The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866. Various

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the splendid valor and enterprising spirit of the South stirred the British heart and blood, and commanded numberless good wishes; while, for some time after the first battle of Bull Run, a prejudice, not readily amenable to reasoning, clung around the Northern arms, and impeded many from doing full relative justice to the military temper and prowess of the Unionists. There was, moreover, a very widespread impression that the North was carrying on the war chiefly by means of mercenaries,—Germans, Irishmen, and "the offscourings of Europe," as the uncomplimentary phrase ran,—who enlisted for the sake of the bounty, and were equally prompt at exhibiting their indifferentism to the grave issues at stake and their blackguardism in dealing with the hostile populations. The Southerners, on the contrary, figured as a chivalrous territorial body driven to fight "for their hearths and homes," (I have even seen "their altars" in print,) waging a noble defensive war against preconcerted spoliation and despotism. To this moment, many people have phrases of the above sort upon their lips.

      Then there were certain personal feelings which told powerfully in the same direction,—personal partly to the English as a nation, and partly to the more prominent actors in the war. The contrast between the American colonies of Great Britain throwing off their allegiance to the Old Country because they saw fit to do so for their own interests, and the government of the Federation of these same ex-colonies insisting that some of them, which in their turn see fit to break loose from the Federal pact, shall not do so, under the alternative of war and the pains of treason,—this contrast is assuredly a glaring one; many people considered that it amounted to a positive anomaly,—not a few to a barefaced act of tyrannic apostasy. The personal feeling of the English people, their national amour propre, conspired to lead towards this harshest construction of the facts: it was so tempting to convict our old adversaries out of their own mouths, and make them, by the logic of events, read out either their recantation of the Colonial Revolution, or their self-condemnation for the Anti-Secession War. I have already explained to what extent these views appear to me to be tenable, and where their weak point lies: that both the insurrection of the colonies against England, and that of the South against the Federation,—both the repressive measures of England against the colonies, and of the Federation against the South,—were in themselves founded on an indefeasible right, and abstractly defensible; and that the "casting vote," (so to speak,) in both cases, depends, not upon any wordy denial of the right, but upon a thorough estimate of all the attendant conditions, and prominently of the "mights of man."

      So far for one phase of the personal question. The other phase pertained to the character and the deeds of some leading actors in the war-drama. To most English apprehensions, the hero of the war, from an early stage of it up to his tragic death, was Stonewall Jackson, whose place was afterwards taken, in popular esteem, though not in coequal enthusiasm, by General Lee, both of them Southerners; while the bête noire of the story was General Butler, the Northerner. It would be futile to expound the reasons of this, patent as they are to everybody; or to inquire what deductions from the renown of Jackson and Lee, or what allowances for the position of Butler, a judicial review of the whole case would proclaim to be equitable. I will only remark here, that, as far as my observation extended, no one complained of Jackson, when it transpired that he had been resolutely in favor of refusing all quarter to Northern soldiers: a severity, not to say barbarism, which, be it right or wrong in itself, would undoubtedly have appeared to many atrocious enough, had it been the doctrine of any Northern general, and beside which the sternest measures of Butler look lax and conciliatory. In like manner, the terrible treatment of Northern prisoners, and the most savage act of war in the whole contest, the massacre at Fort Pillow,5 seemed hardly to graze that delicate susceptibility of Southern partisans which was lashed into a white rage by a few words of printed proclamation from Butler's hand; the facts were either ignored, or dismissed as of secondary importance in the general conduct of the war. Of two other prime actors in the contest, President Davis and President Lincoln, the popular judgment seemed equally arbitrary. Of course each had his admirers among professed Southern or Northern adherents: it is not in that aspect that I speak of them for the moment, but rather as figures in the popular imagination. As such, Davis was credited with all the qualities of a powerful statesman; while Lincoln showed as a not ill-meaning, but grotesquely inadequate and misplaced oddity, a sort of mere accident of mob-favor, and made abundant mirth for the mirthful: how justly the event has perhaps demonstrated. Among the Northern generals, I think that the only one who became to some extent generally popular, though bitterly denounced in adverse quarters, was Sherman,—not only for the splendor and originality of his practical achievements, but for a certain incisive and peremptory realism in his administrative proceedings, which almost marked him with a touch of grim humor.

      I have thus sought to account for the anti-Northern bias in a large number of my countrymen, by their dislike of the American nation and polity, arising partly from the remains of soreness left by past defeat,—by the jealousy of American power, as a practical danger,—by the hatred of war,—and by the sympathy for the gallant weaker combatant. I am compelled reluctantly to add, that the particular operation of these various influences reflects no credit upon British consistency of farsightedness. The conservative temper which stiffens Englishmen towards America was the very same which, in the interests of the moment, led them to justify violent revolutionary measures, and armed resistance to the constitutional and national majority. The greater the conservative, the greater the advocate of insurrection. In like manner, the English detestation of slavery was overwhelmed by sympathy for an "oppressed" community, whose oppression (apart from the much-paraded tariff and other such questions) consisted in a definite intimation that they would not henceforward be allowed to enlarge the area of slavery, and in a suspicion present to their own minds that even the existing area of that cherished institution would be narrowed, and finally reduced to nought,—expunged "as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down." The friends among us of constitutional liberty and of legality, the enemies of anarchy, the unseduced execrators of slavery, the upholders of the tie of brotherhood across the Atlantic, may well look back with shame to the time—and it was no matter of days or weeks, but a period of about four years together—when the loudest and most accepted voices in England exulted over the now ludicrously delusive proposition that the United States were a burst bubble, and slavery the irremovable corner-stone of an empire. It may be a lesson to nations against the indulgence in rancor, the abnegation of the national conscience, and the dear delight of prophesying one's own likings. "Now, therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of these thy prophets, and the Lord hath spoken evil against thee."

      The collapse of the South came at last; and nearly at the same moment came the murder of a man whose modesty, integrity, firmness, single-minded persistency, unresentfulness, and substantial truth of judgment have been invested by his fate with an almost sacred depth of interest and significance,—President Lincoln. Amid the many momentous bearings of these events, it is for me to note only one of comparative unimportance,—the effect which they produced upon English public opinion. There was, I think, a certain good-fortune for Southern sympathizers, in the fact that the announcement of Lincoln's death almost synchronized with that of the surrender of the Confederate armies. After so many confident anticipations and loud predictions of a Southern triumph, so many denunciations of the policy, acts, and leaders of the North, these sympathizers found themselves in a sort of cul-de-sac when Richmond had been taken. Lee had yielded, Johnston was yielding, and the very same "butcher" Grant, "ruthless" Sherman, and "Yahoo" Lincoln, whose savageries and imbecilities had been the theme of annual moral-pointing, were reading the world a lesson of moderation and self-forgetfulness in victory, such as almost seemed to shrink from the plentitude of a triumph which was a humiliation to some of their countrymen. The sympathizers found that they were and had long been of the party in evil odor with that modern "Providence which sides with the stronger battalions," not to speak of the older "God of Battles." They were pulled up sharp in the direction they had been going in, and the alternative of turning right round and retracing their steps was a very awkward and unwelcome one. The assassination of Lincoln came to their relief. They could join, without insincerity, in the burst of public feeling which that terrible deed excited; could merge their protests against Lincoln in the established unwillingness to say evil of the dead; could give momentary pause to national and political considerations, beside the СКАЧАТЬ