University of Virginia Library

THE FALL OF RICHMOND.

TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY—OUR ATTITUDE
TO THE SOUTH AND TO EUROPE.

[From the New York Herald, April, 1865.]

General Lee has surrendered! That is the
news of the hour—the supreme news of our century;
and we have now a moment to think
seriously and calmly on the duties devolved upon
us by the termination of the rebellion. It is not
only the privilege but the duty of victors to be
generous, as by such a course fresh laurels are
added to their fame, and their ascendancy is more
firmly established. A powerful people, who have
so gloriously attested a strength more than adequate
for every need, can well afford to treat their
vanquished domestic enemies with the splendid
leniency exhibited in the terms of surrender proposed
by General Grant and accepted by General
Lee, while regarding with silent derision, or ignoring
altogether, the foiled efforts and hopes of all
their foreign foes. Our great popular struggle,
now virtually closed, finds us with vast interests
in both sections of our reunited country demanding
prompt attention; but with no revenges to

be gratified, nor any inclination to squander time
in the costly luxury of obtaining retribution for
bygone injuries. Over the errors of the South let
a veil be thrown for ever; while for the wrongs
inflicted on us during the past four years by the
governments of France and England we can best
obtain satisfaction by showing to the oppressed
populations of those countries how superbly contemptuous
of foreign interference—how grandly
magnanimous to the misled and chastened children
of our own household—the ruling democracy
of this continent can prove in their hour of triumph.
It is by an example of the ever-increasing
prosperity and grandeur of our reunited country,
acting on the aspirations, necessities, and impulses
of the French and English masses, that the unwise
and unjust policy of their respective governments
in favor of the now almost extinguished “confederacy”
can be most effectually punished—these
governments, in their blind hatred and jealousy
of our free democratic system, having established
a precedent in granting belligerent rights to rebellious
States which must hereafter, and before long,
prove fatal to their own existence. They, surely,
of all others—only existing by legitimacy and
divine right—should have been the last to recognize
and abet any insurrection against organized
national authority; and, least of all, an insurrection
against a government so absolutely free and
equal to all sections and classes as was, and shall
hereafter be, our own. If, for alleged wrongs of
anticipation or frivolous theories of pride, certain
States of our Union were justified in rebelling
against a government under which all had equal
rights and protection—their action receiving the
approval of the French Emperor and the active
sympathy of the British aristocracy—how will the
account stand when the oppressed French and
British populations rise up against the intolerable
political oppressions and physical privations under
which they now groan, and from which their only
present hope of escape is by emigration to this
generous land?

The struggle we have just brought to an end
has not been in the least understood abroad; nor,
indeed, has its full purport been revealed to any
but the most thoughtful and far-seeing of our own
people. Earl Russell declared it to be “a contest
for independence by the South, and for empire on
the part of the North”—than which it is impossible
to conceive or frame any statement of equal
brevity containing errors so gigantic. Our struggle
has not been one for empire, nor even—in any
strict sense—for the constitution; nor will it be
found, when closely scrutinized, a war declared or
carried on by the regular machinery of our government
for the vindication of our national authority.
This war has been a people's war for the maintenance

and supremacy of the people's right to
govern themselves—a war as much for the true
ultimate interests of the Southern as of the Northern
people; and having for its main object to
reaffirm and establish once and for evermore that
the will of the majority, peacefully and legally
expressed, must and shall be the supreme and
irresistible power of our whole country, to which
the minority must peacefully and legally submit,
or be prepared to take the consequences. All will
remember that in the early days of Mr. Lincoln's
previous term his Secretary of State and other
Cabinet officers held grave question as to the expediency
or even “constitutionality” of attempting
to prevent by military force the secession of any
“sovereign State” from the Union. They fussed
and dawdled over this for more than a month,
many prominent republicans being openly in favor
of an unresisted separation. But at last, by the
mad folly of some few Southern leaders, Fort
Sumter was fired upon; and then at once, with
a magnificent unanimity, our whole people arose
in their might, brushing aside as cobwebs all
technical opposition to their will, and fiercely
demanding of the authorities they had placed in
power arms and organization for the re-assertion
of the supremacy of the ballot over every square
mile, and foot, and inch of their indivisible country.
How little the regular machinery of our
government appreciated the gravity of that crisis,
or the intense earnestness of our people in their
resolve to maintain popular authority in all sections,
the first ridiculous call for “seventy-five
thousand men to serve three months” may sufficiently
illustrate. Trained only in the routine of
party chicane and deception, the mere politicians
who then formed our so-called “governing class,”
could not realize that a call for one million men to
fight, and, if need were, all to perish in this cause,
would have been as instantly and fully answered.

And what has been the history of our struggle,
so fraught on both sides with heroic events, since
that hour? Has it not been, on the part of the
North, one continual pushing forward of our laggard
and hesitating authorities by the accumulating
forces of the public will? All former calculations
of finance have been set at defiance by
the lavish promptness of the great masses of our
people in supporting the national credit. All the
generals given to us by Government in the early
days of our struggle proved failures, and not one
of them is now in eminent command. It was our
people who furnished the fighting material of our
campaigns by volunteering—for the “draft”
proved as abortive a measure as all the other special
agencies of our government; and when the
soldiers were thus brought together in vast families
of armies, it was they—armed children of the

people, on behalf of the people—who discovered
and raised to command their proper generals.
Grant—our own glorious and victorious Grant,
whose name will live in history as one of the
world's noblest soldiers—Grant, we say, joined the
volunteers of Illinois as the Captain of a company
of infantry; and the only direct action of the
government in his case was an order to remove
him from command just previous to his capture
of Fort Donelson—an event which retained him
in the service to become, as he is to-day, the military
savior of his country. Sherman declared, in
the first year of the rebellion, that he would
require two hundred thousand men for the operations
which, even at that early day, fell within
the scope of his far-seeing genius; and forthwith
he was relieved and pronounced insane by Mr.
Secretary Cameron. What part had the government
proper in Sheridan's elevation—the matchless
worth of our greatest cavalry leader having
first been discovered by the troops who fought
under him, and the successes they enabled him to
achieve compelling his recognition by the authorities.
It is of public record that it was in contemplation
to remove General Thomas during the
very hottest hours of the contest which hurled
back into Alabama the shattered divisions of
Hood; and, if we chose to extend this article,
and enter upon details, it might. we think, be
demonstrated that in no single case has a military
officer, originally selected for high command by
our government, proved equal to the responsibilities
of his position. It was our people who
furnished the armies, and the armies then selected
their own commanders—the Lieutenant-General
himself having been imposed upon the Government
by a vote which the voice of the army compelled
the elected representatives of the people to
cast in favor of their most trusted chief. It is the
people, also, who have furnished all the requisite
finances, material, resources, and powers for the
conflict, their indestructible faith in the final triumph
of popular institutions overcoming every
obstacle, and even defying the worst mismanagement
of Secretary Chase to bankrupt a treasury
which had its best basis in their unfaltering
resolve.

To the people, therefore, and to our gallant
armies—headed by Stanton, Grant, Sherman,
Sheridan, and their brave associates—all the
glory of the present moment belongs; and it
should properly be left with them to decide on
what terms of permanent pacification the vanquished
in this contest are to be reaccepted as
citizens of the Union. That those terms will be
generous, we are well assured; for our armies are
true representatives of the people, and the Americans
are a most generous people; while, as to

the injuries inflicted upon us in the earlier days
of our struggle by the failure of the English and
French governments to carry out their treaty
obligations with a friendly government, and to
enforce the law of nations in our interest, we can
well afford—as before remarked—to leave time
and the powerful example of our success to bring
about a day of reckoning for their conduct. If
Ireland, for instance, should again rebel—as
Ireland has had a habit of doing for six hundred
years—with what face could the British government
ask us to prevent the Fenian Brotherhood,
for example, from sending over arms and munitions
of war for one or two hundred thousand
men, with from five to seven thousand veteran
soldiers and officers, trained in our battles of the
past four years, and only panting to assist in
organizing on Irish soil the inchoate valor and
sinew of an Irish army? Or what plea could the
French Emperor advance against our recognizing
whatever popular movement may hereafter make
head against his throne, or the throne of his Mexican
protégé, in case the soldiers of General Lee
should see fit to emigrate in that direction; or the
selling and sending by our merchants of armed
ships and all the munitions of “belligerency” to
any country or people with which either he or
Maximilian of Mexico shall hereafter be engaged
in hostilities? Our surest mode of securing satisfaction
and indemnity for all wrongs we have
received from Europe, will be in our reunited
capacity to become hourly and daily more prosperous,
beneficent, and powerful under our popular
institutions, thus setting before the oppressed
masses of France and England a bright example
and beacon, of which the proletarian elements in
both countries will not be slow to take advantage.
The elder Napoleon spoke a most serious and
solemn truth when he declared that within fifty
years from his death “all Europe must be Cossack
or republican.” The triumph of the American
democracy in this war for the supremacy of
the institutions under which all our previous progress
has been achieved, is an assurance that his
prophecy will be fulfilled; and not in the Cossack
alternative. Less than a year ago the popular
assertion of American self-knowledge, which took
shape in the phrase “We are a great people,” furnished
a continual theme of sneering laughter to
all the malignant tory journalists and bitter imperialistic
wits of London and Paris. What have
these gentlemen now to say as they read the intelligence
of the fall of the rebel capital?

But a triumph so great as the fall of Richmond
and the surrender of Gen. Lee, surely deserves to
be preserved in song. We therefore copy from
the editorial page of the Tribune, dated April 3d,
1865, the following lines from the Bard of the

Old Tenth Army Corps, written the previous
evening on receipt of the glorious news: