care of women and old men and boys; and every week adds to the alarms about negro-risings, as more of them disappear from the estates, and as newspapers vanish from the tables of country houses, and tidings from the seat of war spread through the negro quarter almost before they are known in the mansion. In the expectation of a great day coming, numbers of the negroes have secretly learned to read. There were always some who picked up the knowledge,—from the children of the family, from signboards and handbills: and the number has prodigiously increased of late. Such people will require the master’s eye and hand when winter comes on; and they have been kept in daily expectation of his return. The masters fully expected that their President would have been in the White House, and their congress in the Capitol, and their army quartered in New York and Philadelphia, before this time, so that the small proportion who are planters and merchants might have been at home. While they are counting the days of suspense, the lower order of the soldiery are calling out for the plunder which was promised them. They are chafing while the Northern men are drilling and marching; and every week of inaction reduces the one force, while it augments the other. In both sections men are marching southwards; but in the one case it is from, and in the other towards the army they belong to. Sickness and suffering have thinned the Confederate force severely; but many thousands have also gone southwards to defend their own line of coast, or to secure their homes. They had hoped to gain a great battle first, and possess themselves of a northern city or two by a rush: but they can wait no longer.
The Richmond and other Virginia newspapers tell us this much; and the unpopularity of the Confederate government and commanders is declared to be very great, because the troops are undergoing hardships in a stripped country, instead of gaining victories in a rich one. It would not have been so if the authorities could have helped it. The inexperience of the Federalists, and the bad quality of their officers, have afforded ample opportunities to their enemy; but the Confederates have been unable to use any one of the occasions. Thus, while the antagonists have been standing face to face, as it were, on the Potomac, and running about after one another in the West, the world cries out for some result; and the loudest cry of all is from the Southern part of the country itself.
Yet a great deal has happened; and a very great deal has been disclosed of what must happen. It even seems doubtful whether the war will bring about the issue, after all. When experienced observers watch adventures, national or individual, they expect to see the chief aim disappear, and some collateral object rise up. They expect to witness failure in the leading hope, and the gratification of some subordinate or unconscious desire. Thus, it seems that neither of the opposed parties in America will get what it has proposed, while something quite different (whether better or worse in their view), will come about.
It has become plain to the world (what old observers were always aware of), that there is nothing approaching to unanimity on either side. There is not only much difference,—much dissension,—there is an actual split, however anxiously the fact may be concealed to the last moment.
In the Slave States there never was any unanimity at all, great as has been the boast of it up to the present time. It should be remembered, that on the last occasion on which the people of the South were permitted to declare their will as to remaining in the Union, or seceding, the majority in favour of continued union was nearly 200,000. No doubt, a large number of these Unionists became Secessionists, when Secession had actually taken place: but no rational person would suppose that all had so changed, even if we had no evidence of their present state of mind. We may assume that those of that majority who dreaded the annexation of Cuba, the re-opening of the slave trade, the competition of the mean whites as slave-holders, and the continuance of slavery under perilous conditions, still desire the protection of the Union, and would vote for it again, if they could.
There are many more,—immigrants, reduced white families, and merchants, and even political men,—whose declarations on behalf of the Union are kept down only by intimidation. For thirty years past, the abolitionists of the North have been incessantly addressed by unknown correspondents in the Slave States, who have implored them to “go on, for God’s sake.” They were the only hope, they were told, of sufferers under the system which is now made the basis of the proposed new republic. As might be expected, there have been many fugitives, from the planter and merchant, as well as the negro class, since the last hope of free-voting and free-speaking was lost; and, as every intelligent slave tells of the preparations making by his late comrades to join the Federal army as soon as it appears, so every disguised planter or merchant who effects his escape, has tales of horror to tell of the ways in which loyalty to the Union is repressed or punished. I might fill several columns with narratives of the deeds done upon old men, upon honourable gentlemen, upon ladies,—whether long-established residents, or recent guests,—merely for their attachment, or suspected attachment, to the Union;—but it would be painful, and could hardly do good. It is enough to say,—what nobody disputes,—that the fury of persecution against attachment to the Union indicates the presence of a good deal of that attachment; though the same fact precludes any estimate of the extent of that loyalty which was so lately extolled as a virtue.
One interesting fact under this head is the adventurous act of the citizens of Hyde County, North Carolina, in sending a memorial to the President, avowing their unchanged attachment to the Union, and desiring a supply of arms, to defend themselves after such a defiance of the Confederate authorities. If, on the first appearance of a Federal force on the coast, the men of a whole county made haste to speak out, it must be supposed that there are others who would be glad to do the same. We can have no doubt of it
