The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 50, December, 1861

But whatever one may think of the wisdom or the disinterestedness of the organs of English commercial sentiment, it cannot be denied that it is of great importance to us that the public opinion of England should be enlightened in regard to our affairs. It would be idle to complain that her policy is selfish; for the policy of nations is always so. It would be foolish to forget that the sympathy of the British people has always declared itself, sooner or later, in favor of free institutions, and of a manly and upright policy toward other nations, or that this sympathy has been on the whole more outspoken and enduring among Englishmen than in any other nation of the Old World. We may justly complain that England should see no difference between a rebel confederacy and a nation to which she was bound by treaties and with which she had so long been on terms of amity gradually ripening to friendship. But do not let us be so childish as to wish for the suppression of the "Times Correspondent," a shrewd, practised, and, for a foreigner, singularly accurate observer, to whom we are indebted for the only authentic intelligence from Secessia since the outbreak of the Rebellion, and whose strictures, (however we may smile at his speculations,) if rightly taken, may do us infinite service. Did he tell us anything about the shameful rout of Bull Run which could not have been predicted beforehand of raw troops, or which, indeed, General Scott himself had not foreboded? That was not an especially American disgrace. Every nationality under heaven was represented there, and an alarm among the workmen on the Plains of Shinar that the foundations of the Tower of Babel were settling could not have set in motion a more polyglot stampede. The way to blot out Bull Run is as our brave Massachusetts and Pennsylvania men did at Ball's Bluff, with their own blood, poured only too lavishly. To our minds, the finest and most characteristic piece of English literature, more inspiring even than Henry's speech to his soldiers on the eve of Agincourt, is Nelson's signal, "England expects every man to do his duty." When we have risen to that level and are content to stand there, with no thought of self, but only of our country and what we owe her, we need wince at no hostile sneer nor dread any foreign combination. Granted that we have been a little boyish and braggart, as was perhaps not unnatural in a nation hardly out of its teens, our present trial is likely to make men of us, and to leave us, like our British cousins, content with the pleasing consciousness that we are the supreme of creation and under no necessity of forever proclaiming it. Our present experience, also, of the unsoundness of English judgment and the narrowness of English views concerning our policy and character may have the good result of making our independence in matters of thought and criticism as complete as our political emancipation.

Those who have watched the tendencies of opinion among educated Englishmen during the last ten or fifteen years could hardly be surprised, that, when the question was presented to them as being between aristocratic and democratic ideas, between a race of gentlemen and a mob of shopkeepers and snobs, they should have been inclined to sympathize with the South. There have been unmistakable symptoms of a reaction in England, since 1848 especially, against liberalism in politics and in favor of things as they are. We are not to wonder that Englishmen did not stop to examine too closely the escutcheon and pedigree of this self-patented nobility. With one or two not very striking exceptions, like Lord Fairfax and Washington, (who was of kin to one of the few British peers that have enjoyed the distinction of being hanged,) the entire population of America is descended from the middle and lower classes in the old countries. The difference has been, that the man at the South who raised cotton and sold it has gradually grown to consider himself a superior being by comparison with his own negroes, while the man at the North who raised potatoes and sold them has been content with the old Saxon notion that he was as good as his neighbors. The descendant of the Huguenot tradesman or artisan, if in Boston, builds Faneuil Hall or founds Bowdoin College; if in Charleston, he deals in negroes and persuades himself that he is sprung from the loins of Baldwin, King of Jerusalem. The mass of the population at the South is more intensely democratic, so far as white men are concerned, than the same class at the North.

There is a little inconsistency in the English oracles in this respect; for, while they cannot conceal a kind of sympathy with the Southern Rebels in what is supposed to be their war upon democratic institutions, they tell us that they would heartily espouse our cause, if we would but proclaim a crusade against Slavery. Suppose the Squires of England had got up a rebellion because societies had been formed for the abolition of the Corn-Laws; which would the "Times" have gone for putting down first, the rebellion or the laws? England professes not to be able to understand the principles of this wicked, this unholy war, as she calls it. Yet she was not so slow to understand the necessity of putting down the Irish Insurrection of 1848, or the Indian Rebellion ten years later. She thinks it impossible for the Government of the United States to subdue and hold provinces so vast as the Cotton States of America; yet she neither foreboded nor as yet has found any impracticability in renewing and retaining her hold on the vaster provinces of British India,—provinces inhabited, all of them, by races alien in blood, religion, and manners, and many by a population greatly exceeding that of our Southern States, brave, warlike, and, to some extent, trained in European tactics. To have abandoned India would have been to surrender the greatness of England. English writers and speakers, in discussing our affairs, overlook wholly the fact that a rebellion may be crushed by anything except force of arms. Among a people of the same lineage and the same language, but yesterday contented under the same Constitution, and in an age when a victory in the stock-market is of more consequence than successes in the field, political and economical necessities may be safely reckoned on as slow, but effective, allies of the old order of things. The people of this country are too much used to sudden and seemingly unaccountable political revolutions not to be able to forfeit their consistency without any loss of self-respect; and the rapidity with which the Southern Rebellion was forced up to its present formidable proportions, mainly by party management, is not unlikely to find its parallel in suddenness of collapse. But whether this prove to be the fact or not, nay, even if the reëstablishment of the Union had been hopeless from the first, a government which should have abandoned its capital, which should have flinched from the first and plainest duty of self-preservation, which should have admitted by a cowardly surrender that force was law, that treason was constitutional, and fraud honorable, would have deserved and received the contempt of all civilized nations, of England among the first.

There is no such profound and universal alienation, still less such an antagonism in political theory, between the people of the Northern and Southern parts of the Union, as some English journals would infer from the foolish talk of a few conceited persons in South Carolina and Virginia. There is no question between landholders on the one side and manufacturers and merchants on the other. The bulk of the population, North and South, are holders of land, while the average size of the holdings of land under cultivation is probably greater in the Free than in the Slave States. The largest single estate in the country is, we believe, in Illinois. Generalizations are commonly unsafe in proportion as they are tempting; and this, together with its pretty twin-brother about Cavaliers and Roundheads, would seem to have been hatched from the same egg and in the same mare's-nest. If we should take the statements of Dr. Cullen and Mr. Smith O'Brien for our premises, instead of the manifest facts of the case, our conclusion in regard to Ireland would be an anachronism which no Englishman would allow to be within half a century of the actual condition of things. And yet could the Irish revolutionists of thirteen years ago have had the advantage of a ministry like that of Mr. Buchanan,—had every Irish officer and soldier been false to his honor and his allegiance,—had Ireland been supplied and England stripped of arms and munitions of war by the connivance of the Government,—the riot of 1848 might have become a rebellion as formidable as our own in everything but territorial proportions. Equally untrue is the theory that our Tariff is the moving cause of Southern discontent. Louisiana certainly would hardly urge this as the reason of her secession; and if the Rebel States could succeed in establishing their independence, they would find more difficulty in raising a national revenue by direct taxes than the North, and would be driven probably to a tariff more stringent than that of the present United States. If we are to generalize at all, it must be on broader and safer grounds. Prejudices and class-interests may occasion temporary disturbances in the current of human affairs, but they do not permanently change the course of the channel. That is governed by natural and lasting causes, and commerce, in spite of Southern Commercial Conventions, will no more flow up-hill than water. It is possible, we will not say probable, that our present difficulties may result to the advantage both of England and America: to England, by giving her a real hold upon India as the source of her cotton-supply, and to America by making the North the best customer for the staple of the South.

We believe the immediate cause of the Southern Rebellion to be something far deeper than any social prejudice or political theory on the part of slaveholders, or any general apprehension of danger to their peculiar property. That cause is a moral one, and is to be found in the recklessness, the conceit, the sophistry, the selfishness, which are necessarily engendered by Slavery itself. A generation of men educated to justify a crime against the Law of Nature because it is profitable, will hardly be restrained long by any merely political obligation, when they have been persuaded to see their advantage in the breach of it. Why not, then, at once lay the axe to the root of the mischief? Why did not England attack Irish Catholicism in 1848? Why does not Louis Napoleon settle the Papal Question with a stroke of his pen? Because the action of a constitutional government is limited by constitutional obligations. Because every government, even if despotic, must be guided by policy rather than abstract right or reason. Because, in our own case, so much pains have been taken to persuade the people of some peculiar sanctity in human property, and to teach them the duty of yielding their moral instincts to their duty as citizens, that even the Free States are by no means ripe for a crusade. The single and simple duty of the Government is to put down resistance to its legitimate authority; it meddles, and can meddle, with no claim of right except the monstrous one of rebellion. An absolute ruler in advance of his people has been more than once obliged to abandon his reforms to save his throne; a popular government which should put itself in the same position might endanger not only its own hold upon power, (a minor consideration,) but, in such a crisis as ours, the very frame of society itself. We must admit that the administration of Mr. Lincoln has sometimes seemed to us over-cautious; that, while it has not scrupled, and wisely has not scrupled, to go behind the letter of the law to its spirit, in dealing with open abettors of treason in the Free States, because they were perverting private right to public wrong, it has been as scrupulous of meddling with a rebel's legal right in man, though that man were being used for a weapon or a tool against itself, as if to touch it were anathema. The divinity, which is only a hedge about a king, becomes a wall of triple brass about a slaveholder.

But while we should prefer a more daring, or at least a more definite policy on the part of the Government, we do not think the time has come for turning the war into a crusade. The example of saints, martyrs, and heroes, who could disregard consequences because the consequences concerned only themselves and their own life, is for the private man, and not for the statesman who is responsible for the complex life of the commonwealth. To carry on a war we must have money, to get money we must have the confidence of the money-holders, who would not advance a dollar on a pledge of the finest sentiments in the world. There is something instructive in the fate of that mob of enthusiasts who followed the banner of Walter the Penniless, a name of evil omen. It saves trouble to say that we must fight the Devil with fire; though, when the Devil is incarnate in human beings, that policy has never been very successful at Smithfield or elsewhere. But in trying the fiery cure of a servile insurrection, we should run the risk of converting the whole white population of the South into devils of the most desperate sort, with whom any kind of reconciliation, even truce, would be impossible.

We hope and believe that the end of this war will see the snake of Slavery scotched, if not killed. Events move,—slowly, to be sure, but they move,—and the thought of the people moves with them unconsciously to fulfil the purposes of God. Government can do little, perhaps, in controlling them; but it has no right to the power it holds, if it has not the insight and the courage to make use of them at the right moment. If the supreme question should arise of submitting to rebellion or of crushing it in a common ruin with the wrong that engendered it, we believe neither the Government nor the people would falter. The time for answering that question may be nearer than we dream; but meanwhile we would not hasten what would at best be a terrible necessity, and justifiable only as such. We believe this war is to prepare the way for the extinction of Slavery by the action of economical causes, and we should prefer that solution to one of fire and blood. Already the system has received a death-blow in Maryland and Missouri. In Western Virginia it is practically extinct. If the war is carried on with vigor, it may become so before long in East Tennessee. Texas should be taken possession of and held at any cost, and a territory capable of supplying the world with cotton to any conceivable amount thrown open to free labor.

However regarded, this war into which we have been driven is, in fact, a war against Slavery. But emancipation is not and could not be the object of the war. It will be time enough to consider the question as one of military necessity when our armies advance. To proclaim freedom from the banks of the Potomac to an unarmed, subject, and dispirited race, when the whole white population is in arms, would be as futile as impolitic. Till we can equip our own army, it is idle to talk of arming the slaves; and to incite them to insurrection without arms, and without the certainty of support at first and protection afterward, would be merely sacrificing them to no good end. It is true, the war may lack the ardent stimulus that would for a time be imparted to it by a direct and obvious moral purpose. But we doubt whether the impulse thus gained would hold out long against the immense practical obstacles with which it would be confronted and the chill of disappointment which is sure to follow an attempt to realize ideal good by material means. Nor would our gain in this respect more than compensate for the strength which would be added to the rebels by despair. It is a question we have hardly the heart to discuss, where our wishes, our hopes, almost our faith in God, are on one side, our understanding and experience on the other.

Nor are we among those who would censure the Government for undue leniency. If democracy has made us a good-natured people, it is a strong argument in its favor, and we need have no fear that the evil passions of men will ever be buried beyond hope of resurrection. We would not have this war end without signal and bitter retribution, and especially for all who have been guilty of deliberate treachery; for that is a kind of baseness that should be extirpated at any cost. If, in moments of impatience, we have wished for something like the rough kingship of Jackson, cooler judgment has convinced us that the strength of democratic institutions will be more triumphantly vindicated by success under an honest Chief Magistrate of average capacity than under a man exceptional, whether by force of character or contempt of precedent.

Is this, then, to be a commonplace war, a prosaic and peddling quarrel about Cotton? Shall there be nothing to enlist enthusiasm or kindle fanaticism? Are we to have no Cause like that for which our English republican ancestors died so gladly on the field, with such dignity on the scaffold?—no Cause that shall give us a hero, who knows but a Cromwell? To our minds, though it may be obscure to Englishmen who look on Lancashire as the centre of the universe, no army was ever enlisted for a nobler service than ours. Not only is it national life and a foremost place among nations that is at stake, but the vital principle of Law itself, the august foundation on which the very possibility of government, above all of self-government, rests as in the hollow of God's own hand. If democracy shall prove itself capable of having raised twenty millions of people to a level of thought where they can appreciate this cardinal truth, and can believe no sacrifice too great for its defence and establishment, then democracy will have vindicated itself beyond all chance of future cavil. Here, we think, is a Cause the experience of whose vicissitudes and the grandeur of whose triumph will be able to give us heroes and statesmen. The Slave-Power must be humbled, must be punished,—so humbled and so punished as to be a warning forever; but Slavery is an evil transient in its cause and its consequences, compared with those which would result from unsettling the faith of a nation in its own manhood, and setting a whole generation of men hopelessly adrift in the formless void of anarchy.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

The Armies of Europe: Comprising Descriptions in Detail of the Military Systems of England, France, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sardinia, adapting their Advantages to all Arms of the United States Service; and embodying the Report of Observations in Europe during the Crimean War, as Military Commissioner from the United Stales Government in 1855-56. By GEORGE B. McCLELLAN, Major-General U.S. Army. Originally published under the Direction of the War Department, by Order of Congress. Illustrated with a Fine Steel Portrait and Several Hundred Engravings. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co. 8vo.

It is an interesting study to examine into the causes or motives which have produced military books of the higher order; for we are thus vouchsafed an insight into the writer's genius, and an intelligence of the circumstances amidst which he wrote, and of which he was often an important controller. The Archduke Charles wrote his "Grundsätze der Strategie," etc., as a vindication of his splendid movements in 1796, against the French armies of the Rhine and the Sambre-et-Meuse; and it has remained at once a monument to his achievements and a standard text-book in military science. Marmont, the Marshal Duke of Ragusa, collecting the principles of the art of war from "long and frequent conversations with Napoleon, twenty campaigns, and more than half a century of experience," has given us, in his "Esprit des Institutions Militaires," a condensed view of his own military life, as complete, if not as pleasantly diffuse, as his large volumes of "Mémoires." Jomini, from an extended experience, and a study of the genius of Napoleon, which his Russian position could never induce him to undervalue, has produced those standard works which must always remain the treasure-houses of military knowledge. We admire veracity, but let no soldier confess that he has not read the "Vie Politique et Militaire," and the "Précis de l'Art de la Guerre." But, in all these cases, the litera scripta has been but the closing act,—the signing of the name to History's bead-roll of passing greatness,—the testamentum of the old soldier whose personalty is worth bequeathing to the world.

The work before us, although of great value and present importance, is of a very different character; as a glance at the circumstances which produced it will show. It has, however, we would fondly hope, anticipated for its youthful author a greater success.

In 1855, Mr. Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, sent a military commission to Europe, composed of Major Delafield of the Engineers, Major Mordecai of the Ordnance, and Captain McClellan, just promoted from a Lieutenancy of Engineers to a Captaincy in the Cavalry. Major Delafield was charged with the special subject of Engineering; Major Mordecai with Ordnance and Gunnery; and to Captain McClellan was assigned the duty of a general report upon the Organization of Armies, with a special hearing upon the formation of Infantry and Cavalry. Each of these gentlemen has written a book, and that of McClellan, originally published as a Report to the Secretary of War,—in unmanageable quarto, and at a more unmanageable price,—is now issued, in the volume before us, with the very appropriate title, "The Armies of Europe," and in a convenient form for the eye and the purse.

Whatever of technical value the other reports may have,—and they are, we doubt not, excellent,—McClellan's is the only one of popular interest, the only one of rounded proportions and general importance; and if it also contain much addressed to the professional soldier, it must be remembered that the country is now being educated up to the intelligent perusal of such books.

Travelling in all the principal countries of Europe,—Montesquieu's assertion is now verified, that "only great nations can have large armies,"—the commission met everywhere proper facilities for observation. McClellan made full notes upon the spot, procured all the books of Tactics, Regulations, Military Laws, etc., and provided himself with such models of arms, equipments, saddles, bridles, tents, etc., as were easily transported. Operations of a difficult and laborious character, such as carrying horses on shipboard, are fully demonstrated with diagrams. Marches, manoeuvres, detachments, battles, are fully disclosed. Such investigations, when the French, Italian, or German language was the medium, were comparatively easy; but in order to give a proper comparative view, he was obliged also to study Russian, which he did successfully; by this means he has given us a masterly summary of the Russian system, with its immense battalions, its thousands of military schools, and its Cossack skirmishers, of wonderful endurance and formidable fierceness.

The volume is a complete description in detail of the principal armies, and of wider scope than would be expected; for, while the author has been very full upon the special topics assigned him, which did not include the duties of Engineers and Engineer Troops, it is easy to see everywhere that these latter would intrude themselves with the siren charms of a first love, and nothing but the record could dissolve the spell. Indeed, he urgently recommends to the Government the organization of Engineer troops, specifying their equipments, points of instruction, and duties. In this department, his description of Military Bridges is of great value. Incident to the faithful descriptions contained in the Report, and by far the most valuable feature of the work, we would specify his comments upon all that he saw. They are manly and bold, but raisonnés and just. They give token of that originality of thought which we call genius. The opening chapter on the Crimean War is the only fair critique of that gallant, but mismanaged campaign we remember to have seen. The author's object is to exhibit the movements of both Allies and Russians

"As truth will paint them, and as bards will not."

When MeClellan's work first appeared, the "Athenaeum" took up spear and shield; but, selon conseil, McClellan declined to reply, and the champion fought the air, without injuring the record.