Colonel Mulligan

HARPER'S WEEKLY.

[OCTOBER 19, 1861.

658

DIED, ON THE BATTLE-FIELD.

FAR from his native home he died ; The clash of arms on every side, The roar of cannon, and the tide

Of red blood flowing.

Around the dying and the dead Lay on the field of battle, red

With carnage, while the sky o'erhead Crimson was blushing.  

Slowly the spark of life went out, As rang the gallant victors' shout, Telling the foe were put to rout

By his brave comrades.

No gentle mother softly laid

On his hot brow her hand, or prayed As his soul heavenward strayed

Heavenward ascended.

But as the glorious field was won, While rushed the conquering army on, As blood-red sank the setting sun,

Gloriously he perished.

Around his green and hallowed grave Fond friends shall sadly mourn the brave, Saying, " He gladly died to save

His land from ruin."

Over this lowly mound of his

All that he asked or wished for is Graved on his narrow headstone this

"DIED FOR HIS COUNTRY!"

LYNN, MASSACHUSETTS, 1861.

COLONEL MULLIGAN.

WE publish on page 657, from a photograph sent us from the West, a portrait of the brave COLONEL MULLIGAN, whose gallant defense of Lexington we chronicled last week. The following biography of Colonel Mulligan is interesting :

Colonel James A. Mulligan was born in the city of Utica, New York, in the year 1829, and is consequently in his thirty-second year. His parents were natives of Ireland. His mother, after the death of his father, which took place when he was a child, removed to Chicago, where she has resided with her son for the past twenty-three years. She married a respectable Irish-American in Chicago named Michael Lantry, who has steadily watched with a father's solicitude the expanding mind of the brave young soldier. He was educated at the Catholic College of North Chicago, under the superintendence of the Rev. Mr. Kinsellar, now of New York City. He is a strict member of the Catholic Church. In 1852, 1853, and 1854 he read law in the office of the Hon. Isaac N. Arnold, Congressman from the Chicago District. For a short time he edited the Western Tablet, a semi-religious weekly newspaper in Chicago. In 1856 he was admitted an attorney-at-law in Chicago. At this time he held the position of Second Lieutenant in the Chicago Shields Guards, one of the companies attached to the Irish Brigade now in Missouri, and which has done so well at Lexington.

In the winter of 1857 Senator Fitch, of Indiana, tendered him a clerkship in the Department of the Interior. He accepted the position and spent the winter at Washington. During his residence in Washington he corresponded with the Utica Telegraph over the nom de plume of "Satan." After his return from Washington he was elected Captain of the Shields Guards. On the news arriving of the bombardment of Fort Sumter he threw his soul into the National cause. The Irish American companies held a meeting, of which he was Chairman. Shortly afterward he went to Washington with a letter, written by the late Senator Douglas on his death-bed, to the President, tendering a regiment to be called the "Irish Brigade." He was elected Colonel, and immediately went to work with a will. The course of the Brigade up to the battle of Lexington is well known; it has nobly, bravely, and honorably done its duty.

Colonel Mulligan is worthy of all praise. A purer, better man does not live in the State of Illinois. Since he was able to tell the difference between ale and water a glass of spirituous or malt liquor has not passed his lips. He is a rigid temperance man, although he is jocund and whole-souled to a fault. He is six feet three inches in height, with a wiry, elastic frame, a large, lustrous, hazel eye, an open, frank, Celtic face, stamped with courage, pluck, and independence, surmounted with a bushy profusion of hair, tinctured with gray. Honorable in all relations, respected by all, he has won his way by untiring industry and unquestionable courage. On the 26th of October, 1859, he was married to Miss Marian Nugent by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Chicago.

THE WAR IN MISSOURI.

WE continue to devote a large section of our space to illustrations of the war in Missouri. On page 664 we publish a large view of JEFFERSON CITY, the present head-quarters of General Fremont, and on page 663 a Plan of the same, showing the fortifications. Jefferson City, on the Missouri River, is, as every one knows, the capital of the State of Missouri. When the rebellion first broke out in Missouri Jefferson City was promptly occupied by General Lyon, and Governor Jackson was expelled. The Union troops proceeded to erect fortifications, so as to protect the State Capitol, and ever since then Jefferson City has been a place of great military activity. There must be at the present time over 40,000 Union troops in the place, and between it and Lexington ; and a battle in the vicinity is hourly expected. Troops continue to arrive daily, both by rail and by steamer.

Another picture, on page 667, from a sketch by Alexander Simplot, represents the EMBARKATION AT ST. LOUIS OF THE NINTH MISSOURI REGIMENT, COLONEL KELTON, FOR LEXINGTON. The peculiar build of the Mississippi steamers will be recognized by all who have sailed on the Father of Waters. Colonel Kelton, we need hardly add, arrived too late to save the brave Colonel Mulligan.

On page 657 we give a picture of a scene which took place at Lexington after the surrender. The rebel Governor Jackson ordered Mulligan's brigade to be drawn up in solid column to hear a speech from him. He then addressed them in harsh language, demanding what business they had to make war in the State of Missouri, adding that when Missouri needed troops from Illinois she would ask for them. After upbraiding them for some length of time, this wretched traitor at last told them they might go home, when they dispersed with feelings which can be more easily imagined than described. If Governor Jackson falls into the hands of any of the Illinois Volunteers he will have a hard time.

HARPER'S WEEKLY.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19, 1861.
WAR AS A SCHOOLMASTER.

THE peace party has deafened us with commonplaces about the evils of war. No one denies that war brings great evils in its train, though there are still greater evils than they, and wise and good men often advise war and accept its mischiefs in order to escape the greater calamities of peace. Too little attention has, however, been paid, since the present conflict began, to the benefits of war in the abstract. Reflection will show that they are by no means insignificant.

Peace enervates and corrupts society; war strengthens and purifies. The chief danger against which all philosophers have warned us in this country has been the corruption pervading our society and our political institutions. Our aristocracy being exclusively mercantile, money has grown to be the sole idol worshiped by the bulk of our people ; and those who worshiped it faithfully and successfully have been pardoned when they neglected every other object of reverence. Society accepts the fraudulent bankrupt ; tolerates notorious cheats ; winks at open rascality if it yields 20 per cent. ; and where honor and profit are in conflict, never misses an opportunity of pronouncing in favor of the latter. This is the case to some extent in every nation, in direct ratio of the influence of the mercantile spirit. Our corruption is more intense and more general than that of European countries, because here the mercantile class is paramount, while there it is only one of many competitors for power. Wherever men enjoy the suffrage some votes are bought : it is only in a country where money is the sole exclusive idol that all offices are matters of bargain and sale.

If this evil can be cured, it must be done by raising up some rival influence to that of sheer dollars. This a war will do. Nothing is so directly opposed to the mercantile spirit as the military spirit. The one calls into play the most sordid and the basest instincts of our nature : the other appeals to our noblest and purest impulses—courage, honor, patriotism, self-devotion, self-denial. In a mercantile point of view, it does not pay to be killed or wounded for one's country. On the other hand, soldiers usually deem all traders knaves. The merchant's aim is profit, the soldier's, glory. The merchant's means are cunning and calculation, the soldier's, daring and chivalry. Evidently, more opposite and antagonistic classes than soldiers and merchants it were hard to conceive. And the effect of the creation of a military class in our midst will necessarily be to counterbalance the mercantile influence now paramount, and to raise up honor as an idol in opposition to dollars. If the war achieves this result, it will not have been in vain.

The war will consolidate us as a nation. Nearly half a century has elapsed since the last appeal was made to the patriotism of the American people. Few persons are now living who responded to that appeal. The present race of Americans have never known any thing practically about the blessings of national security or the cost of national danger, and the patriotic sentiment has so nearly died out in them that men of intelligence and education are heard unblushingly to sneer at the present struggle for national existence. Half a century of undisputed peace and the pursuit of gain have rusted their hearts. The war will now develop the dormant principle of love of country. The honest will revive to patriotism ; the sordid will realize that their private schemes can not thrive if the great public scheme fails. Men's hearts, from various motives, will expand from their present selfish bounds to the breadth of good citizenship.

The war will put an end forever to the pernicious heresy of State Sovereignty. However it ends, we shall hear no more, at the North at all events, about the rights of States. States will preserve their rights, undoubtedly ; and so will towns, theatres, and newspapers. But none of these rights will ever again be invoked in bar of the sovereignty of the American people. We shall emerge from this war a nation in fact as in name, consolidated and homogeneous.

The war will prepare us for struggles, if any should come, with foreign nations. It is already evident that the British aristocracy would submit to any ordinary sacrifice in order to have the rebellion succeed, in the hope that the catastrophe of American democracy might check the aspirations of the working-classes in Great Britain. No one can tell at what time this selfish oligarchy may delude England into a war with the United States. Nor can any one foresee the result of the complications which must grow out of the movements of Spain in St. Domingo, and of the maritime powers of Europe in Mexico. Before this war we were in no condition to contend with a power like Great Britain. When the war ends we shall be able to hold our own not only against England, but against any combination of foreign powers. We shall have a first-class army and a first-class navy, ample

resources, and a thorough and complete military and naval organization.

But the chief advantage which the war will confer upon the country will be the diversion of at least a part of the national intellect and energy from the mere pursuit of gain, and the elevation of a substantial section of our people to nobler and higher aims. It can not but leave behind it a pretty general conviction that there really is something in this world better than dollars, and something worthier than the craft which is called smartness. 'Tis no mean boon that we "Wake to the higher aims Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold, And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames, Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told,

And hail once more to the banner of battle unrolled! Though many a light shall darken, and many shall weep For those that are crushed in the clash of jarring claims, Yet God's just doom shall be wreaked on a giant liar, And many a darkness into the night shall leap, And shine in the sudden making of splendid names, And noble thought be freer under the sun,

And the heart of a people beat with one desire;

For the long, long canker of peace is over and done!"

THE LOUNGER.

ENGLISH HATE.

No thoughtful American can affect to be indifferent to English criticism, because the English have necessarily a deeper sympathy with us than any other nation in the world. But the malignity of hatred which the leading English papers evince toward us—papers which are known to be the organs of eminent public men in England—reveals a condition of the English mind which few of us could have suspected. Had this nation been engaged in a bloody war for the purpose of territorial aggrandizement, or for commercial advantages; had it, for instance, gone to the other side of the globe to India, and, with the most unblushing military barbarism, virtually taken possession of an entirely foreign country, holding it by means which have made the names of Clive and Warren Hastings badly eminent ; or had it insisted upon thrusting a poisonous drug into China, and made its refusal to receive it a cause of war against a distant people who " only asked to be let alone," it would then be natural that a great civilized, constitutional, commercial power should censure the crime and sentence the criminal to public infamy.

But why a friendly nation, engaged in suppressing a rebellion which strikes at the very existence of the nation ; a rebellion whose success would be the most fatal blow to constitutional liberty ; a rebellion undertaken, as its leaders expressly avow, not because the Government has done them any wrong, but because they fear that slavery is in danger if the Government is not overthrown; a rebellion which betrays as incredible and dangerous a want of personal honor in the leaders as the English people found in Charles the First—why a friendly nation, engaged in the repression of such a rebellion, should be so ferociously and recklessly maligned as we have been, and are, by the chief English organs of public opinion, is a question as difficult to answer as it is to discover why we ever supposed that the haughtiest and most selfish power in the world could possibly forget that in our weakling infancy our little finger was stronger than her loins.

The Laureate of England dreamed of " a federation of the world." So, possibly, did many a dreamer who was no laureate. If it could begin to come it could only be by the confidence and friendship of natural and political allies. How near that Millennium is, read the English papers and discover.

MR. SEWARD UPON SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS.

WHEN the correspondent of the London Times came to this country last spring there was a good deal of foolish talk about the arrival of an embassador of the great power of the day, the "public press." Of late there has not been so much said of the correspondent in that capacity. The last fact in the career of the Doctor of Laws was, that he had been fined thirty or forty dollars for breaking the law of Illinois and shooting birds on Sunday. At an earlier period one of his letters was telegraphed all the way from Newfoundland by the " Associated Press"--a letter, by-the-way, in which the Barrister at Law rapped several of them in a rousing way upon the knuckles. Then came the petition of some worthy persons to the Secretary of State, calling attention to the letters and the letter-writer. Mr. Seward's reply was pointed and conclusive.

There is a word to be said about that letter of Mr. Seward's. Of course we all know, or ought to know, that the letters of the Doctor and Barrister are the chief credited sources of information in Europe and England of the condition of affairs in this country. They doubtless make European public opinion ; and they are therefore undeniably important. That they are crude, prejudiced, untrue, and foolish, is evident enough ; but that does not affect their influence. Now an authorized expulsion of this person from the country would have been obviously impolitic. The Government fears to have the truth told, would have been the Doctor's cry, duly echoed through Europe. But the letter of the Secretary of State emphatically stigmatizes the writer as a " foreigner who perverts our hospitality to shelter himself in writing injurious publications against us for a foreign press." To those in other lands who are still accessible to reason, who still believe that the Government of the United States is not recreant to constitutional liberty, and who do not reproach us with imbecility because we can not at once fire a gun from which the charge has been drawn, the letter of the Secretary will be literally a letter of credit in our power, our purpose, and our patience.

And if, in the patriotic spirit of that letter, the officers of the army, forbidding him their lines, would treat with silent contempt a man who sees only to slander—if all gentlemen who have the honor of their country at heart would make him feel that whoever sneers at the nation in peril can be no associate or guest of theirs—and if the newspapers, by common consent, would leave his libels in the London Times, for which they are written, the Doctor of Laws would find himself in an isolation compared with which the casemates of Fort Lafayette would be delightful.

A GLIMPSE OF ITALIAN LIFE.

THE revelations of the interior of Italian life of two or three centuries ago is an exposure of the most startling romance and tragedy. Copious and interesting accounts are found in Adolphus Trollope's " Italian Women." The story of Beatrice Cenci is a melancholy glimpse enough. The traditions which Browning interweaves in his poetry, and which give a lurid light to so many of his pictures, belong to the same department of literature and history, to which the latest contribution is a work by Philarete Chasles, Professor in the College of France, called "Virginie de Leyva, or the interior of an Italian nunnery in the beginning of the seventeenth century." It is simply a story of love and ghastly crime ; but, like all such stories sincerely told, it is a marvelous mirror of contemporary life. A tree is told by its fruit—a civilization by its incidents. No wonder that Trollope so bitterly sneers at " the good old times," of all times the most wretched and hopeless.

Virginia was the grand-daughter of a bold brigand of Navarre and handsome Free Lance of Charles the Fifth, who, after a life of crime, died Prince of Ascoli, and went to rest under a sumptuous monument in a church at Milan. Virginia was sent to the convent at Monza, to which young women came to be taught, and among the rest a young Isabella. Osio, a handsome youth, saw Isabella in the convent garden and made love to her by signs. But the saintly Virginia saw the offense and told the notary, who told Isabella's father, who took his daughter away and married her. Osio, stung with rage, stabbed the notary, and the magistrate feared to arrest him lest he too should be stabbed. Besides, Virginia was softened by the young man's grief, and was sorry for what she had done. She used her influence, as seigniorial lady, with the magistrate, and Osio went to thank her, and they fell in love. Virginia was then twenty years old.

The Confessor of the convent, Arrighone, was an unsuccessful lover of the lady, and one of the worst of men. Oslo gave her a book from the Confessor's library, in which it was written that a layman might enter without sin the cell of a nun, and that the only sin was in the nun quitting her retreat. Arrighone pressed his suit insolently. He declared that he wrote all the letters signed " Osio ;" and Virginia threw herself into Osio's arms.

A family was born, and Virginia's maid, Meda, was ostensibly the mother. In a quarrel she threatened to expose her mistress. Virginia and two nuns tried to kill her. But Osio succeeded. Rumors escaped the convent through Ranieri, an apothecary, and Virginia's relations had Osio arrested, fearing some political consequences. A solemn testimony went up from the nuns declaring the tale of intimacy between Osio and Virginia a vile scandal. Thereupon he was released, and a few hours after he returned to Monza Ranieri was shot. Virginia concealed her lover in her cell. But the cry of shame at Monza reached the Cardinal Borromeo, and he came to see what was the matter. He had an interview with Virginia. She confessed every thing. The Cardinal was dumb, and so departed. But at night came a carriage with four mules to the gate of the convent, and the Lady of Monza was carried to Milan.

The two nuns who had tried to murder Meda fled under Osio's protection. He had two servants with him. One of them hurled one of the nuns into a deep river. Then Osio stabbed him. A little further on Osio threw the other nun into a well, and then stabbed the other servant. But both women marvelously escaped and told the tale. Osio flew into the mountains at the foot of Lake Como and led a band of desperate outlaws. The Governor of Milan offered a reward for him, dead or alive. A friend invited him to his house, and there, while the servants held Osio, his friend murdered him exactly as he had murdered Meda. Next day his head was on the ruined wall at Monza. Arrighone had three years in the galleys. Virginia was immured in a convent, and died in the very odor of sanctity, like a saint, said Cardinal Borromeo ; into the urn of whose colossal brazen statue you may climb if you choose when you go to his isola maggiore.

This terrible text M. Chasles improves by reasoning that the conventual system was responsible for this character. But the Athenoeum, from which we take the facts, seems to be correct in denying this, on the ground that, as a rule, the inmates of the religious houses were better, measured by their temptations, than the women of the surrounding hamlets.

But whatever the moral improvement that may be drawn from it, the story is a curious episode of Italian life. It belongs to the department of real history, which consists in a picture of the condition of the people, not of the marches and countermarches of a few leaders. Thus it is in memoirs, diaries, letters, and local annals that we come to the truest knowledge of the state of the world at any period.

M. Chasles dedicates his work to Mr. Thackeray ; not, we suppose, as a sly insinuation that Virginia typifies women as Thackeray believes them to be, but because of personal regard, and because M. Chasles is the French author of eminence most familiar with English literature.

THE WAR AND EMANCIPATION.

THERE is still confusion about the cardinal point of the relation of Slavery to the War. Lord Palmerston's (Next Page)