University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XLII.

I shall here briefly recapitulate what has occurred since
the last mention of political events.

In the first place the South has been developing every day
greater energy in widening the breach between it and the
North, and preparing to fill it with dead; and the North, so
far as I can judge, has been busy in raising up the Union as
a nationality, and making out the crime of treason from the
act of Secession. The South has been using conscription in
Virginia, and is entering upon the conflict with unsurpassable
determination. The North is availing itself of its greater resources
and its foreign vagabondage and destitution to swell
the ranks of its volunteers, and boasts of its enormous armies,
as if it supposed conscripts well led do not fight better than
volunteers badly officered. Virginia has been invaded on
three points, one below and two above Washington, and passports
are now issued on both sides.

The career open to the Southern privateers is effectually
closed by the Duke of Newcastle's notification that the British
Government will not permit the cruisers of either side to bring
their prizes into or condemn them in English ports; but,
strange to say, the Northerners feel indignant against Great
Britain for an act which deprives their enemy of an enormous
advantage, and which must reduce their privateering to the
mere work of plunder and destruction on the high seas. In
the same way the North affects to consider the declaration of
neutrality, and the concession of limited belligerent rights to
the seceding States, as deeply injurious and insulting; whereas
our course has, in fact, removed the greatest difficulty from
the path of the Washington Cabinet, and saved us from inconsistencies
and serious risks in our course of action.

It is commonly said, "What would Great Britain have done
if we had declared ourselves neutral during the Canadian rebellion,
or had conceded limited belligerent rights to the Sepoys?"
as if Canada and Hindostan have the same relation
to the British Crown that the seceding States had to the
Northern States. But if Canada, with its parliament, judges,
courts of law, and its people, declared it was independent of
Great Britain; and if the Government of Great Britain,
months after that declaration was made and acted upon, permitted
the new State to go free, whilst a large number of her
Statesmen agreed that Canada was perfectly right, we could
find little fault with the United States Government for issuing
a proclamation of neutrality the same as our own, when after
a long interval of quiescence a war broke out between the
two countries.

Secession was an accomplished fact months before Mr. Lincoln
came into office, but we heard no talk of rebels and pirates
till Sumter had fallen, and the North was perfectly quiescent
—not only that—the people of wealth in New York were
calmly considering the results of Secession as an accomplished
fact, and seeking to make the best of it; nay, more, when I
arrived in Washington some members of the Cabinet were
perfectly ready to let the South go.

One of the first questions put to me by Mr. Chase in my
first interview with him, was whether I thought a very injurious
effect would be produced to the prestige of the Federal
Government in Europe if the Northern States let the South
have its own way, and told them to go in peace. "For my
own part," said he, "I should not be averse to let them try it,
for I believe they would soon find out their mistake." Mr.
Chase may be finding out his mistake just now. When I left
England the prevalent opinion, as far as I could judge, was,
that a family quarrel, in which the South was in the wrong,
had taken place, and that it would be better to stand by and
let the Government put forth its strengh to chastise rebellious
children. But now we see the house is divided against itself,
and that the family are determined to set up two separate
establishments. These remarks occur to me with the more
force because I see the New York papers are attacking me
because I described a calm in a sea which was afterwards
agitated by a storm. "What a false witness is this," they
cry; "see how angry and how vexed is our Bermoothes, and
yet the fellow says it was quite placid."

I have already seen so many statements respecting my sayings,
my doings, and my opinions, in the American papers,
that I have resolved to follow a general rule, with few exceptions
indeed, which prescribes as the best course to pursue,
not so much an indifference to these remarks as a fixed purpose
to abstain from the hopeless task of correcting them.
The "Quicklys" of the press are incorrigible. Commerce
may well be proud of Chicago. I am not going to reiterate
what every Crispinus from the old country has said again and
again concerning this wonderful place—not one word of statistics,
of corn elevators, of shipping, or of the piles of buildings
raised from the foundation by ingenious applications of
screws. Nor am I going to enlarge on the splendid future of
that which has so much present prosperity, or on the benefits
to mankind opened up by the Illinois Central Railway. It
is enough to say that by the borders of this lake there has
sprung up in thirty years a wonderful city of fine streets, luxurious
hotels, handsome shops, magnificent stores, great warehouses,
extensive quays, capacious docks; and that as long
as corn holds its own, and the mouths of Europe are open,
and her hands full, Chicago will acquire greater importance,
size, and wealth with every year. The only drawback, perhaps,
to the comfort of the money-making inhabitants, and of
the stranger within the gates, is to be found in the clouds of
dust and in the unpaved streets and thoroughfares, which give
anguish to horse and man.

I spent three days here writing my letters and repairing the
wear and tear of my Southern expedition; and although it was
hot enough, the breeze from the lake carried health and vigor
to the frame, enervated by the sun of Louisiana and Mississippi.
No need now to wipe the large drops of moisture from
the languid brow lest, they blind the eyes, nor to sit in a state
of semi-clothing, worn out and exhausted, and tracing with
moist hand imperfect characters on the paper.

I could not satisfy myself whether there was, as I have been
told, a peculiar state of feeling in Chicago, which induced many
people to support the Government of Mr. Lincoln because they
believed it necessary for their own interest to obtain decided
advantages over the South in the field, whilst they were opposed
totis viribus to the genius of emancipation and to the views of
the Black Republicans. But the genius and eloquence of the
Little Giant have left their impress on the facile mould of democratic
thought; and he who argued with such acuteness and

ability last March in Washington, in his own study, against
the possibility, or at least the constitutional legality, of using
the national forces, and the militia and volunteers of the Northern
States, to subjugate the Southern people, carried away by
the great bore which rushed through the placid North when
Sumter fell, or perceiving his inability to resist its force, sprung
to the crest of the wave, and carried to excess the violence of
the Union reaction.

Whilst I was in the South I had seen his name in Northern
papers with sensation headings and descriptions of his magnificent
crusade for the Union in the West. I had heard his name
reviled by those who had once been his warm political allies,
and his untimely death did not seem to satisfy their hatred.
His old foes in the North admired and applauded the sudden
apostasy of their eloquent opponent, and were loud in lamentations
over his loss. Imagine, then, how I felt when visiting
his grave at Chicago, seeing his bust in many houses, or his
portrait in all the shop-windows, I was told that the enormously
wealthy community of which he was the idol were
permitting his widow to live in a state not far removed from
penury.

"Senator Douglas, sir," observed one of his friends to me,
"died of bad whiskey. He killed himself with it while he was
stumping for the Union all over the country." "Well," I said,
"I suppose, sir, the abstraction called the Union, for which by
your own account he killed himself, will give a pension to his
widow." Virtue is its own reward, and so is patriotism, unless
it takes the form of contracts.

As far as all considerations of wife, children, or family are
concerned, let a man serve a decent despot, or even a constitutional
country with an economizing House of Commons, if he
wants anything more substantial than lip-service. The history
of the great men of America is full of instances of national ingratitude.
They give more praise and less pence to their
benefactors than any nation on the face of the earth. Washington
got little, though the plundering scouts who captured
André were well rewarded; and the men who fought during
the War of Independence were long left in neglect and poverty,
sitting in sackcloth and ashes at the doorsteps of the temple of
liberty, whilst the crowd rushed inside to worship Plutus.

If a native of the British Isles, of the natural ignorance of
his own imperfections which should characterize him, desires
to be subjected to a series of moral shower-baths, douches, and

shampooing with a rough glove, let him come to the United
States. In Chicago he will be told that the English people
are fed by the beneficence of the United States, and that all
the trade and commerce of England are simply directed to the
one end of obtaining gold enough to pay the Western States
for the breadstuffs exported for our population. We know
what the South think of our dependence on cotton. The people
of the East think they are striking a great blow at their
enemy by the Morrill tariff and I was told by a patriot in
North Carolina, "Why, creation! if you let the Yankees shut
up our ports, the whole of your darned ships will go to rot.
Where will you get your naval stores from? Why, I guess
in a year you could not scrape up enough of tarpentine in the
whole of your country for Queen Victoria to paint her nursery-door
with."

Nearly one half of the various companies enrolled in this
district are Germans, or are the descendants of German parents,
and speak only the language of the old country; two-thirds
of the remainder are Irish, or of immediate Irish descent;
but it is said that a grand reserve of Americans born lies behind
this avant garde, who will come into the battle should
there ever be need for their services.

Indeed so long as the Northern people furnish the means of
paying and equipping armies perfectly competent to do their
work, and equal in numbers to any demands made for men,
they may rest satisfied with the accomplishment of that duty,
and with contributing from their ranks the great majority of
the superior and even of the subaltern officers; but with the
South it is far different. Their institutions have repelled immigration;
the black slave has barred the door to the white
free settler. Only on the seaboard and in the large cities are
German and Irish to be found, and they to a man have come
forward to fight for the South; but the proportion they bear to
the native-born Americans who have rushed to arms in defence
of their menaced borders, is of course far less than it is
as yet to the number of Americans in the Northern States who
have volunteered to fight for the Union.

I was invited before I left to visit the camp of a Colonel
Turchin, who was described to me as a Russian officer of
great ability and experience in European warfare, in command
of a regiment consisting of Poles, Hungarians, and
Germans, who were about to start for the seat of war; but I
was only able to walk through his tents, where I was astonished

at the amalgam of nations that constituted his battalion;
though, on inspection, I am bound to say there proved to be an
American element in the ranks which did not appear to have
coalesced with the bulk of the rude, and, I fear, predatory Cossacks
of the Union. Many young men of good position have
gone to the wars, although there was no complaint, as in Southern
cities, that merchants' offices have been deserted, and great
establishments left destitute of clerks and working hands. In
warlike operations, however, Chicago, with its communication
open to the sea, its access to the head waters of the Mississippi,
its intercourse with the marts of commerce and of manufacture,
may be considered to possess greater belligerent power
and strength than the great city of New Orleans; and there
is much greater probability of Chicago sending its contingent
to attack the Crescent City than there is of the latter being
able to despatch a soldier within five hundred miles of its
streets.