Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 5/The Fourth of July, 1861
THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1861.
Since the meeting of the extraordinary Congress at Washington, English people have begun to feel that the great scene of the second American Revolution is really unfolding, and that every day has been bringing on mighty issues, while we were complaining that nothing was being done. This is not the only nonsense that we have talked about an affair which we ought to have understood better. We are now perceiving how much more expedient it is to learn than to criticise; and, as events are marching now, we must be dull scholars not to get on fast.
The meeting of Congress on the Fourth of July is a singular incident in itself. The associations with the assemblage of the two Houses are of intolerable cold out of doors, and an oppressive artificial heat within, alternating with bitter draughts in the passages of the Capitol, and on the staircases of the boarding-houses. The bare trees in Pennsylvania Avenue stand iron-stiff in the frost. The pathways are sheeted with ice, or raised two or three feet by masses of hard snow. The daily banquets are gay, with the steaming dinners, the reviving wine, the vast furnace-fires of anthracite coal, and the abundance of warm light. The business going on in the Capitol is slight in quality and moderate in quantity, in ordinary times; there is plenty of amusement in flitting about to hear the best speakers; the balls are gay, and the session, from the 4th of December to the 4th of March, is a long winter holiday for the Congressional class of society. On the Fourth of July, on the contrary, they are all at their homes, except the Southern members, who have to flee to watering-places, from the fever of their own region. In town or country, among the orchards of New England, or the pine-barrens, or cotton-fields of the Middle States, the citizens rise to a hot day. From daybreak, when they get up to hang out their flags and load their cannon in the cool of the morning, till night when the fireflies stream from the sprays of the trees, like a cascade of green light, all is planned with a view to bearing the heat. City banquets, to celebrate Independence, are held in cool, shaded, breezy halls; and, in the country, the citizens meet in groves, or on lake sides, to enjoy oratory and ices, patriotic songs and fruit in the shade. This year, the scene was unlike any former celebration of the great day. The trees in Pennsylvania Avenue were in full leaf; and sun-blinds had replaced the warm curtains in all windows. The crowd to see the President pass to the Capitol were not muffled up, and blue and pinched, but rather sweltering in the heat, and undergoing “dissolution and thaw” for the sight which must be so memorable. In the Capitol the demand must have been for air and shade, instead of hot flues; and the somewhat dreary landscape from the top of the steps must have been softened by the verdure which many of the members had never seen there before. But there were greater differences. Far away in various directions were lines of camps, with their martial music and hum of voices celebrating the day. Instead of holiday festivity, consecrated by thanksgivings for the blessing of a glorious and prosperous polity, here was a meeting between the Executive Government and the Legislature, to announce to the world the disgrace and calamity of a great rebellion, and to take measures for carrying on a fierce civil war. The contrast between this and every preceding Fourth of July may well fix the attention of the world; and the utterances of the day could not but satisfy European observers that they have been over ready to criticise before they possessed materials for a judgment.
Some excuse for such a mistake is found in Mr. Seward’s presence in the Cabinet. We have heard enough of Mr. Seward’s speeches within two years as candidate for the Presidentship, as a retiring politician, and as minister, to have a decided opinion about both his honesty and his statesmanship; and we cannot but be prejudiced against any government which has him for one of its chief members. Thus far, criticism has been warranted, from whatever quarter it came; for it is impossible that a sensible politician or an honourable man could have changed his tone so often as Mr. Seward, or said such indefensible things. But it may be a question how far the President is censurable for having such a minister. Which of the rumours on this matter are true, or whether any of them, it is unnecessary to inquire. The thing that is generally understood on the spot is that Mr. Seward’s presence in the Cabinet is a mistake, into which the President was led by intrigue; and that, of all Mr. Lincoln’s anxieties, this is perhaps the greatest. It was known, many weeks ago, that there was difficulty in reconciling two parties in the Cabinet, represented by Mr. Seward and Mr. Chase. It now appears that Mr. Chase is strong in his position, clear in his aims, and, as always, steadfast and honest in his avowals. He may be taken as an exponent of the spirit and views of the government, while Mr. Seward may be regarded, I trust, as a temporary and mischievous accident.
Up to this meeting of Congress a deep obscurity hung over both the North and the South. Of the South next to nothing was known on the same continent till the letters of the “Times’” correspondent lifted the curtain here and there. A group of fugitive planters, every few days, might tell of the state of affairs in their own neighbourhood; and there were newspapers and manifestoes of the Confederate Government: but planters ready to fly were exactly the men least likely to be informed of Secessionist affairs; and the Southern newspapers are really unreadable—which they would not be if they contained genuine information. They are, as far as we can judge here, full of dreams and boasts, of virulent slander, and of lies prepared for a local or general public which must be humoured or led. From amidst this ugly haze, the “Times’” correspondent has brought out groups of clear facts from which it is possible to derive some definite impressions and anticipations. The effect of the series of letters is undoubtedly to satisfy people in general that the Confederacy cannot succeed, if the Federal Government decides that it shall not. Throughout the North this will be learned for the first time through the Englishman’s correspondence with home; and we may expect to see one effect of his disclosures in the homage which will now be paid him in places where very rash and insulting things have been publicly said of him, merely because he went to see the South with his own eyes. It showed a sad want of self-respect in certain Northern citizens to assume that to see the South must be to advocate its cause; just as it was, more recently, to fancy that because England would not take sides with the North, she must be “aiding and comforting” the South. Such incidents show that the Free States have been much like Europe in their ignorance of the actual plans, operations, and resources of the Confederacy.
Almost as great an obscurity hung about the Federal Government till the Fourth of July. I need say nothing here of the folly of complaining of the President for his apparent slowness, as long as there was no evidence of irresolution. Everybody now admits,—as one consequence of some grievous accidents to the Federal forces,—that a trustworthy military organisation cannot be made out of a crowd of civilians in a day, or a week, or a month. There was no due supply of officers; and they cannot be had for the asking. When the great converging forces began to move southwards, the world began to see what General Scott and the Government had been doing; and perhaps we may end in wondering how so much could have been effected in so short a time. This march into Virginia, after Washington was secured, revealed the action and intention of the War Office; and at the same time, the frank explanations of the President and the Finance Minister have made all plain as to the policy of the Government, and the means which it is proposed to employ.
What we may be said to know, then, is that the Secessionist public are still in a state of delusion about the prospects of their cause, imagining that England and France will either sustain it, or prevent any disastrous results of the conflict: that the Southern public is still deceived about the amount and quality of force that the North has produced: that the Southern troops are not well furnished for the war; nor disposed for the discipline which their commanders know to be necessary: and that poverty presses hard upon large sections of society in the Slave States, where the citizens’ resources are drawn from them without any prospect of being replaced. They give their cotton and tobacco to the Confederate Government for paper acknowledgments, which serve as currency now, and are to be redeemed some time or other: but there is nothing to sell, and nothing to buy; no prospect of an income for anybody, heavy taxes to pay, and the land producing less than ever before, because those who should look to it are gone to the wars, or fugitives to the Free States. If the Confederate leaders are more able than they at present appear to sustain the conflict they have provoked, a little time will show it. At present, nobody believes that they can stand their ground.
One cause of this impression is the character of the war which they wage. It is not warfare, but assassination. It seems to be copied from the Indians, whom they have mixed with their force;—fellows whose notion of war is brandishing their long knives in the streets of Fredericksburg by day, and skulking at night to destroy as many enemies as possible in detail. All through New England there are households mourning the loss of some son or brother who has been murdered at his post in the dark, without a chance of meeting his enemy. There must always be danger of the infection of this mode of warfare spreading through revenge; and there has been one striking instance of this already on the Northern side. A citizen has been so moved by the lynching of a brother in one of the Slave States, where the young man was hanged, under circumstances of cruel aggravation, merely for his Northern birth, that the thirst for revenge seems unquenchable. The survivor is described as incessantly on the watch to kill somebody in the Confederate camps; and as reckoning up his number as he would account for the business of his life. This seems, however, to be a single instance; and the Northern notion is of fighting battles in open field in broad day, and pressing the enemy southwards by the steady advance of weighty forces.
The question of success manifestly depends on the proportion of the Union party to the Secessionists in the Slave States. It remains true, as it has been from the beginning, that if the Federal Government is right in its estimate of the Union sentiment which exists in every State, there can be no doubt of the issue: and all controversy as to the event must turn on the soundness or unsoundness of that estimate. No sensible person in any foreign country will pretend to be able to form a judgment upon it, while the only public evidence is the flight of planters to the Free States, and the only testimony that which they bring with them from their neighbours. The truth will be known when the Federal forces render it safe for Union men to declare themselves; and not till then.
One of the strangest characteristics of the respective antagonists is their way of raising means for their struggle. The Confederate authorities rely on getting an opportunity of selling the cotton and tobacco they have collected as tribute: but this mode of taxation was not resorted to till they had got all they could by direct levies and confiscations, and seizure of debts due to the North. They advocate direct taxation with a vengeance though as far as can well be from liking democratic government. Their rule has always been oligarchical and extremely despotic; yet their mode of taxation is the most direct that can be seen anywhere in the world. Meantime, in the democratic North, the Finance Minister brings forward a scheme of an opposite character, and there are still champions of the Morrill tariff. This latter production,—the creature of ignorance and cunning,—will soon be beyond the reach of argument. It is remarkable; and perhaps it required an absurdity as great as this to rouse the mercantile class and the consuming public to resistance to the class-legislation of the manufacturers: but it will remain on record as a proof of the backward state of political economy among an enlightened and business-like people. It really seems as if nobody was qualified to check the nonsense that is talked by the promoters of the most suicidal commercial scheme of modern times; for the public takes no effectual notice while desperate injuries are inflicted on trade, and has no correction ready for journalists who write about it without any idea of the bearing of what they say. While such a thing can be, it is no wonder that Mr. Chase proposes a scheme in which direct taxation bears a very small share. The Morrill tariff was made foolishly unproductive by the protection to native industry being made to depend more on obstruction in the Custom House than amount of duty. Its advocates think they have defended it perfectly when they show that there are articles on which the duty is not so high as in former tariffs; and they either do not see, or do not wish their neighbours to see, that it is the amount of obstruction of any kind, keeping out foreign commodities, which constitutes the prohibition, and not necessarily the one impediment of a high duty. Nobody gains, however, by the waste of time and toil which the Morrill tariff imposes; and if the prohibition of foreign manufactures is determined upon, it is a pity that the Government should not have the benefit,—dearly bought as we know it would be—of high duties, rather than that everybody’s temper should be tried by the most singular aggregate of inconveniences that could be devised. It pays nobody that the duty should be charged in part by weight, and in part ad valorem. It profits nobody that merchants and officials should be for ever unpacking and repacking goods in transit, and counting threads, and measuring inches, and weighing and computing till nobody has any temper left. A heavy duty would be better for the Government, and no worse for seller, shipper, and buyer. But then the champions of the tariff could not defend it for being, and for not being protectionist, at the same time.
Heavy duties on coffee, tea, and sugar come under another head, as those commodities do not compete with any Northern products; and it may be as well to have more than one method of taxation. Taxes on exotic commodities are not altogether indefensible in a democratic republic, as protective duties are. But it does seem strange that so little attention appears to be directed towards a method of direct taxation which seems to be actually required by republican principle. It may be very true that the South may be made to pay by Customs duties, while no kind of direct taxation could at present be enforced. This may justify the tea and coffee duties; but it remains evident that the readiest, fairest, completest, and most democratic method of taxation is an income tax for the twenty millions of Northern people. Yet the idea seems not even to have been considered by anybody there. Perhaps one of the ultimate gains of the war,—again reaped from its losses,—may be that political economy may obtain some attention. I am aware that it is professed in colleges, and written about by antagonists of Ricardo, Malthus, and Adam Smith: but the history and mystery of the Morrill tariff, passed in April, and followed by the war budget of the Government in July, are enough to show how much American society has to learn in the economical province of its politics.
Open, manifest, indisputable above everything, is the noble spirit of the people at large, now that the first burst of enthusiasm would have been over if it had not been genuine, and at the moment when the whole significance of the war is disclosed. They know now what loss or ruin of fortune most of them must incur: they have felt something of the toil and privation of military service; and the amount of needless, wanton, exasperating slaughter might well sicken the general heart. Yet there is no flinching. The President’s call for 400,000 men is met as eagerly as his prior call for 75,000. When he asks whether they will raise 80,000,000l. for the national service, they say “O yes,” as if he asked for 80,000l. When the old family tombs of the Forefathers are opened, to admit the coffin of some gallant representative of each, the next brother starts off for the battle-field, as soon as the “Amen” is said over the grave. The betrothed girl waves her handkerchief with a smile as he who should have been her husband next week marches past for the South, and faints away when he is past the corner. The aged mother paces her room for hours, when she is weary of making lint, and finds her Bible brings the tears too fast. Except a very few cowards, traitors, and sordid trimmers, who try to raise a call for compromise, there seems to be no defection from this splendour of patriotism. This is the broadest, plainest, weightiest, and most brilliant fact of all that strikes the eye.
Meantime, there is something behind, deep in the shade, almost shrouded in silence, yet occupying intelligent people more than all the rest together; something which we long to know about, and on which at last we can gather some light, if we try. What about the negroes? Slavery left a great flaw in the original Republic. Slavery has prevented half the States from ever being republican at all; slavery bred the antagonism which has issued in this war; and the fate of slavery avowedly depends on this war. What, then, is doing about slavery?
There is an almost total silence preserved at Washington about it; but that is easily understood. While it is the uppermost thought in the minds of all who bear a share in the responsibility of governing the country, it is a subject of which they can take no notice in Congress, lest a rising of the slaves should be induced by it. Owing to the imprudence of Southern orators, the slaves everywhere know that the war is somehow on their account, and that the question is of their emancipation. The newspapers of all the States tell of the expectation of deliverance which is prevalent among the negroes—the “great man coming” who is to make them all free. Any mention of them in the President’s Message, any discussion of their case in Congress, would probably be followed by insurrection, such as it has always been the desire of all parties (except a handful of followers of John Brown) to preclude. Yet something must be settled as to what is to be done with the negroes set free by the advance of the Federal forces. It is clear that slavery can never exist again on the ground which the Republicans have passed over. Some of the Virginia masters have sensibly emancipated their negroes at once, though how they are to settle accounts with the law of Virginia remains to be seen. From some of the estates the negroes repair to the Federal forts and armies; and the authorities report that they have come in—men, women, and children—by hundreds; that they are working well, behaving well, and exceedingly happy. They are employed in field works and the service of the camps, and are paid as ordinary labourers. It is observable that the officers are surprised at the intelligence of these people, and at their accurate understanding of the movement by which the South has been pleased to bring the slavery question to an issue. So far so good; but there are millions of these people. If the educated and substantial planters were the managers of the Secession movement, it might be hoped that they would do the sensible thing, and use the occasion for converting their negroes into hired labourers; in which case they would retain most of them in their service, and gain rather than lose in fortune. But the Secession leaders and agitators are, for the most part, men of a lower social standing, jealous of the planters, and suspicious of their loyalty to the Confederacy. That they will promote in any sensible way the now inevitable emancipation is not to be hoped; and this throws a great charge on the Government and the Northern citizens. While silent, for the enemy’s sake, the Northern men have to provide for the employment and maintenance of any number of negroes who may apply to them. At present the numbers are manageable, because there are plenty of hogs, poultry, and corn-cobs on the estates deserted by the planters and overseers—some of whom are in the one army and some in the other; but, when the provisions are eaten, when cold weather comes, when war has swept over the plantations, or when there are rumours of the overseer and the whip coming back, the whole negro population will betake itself to the delivering force. It is not difficult to see that the Government is looking forward to what must happen so soon; and it is cheering to observe the cordial readiness of all parties and persons to aid the Government, and discourage any action which could embarrass it. There has been no move to excite the slaves, though bands of mounted men could raise them any day, by merely riding in among them. The wish of the Government, that emancipation should simply accompany the march of the armies, has thus far been respected; and the citizens who remain at home are busy in providing for the disposal of the released negroes. It is not a new task; for the number of fugitives has been on the increase for many years, till it has risen from tens to thousands; and there is now a new prospect opening. While negro slavery existed, the best of the free negroes refused to leave the country, because they would thereby lessen the chances of obtaining the rights of humanity and citizenship for their enslaved brethren. Hence the failure of many schemes of colonisation, from the opening of the century till now. But, now that slavery is obviously near its end, the objection is loosening. The brightest and best of the free negroes, the educated men, the merchants, and capitalists, will, no doubt, stay where they are. So, probably, will the larger proportion of labourers in the cotton and tobacco States, if the planters have the good sense to make reasonable terms with them. But a very large number will remain, eager to settle under new conditions. A very large number are in Canada now; and many are growing cotton in Hayti. The Washington Government and its advisers will take timely care that opportunity is provided for the settlement of any number that may present themselves: and they are busy about it now.
They have every encouragement in the behaviour of the negroes. We know, by the strong and reiterated testimony of the “Times’” correspondent, how depressed is the mood, and subdued the bearing of the slaves. In the first days of freedom, their exhilaration is in proportion; but they show no sign of vindictive passion. It is only in despair that negro slaves have done anything cruel. Their exaltation of mind is extreme in this crisis; but in behaviour they are docile. When the Massachusetts regiment, which had lost two men in Baltimore, marched down, the day after, into a slave-holding district, some of the men, curious to know how they were regarded, asked an old negro woman what was thought of them and their arrival. Her instant reply was:
“You are Jesus Christ to us; come to shed your blood for us.”
The body of one of their murdered comrades was with them; and these words brought tears to many eyes unused to shed them. The anecdote got into the Southern newspapers, where the tears were treated with mockery; but it is a grave season when sons of the Puritans, a reserved and tearless tribe, are so moved by a voice from an enslaved race.
On the whole, the indications appear to be that the great peril of all,—that of a servile war,—seems to be lessening as the civil war proceeds. The Secessionists, claiming to speak for the South, have chosen to commit their “peculiar institution” to the chances of civil war; and it is already evident that nothing short of a conquest of the Free States by the South could save the institution. The day will come when the men and women of the South will appreciate what the Federal Government is doing now, in rendering safe that abolition of slavery which is the haunting terror of their lives.