This Site:
Civil War
Civil War Overview
Civil War 1861
Civil War 1862
Civil War 1863
Civil War 1864
Civil War 1865
Civil War Battles
Confederate Generals
Union Generals
Confederate History
Robert E. Lee
Civil War Medicine
Lincoln Assassination
Slavery
Site Search
Civil War Links
Civil War Art
Mexican War
Republic of Texas
Indians
Winslow Homer
Thomas Nast
Mathew Brady
Western Art
Civil War Gifts
Robert E. Lee Portrait
|
LAY
OV THE MODDERN "KONSERVATIVS."
I AM a gay "Konservativ,"
I stand by the old Konstitushun,
I du;
I go fur the Uniun ez it was,
With the old Dimmycrat ticket,
rite than. These black Republikans don't suit me,
Fur I'm a Konservativ man, yu
see!
I am a Dimmycrat, dyed in the
wool—
I go fur free trade, and that
sort ov thing;
I think it's rite tu let Slavery
rule
Sooner'n hev Lincoln I'd vote fur
a king, And hev the Saouth fur an aristockracy
Tu rule the hull North (except
the Dimmockracy).
Shuttin up fokes fur speekin
their mind
In my opinion's a peece of
knavery—
I go fur free speech ov every
kind,
Except when it interferes with
slavery!
(Sich kind ov free speech all
Dimmykrats fight—
Ef Brooks hed killed Sumner he'd
done jest right.)
I go fur aour konstitushunal
rights,
With the rit ov habeas corpus
invi'late,
I'd show 'em haow a Dimmykrat
fights,
Ef Abram Lincoln attempts to
spile it!
I've a right tu tawk treeson, ez
I understand—
Tawk's tawk; it's money that buys
the land!
I go fur the vigorous conduct ov
war
(Of course with a decent regard
tu figgars,
So ez not tu inkreese aour
national debt),
And abuv all not tu free the
niXXers.
I'd rather the North hed not
pulled a trigger
Than see a traitor shot daown by
a niXXer.
Yes, I am a reel Konservativ;
I stand by the Konstitushun, I du!
Ef enny wun sez I'm frends with
the Saouth,
I'll sware by hokey it isn't
true!
I ain't a rebbel; but, he—m!—speek
low—I kinder beleeve in Vallandigham, though!
CHARITY GRIMES.
HARPER'S WEEKLY.
SATURDAY, MAY 16, 1863.
"Scarcely any paper is doing so
much for UNION and LIBERTY as Harper's Weekly."—Boston Commonwealth.
THE
SITUATION.
ONCE more the nation is called
upon to sustain itself bravely under the smart of defeat. Major-General Hooker's
campaign against
Fredericksburg, like that of
General Burnside, has failed.
Of the operations of the Army of
the Potomac we have news up to Wednesday, May 6. On 28th, 29th, and 30th April
General Hooker crossed the
Rappahannock at various fords from 10 to 20 miles
above Fredericksburg, and drove in the rebel pickets, advancing his army to a
small village called Chancellorsville, near the residence of a Mr. Chancellor. A
day or two previously
General Stoneman, with a large cavalry force, had been
sent to make a grand detour by way of the Upper Rapidan and the southern part of
Orange and Spotsylvania counties, with a view of cutting the railroad between
Richmond and Fredericksburg in the neighborhood of Milford. General Hooker's
advance took the rebels by surprise, and compelled them to come out of their intrenchments and attack the Union army. Withdrawing the bulk of his army from
the heights above Fredericksburg, the rebel General made his first attack on
Friday afternoon, another on Saturday, and a third on Sunday. These various
fights appear to have been bloody and indecisive. Fortune varied, as usual in
the great battles of this war; at times we drove the enemy, and at times they
drove us; one day we took some guns and prisoners, and the next we lost some.
But on Monday, 4th, General Sedgwick, who had stormed the heights of
Fredericksburg when the rebels withdrew the bulk of their force from that point,
was obliged to give way. General Longstreet, who is said to have brought up
reinforcements to the rebels, attacked him fiercely, and finally drove him
across the river, with a loss of some 6000 men. On the following day
General
Lee, flushed by success, threw his whole army upon General Hooker, and compelled
him also to withdraw his army across the Rappahannock. Of the results of General
Stoneman's raid, which was a part of the general plan, we have as yet no
intelligence that is worth repeating. He should by this time have succeeded in
cutting the railroad, so as to prevent the transmission of supplies,
reinforcements, and ammunition to General Lee. Comment on this event would as
yet be premature, and we forbear.
Turning to the other theatres of
the war, we find that all is activity in the Southwest. The railroad between
Vicksburg and Jackson has been cut by our cavalry, and another attack upon that
strong-hold has been commenced. General Sherman has landed a force in the Yazoo,
near the point where he landed before, and
General Grant has disembarked his
army on the Mississippi side of the river a few miles below Vicksburg.
Simultaneously, the fleets, under
Porter and
Farragut, are said to be preparing
for a new bombardment. For the first time, therefore, Vicksburg may now be said
to be fairly beleaguered, and, whatever be the prospect of an assault, the
difficulty experienced by the rebels in keeping up their communications must be
very great indeed.
The last heard of
General Banks was that he had succeeded in driving the rebels out of the richest portion of
Louisiana, and had occupied the town of Alexandria, at the head of steam-boat
navigation on the Red River. He has thus driven the rebel Governor of Louisiana
to the very confines of the State; has cut off all the supplies which the rebels
at Vicksburg had been receiving by way of the Red River; and, more important
still, appears to have discovered a large number of Union men, who were only too
glad to welcome his approach, and return to their allegiance.
From the army of Tennessee we
have no news except that our cavalry are making some serious raids into the
rebel country, destroying railroads and capturing supplies. Neither
General
Rosecrans nor General Bragg seem inclined to provoke the inevitable encounter;
each waits for the other to move.
From
Charleston a story reaches
us that the iron-clads are again preparing to cross the bar. This we doubt.
Still there can be no question but that the attack on this strong-hold of
treason should be renewed as soon as possible, and as often as required, until
it was successful. It would be well if the Navy Department were to direct
Admiral Du Pont to attack Charleston once a month from this time forth, and to
go on building iron-clads to replace any which might be destroyed in the
attacks.
The President has described the
situation in a word. We are "pegging away," and shall continue to "peg away"
until our work is done.
OUR RELATIONS
WITH
ENGLAND.
WE publish in another column a
letter from an Englishman, which purports to prove that the mass of the English
people are not, as has been supposed, in alliance with the slave confederacy of
the South; but that those Englishmen who have made public their sympathy with
our slaveholding oligarchy are in effect themselves little better than another
slaveholding oligarchy, which has been conspicuous in history as the opponent of
freedom, democracy, and equal rights.
We freely admit that the people
of the large cities of Great Britain—London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham,
Glasgow, etc.—have in assembled meeting testified their adherence to the great
principles of human liberty which have been the basis of England's power and
prosperity, and for the maintenance of which the United States are now
struggling. And, insomuch as this testimony of theirs, at this particular time,
confers upon us moral if not material support, the people of the United States
ought to be and are grateful for it.
That gratitude, however, it is
but fair to say, would be more lively if the views of our friends in England
took the shape of a practical purpose instead of remaining a sentimental desire.
It profits us very little to hear
that large meetings have been held in British cities in support of the Union,
when at the same time we learn that new pirates are being fitted out in British
dock-yards, and being sent to sea to prey upon American commerce, with the
merest formality of official obstruction; when every leading newspaper in
England continues to misrepresent and belie us in the most shameless and
outrageous manner; and when men who are supposed to rise superior to vulgar
impulses of demagogy—like Lord Palmerston, Earl Russell, and Mr.
Gladstone—gratuitously falsify our condition and our purposes, and throw their
official mantle over slave rebellion and blockade-running.
If these Englishmen, who are so
much our friends, really mean well by us, why did they not prevent the Japan
getting to sea and obtaining her armament from the Afar? Why do they sit by
quietly and see the Alabama refit and coal in British ports? Why have they
nothing to say to the pro-slavery articles in the leading papers, to the grossly
false dispatches of Earl Russell, and the shameful perversions of fact contained
in the speeches of Lord Palmerston?
It is extremely agreeable to hear
that the British people are on our side; but so long as the only depredations
committed on our commerce are committed by British pirates, and the only
statesmen in the world who deliberately lie about us in the rebel interests are
English statesmen, and the only newspapers which make a business of falsifying
our record and misrepresenting us in the eyes of the world are English
newspapers, we must be permitted to tone down our gratitude for British
sympathy.
Englishmen must understand that
we have never sought aid, moral or material, from abroad, From the recognition,
by the maritime powers of Europe, of the rebels as belligerents, every one in
this country has understood that we were to fight out our battle alone. All that
we have asked has been non-intervention. If the Queen were to condemn the rebels
in her speech to Parliament, and her ministers were to join in denouncing the
nefarious attempt of
Mr. Davis and his confederates to establish a slave
confederacy, it would do us no good. We ask no foreign aid, and desire none.
Those among us who once loved England would have liked, for her sake, to have
seen her take a position in this great controversy worthy of her antecedents,
and worthy of her great men of
the past. They have sorrowed to see her sink to the level of a purveyor of
pirates, a manufacturer of manacles, and a sneaking ally of the meanest form of
treason.
A
VOICE FROM ENGLAND.
To the Editor of Harper's Weekly:
SIR,—The state of the public mind
in this country has arrested my attention, and induces me to ask you to allow a
stranger to offer a few remarks upon its relations with England. The struggle in
which you are engaged is one in which few Englishmen are unconcerned spectators,
but one in which your people too readily assume the interest to be all upon the
side of the South. It need not, and indeed could not, be denied that large
drafts have been made and honored upon that account; but it may be now
respectfully submitted that the deposits are exhausted, and "no effects" will
ere long be the indorsement. The reasons for the expression of sympathy so
frequent some months ago may be epitomized as follows:
1st, Pluck. As all Englishmen
admire pluck, from the bishop to the cabman, as Emerson says, so a small people
numerically contending with one three or four times as many, and fighting—as it
must be admitted they have fought—bravely, necessarily appealed to this powerful
English principle; and men of strong impulse, animal courage, with no great
mental power or cultivation, such as Sir Robert Peel (son of the Sir Robert),
very readily fell into the error of forgetting the cause contended for in the
way it was contested.
2d, The demonstrated feasibility
of separation in the case of your own great Republic, born of our own Empire,
suggested that as readily might North and South fall into two peoples; such
reasoners having forgotten or overlooked the not unimportant fact that
parturition and dismemberment are widely different processes; and while in the
earlier case the Atlantic and the great lakes suggested a natural boundary,
Nature herself has, in the latter, made perpetual presence and almost as
constant antagonism the essential conditions of separation.
3d, While cotton had not seared
the conscience and stopped the mouths of all England, it had laid its spell upon
influential classes, such as cotton-spinners and manufacturers (not all of
these, however), ship -owners and ship -brokers of the Z. C. Pearson and W. S.
Lindsay school, blockade runners, and the whole hap-hazard gambling fraternity,
who, as Arab freebooters, hang upon the flanks of commerce in ordinary times,
seeking chances of irregular gain, but who, in times of warfare, find a wide
field for their desultory activities—all these classes perpetually cried, "Great
is Diana of the Ephesians!" and for the same reason as their prototypes: "By
this craft they have their wealth." They make noise enough for the people, but
after all they are only mobs.
4th, There are the old Tories, of
whom a goodly number can always be relied upon to creep out and sun themselves
whenever earnest men arraign, try, and are about to execute any great criminal.
Their sound and hearty lungs were expanded within the last fifty years to keep
Presbyterians, Independents, Methodists, and Quakers out of Parliament—but they
are there. If they died for it, no Romanist should ever enter St. Stephen's—but
Daniel O'Connell gave them the benefit of his fine rich brogue. They seated
themselves in their impregnable rotten boroughs, but that sad little incendiary
John Russell came in with his Reform Bill, and its schedules left them bereaved
Rachels. The Corporations were left them as a fit field for intolerant contempt
to trample upon municipal rights, but alas! they too were reformed. But between
these latter contests as great a contest as English history has witnessed under
the Brunswick dynasty had to be decided, and over and after their old Port the
Old Guard of abuses wheeled into line. A canting fanatic called Wilberforce, not
content with depriving the people of Liverpool and Bristol of the privilege of
stealing negroes, and negroes the privilege of being stolen from Africa, had
dared to set on foot an agitation, and had got a few Quakers and other
"nobodies," such as Buxtons, Gurneys, Sturges, Croppers, etc., to aid him in the
destruction of Church and State, the spread of infidelity, destruction of
morals, and all the other abominations well known both in England and America,
summed up in that one word, "Abolitionism." Alas! alas! even negro slavery had
to fall, and our poor but chivalric Tory squires had to pay their share of One
Hundred Million Gold Dollars, or Twenty Million Pounds.
Surely now their troubles are
ended; little is left to live for, except fat rent-rolls for themselves and
their eldest sons, a few thousand sinecure places (or places which any noodle of
influence may fill, and draw his salary on quarter-day), the church for the
non-combatant, and the army for the more plucky or dashing younger sons—surely
none can grudge them these! Even here the hunted stag is brought to bay. A vile
place of some few hundreds of thousands of "hands," of which no gentleman had
ever heard until that infernal Reform Bill was hatched, called Manchester, would
not only not send up some of the country gentlemen to represent it, but would
even dare to poke its dirty fingers into politics, and lo! a Manchester school
is formed, and a coupe of incendiaries called Bright and Cobden propound the
notable scheme of every working man eating his own loaf, with the help of his
wife and children, instead of reverently and thankfully sending the first slice
to the lord of the manor in the shape of a protective duty for the benefit of
the English agriculturist.
There the virtue of Toryism
concentrated itself. It submitted to a fresh baptism: it called itself
Conservative (own brother, if I mistake not, to a character of that name
recently seen dodging about certain streets in New York, and suspected by this
present writer as worth watching); it even humiliated itself so far as to accept
a parvenu leader;
and, warmed with its generous
potions, it sang—with rather a cracked and unsteady voice, it is true—"With Peel
for our pilot we'll weather the storm." Alas, poor Yorick! Peel ran them on the
reef high and dry, declaring the old craft to be totally unseaworthy, went over,
with his first officer, Gladstone, and several of inferior rank, to the Free
Trade flag.
Excuse my lengthened digression;
it has a moral for the American people. Power and Privilege fight bravely in
England; their voice is heard in high places; but they inevitably go down before
the march of the people.
Liberty-loving men of the North,
be not discouraged! Old Toryism hates you as it has hated Liberals and
Liberalism at home; but its bark is worse than its bite. It has tried to tempt
the unemployed operatives—if I mistake not, Ferrand has only recently made a
last attempt upon their virtue; but they, in common with the mass of Englishmen,
love liberty and hate slavery. They now know their strength and their weakness.
Trimmers and time-servers in our
Government and in our House of Commons know what they have to expect at the
hands of an indignant country should they attempt to commit old England to any
complicity with slavery; and Lord Russell and his true colleagues in the Cabinet
have now the support of a great, growing, and loudly-expressed public opinion in
crushing the activity of Confederate agents and mercenary ship-builders, who
will soon have to give account to English law, and English opinion too, for the
wrongful acts of which your Chamber of Commerce so loudly and so properly
proclaims. One mistake is, however, made:
the Alabama is not owned by
Englishmen. Her career is looked upon with as much disgust by many Englishmen as
it is in New York; and the seizure of the Alexandra, and the order, given in
perfect good faith, to seize the Japan, evidence the determination of the
British Government to put a stop to this business. They mean to be neutral. The
people, in their might and majesty, wherever space could be found in any public
buildings in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, York, Glasgow,
etc., speak with one voice, "God bless the North!" Despite agents "acting with
efficiency in moulding public opinion in Europe (see Benjamin's letter to De
Leon, 13th December, 1862), the English people are well informed of the issues
involved in this struggle. Cairnes's able book on the "Slave Power"—Ellison and
Rawlins, who have exhausted the argument upon the Constitutionality of
Secession—Bright, Forster, and Stansfield, who have examined its political
bearings—Baptist Noel and Newman Hall, who have reviewed its moral aspects, and
the crowd of inconsiderable "nobodies," such as T. Hughes (Tom Brown),
Professors Newman and Goldwin Smith, John Stuart Mill, the Duke of Argyle, and
Milner Gibson, have not spoken in vain to the middle classes, the real exponents
of public opinion. The Times tried to ignore the movement, but ten thousand
people in and around Exeter Hall could not be ignored. Now it scoffs and
ridicules it; but the people do not mind its scoffs; and its able and honest
competitor, the Daily News, presents the facts and able reasonings thereon, as
does the Star; and, with few exceptions, the leading provincial papers, such as
the Leeds Mercury, Birmingham Daily Post, Manchester Examiner and Times,
Liverpool Daily Post, Caledonian Mercury, and Belfast Northern Whig vigorously
counteract the Times teachings. Let the American people and Congress vigorously
act out President Lincoln's Proclamation, and they may be assured of the good
wishes of old England. In the words of the great and good Dr. Guthrie, Moderator
of the Free Church of Scotland, "THE ADVANCED POSITION WHICH THE FEDERAL
GOVERNMENT AND THE NORTH HAVE TAKEN ON THE SUBJECT OF SLAVERY HAS MADE THEIR
CAUSE THAT OF HUMANITY AND RELIGION; THEREFORE I CAN NOT BUT WISH, AND HEARTILY
WISH, THEM SUCCESS AGAINST A POWER WHICH RESTS ON PRINCIPLES AS INSULTING TO GOD
AS THEY ARE CRUEL TO MAN."
I am, Sir, respectfully,
A BRITISHER.
May 2,1863.
THE
LOUNGER.
FIRMNESS THE SECURITY OF PEACE.
BETWEEN great nations, as
Washington said, in his Farewell Address, there can be no romantic friendship;
but there can be, and there is, a degree of friendliness, ranging from a
thinly-masked hostility up to an expression and action of cordial sympathy.
These extremes of political friendliness between states are illustrated in the
conduct and expression of Lord Russell in Great Britain and of Count Cavour in
Italy, before the death of that greatest of modern statesmen, as reported in the
correspondence with the State Department of Mr. Marsh, our Minister to Italy.
Self-respect, therefore, and the cause of popular civil liberty. for which this
Government is contending, require that its relations with Great Britain should
be regulated by a strict and cold regard to the letter of the law, and nothing
further.
If Cavour were still living and
directing the foreign policy of Italy, and the Peterhoff had been sailing under
the Italian flag when she was arrested upon suspicion, the surrender of her
mail-bag, even although it might have been retained upon strictly technical
grounds, would not have touched so deeply the honor of this nation. It would
have been a concession, but it would have been made willingly, to mark our
perception of the different bearing of one neutral power from another. In the
actual case, however, there was no call for the least concession, even in
appearance. If the Peterhoff were justly detained, every spar and rope and
marling-spike and piece of paper on board were equally good prize. If she were
unjustly captured, there should have been not a moment's delay upon the part of
the Government in amply apologizing and compensating. But until that (Next
Page)
|