University of Virginia Library

MY DIARY NORTH AND SOUTH.

CHAPTER I.

On the evening of 3d March, 1861, I was transferred from
the little steam-tender, which plies between Cork and the anchorage
of the Cunard steamers at the entrance of the harbor,
to the deck of the good steamship Arabia, Captain Stone; and
at nightfall we were breasting the long rolling waves of the
Atlantic.

The voyage across the Atlantic has been done by so many
able hands, that it would be superfluous to describe mine,
though it is certain no one passage ever resembled another,
and no crew or set of passengers in one ship were ever identical
with those in any other. For thirteen days the Atlantic
followed its usual course in the month of March, and was true
to the traditions which affix to it in that month the character
of violence and moody changes, from bad to worse and back
again. The wind was sometimes dead against us, and then
the infelix Arabia with iron energy set to work, storming
great Malakhofs of water, which rose above her like the side
of some sward-coated hill crested with snow-drifts; and having
gained the summit, and settled for an instant among the
hissing sea-horses, ran plunging headlong down to the encounter
of another wave, and thus went battling on with heart
of fire and breath of flame—igneus est ollis vigor—hour
after hour.

The traveller for pleasure had better avoid the Atlantic in
the month of March. The wind was sometimes with us, and
then the sensations of the passengers and the conduct of the
ship were pretty much as they had been during the adverse

breezes before, varied by the performance of a very violent
"yawing" from side to side, and certain squashings of the
paddle-boxes into the yeasty waters, which now ran a race
with us and each other, as if bent on chasing us down, and
rolling their boarding parties with foaming crests down on our
decks. The boss, which we represented in the stormy shield
around as, still moved on; day by day our microcosm shifted
its position in the ever-advancing circle of which it was the
centre, with all around and within it ever undergoing a sea
change.

The Americans on board were, of course, the most interesting
passengers to one like myself, who was going out to visit
the great Republic under very peculiar circumstances. There
was, first, Major Garnett, a Virginian, who was going back
to his State to follow her fortunes. He was an officer of the
regular army of the United States, who had served with distinction
in Mexico; an accomplished, well-read man; reserved,
and rather gloomy; full of the doctrine of States' Rights, and
animated with a considerable feeling of contempt for the New
Englanders, and with the strongest prejudices in favor of the
institution of slavery. He laughed to scorn the doctrine that
all men are born equal in the sense of all men having equal
rights. Some were born to be slaves—some to be laborers
in the lower strata above the slaves—others to follow useful
mechanical arts—the rest were born to rule and to own their
fellow-men. There was next a young Carolinian, who had
left his post as attaché at St. Petersburgh to return to his
State: thus, in all probability, avoiding the inevitable supersession
which awaited him at the hands of the new Government
at Washington. He represented, in an intensified form,
all the Virginian's opinions, and held that Mr. Calhoun's interpretation
of the Constitution was incontrovertibly right.
There were difficulties in the way of State sovereignty, he
confessed; but they were only in detail—the principle was
unassailable.

To Mr. Mitchell, South Carolina represented a power quite
sufficient to meet all the Northern States in arms. "The
North will attempt to blockade our coast," said he; "and in
that case, the South must march to the attack by land, and
will probably act in Virginia." "But if the North attempts
to do more than institute a blockade?—for instance, if their
fleet attack your seaport towns, and land men to occupy
them?" "Oh, in that case we are quite certain of beating

them." Mr. Julian Mitchell was indignant at the idea of
submitting to the rule of a "rail-splitter," and of such men
as Seward and Cameron. "No gentleman could tolerate such
a Government."

An American family from Nashville, consisting of a lady
and her son and daughter, were warm advocates of a "gentlemanly"
government, and derided the Yankees with great
bitterness. But they were by no means as ready to encounter
the evils of war, or to break up the Union, as the South-Carolinian
or the Virginian; and in that respect they represented,
I was told, the negative feelings of the Border States,
which are disposed to a temporizing, moderate course of action,
most distasteful to the passionate seceders.

There were also two Louisiana sugar-planters on board—
one owning 500 slaves, the other rich in some thousands of
acres; they seemed to care very little for the political aspects
of the question of Secession, and regarded it merely in reference
to its bearing on the sugar crop, and the security of slave
property. Secession was regarded by them as a very extreme
and violent measure, to which the State had resorted with reluctance;
but it was obvious, at the same time, that, in event
of a general secession of the Slave States from the North,
Louisiana could neither have maintained her connection with
the North, nor have stood in isolation from her sister States.

All these, and some others who were fellow-passengers,
might be termed Americans—pur sang. Garnett belonged
to a very old family in Virginia. Mitchell came from a stock
of several generations' residence in South Carolina. The
Tennessee family were, in speech and thought, types of what
Europeans consider true Americans to be. Now take the
other side. First there was an exceedingly intelligent, well-informed
young merchant of New York—nephew of an English
county Member, known for his wealth, liberality, and munificence.
Educated at a university in the Northern States,
he had lived a good deal in England, and was returning to
his father from a course of book-keeping in the house of his
uncle's firm in Liverpool. His father and uncle were born
near Coleraine, and he had just been to see the humble dwelling,
close to the Giant's Causeway, which sheltered their
youth, and where their race was cradled. In the war of 1812,
the brothers were about sailing in a privateer fitted out to
prey against the British, when accident fixed one of them in
Liverpool, where he founded the house which has grown so

greatly with the development of trade between New York
and Lancashire, whilst the other settled in the States. Without
being violent in tone, the young Northerner was very resolute
in temper, and determined to do all which lay in his
power to prevent the "glorious Union" being broken up.

The "Union" has thus founded on two continents a family
of princely wealth, whose originals had probably fought with
bitterness in their early youth against the union of Great
Britain and Ireland. But did Mr. Brown, or the other Americans
who shared his views, unreservedly approve of American
institutions, and consider them faultless? By no means.
The New Yorkers especially were eloquent on the evils of the
suffrage, and of the license of the Press in their own city;
and displayed much irritation on the subject of naturalization.
The Irish were useful, in their way, making roads and working
hard, for there were few Americans who condescended to
manual labor, or who could not make far more money in
higher kinds of work; but it was absurd to give the Irish
votes which they used to destroy the influence of native-born
citizens, and to sustain a corporation and local bodies of unsurpassable
turpitude, corruption, and inefficiency.

Another young merchant, a college friend of the former,
was just returning from a tour in Europe with his amiable
sister. His father was the son of an Irish immigrant, but he
did not at all differ from the other gentlemen of his city in
the estimate in which he held the Irish element; and though
he had no strong bias one way or other, he was quite resolved
to support the abstraction called the Union, and its representative
fact—the Federal Government. Thus the agriculturist
and the trader—the grower of raw produce and the merchant
who dealt in it—were at opposite sides of the question
—wide apart as the Northern and Southern Poles. They
sat apart, ate apart, talked apart—two distinct nations, with
intense antipathies on the part of the South, which was active
and aggressive in all its demonstrations.

The Southerners have got a strange charge de plus against
the Irish. It appears that the regular army of the United
States is mainly composed of Irish and Germans; very few
Americans indeed being low enough, or martially disposed
enough, to "take the shilling." In case of a conflict, which
these gentlemen think inevitable, "low Irish mercenaries
would," they say, "be pitted against the gentlemen of the
South, and the best blood in the States would be spilled by

fellows whose lives are worth nothing whatever." Poor
Paddy is regarded as a mere working machine, fit, at best, to
serve against Choctaws and Seminoles. His facility of reproduction
has to compensate for the waste which is caused
by the development in his unhappy head of the organs of
combativeness and destructiveness. Certainly, if the war is
to be carried on by the United States' regulars, the Southern
States will soon dispose of them, for they do not number
20,000 men, and their officers are not much in love with the
new Government. But can it come to War? Mr. Mitchell
assures me I shall see some "pretty tall fighting."

The most vehement Northerners in the steamer are Germans,
who are going to the States for the first time, or returning
there. They have become satisfied, no doubt, by long
process of reasoning, that there is some anomaly in the condition
of a country which calls itself the land of liberty, and is
at the same time the potent palladium of serfdom and human
chattelry. When they are not sea-sick, which is seldom, the
Teutons rise up in all the might of their misery and dirt, and,
making spasmodic efforts to smoke, blurt out between the
puffs, or in moody intervals, sundry remarks on American
politics. "These are the swine," quoth Garnett, "who are
swept out of German gutters as too foul for them, and who
come over to the States and presume to control the fate and
the wishes of our people. In their own country they proved
they were incapable of either earning a living, or exercising
the duties of citizenship; and they seek in our country a
license denied them in their own, and the means of living
which they could not acquire anywhere else."

And for myself I may truly say this, that no man ever set
foot on the soil of the United States with a stronger and sincerer
desire to ascertain and to tell the truth, as it appeared to
him. I had no theories to uphold, no prejudices to subserve,
no interests to advance, no instructions to fulfil; I was a free
agent, bound to communicate to the powerful organ of public
opinion I represented, my own daily impressions of the men,
scenes, and actions around me, without fear, favor, or affection
of or for anything but that which seemed to me to be the
truth. As to the questions which were distracting the States,
my mind was a tabula rasa, or, rather, tabula non seripta. I
felt indisposed to view with favor a rebellion against one of the
established and recognized governments of the world, which,
though not friendly to Great Britain, nor opposed to slavery,

was without, so far as I could see, any legitimate cause of revolt,
or any injury or grievance, perpetrated or imminent, assailed
by States still less friendly to us, which the Slave States,
pure and simple, certainly were and probably are. At the
same time, I knew that these were grounds which I could justly
take, whilst they would not be tenable by an American, who
is by the theory on which he revolted from us and created his
own system of government, bound to recognize the principle
that the discontent of the popular majority with its rulers, is
ample ground and justification for revolution.

It was on the morning of the fourteenth day that the shores
of New York loomed through the drift of a cold wintry sea,
leaden-gray and comfortless, and in a little time more the
coast, covered with snow, rose in sight. Towards the afternoon
the sun came out and brightened the waters and the sails
of the pretty trim schooners and coasters which were dancing
around us. How different the graceful, tautly-rigged, clean,
white-sailed vessels, from the round-sterned, lumpish billyboys
and nondescripts of the eastern coast of our isle! Presently
there came bowling down towards us a lively little schooner-yacht,
very like the once famed "America," brightly painted,
in green, sails dazzling white, lofty ponderous masts, no tops.
As she came nearer, we saw she was crowded with men in
chimney-pot black hats, and coats, and the like—perhaps a
party of citizens on pleasure, cold as the day was. Nothing
of the kind. The craft was our pilot-boat, and the hats and
coats belonged to the hardy mariners who act as guides to the
port of New York. Their boat was lowered, and was soon
under our mainchains; and a ehimney-pot hat having duly
come over the side, delivered a mass of newspapers to the captain,
which were distributed among the eager passengers, when
each at once became the centre of a spell-bound circle.