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532

LITERARY ATTACKS ON THE UNION.

[SECT. XIII.

ern debtors and their property from going beyond the grasp of Northern merchants.

"Stripped of its trappings, it is a mere quarrel for terIt is a savage quar- ritory. The antagonists are acting like Delrel about territory. awares or Pawnees. War to the knife, pushed to absolute extermination, is what they have resolved on; government and people breathe language of massacre and extermination. Massachusetts is enforcing the doctrines of legitimacy and Toryism. It is a congregation of seceders protesting against a repetition of secession. Mr. Seward's letter to Mr. Dayton, the Amer sulted the French. ican representative in Paris, is a message defiance, if not of insult, to France.

Mr. Seward has in

of

"The march of events has made us regard this dispute as a more commonplace quarrel than at first it appeared to be. The South received no provocation and enjoyed Absurdity of Lin- no sovereign prerogatives, and Mr. Lincoln coln's views. is invoking resolutions made by one tenth of the present population nearly eighty years ago; he thinks that by such a document as that all living Americans must be bound.

"Lord John Russell's accordance of belligerent rights to the South is discussed in a tone highly hostile to England; but what have we done to deserve this American tornado of abuse? We are neither to have liberty of action nor of inaction. That people has acquired a habit of petulance and insolence. The grievance is simply this -that we think as they thought six weeks before; and yet we are expected to join in hounding on the invaders. But the French emperor has followed our matter in accord example without a word of explanation. The terms he uses are like those that we employed. He places the two on an equality-"one or other of the belligerents." The North has had to take a great moral "cocktail," but it is of its own mixing. Nei

France views the

with England.

CHAP. LXII.] THE NORTH CAN NOT CONQUER THE SOUTH.

The war a mere quarrel between two rival shops.

533

ther England, nor France, nor any other state supposes there to be any rights or any wrongs about it. It is simply a quarrel. This is intensely disagreeable to the North, who thinks that heaven and earth are bound to avenge its cause. People give themselves no concern about a quarrel between two rival shops, or are only concerned that there is a breach of the peace and public scandal. For some unknown reason the Northern States empty all their vials of wrath on the English nation. They are wounded because we have not admired their movements sufficiently. Our course, however,.has been followed by the French government."

On the news of the battle of Bull Run reaching EuDerision at the bat- rope, it was said, "The North has lost alltle of Bull Run. even military honor; her people were bellowing behind the army. It is a complete victory for the South-as complete a victory as Austerlitz. We have been cheated out of our sympathies; we don't like to laugh. They are shaking their knives at each other and their fists at us. But an American battle is not as dangerous as an American steam-boat. It is carried on upon strict humanitarian principles. Seventy-five thousand American patriots have fled twenty miles in an agony of fear, though there was nobody pursuing them.”

The solemn resolution passed by the houses of ConThe gasconading gress on the national defeat at Bull Run (p. vote of Congress. 185) is stigmatized as a "gasconading vote." "The two sections of the late republic had better part and be friends. The North is undertaking more than Napoleon did in his Russian campaign. It is better for it to accept the situation, as we did eighty years ago on their own soil. Let it consider if it can do what Napoleon could not. The United States of America have ceased to

The North can no

more conquer the leon could conquer

Russia.

534

THE SOUTH RISING IN FAVOR.

[SECT. XIII.

be; the subjugation of the South is impossible, and its submission improbable. The almost unanimous opinion in England is that they should part on fair terms.

"The Americans should give us credit for fair feeling and honest wishes. At first we regretted their quarrel, and any idea that a partition of the domineering republic would be advantageous was repressed. We inclined, if at all, to the North. The slavery of the South was an abomination to us; we thought that it was the cause of the war. Our ideas of fair play were offended; the South had been fairly beaten in an election; it was perhaps their turn to lose. They could not take their beating. Moreover, we attributed the arrogance of the government to them. They were identified with the disgraceful system of repudiation.

Cause of the South

Europe.

"But then a change came over us, owing to the conduct of the North; its behavior was so unwarrising in favor in rantable; its menaces so insolent; its exactions so fierce and irrational. We would not stigmatize the South as rebels; they suggested to it to be friends, and together make war on us. They wanted us to regard, as a worthless rabble, ten millions of people fighting for independence, and not to recognize as belligerents confederacy holding their government in check with two hundred thousand soldiers. Meantime the South was winning its way to favor. It was not in human nature to consider, their Bull Run achievement without admiration. But the one great fact which swayed English opinion was the decided and multiform antagonism between the North and the South which events disclosed. Secession had been in contemplation for thirty years, and the South is doing no more than hundreds of other states have previously done. They may be wrong, but they are ten millions. So long as the insurrection seemed only a spiteful rebellion against

CHAP. LXII.] ADVANTAGES OF SECESSION TO EUROPE.

535

the results of a particular election, we regarded it as utterly unjustifiable. But it is not so; the difference is as irreconcilable as that between the Greeks and Turks. If the whole case of the war is to be analyzed, we must needs say the Northerners have the right on their side, for the Southerners have destroyed, without provocation, a mighty political fabric, and have impaired the glory and strength of the great American republic. But, as they have chosen to do this; as they have shown themselves hitherto no less powerful than their antagonists; as the decision of so large a population can not be contemned, and as we can not persuade ourselves that a genuine peace is likely to spring from a protracted war, we should rejoice to see the pacification of America promoted by other means. The secession of the Slave States takes away from the North all the violence, and for the benefit of injustice, and blasphemous teaching about the scriptural sanction of slavery. Englishmen think that the recognition of the Confederacy will accomplish all that the anti-slavery party has been advocating for years. It is perfectly true that the North is only fighting for empire. Separation will take away the horsewhips and revolvers from Northern Legislatures, and the blasphemy from Northern pulpits. It will diminish the power of the slave-owning filibusters, who will no longer have the Union to back them. The be an Anglo-Saxon South will be a kind of Anglo-Saxon Brazil, easily curbed. It would have demanded the extension of slavery over Mexico, and the North would have conceded it, but now the South will have a rival, and the cause of justice and civilization will gain by the quarrel of these partners in guilt.

Secession will be

the North,

and the South will

Brazil.

"Let us review the course we have taken. The Americans allege that we precipitately gave up the Union. We did no such thing. We showed that South Caro

536

IMPOSSIBILITY OF CONQUERING THE SOUTH. [SECT. XIII.

Summary of the

journalism by

itself.

lina had neither right nor reason—no more views of English right to secede than Lancashire; that the Southern resentment about Mr. Lincoln's election was unwarrantable, and that nothing could be gained by breaking the Union. Americans were contemplating the destruction of their government with indifference, while Englishmen were protesting against it on such unwarrantable grounds. Then came Sumter, and they changed. They were indignant that we would not denounce their antagonists as pirates. Then one third of the whole population seceded. Numbers make right as well as might. It became superfluous to discuss their arguments; however, it appeared they had more warrant for disaffection than was at first imagined. The insurrec tion might be traitorous, unprovoked, unreasonable, wicked; but there stood the insurgents. We did not believe that they could be subdued. At that point of conquering the the North became angry with us; it got indignant about our declaration of neutrality; it rebuked us for our cold-blooded serenity. Up to this time they have not made one step toward subjugation. The seceders are a match for them. The head and front of our offending is that we formed a just estimate. The one great argument with us has been, not the injustice, but the impossibility of the object proposed by the North.

The impossibility

South.

Contemptuous in

"We are very low in the good graces of the multitudinous monarch of the United States. We difference to Amer- might have known it before. The Amer ican opinion. icans sympathized with the French Canadians; they held violent language about the Oregon boundary; they refused the right of search in connection with the slave-trade; they seized the island of St. Juan when in controversy with England. We bore all these things patiently, and do not regret it. We have

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