The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 49, November, 1861

But whatever power of mischief lay in this marvellous combination of evil forces, so malignly working together, the Administration in which they found their life and whose agencies they employed was soon to yield up its fearfully desecrated trust. A new order of things, representing at least the spirit and purpose of that philanthropy and public righteousness to which our English brethren had for years been prompting us, was to come in with a new Administration, already constitutionally recognized, but not as yet put into power. It was asking but little of intelligent foreigners of our own blood and language, that they should make due allowance for that recurring period in the terms of our Government—as easily turned to mischievous influences as is an interregnum in a monarchy—by which there is a lapse of four months between the election and the inauguration of our Chief Magistrate. A retiring functionary may work and plan and provide an immense amount of disabling, annoying, and damaging experience to be encountered by his successor. That successor may at a distance, or close at hand, be an observer of all this influence; but whether it be simply of a partisan or of a malignant character, he is powerless to resist it, and good taste and the proprieties of his position seem to suggest that he make no public recognition of it. Every Chief Magistrate of this Republic, before its present head, acceded to office with its powers and dignities and facilities and trusts unimpaired by his predecessor. We have thought that among the thorns of the pillow on which a certain "old public functionary" lays his head, as he watches the dismal working of elements which he had more power than any other to have dispelled, not the least sharp one must be that which pierces him with the thought of the difference between the position which his predecessors prepared for him and that which he prepared for his successor. Not among the least of the claims which that successor has upon the profound and respectful sympathy of all good men everywhere is the fact that there has been no public utterance of complaining or reproachful words from his lips, reflecting upon his predecessor, or even asking indulgence on the score of the shattered and almost wrecked fabric of which we have put him in charge. We confess that we have looked through the English papers for months for some magnanimous and high-souled tribute of this sort to the Man who thus nobly represents a sacred and imperilled cause. If such tribute has been rendered, it has escaped our notice.

Now, as we are reflecting upon the tone and spirit of the English press at the opening of the Rebellion, we have to recall to the minds of our readers the fact, that in all its early stages, even down to and almost after the proclamation of the President summoning a volunteer force to resist it, we ourselves, at the North, utterly refused to consider the Seceders as in earnest. We may have been stupid, besotted, infatuated even, in our blindness and incredulity. But none the less did we, that is, the great majority of us, regard all the threats and measures of the South as something less formidable and actual than open war and probable or threatening revolution. We were persuaded that the people of the South had been wrought up by artful and ambitious leaders to wild alarm that the new Administration would visit outrages upon them and try to turn them into a state of vassalage. Utterly unconscious as we were of any purpose to trespass upon or reduce their fullest constitutional rights, we knew how grossly our intentions were misrepresented to them. We applied the same measure to the distance between their threats and the probability that they would carry them out which we knew ought to be applied to the difference between our supposed and our real intentions. In a word,—for this is the simple truth,—we regarded the manifestations of the seceding and rebelling States—or rather of the leaders and their followers in them—as in part bluster and in part a warning of what might ensue, though it would not be likely to ensue when their eyes were open to the truth. We were met by bold defiance, by outrageous abuse, and with an almost overwhelming venting of falsehoods. There was boastfulness, arrogance, assured claims of sufficient strength, and daring prophecies of success, enough to have made any cause triumphant, if triumph comes through such means. Still we were incredulous, perhaps foolishly and culpably so,—but incredulous, and unintimidated, and confident, none the less. We believed that wise, forbearing, and temperate measures of the new Administration would remove all real grievances, dispel all false alarms, and at least leave open the way to bloodless methods of preserving the Union. Part of our infatuation consisted in our seeing so plainly the infatuation of the South, while we did not allow for the lengths of wild and reckless folly into which it might drive them. We could see most plainly that either success in their schemes, or failure through a struggle to accomplish them, would be alike ruinous to them; that no cause standing on the basis and contemplating the objects recognized by them could possibly prosper, so long as the throne of heaven had a sovereign seated upon it. Full as much, then, from our conviction that the South would not insist upon doing itself such harm as from any fear of what might happen to us, did we refuse to regard Secession as a fixed fact. At the period of which we are speaking, there was probably not a single man at the North, of well-furnished and well-balanced mind—who stood clear in heart and pocket of all secret or interested bias toward the South—that deliberately recognized the probability of the dissolution of the Union. Very few such men will, indeed, recognize that possibility now, except as they recognize the possibility of the destruction of an edifice of solid blocks and stately columns by the grinding to powder of each large mass of the fabric, so that no rebuilding could restore it.

This was the state of mind and feeling with which we, who had so much at stake and could watch every pulsation of the excitement, contemplated the aspect of our opening strife. But with the first echo from abroad of its earliest announcements here came the most positive averments in the English papers, with scarcely a single exception, that the knell of this Union had struck. We had fallen asunder, our bond was broken, we had repudiated our former league or fellowship, and henceforth what had been a unit was to be two or more fragments, in peaceful or hostile relations as the case might be, but never again One. It would but revive for us the first really sharp and irritating pangs of this dismal experience, to go over the files of papers for those extracts which were like vinegar to our eyes as we first read them. Their substance is repeated to us in the sheets which come by every steamer. There were, of course, variations of tone and spirit in these evil prognostications and these raven-like croaks. Sometimes there was a vein of pity, and of that kind of sorrow which we feel and of that other kind which we express for other people's troubles. Sometimes there was a start of surprise, an ejaculation of amazement, or even profound dismay, at the calamity which had come upon us. In others of these newspaper comments there was that unmistakable superciliousness, that goading contemptuousness of self-conceit and puffy disdain, which John Bull visits on all "un-English" things, especially when they happen under their unfortunate aspects. In not a few of these same comments there was a tone of exultation, malignant and almost diabolical, as at the discomfiture of a hated and dangerous rival. We have read at least three English newspapers for each week that has passed since our troubles began; we have been readers of these papers for a score of years. In not one of them have we met the sentence or the line which pronounces hopefully, with bold assurance, for the renewed life of our Union. In by far the most of them there is reiterated the most positive and dogged averment that there is no future for us. We are not unmindful of the manliness and stout cheer with which a very few of them have avowed their wish and faith that the Rebels may be utterly discomfited and held up before the world in their shame and friendlessness, and have coupled with these utterances words of warm sympathy and approval for the North. But these ill-wishes for the one party and these good wishes for the other party are independent of anything but utter hopelessness as to the preservation or the restoration of the Union.

Now some may suggest that we make altogether too much of what so far is but the expression of an opinion, and, at worst, of an unfavorable opinion,—an opinion, too, which may yet prove to be correct. But the giving of an opinion on some matters has all the effect of taking a side, and often helps much to decide the stake. On very many accounts, this expression of English opinion, at the time it was uttered and with such emphasis, was most unwarranted and most mischievous. It is very easy to distribute its harmful influence upon our interests and prospects into three very different methods, all of which combined to injure or obstruct the Northern cause,—the National cause. Thus, this opinion of the hopelessness of our resistance of the men of our Union was of great value to the Rebels as an encouragement under any misgivings they might have; it was calculated to prejudice our position in the eyes of the world; and it had a tendency to dispirit many among ourselves. A word upon each of these points.—How quickening must it have been to the flagging hopes or determination of the Rebels to read in the English journals that they were sure of success, that the result was already registered, that they had gained their purpose simply by proposing it! Nor was it possible to regard this opinion as not carrying with it some implication that the cause of the Rebels was a just one, and was sure of success, if for other reasons, for this, too, among them, namely, that it was just. Why else were the Rebels so sure of a triumph? Was it because of their superior strength or resources? A very little inquiry would have set aside that suggestion. Was it because of the nobleness of their cause? A very frank avowal from the Vice-President of the assumed Confederacy announced to liberty-loving Englishmen that that cause was identified with a slavocracy. Or was the Rebel cause to succeed through the dignity and purity of the means enlisted in its service? It was equally well known on both sides of the water by what means and appliances of fraud, perfidy, treachery, and other outrages, the schemes of the Rebellion were initiated and pursued. If, in spite of all these negatives, the English press prophesies success to the Rebels, was not the prophecy a great comfort and spur to them?—Again, this prophecy of our sure discomfiture prejudiced us before the world. It gave a public character and aspect of hopelessness to our cause; it invited coldness of treatment towards us; it seemed to warn off all nations from giving us aid or comfort; and it virtually affirmed that any outlay of means or life by us in a cause seen to be impracticable would be reckless, sanguinary, cruel, and inhuman.—And, once more, to those among ourselves who are influenced by evil prognostications, it was most dispiriting to be told, as if by cool, unprejudiced observers from outside, that no uprising of patriotism, no heroism of sacrifice, no combination of wisdom and power would be of any avail to resist a foreordained catastrophe.—In these three harmful ways of influence, the ill-omened opinion reiterated from abroad had a tendency to fulfil itself. The whole plea of justification offered abroad for the opinion is given in the assertion that those who have once been bitterly alienated can never be brought into true harmony again, and that it is impossible to govern the unwilling as equals. England has but to read the record of her own strifes and battles and infuriated passages with Scotland and Ireland,—between whom and herself alienations of tradition, prejudice, and religion seemed to make harmony as impossible as the promise of it is to these warring States,—England has only to refresh her memory on these points, in order to relieve us of the charge of folly in attempting an impossibility. So much for the first grievance we allege against our English brethren.

Another of our specifications of wrong is involved in that already considered. If English opinion decided that our nationality must henceforth be divided, it seemed also to imply that we ought to divide according to terms dictated by the Seceders. This was a precious judgment to be pronounced against us by a sister Government which was standing in solemn treaty relations with us as a unit in our nationality! What did England suppose had become of our Northern manhood, of the spirit of which she herself once felt the force? There was something alike humiliating and exasperating in this implied advice from her, that we should tamely and unresistingly submit to a division of continent, bays, and rivers, according to terms defiantly and insultingly proposed by those who had a joint ownership with ourselves. How would England receive such advice from us under like circumstances? But we must cut short the utterance of our feelings on this point, that we may make another specification,—

Which is, that our English critics see only, or chiefly, in the fearful and momentous conflict in which we are engaged, "a bursting of the bubble of Democracy"! Shall we challenge now the intelligence or the moral principle, the lack of one or the other of which is betrayed in this sneering and malignant representation—this utter misrepresentation—of the catastrophe which has befallen our nation? Intelligent Englishmen know full well that the issue raised among us does not necessarily touch or involve at a single point the principles of Democracy, but stands wide apart and distinct from them. We might with as much propriety have said that the Irish Rebellion and the Indian Mutiny showed "the bursting of the bubble of Monarchy." The principles of Democracy stand as firm and find our people as loyal to them in every little town-meeting and in every legislature of each loyal State in the Union as they did in the days of our first enthusiastic and successful trial of them. Supposing even that the main assumption on which so many Englishmen have prematurely vented their scorn were a fact; we cannot but ask if the nation nearest akin to us, and professing to be guided in this century by feelings which forbid a rejoicing over others' great griefs, has no words of high moral sympathy, no expressions of regretful disappointment in our calamities? Is it the first or the most emphatic thing which it is most fitting for Christian Englishmen to say over the supposed wreck of a recently noble and promising country, the prospered home of thirty millions of God's children,—that "a bubble has burst"? We might interchange with our foreign "comforters" a discussion by arguments and facts as to whether a monarchy or a democracy has about it more of the qualities of a bubble, but the debate would be irrelevant to our present purpose. We believe that Democracy in its noblest and all-essential and well-proved principles will survive the shock which has struck upon our nation, whatever the result of that shock may yet prove to be. We believe, further, that the principles of Democracy will come out of the struggle which is trying, not themselves, but something quite distinct from them, with a new affirmation and vindication. But let that be as it may, we are as much ashamed for England's sake as we are aggrieved on our own account that from the vehicles of public sentiment in "the foremost realm in the world for all true culture, advanced progress, and the glorious triumphs of liberty and religion," what should be a profoundly plaintive lament over our supposed ruin is, in reality, a mocking taunt and a hateful gibe over our failure in daring to try an "un-English" experiment.1

The stately "Quarterly Review," in its number for July, uses a little more of dignity in wording the title of an article upon our affairs thus,—"Democracy on its Trial"; but it makes up for the waste of refinement upon its text by a lavish indulgence in scurrility and falsehood in its comments. As a specimen, take the following. Living here in this goodly city of Boston, and knowing and loving well its ways and people, we are asked to credit the following story, which the Reviewer says he heard from "a well-known traveller." The substance of the story is, that a Boston merchant proposed to gild the lamp over his street-door, but was dissuaded from so doing by the suggestion of a friend, that by savoring of aristocracy the ornamented gas-burner would offend the tyrannical people and provoke violence against it! This, the latest joke in the solemn Quarterly, has led many of its readers here to recall the days of Madame Trollope and the Reverend Mr. Fiddler, those veracious and "well-known travellers." There are, we are sorry to say, many gilded street-lamps, burnished and blazing every night, in Boston. But instead of standing before the houses of our merchants, they designate quite a different class of edifices. Our merchants, as a general thing, would object, both on the score of good taste and on grounds of disagreeable association with the signal, to raise such an ornament before the doors of their comfortable homes. The common people, however, so far from taking umbrage at the spectacle, would be rather gratified by the generosity of our grandees in being willing to show some of their finery out of doors. This would be the feeling especially of that part of our population which is composed of foreigners, who have been used to the sight of such demonstrations in their native countries, which are not democracies. In fact, we suspect that the reason why English "flunkeys" hate American "flunkeyism," with its laced coachmen, etc., is because mere money, by aping the insignia of rank, its gewgaws and trumpery, shows too plainly how much of the rank itself depends upon the fabrics and demonstrations through which it sets itself forth. We can conceive that an English nobleman travelling in this country, who might chance in one of our cities to see a turn-out with its outriders, tassels, and crests, almost or quite as fine as his own, if he were informed that it belonged to a plebeian who had grown vastly rich through some coarse traffic, might resolve to reduce all the display of his own equipage the moment he reached home. The labored and mean-spirited purpose of the writer of the aforesaid article in the Quarterly, and of other writers of like essays, is to find in our democracy the material and occasion of everything of a discreditable sort which occurs in our land. Now we apprehend, not without some means of observation and inquiry, that the state and features of society in Great Britain and in all our Northern regions are almost identically the same, or run in parallelisms, by which we might match every phenomenon, incident, prejudice, and folly, every good and every bad trait and manifestation in the one place with something exactly like it in the other. During a whole score of years, as we have read the English journals and our own, the thought has over and over again suggested itself to us that any one who had leisure and taste for the task might cut out from each series of papers respectively, for a huge commonplace book, matters of a precisely parallel nature in both countries. A simple difference in the names of men and of places would be all that would appear or exist. Every noble and every mean and every mixed exhibition of character,—every act of munificence and of baseness,—every narrative of thrilling or romantic interest,—every instance and example of popular delusion, humbug, man-worship, breach of trust, domestic infelicity, and of cunning or astounding depravity and hypocrisy,—every religious, social, and political excitement,—every panic,—and every accident even, from carelessness or want of skill,—each and all these have their exact parallels, generally within the same year of time in Great Britain and in our own country. The crimes and the catastrophes, in each locality, have seemed almost repetitions of the same things on either continent. Munificent endowments of charitable institutions, zeal in reformatory enterprises and in the correction of abuses, have shown that the people of both regions stand upon the same plane of humanity and practical Christian culture. The same great frauds have indicated in each the same amount of rottenness in men occupying places of trust. Both regions have had the same sort of unprincipled "railway kings" and bankers, similar railroad disasters, similar cases of the tumbling down of insecure walls, and of wife-poisoning. A Chartist insurrection enlists a volunteer police in London, and an apprehended riot among foreigners is met by a similar precaution in one of our cities. An intermittent controversy goes on in England about the interference of religion with common education, and Boston or New York is agitated at the same time with the question about the use of the Bible in the public schools. Boston rowdies mob an English intermeddler with the ticklish matters of our national policy, and English rowdies mob an Austrian Haynau. England goes into ecstasies over the visit of a Continental Prince, and our Northern States repeat the demonstration over the visit of a British Prince. The Duke of Wellington alarms his fellow-subjects by suggesting that their national defences would all prove insufficient against the assaults of a certain terrible Frenchman, and an American cabinet official echoes the suggestion that England may, perhaps, try her strength in turn against us. There are evidently a great many bubbles in this world, and, for all that we know to the contrary, they are all equally liable to burst. Some famous ones, bright in royal hues, have burst within the century. Some more of the same may, not impossibly, suffer a collapse before the century has closed. So that, for this matter, "the bubble of Democracy" must take its chance with the rest.

We have one more specification to make under our general statement of reasons why the North feels aggrieved with the prevailing tone of sentiment and comment in the English journals in reference to our great calamity. We protest against the verdict which finds expression in all sorts of ways and with various aggravations, that, in attempting to rupture our Union, and to withdraw from it on their own terms, at their own pleasure, the seceding States are but repeating the course of the old Thirteen Colonies in declaring themselves independent, and sundering their ties to the mother country. There is evidently the rankling of an old smart in this plea for rebels, which, while it is not intended to justify rebellion in itself, is devised as a vindication of rebels against rebels. There is manifest satisfaction and a high zest, and something of the morally awful and solemnly remonstrative, in the way in which the past is evoked to visit its ghostly retribution upon us. The old sting rankles in the English breast. She is looking on now to see us hoist by our own petard. These pamphlet pages, with their circumscribed limits and their less ambitious aims, do not invite an elaborate dealing with the facts of the case, which would expose the sophistical, if not the vengeful spirit of this English plea, as for rebels against rebels. A thorough exposition of the relations which the present Insurrection bears to the former Revolution would demand an essay. The relations between them, however, whether stated briefly or at length, would be found to be simply relations of difference, without one single point of resemblance, much less of coincidence. We can make but the briefest reference to the points of contrast and unlikeness between the two things, after asserting that they have no one common feature. It might seem evasive in us to suggest to our English critics that they should refresh their memories about the causes and the justification of our Revolution by reading the pages of their own Burke. We are content to rest our case on his argument, simply affirming that on no one point will it cover the alleged parallelism of the Southern Rebellion.

The relations of our States to each other and to the Union are quite unlike those in which the Colonies stood to England. England claimed by right of discovery and exploration the soil on which her Colonies here were planted, though she had rival claimants from the very first. A large number of the Colonists never had any original connection with England, and owed her no allegiance. Holland, Sweden, and other countries furnished much of the first stock of our settlers, who thought they were occupying a wild part of God's earth rather than a portion of the English dominions. The Colonies were not planted at public charge, by Government cost or enterprise. The English exiles, with but slender grounds of grateful remembrance of the land they had left, brought with them their own private means, subdued a wilderness, extinguished the aboriginal titles, and slowly and wearily developed the resources of the country. Often in their direst straits did they decline to ask aid from England, lest they might thereby furnish a plea for her interference with their internal affairs. Several of the Colonies from the first acted upon their presumed independence, and resolved on the frank assertion of it as soon as they might dare the venture. That time for daring happened to be contemporaneous with a tyrannical demand upon them for tribute without representation. Thus the relations of the Colonies to England were of a hap-hazard, abnormal, incidental, and always unsettled character. They might be modified or changed without any breach of contract. They might be sundered without perjury or perfidy.