily developed the resources of the
country. Often in their direst straits did they decline to ask aid from
England, lest they might thereby furnish a plea for her interference
with their internal affairs. Several of the Colonies from the first
acted upon their presumed independence, and resolved on the frank
assertion of it as soon as they might dare the venture. That time for
daring happened to be contemporaneous with a tyrannical demand upon them
for tribute without representation. Thus the relations of the Colonies
to England were of a hap-hazard, abnormal, incidental, and always
unsettled character. They might be modified or changed without any
breach of contract. They might be sundered without perjury or perfidy.
How unlike in all respects are the relations of these States to each
other and to the Union! Drawn together after dark days and severe
trials,--solemnly pledged to each other by the people whom the Union
raised to a full citizenship in the Republic,--bound by a compact
designed to be without limitation of time,--lifted by their
consolidation to a place and fame and prosperity which they would never
else have reached,--mutually necessary to each other's thrift and
protection,--making a nation adapted by its organic constitution to the
region of the earth which it occupies,--and now, by previous memories
and traditions, by millions of social and domestic alliances, knit by
heart-strings the sundering of which will be followed by a flow of the
life-blood till all is spent,--these terms are but a feeble setting
forth of the relations of these States to each other and to the Union.
Some of these States which have been voted out of the Union by lawless
Conventions owe their creation to the Union. Their very soil has been
paid for out of the public treasury. Indeed, the Union is still in debt
under obligations incurred by their purchase.
How striking, too, is the contrast between the character and method of
the proceedings which originated and now sustain the Rebellion, and
those which initiated and carried through the Revolution! The Rebellion
exhibits to us a complete inversion of the course of measures which
inaugurated the Revolution. "Secession" was the invention of ambitious
leaders, who overrode the forms of law, and have not dared to submit
their votes and their doings to primary meetings of the people whom
they have driven with a despotic tyranny. In the Revolution the
people themselves were the prime movers. Each little country town and
municipality of the original Colonies, that has a hundred years of
history to be written, will point us boastfully to entries in its
records showing how it _instructed_ its representatives first to
remonstrate against tyranny, and then to resist it by successive
measures, each of which, with its limitations and its increasing
boldness, was dictated by the same people. The people of Virginia,
remembering the ancient precedent which won them their renown,
_intended_ to follow it in an early stage of our present strife. They
allowed a Convention to assemble, under the express and rigid condition,
that, if it should see fit to advise any measure which would affect the
relations of their State to the Union, a reference should be made of it,
prior to any action, to the will of the people. The Convention covertly
and treacherously abused its trust. In secret session it authorized
measures on the strength of which the Governor of the State proceeded
to put it into hostile relations with the Union. When the foregone
conclusion was at last farcically submitted to the people, a perjured
Senator of the National Congress notified such of them as would not
ratify the will of the Convention, that they must leave the State.
Once more, in our Revolution, holders of office and of lucrative trusts
in the interest of England were to a man loyal to the Home Government,
and our independence was effected without any base appliances. In the
work of secession and rebellion, the very officials and sworn guardians
of our Government have been the foremost plotters. They have used their
opportunities and their trusts for the most perfidious purposes. Nothing
but perjury in the very highest places could have initiated secession
and rebellion, and to this very moment they derive all their vigor in
the council-chamber and on the field from forsworn men, most of whom
have been trained from their childhood, nurtured, instructed, and fed,
and all of whom have been fostered in their manhood, and gifted with
their whole power for harming her, by the kindly mother whose life they
are assailing. If the Man with the Withered Hand had used the first
thrill of life and vigor coming into it by the word of the Great
Physician to aim a blow at his benefactor, his ingratitude would have
needed to stand recorded only until this year of our Lord, to have been
matched by deeds of men who have thrown this dear land of ours into
universal mourning. Yet our English brethren would try to persuade
us that these men are but repeating the course and the deeds of the
American Revolution!
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