The War Between Freedom And Slavery In Missouri.

It is admitted that no man can write
the history of his own times with such
fullness and impartiality as shall entitle
his record to the unquestioning credence
and acceptance of posterity. Men are
necessarily actors in the scenes amid
which they live. If not personally taking
an active part in the conduct of
public affairs, they have friends who
are, and in whose success or failure their
own welfare is in some way bound up.
The bias which interest always gives
will necessarily attach to their judgment
of current events, and the leading actors
by whom these events are controlled.
Cotemporaneous history, for this reason,
will always be found partisan history—not
entitled to, and, if intelligently and
honestly written, not exacting, the implicit
faith of those who shall come after;
but simply establishing that certain
classes of people, of whom the writer
was one, acted under the conviction
that they owed certain duties to themselves
and their country. It will be for
the future compiler of the world’s history,
who shall see the end of present
struggles, to determine the justice of the
causes of controversy, and the wisdom
and honesty of the parties that acted
adversely. To such after judgment,
with a full knowledge of present reproach
as a partisan, the writer of this
article commends the brief sketch he
will present of the beginning and military
treatment of the great Rebellion in
the State of Missouri. He will not attempt
to make an episode of any part
of this history, because of the supposed
vigor or brilliancy of the martial deeds
occurring in the time. Least of all
would he take the ‘Hundred Days,’
which another pen has chosen for special
distinction, as representing the period
of heroism in that war-trampled
State. Any ‘hundred days’ of the rebellion
in Missouri have had their corresponding

nights; and no one can be
bold enough yet to say that the day of
permanent triumph has dawned. Humiliation
has alternated with success so
far; and the most stunning defeats of
the war in the West marked the beginning
and the close of the hundred days
named for honor. This fact should teach
modesty and caution. For while justice
to men requires us to admit that the
greatest abilities do not always command
success, devotion to principle forbids
that a noble cause should be obscured
to become the mere background
of a scene in which an actor and popular
idol is the chief figure. It is with a
consciousness of such partialities as are

common to men, but with an honest purpose,
so far as the writer is able, to subordinate
men to principles, that this review
of the origin and chief incidents of
the rebellion in Missouri is begun.

The close connection of the State of
Missouri with the slavery agitation that
has now ripened into a rebellion against
the government of the United States, is
a singular historical fact. The admission
of the State into the Union was
the occasion of vitalizing the question of
slavery extension and fixing it as a permanent
element in the politics of the
country. It has continued to be the
theatre on which the most important
conflicts growing out of slavery extension
have been decided. It will be the
first, in the hope and belief of millions,
to throw off the fetters of an obsolete
institution, so long cramping its social
and political advancement, and to set
an example to its sister slave-holding
States of the superior strength, beauty,
and glory of Freedom.

The pro-slavery doctrines of John C.
Calhoun, after having pervaded the democracy
of all the other slave-holding
States, and obtained complete possession
of the national executive, legislative
and judicial departments, finally, in
1844, appeared also in the State of Missouri.
But it was in so minute and subtle
a form as not to seem a sensible heresy.
Thomas H. Benton, the illustrious
senator of the Jackson era, was then, as
he had been for twenty-four years, the
political autocrat of Missouri. He had
long been convinced of the latent treason
of the Calhoun school of politicians.
He was able to combat the schemes
of the Southern oligarchy composing
and controlling the Cabinet of President
Polk; unsuccessfully, it is true, yet with
but slight diminution of his popularity
at home. Nevertheless, the seeds of disunion
had been borne to his State; they
had taken root; and, like all evil in life,
they proved self-perpetuating and ineradicable.
In 1849 the Mexican war,
begun in the interest of the disunionists,
had been closed. A vast accession of
territory had accrued to the Union. It
was the plan and purpose of the disunion
party to appropriate and occupy
this territory; to organize it in their interests;
and, finally, to admit it into the
Union as States, to add to their political
power, and prepare for that struggle between
the principle of freedom and the
principle of slavery in the government,
which Mr. Calhoun had taught was inevitable.
But the hostility of Benton in
the Senate was dreaded by the Southern
leaders thus early conspiring against the
integrity of the Union. The Missouri
senator seemed, of all cotemporaneous
statesmen, to be the only one that fully
comprehended the incipient treason.
His earnest opposition assumed at times
the phases of monomania. He sought
to crush it in the egg. He lifted his
warning voice on all occasions. He inveighed
bitterly against the ‘Nullifiers,’
as he invariably characterized the Calhoun
politicians, declaring that their
purpose was to destroy the Union. It
became necessary, therefore, before attempting
to dispose of the territories
acquired from Mexico, to silence Benton,
or remove him from the Senate.
Accordingly, when the legislature of
Missouri met in 1849, a series of resolutions
was introduced, declaring that all
territory derived by the United States,
in the treaty with Mexico, should be
open to settlement by the citizens of all
the States in common; that the question
of allowing or prohibiting slavery
in any territory could only be decided
by the people resident in the territory,
and then only when they came to organize
themselves into a State government;
and, lastly, that if the general
government should attempt to establish
a rule other than this for the settlement
of the territories, the State of Missouri
would stand pledged to her sister Southern
States to co-operate in whatever
measures of resistance or redress they
might deem necessary. The resolutions
distinctly abdicated all right of judgment
on the part of Missouri, and committed
the State to a blind support of
Southern ‘Nullification’ in a possible
contingency. They were in flagrant

opposition to the life-long principles and
daily vehement utterances of Benton—as
they were intended to be. Nevertheless,
they were adopted; and the
senators of Missouri were instructed to
conform their public action to them.
These resolutions were introduced by
one Claiborne F. Jackson, a member
of the House of Representatives from
the County of Howard, one of the
most democratic and largest slave-holding
counties in the State. The resolutions
took the name of their mover, and
are known in the political history of Missouri
as the ‘Jackson resolutions.’ And
Claiborne F. Jackson, who thus took the
initiative in foisting treason upon the
statute-books of Missouri, is, to-day, by
curious coincidence, the official head of
that State nominally in open revolt.
But Jackson, it was early ascertained,
was not entitled to the doubtful honor
of the paternity of these resolutions.
They had been matured in a private
chamber of the Capitol at Jefferson
City, by two or three conspirators, who
received, it was asserted by Benton, and
finally came to be believed, the first
draft of the resolutions from Washington,
where the disunion cabal, armed
with federal power, had its headquarters.

Thus the bolt was launched at the
Missouri senator, who, from his prestige
of Jacksonism, his robust patriotism, his
indomitable will, and his great abilities,
was regarded as the most formidable
if not the only enemy standing in
the way of meditated treason. It was
not doubted that the blow would be fatal.
Benton was in one sense the father
of the doctrine of legislative instructions.
In his persistent and famous efforts to
‘expunge’ the resolutions of censure on
Gen. Jackson that had been placed in
the Senate journal, Benton had found
it necessary to revolutionize the sentiments
or change the composition of the
Senate. Whigs were representing democratic
States, and Democrats refused to
vote for a resolution expunging any part
of the record of the Senate’s proceedings.
To meet and overcome this resistance,
Benton introduced the dogma
that a senator was bound to obey the
instructions of the legislature of his
State. He succeeded, by his great influence
in his party, and by the aid of
the democratic administration, in having
the dogma adopted, and it became an
accepted rule in the democratic party.
Resolutions were now invoked and obtained
from State legislatures instructing
their senators to vote for the ‘Expunging
Resolutions,’ or resign. Some
obeyed; some resigned. Benton carried
his point; but it was at the sacrifice of
the spirit of that part of the Constitution
which gave to United States senators
a term of six years, for the purpose
of protecting the Senate from frequent
fluctuations of popular feeling,
and securing steadiness in legislation.
Benton was the apostle of this unwise
and destructive innovation upon the
constitutional tenure of senators. He
was doomed to be a conspicuous victim
of his own error. When the ‘Jackson
resolutions’ were passed by the legislature
of Missouri, instructing Benton to
endorse measures that led to nullification
and disunion, he saw the dilemma
in which he was placed, and did the best
he could to extricate himself. He presented
the resolutions from his seat in
the Senate; denounced their treasonable
character, and declared his purpose to
appeal from the legislature to the people
of Missouri.

On the adjournment of Congress,
Benton returned to Missouri and commenced
a canvass in vindication of his
own cause, and in opposition to the democratic
majority of the legislature that
passed the Jackson resolutions, which
has had few if any parallels in the history
of the government for heat and bitterness.
The senator did not return to
argue and convert, but to fulminate and
destroy. He appointed times and places
for public speaking in the most populous
counties of the State, and where the opposition
to him had grown boldest. He
allowed no ‘division of time’ to opponents
wishing to controvert the positions
assumed in his speeches. On the contrary,

he treated every interruption,
whether for inquiry or retort, on the
part of any one opposed to him, as an
insult, and proceeded to pour upon the
head of the offender a torrent of denunciation
and abuse, unmeasured and
appalling. The extraordinary course
adopted by Benton in urging his ‘appeal,’

excited astonishment and indignation
among the democratic partisans
that had, in many cases, thoughtlessly
become arrayed against him.1 They
might have yielded to expostulation;
they were stung to resentment by unsparing
vilification. The rumor of Benton’s
manner preceded him through the
State, after the first signal manifestations
of his ruthless spirit; and he was
warned not to appear at some of the appointments
he had made, else his life
would pay the forfeit of his personal assaults.
These threats only made the
Missouri lion more fierce and untamable.
He filled all his appointments,
bearing everywhere the same front, often
surrounded by enraged enemies
armed and thirsting for his blood, but
ever denunciatory and defiant, and returned
to St. Louis, still boiling with
inexhaustible choler, to await the judgment
of the State upon his appeal. He
failed. The pro-slavery sentiment of the
people had been too thoroughly evoked
in the controversy, and too many valuable
party leaders had been needlessly
driven from his support by unsparing invective.
An artful and apparently honest
appeal to the right of legislative instructions,—an
enlargement of popular
rights which Benton himself had conferred
upon them,—and—the unfailing
weapon of Southern demagogues against
their opponents—the charge that Benton
had joined the ‘Abolitionists,’ and
was seeking to betray ‘the rights of the
South,’ worked the overthrow of the hitherto
invincible senator. The Whigs of
Missouri, though agreeing mainly with
Benton in the principles involved in
this contest, had received nothing at his
hands, throughout his long career, but
defeat and total exclusion from all offices
and honors, State and National. This
class of politicians were too glad of the
prospective division of his party and the
downfall of his power, to be willing to
re-assert their principles through a support
of Benton. The loyal Union sentiments
of the State in this way failed to
be united, and a majority was elected to
the legislature opposed to Benton. He
was defeated of a re-election to the Senate
by Henry S. Geyer, a pro-slavery
Whig, and supporter of the Jackson resolutions,
after having filled a seat in that
august body for a longer time consecutively
than any other senator ever did.
Thus was removed from the halls of
Congress the most sagacious and formidable
enemy that the disunion propagandists
ever encountered. Their career in
Congress and in the control of the federal
government was thenceforth unchecked.
The cords of loyalty in Missouri
were snapped in Benton’s fall, and
that State swung off into the strongly-sweeping
current of secessionism. The
city of St. Louis remained firm a while,
and returned Benton twice to the
House; but his energies were exhausted
now in defensive war; and the truculent
and triumphant slave power dominating,
the State at last succeeded, through the

coercion of commercial interests, in defeating
him even in the citadel of loyalty.
He tried once more to breast the
tide that had borne down his fortunes.
He became a candidate for governor in
1856; but, though he disclaimed anti-slavery
sentiments, and supported James
Buchanan for President against Fremont,
his son-in-law, he was defeated by
Trusten Polk, who soon passed from the
gubernatorial chair to Benton’s seat in
the United States Senate, from which
he was, in course of time, to be expelled.
Benton retired to private life,
only to labor more assiduously in compiling
historical evidences against the
fast ripening treason of the times.

The Missouri senator was no longer in
the way of the Southern oligarchs. A
shaft feathered by his own hands—the
doctrine of instructions—had slain him.

But yet another obstacle remained.
The Missouri Compromise lifted a barrier
to the expansion of the Calhoun idea
of free government, having African slavery
for its corner-stone. This obstacle
was to be removed. Missouri furnished
the prompter and agent of that wrong in
David E. Atchison, for many years Benton’s
colleague in the Senate. Atchison
was a man of only moderate talents,
of dogged purpose, willful, wholly unscrupulous
in the employment of the influences
of his position, and devoid of all
the attributes and qualifications of statesmanship.
He was a fit representative
of the pro-slavery fanaticism of his
State; had lived near the Kansas line;
had looked upon and coveted the fair
lands of that free territory, and resolved
that they should be the home and appanage
of slavery. It is now a part of
admitted history, that this dull but determined
Missouri senator approached
Judge Douglas, then chairman of the
Committee on Territories, and, by some
incomprehensible influence, induced that
distinguished senator to commit the flagrant
and terrible blunder of reporting
the Kansas-Nebraska bill, with a clause
repealing the Missouri Compromise, and
thus throwing open Kansas to the occupation
of slavery. That error was grievously
atoned for in the subsequent hard
fate of Judge Douglas, who was cast off
and destroyed by the cruel men he had
served. Among the humiliations that
preceded the close of this political tragedy,
none could have been more pungent
to Judge Douglas than the fact that
Atchison, in a drunken harangue from
the tail of a cart in Western Missouri,
surrounded by a mob of ‘border ruffians’
rallying for fresh wrongs upon the free
settlers of Kansas, recited, in coarse glee
and brutal triumph, the incidents of his
interview with the senator of Illinois,
when, with mixed cajolery and threats,
he partly tempted, partly drove him to
his ruin. The Kansas-Nebraska bill was
passed. What part Atchison took, what
part Missouri took, under the direction
of the pro-slavery leaders that filled
every department of the State government,
the ‘border-ruffian’ forays, the pillage
of the government arsenal at Liberty,
the embargo of the Missouri river,
and the robbing and mobbing of peaceful
emigrants from the free States, the
violence at the polls, and the fraudulent
voting that corrupted all the franchises
of that afflicted territory, do sufficiently
attest. It is not needed to rehearse any
of this painful and well-known history.

The Territory of Kansas was saved
to its prescriptive freedom. The slavery
propagandists sullenly withdrew and
gave up the contest. The last days of
the dynasty that had meditated the conquest
of the continent to slave-holding
government were evidently at hand.
The result of the struggle in Kansas had
reversed the relation of the contesting
powers. The oligarchs, who had always
before been aggressive, and intended to
subordinate the Union to slavery, or
destroy it, found themselves suddenly
thrown on the defensive; and, with the
quick intelligence of a property interest,
and the keen jealousy of class and caste
which their slave-holding had implanted,
they saw that they were engaged in an
unequal struggle, that their sceptre was
broken, and that, if they continued to
rule, it would have to be over the homogeneous
half of a dismembered Union.

From this moment a severance of the
Slave States from the Free was resolved
on, and every agency that could operate
on governments, State and National, was
set to work. It was not by accident that
Virginia had procured the nomination
of the facile Buchanan for President in
the Baltimore Convention of 1856; it
was not by accident that Floyd was
made Secretary of War, or that, many
months before any outbreak of rebellion,
this arch traitor had well-nigh stripped
the Northern arsenals of arms, and
placed them where they would be ‘handy’

for insurgents to seize. It was not
by accident that John C. Breckenridge
headed the factionists that willfully divided
and defeated the National Democracy,
that perchance could have elected
Judge Douglas President; nor was it by
accident that Beriah Magoffin, a vain,
weak man, the creature, adjunct, and
echo of Breckenridge, filled the office of
governor of Kentucky, nominated thereto
by Breckenridge’s personal intercession.
And lastly, to return to the special
theatre of this sketch, it was not by
accident that Claiborne F. Jackson, the
original mover for Benton’s destruction,
was at this remarkable juncture found
occupying the governor’s chair, with
Thomas C. Reynolds for his lieutenant
governor, a native of South Carolina,
an acknowledged missionary of the nullification
faith to a State that required to
be corrupted, and that he had, during
his residence, zealously endeavored to
corrupt.

We have now reached the turning
point in the history of Missouri. The
State is about to be plunged into the
whirlpool of civil war. Undisguised disunionists
are in complete possession of
the State government, and the population
is supposed to be ripe for revolt.
Only one spot in it, and that the city
of St. Louis, is regarded as having the
slightest sympathy with the political sentiments
of the Free States of the Union.
The State is surely counted for the
‘South’ in the division that impends,
for where is the heart in St. Louis bold
enough, or the hand strong enough, to
resist the swelling tide of pro-slavery fanaticism
that was about to engulf the
State? Years ago, when it was but a
ripple on the surface, it had overborne
Benton, with all his fame of thirty years’
growth. What leader of slighter mold
and lesser fame could now resist the
coming shock? In tracing the origin
and growth of rebellion in Missouri, it is
interesting to gather up all the threads
that link the present with the past. It
will preserve the unity of the plot, and
give effect to the last acts of the drama.

The first visible seam or cleft in the
National Democratic party occurred
during the administration of President
Polk, in the years 1844-48. Calhoun
appeared as Polk’s Secretary of State.
Thomas Ritchie was transferred from
Richmond, Va., to Washington, to edit
the government organ, in place of Francis
P. Blair, Sr. The Jackson regime

of unconditional and uncompromising
devotion to the ‘Federal Union’ was
displaced, and the dubious doctrine of
‘States’ Rights’ was formally inaugurated
as the chart by which in future the
national government was to be administered.
But the Jackson element was
not reconciled to this radical change in
the structure and purpose of the National
Democratic organization; and, although
party lines were so tensely drawn
that to go against ‘the Administration’
was political treason, and secured irrevocable
banishment from power, the
close of Polk’s administration found
many old Democrats of the Jackson era
ready for the sacrifice. The firm resolve
of these men was manifested when, after
the nomination of Gen. Cass, in 1848, in
the usual form, at Baltimore, by the
Democratic National Convention, they
assembled at Buffalo and presented a
counter ticket, headed by the name of
Martin Van Buren, who had been thrust
aside four years previously by the Southern
oligarchs to make way for James K.
Polk. The entire artillery of the Democratic
party opened on the Buffalo schismatics.
They were stigmatized by such
opprobrious nicknames and epithets as
‘Barnburners, ‘Free Soilers,’ ‘Abolitionists,’

and instantly and forever ex-communicated
from the Democratic party.
In Missouri alone, of all the Slave
States, was any stand made in behalf of
the Buffalo ticket. Benton’s sympathies
had been with Van Buren, his old friend
of the Jackson times; and Francis P.
Blair, Sr., of the Globe, had two sons,
Montgomery Blair and Francis P. Blair,
Jr., resident in St. Louis. These two,
with about a hundred other young men
of equal enthusiasm, organized themselves
together, accepted the ‘Buffalo
platform’ as their future rule of faith,
issued an address to the people of Missouri,
openly espousing and advocating
free soil-principles; and, by subscription
among themselves, published a campaign
paper, styled the Barnburner, during the
canvass. The result at the polls was
signal only for its insignificance; and the
authors of the movement hardly had
credit for a respectable escapade. But
the event has proved that neither ridicule
nor raillery, nor, in later years, persecutions
and the intolerable pressure of
federal power, could turn back the revolution
thus feebly begun. In that
campaign issue of the Barnburner were
sown the seeds of what became, in later
nomenclature, the Free Democracy,
and, later still, the ‘Republican’ party
of Missouri. The German population
of St. Louis sympathized from the start
with the free principles enunciated.
Frank Blair, Jr., became from that year
their political leader; right honestly did
he earn the position; and right well,
even his political foes have always admitted,
did he maintain it.

Frank Blair was a disciple of Benton;
yet, as is often the case, the pupil soon
learned to go far ahead of his teacher.
In 1852, there was a union of the Free
Democrats and National Democrats of
Missouri, in support of Franklin Pierce.
But the entire abandonment of Pierce’s
administration to the rule of the Southern
oligarchs sundered the incongruous
elements in Missouri forever. In 1856
Benton was found supporting James
Buchanan for President; but Blair declined
to follow his ancient leader in that
direction. He organized the free-soil
element in St. Louis to oppose the Buchanan
electoral ticket. An electoral
ticket in the State at large, for John C.
Fremont, was neither possible nor advisable.
In some districts no man would
dare be a candidate on that side; in
others, the full free-soil vote, from the
utter hopelessness of success, would not
be polled; and thus the cause would be
made to appear weaker than it deserved.
To meet the emergency, and yet bear
witness to principle, the free-soil vote
was cast for the Fillmore electoral ticket,
‘under protest,’ as it was called, the
name of ‘John C. Fremont’ being printed
in large letters at the head of every
free-soil ballot cast. By this means the
Buchanan electors were beaten fifteen
hundred votes in St. Louis City and
County, where, by a union as Benton
proposed, they would have had three
thousand majority. But the ‘free-soilers’
failed to defeat Buchanan in the
State.

Nothing discouraged by this result,
Blair resumed the work of organizing
for the future. The Fillmore party
gave no thanks to the free-soilers for
their aid in the presidential election,
nor did the latter ask any. They had
simply taken the choice of evils; and
now, renouncing all alliances, Blair became
the champion and leader of a self-existing,
self-reliant State party, that
should accomplish emancipation in Missouri.
He again established a newspaper
to inculcate free principles in the
State. By untiring effort, he revived
and recruited his party. He gave it
platforms, planned its campaigns, contested
every election in St. Louis,
whether for municipal officers, for State
legislature, or for Congress; and always
fought his battles on the most advanced
ground assumed by the growing free-soil
party of the Union. The powerful
and rapidly-increasing German population
of St. Louis responded nobly to his
zeal and skillful leadership. Soon a victory
was gained; and St. Louis declared
for freedom, amid acclamations that reverberated
throughout the States that

extended from the Ohio to the lakes,
and from the Mississippi to the Atlantic.
But, having wrenched victory from a
people so intolerant as the pro-slavery
population of Missouri, it was not to be
expected that he would retain it easily.
He was set upon more fiercely than ever.
The loss of the city of St. Louis was considered
a disgrace to the State; and the
most desperate personal malignity was
added to the resentment of pro-slavery
wrath in the future election contests in
that city. The corrupting appliances
of federal power were at last invoked,
under Buchanan’s administration; and
Blair was for the moment overwhelmed
by fraud, and thrown out of Congress.
But, with a resolution from which even
his friends would have dissuaded him,
and with a persistency and confidence
that were a marvel to friend and foe, he
contested his seat before Congress, and
won it. And this verdict was soon ratified
by his brave and faithful constituency
at the polls. Such was the Republican
party, such their leader in St. Louis,
when the black day of disunion came.
And in their hands lay the destiny of the
State.

As soon as the presidential election
was decided, and the choice of Abraham
Lincoln was known, the disunionists in
Missouri commenced their work. Thomas
C. Reynolds, the lieutenant-governor,
made a visit to Washington, and extended
it to Virginia, counseling with the
traitors, and agreeing upon the time and
manner of joining Missouri in the revolt.
The legislature of Missouri met in the
latter part of December, about two
weeks after the secession of South Carolina.
A bill was at once introduced,
calling a State convention, and passed.
The message of Claiborne F. Jackson,
the governor, had been strongly in favor
of secession from the Union. The Missouri
Republican, the leading newspaper
of the State, whose advocacy had elected
the traitor, declared, on the last day of
the year, that unless guaranties in defence
of slavery were immediately given
by the North, Missouri should secede
from the Union. And so the secession
feeling gathered boldness and volume.

Candidates for the State convention
came to be nominated in St. Louis, and
two parties were at once arrayed—the
unconditional Union party, and the
qualified Unionists, who wished new
compromises. Frank Blair was one of
the leaders of the former, and he was
joined by all the true men of the old parties.
But the secessionists—they might
as well be so called, for all their actions
tended to weaken and discredit the
Union—nominated an able ticket.
The latter party were soon conscious of
defeat, and began to hint mysteriously
at a power stronger than the ballot-box,
that would be invoked in defence of
‘Southern rights.’ To many, indeed to
most persons, this seemed an idle threat.
Not so to Frank Blair. He had imbibed
from Benton the invincible faith
of the latter in the settled purpose of the
‘nullifiers’ to subvert and destroy the
government. And in a private caucus
of the leaders of the Union party, on an
ever-memorable evening in the month
of January, he startled the company by
the proposition that the time had come
when the friends of the government
must arm in its defence. With a deference
to his judgment and sagacity
that had become habitual, the Unionists
yielded their consent, and soon the enrolment
of companies began; nightly
drills with arms took place in nearly all
the wards of the city; and by the time
of election day some thousands of citizen
soldiers, mostly Germans, could have
been gathered, with arms in their hands,
with the quickness of fire signals at
night, at any point in the city. The
secessionists had preceded this armed
movement of the Union men by the organization
of a body known as ‘minute-men.’ But the promptness and superior
skill that characterized Frank
Blair’s movement subverted the secession
scheme; and it was first repudiated,
and then its existence denied. The day
of election came, and passed peacefully.
The unconditional Union ticket was

elected by a sweeping majority of five
thousand votes. The result throughout
the State was not less decisive and surprising.
Of the entire number of delegates
composing the convention, not one
was chosen who had dared to express secession
sentiments before the people;
and the aggregate majority of the Union
candidates in the State amounted to
about eighty thousand. The shock of
this defeat for the moment paralyzed the
conspirators; but their evil inspirations
soon put them to work again. Their organs
in Missouri assumed an unfriendly
tone towards the convention, which was
to meet in Jefferson City. The legislature
that had called the convention remained
in session in the same place, but
made no fit preparations for the assembling
of the convention, or for the accommodation
and pay of the members.
The debate in the legislature on the bill
for appropriations for these purposes was
insulting to the convention, the more ill-tempered
and ill-bred secession members
intimating that such a body of ‘submissionists’

were unworthy to represent
Missouri, and undeserving of any pay.
The manifest ill feeling between the two
bodies—the legislature elected eighteen
months previously, and without popular
reference to the question of secession,
and the convention chosen fresh from
the people, to decide on the course of
the State—soon indicated the infelicity
of the two remaining in session at the
same time and in the same place. Accordingly,
within a few days after the
organization of the convention, it adjourned
its session to the city of St. Louis.
It did not meet a cordial reception there.
So insolent had the secession spirit already
grown, that on the day of the assembling
of the convention in that city,
the members were insulted by taunts in
the streets and by the ostentatious floating
of the rebel flag from the Democratic
head-quarters, hard by the building in
which they assembled.

Being left in the undisputed occupancy
of the seat of government, the governor,
lieutenant-governor, and legislature
gave themselves up to the enactment of
flagrant and undisguised measures of
hostility to the federal government.
Commissioners from States that had renounced
the Constitution, and withdrawn,
as they claimed, from the Union,
arrived at Jefferson City as apostles of
treason. They were received as distinguished
and honorable ambassadors. A
joint session of the legislature was called
to hear their communications. The lieutenant-governor,
Reynolds, being the
presiding officer of the joint session, required
that the members should rise when
these traitors entered, and receive them
standing and uncovered. The commissioners
were allowed to harangue the representatives
of Missouri, by the hour, in
unmeasured abuse of the federal government,
in open rejoicings over its supposed
dissolution, and in urgent appeals
to the people of Missouri to join the
rebel States in their consummated treason.
Noisy demonstrations of applause
greeted these commissioners; and legislators,
and the governor himself, in a
public speech in front of the executive
mansion, pledged them that Missouri
would shortly be found ranged on the
side of seceded States. The treason of
the governor and legislature did not
stop with these manifestations. They
proceeded to acts of legislation, preparatory
to the employment of force, after
the manner of their ‘Southern bretheren.’
First, it was necessary to get control
of the city of St. Louis. The Republican
party held the government of
the city, mayor, council, and police
force—a formidable Union organization.
The legislature passed a bill repealing
that part of the city charter that,
gave to the mayor the appointment of
the police, and constituting a board of
police commissioners, to be appointed
by the governor, who should exercise
that power. He named men that suited
his purposes. The Union police were
discharged, and their places filled by
secessionists. Next, the State militia
was to be organized in the interests of
rebellion, and a law was passed to accomplish
that end. The State was set
off into divisions; military camps were

to be established in each; all able-bodied
men between the ages of eighteen
and fifty were liable to be called into
camp and drilled a given number of
days in the year; and, when summoned
to duty, instead of taking the usual
oath to support the Constitution of the
United States, they were required only
to be sworn ‘to obey the orders of the
governor of the State of Missouri.’
These camps were styled camps of instruction.
One of them was established
at St. Louis, within the corporate limits
of the city, about two miles west of
the court-house, on a commanding eminence.

Thus the lines began to be drawn
closely around the Unionists of St.
Louis. The State convention had adjourned,
and its members had gone
home, having done but little to re-assure
the loyalists. They had, indeed,
passed an ordinance declaring that Missouri
would adhere to the Union; but
the majority of the members had betrayed
such hesitancy and indecision,
such a lack of stomach to grapple with
the rude issues of the rebellion, that
their action passed almost without moral
effect. Their ordinance was treated
with contempt by the secessionists, and
nearly lost sight of by the people; so
thoroughly were all classes lashed into
excitement by the storm of revolution
now blackening the whole Southern
Hemisphere.

The friends of the Union could look
to but one quarter for aid, that was
Washington, where a new administration
had so recently been installed,
amid difficulties that seemed to have
paralyzed its power. The government
had been defied by the rebellion at
every point; its ships driven by hostile
guns from Southern ports; its treasures
seized; its arsenals occupied, and its
abundant arms and munitions appropriated.
Nowhere had the federal arm
resented insult and robbery with a blow.
This had not been the fault of the government
that was inaugurated on the
fourth of March. It was the fruit of the
official treason of the preceding administration,
that had completely disarmed
the government, and filled the new executive
councils with confusion, by the
numberless knaves it had placed in all
departments of the public service, whose
daily desertions of duty rendered the
prompt and honest execution of the
laws impossible. But the fact was indisputable;
and how could St. Louis
hope for protection that had nowhere
else been afforded? The national government
had an arsenal within the city
limits. It comprised a considerable area
of ground, was surrounded by a high
and heavy stone wall, and supplied with
valuable arms. But so far from this establishment
being a protection to the
loyal population, it seemed more likely,
judging by what had occurred in other
States, that it would serve as a temptation
to the secession mob that was evidently
gathering head for mischief, and that
the desire to take it would precipitate
the outbreak. The Unionists felt their
danger; the rebels saw their opportunity.
Already the latter were boasting that
they would in a short time occupy this
post, and not a few of the prominent
Union citizens of the town were warned
by secession leaders that they would soon
be set across the Mississippi river, exiles
from their homes forever. As an instance
of the audacity of the rebel element
at this time, and for weeks later,
the fact is mentioned that the United
States soldiers, who paced before the
gates of the arsenal as sentinels on duty,
had their beats defined for them by the
new secession police, and were forbidden
to invade the sacred precincts of the
city’s highway. The arsenal was unquestionably
devoted to capture, and it
would have been a prize to the rebels
second in value to the Gosport navy-yard.
It contained at this time sixty-six
thousand stand of small arms, several
batteries of light artillery and heavy
ordnance, and at least one million dollars’
worth of ammunition. It was besides
supplied with extensive and valuable
machinery for repairing guns, rifling
barrels, mounting artillery, and preparing
shot and shell. The future, to the

Union men of St. Louis, looked gloomy
enough; persecution, and, if they resisted,
death, seemed imminent; and no
voice from abroad reached them, giving
them good cheer. But deliverance was
nigh at hand.

About the middle of January, Capt.
Nathaniel Lyon, of the Second Infantry,
U.S.A., arrived in St. Louis with his
company; and his rank gave him command
of all the troops then at the arsenal
and Jefferson Barracks, a post on
the river, ten miles below, the department
being under the command of Brigadier
General Harney. Capt. Lyon
had been garrisoning a fort in Kansas.
He was known to some of the Union
men of St. Louis; and his resolute spirit
and devoted patriotism marked him as
their leader in this crisis. Frank Blair
at once put himself in communication
with Capt. Lyon, and advised him fully
and minutely as to the political situation.
He exposed to him the existence
of his volunteer military organization.
At his request Capt. Lyon visited and
reviewed the regiments; and it was arranged
between them that if an outbreak
should occur, or any attempt be
made to seize the arsenal, Capt. Lyon
should receive this volunteer force to his
assistance, arm it from the arsenal, and
take command for the emergency. It
should be known, however, to the greater
credit of the Union leaders of St.
Louis, that they had already, from private
funds, procured about one thousand
stand of arms, with which their nightly
drills, as heretofore stated, had been
conducted. As soon as Capt. Lyon’s
connection with this organization was
suspected, an attempt was made to have
him removed, by ordering him to Kansas
on the pretext of a court of inquiry; but
this attempt was defeated. Thus matters
stood for a time, the Union men beginning
to be reassured, but still doubtful
of the end. After a while, Fort Sumter
was opened upon, and fell under its furious
bombardment. The torch of war was
lit. President Lincoln issued his proclamation
for volunteers. Gov. Jackson
telegraphed back an insolent and defiant
refusal, in which he denounced the
‘war waged by the federal government’
as ‘inhuman and diabolical.’ Frank
Blair instantly followed this traitorous
governor’s dispatch by another, addressed
to the Secretary of War, asking
him to accept and muster into service
the volunteer regiments he had
been forming. This offer was accepted,
and the men presented themselves. But
Brig. Gen. Harney, fearing that the
arming of these troops would exasperate
the secession populace, and bring about
a collision with the State militia, refused
to permit the men to be mustered into
service and armed. This extraordinary
decision was immediately telegraphed to
the government, and Gen. Harney was
relieved, leaving Capt. Lyon in full command.
This was the 23d of April. In
a week four full regiments were mustered
in, and occupied the arsenal. A
memorial was prepared and sent to
Washington by Frank Blair, now colonel
of the first of these regiments, asking
for the enrolment of five other regiments
of Home Guards. Permission was
given, and in another week these regiments
also were organized and armed.
The conflict was now at hand. Simultaneously
with this arming on the part
of the government for the protection of
the arsenal, the order went forth for
the assembling of the State troops in
their camps of instruction. On Monday,
the 6th of May, the First Brigade
of Missouri militia, under Gen. D.M.
Frost, was ordered by Gov. Jackson into
camp at St. Louis, avowedly for purposes
of drill and exercise. At the same
time encampments were formed, by order
of the governor, in other parts of
the State. The governor’s adherents in
St. Louis intimated that the time for
taking the arsenal had arrived, and the
indiscreet young men who made up the
First Brigade openly declared that they
only awaited an order from Gov. Jackson—an
order which they evidently had
been led to expect—to attack the arsenal
and possess it, in spite of the feeble
opposition they calculated to meet from

‘the Dutch’ Home Guards enlisted to

defend it. A few days previously, an
agent of the governor had purchased at
St. Louis several hundred kegs of gun-powder,
and succeeded, by an adroit
stratagem, in shipping it to Jefferson
City. The encampment at St. Louis,
‘Camp Jackson,’ so called from the
governor, was laid off by streets, to
which were assigned the names ‘Rue de
Beauregard,’ and others similarly significant;
and when among the visitors whom
curiosity soon began to bring to the camp
a ‘Black Republican’ was discovered by
the soldiers,—and this epithet was applied
to all unconditional Unionists,—he
was treated with unmistakable coldness,
if not positive insult. If additional
proof of the hostile designs entertained
against the federal authority by
this camp were needed, it was furnished
on Thursday, the 9th, by the reception
within the camp of several pieces of cannon,
and several hundred stand of small
arms, taken from the federal arsenal at
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which was then
in the possession of the rebels. These
arms were brought to St. Louis by the
steamboat J.C. Swon, the military authorities
at Cairo having been deceived
by the packages, which were represented
to contain marble slabs. On the arrival
of the Swon at the St. Louis levee, the
arms were taken from her, sent to Camp
Jackson, and received there with demonstrations
of triumph.

When Capt. Lyon was entrusted with
full command at St. Louis, President
Lincoln had named, in his orders to him,
a commission of six loyal and discreet
citizens with whom he should consult in
matters pertaining to the public safety,
and with whose counsel he might declare
martial law. These citizens were
John How, Samuel T. Glover, O.D.
Filley, Jean J. Witsig, James O. Broadhead,
and Col. Frank P. Blair. The last
mentioned—Colonel Blair—was Capt.
Lyon’s confidential and constant companion.
They were comrades in arms,
and a unit in counsel. Their views
were in full accord as to the necessity
of immediately reducing Camp Jackson.
Defiance was daily passing between the
marshalling hosts, not face to face, but
through dubious partisans who passed
from camp to camp, flitting like the
bats of fable in the confines of conflict.
Capt. Lyon’s decision, urged thereto by
Col. Blair, was made without calling a
council of the rest of his advisers. They
heard of it, however, and, though brave
and loyal men all, they gathered around
him in his quarters at the arsenal,
Thursday evening, and besought him
earnestly to change his purpose. The
conference was protracted the livelong
night, and did not close till six o’clock,
Friday morning, the 10th. They found
Capt. Lyon inexorable,—the fate of
Camp Jackson was decreed. Col. Blair’s
regiment was at Jefferson Barracks, ten
miles below the arsenal, at that hour.
It was ordered up; and about noon on
that memorable Friday, Capt. Lyon
quietly left the arsenal gate at the head
of six thousand troops, of whom four
hundred and fifty were regulars, the remainder
United States Reserve Corps
or Home Guards, marched in two columns
to Camp Jackson, and before the
State troops could recover from the
amazement into which the appearance
of the advancing army threw them, surrounded
the camp, planting his batteries
upon the elevations around, at a distance
of five hundred yards, and stationing
his infantry in the roads leading
from the grove wherein their tents were
pitched. The State troops were taken
completely by surprise; for, although
there had been vague reports current in
camp of an intended attack from the
arsenal, the cry of the visitors at the
grove, ‘They’re coming!’ ‘They’re
coming!’ raised just as the first column
appeared in sight, found them strolling
leisurely under the trees, chatting with
their friends from the city, or stretched
upon the thick green grass, smoking and
reading.

Beaufort District,—Past, Present, And Future.

The sovereign State of South Carolina
seems from the beginning to have
been actuated by the desire not only to
mold its institutions according to a system
differing entirely from that of its
sister States, but even to divide its territory
in a peculiar manner, for which
reason we find in it ‘districts’ taking
the place of counties. The south-west
of these bears the name of its principal
town, ‘Beaufort.’ It is bounded on the
west by the Savannah River, and on the
south by the Atlantic. Its length from
north to south is fifty-eight miles, its
breadth thirty-three miles, and it contains
about one and a quarter millions
of acres of land and water. Considered
geologically, Beaufort is one of the
most remarkable sections of the United
States. As recent events have brought
it so prominently before us, we propose
to consider its history, capacities, and
prospects.

From its proximity to the Spanish settlements
in the peninsula of Florida, its
beautiful harbors and sounds were early
explored and taken possession of by the
Spaniards. It is now certain they had
established a post here called ‘Fort St.
Phillip,’ at St. Elena,2 as early as
1566-7; this was probably situated on
the south-western point of St. Helena
Island, and some remains of its entrenchment
can still be traced. From this fort
Juan Pardo, its founder, proceeded on
an expedition to the north-west, and explored
a considerable part of the present
States of South Carolina and Georgia.

How long the Spaniards remained
here is now uncertain, but they long
claimed all this coast as far north as
Cape Fear. The French planted a colony
in South Carolina, and gave the
name Port Royal to the harbor and
what is now called Broad River; but
they were driven off by the Spaniards,
and history is silent as to any incidents
of their rule for a century. In 1670 a
few emigrants arrived in a ship commanded
by Capt. Hilton, and landed at
what is now known as ‘Hilton’s Head,’
the south-western point of Port Royal
harbor, which still perpetuates his name.
The colony was under the management
of Col. Sayle; but the Spaniards at St.
Augustine still claimed the domains, and
the settlers, fearing an attack, soon removed
to the site of Old Charleston, on
Ashley River. In 1682, Lord Cardoss
led a small band from Scotland hither,
which settled on Port Royal Island,
near the present site of Beaufort. He
claimed co-ordinate authority with the
governor and council at Charleston.
During the discussion of this point the
Spaniards sent an armed force and dislodged
the English, most of whom returned
to their native country. A permanent
settlement was finally made on
Port Royal Island in 1700. The town
of Beaufort was laid out in 1717, and an
Episcopal church erected in 1720. The
name was given from a town in Anjou,
France, the birthplace of several of the
Huguenot settlers.

For many years the Spaniards threatened
the coast as far north as Charleston,
but the settlement increased, and
extended over St. Helena and other islands.
Slavery was here coeval with
settlement, and the peculiar institution
was so earnestly fostered, that in 1724
it was estimated that South Carolina
contained 18,000 slaves to only 14,000
whites. The slaves were mostly natives
of Africa of recent importation, and
were poorly adapted to clear up the
forests and prepare the way for extensive
plantations, but their cost was small,
and every year they improved in capacity
and value. In the succeeding half
century were laid the fortunes of the
prominent families who have controlled
the district, and often greater interests,

to our day. Grants of land could be
had almost for the asking, especially by
men of influence; and fertile islands
were given, containing hundreds and
sometimes thousands of acres, to a single
family, who have here been monarchs
of all they survey, including hundreds
of slaves, till the Hegira or flight
A.D. 1861.

When we take into account the salubrity
of the climate and the fertility of
the soil, we must allow that this district
has many natural advantages which can
not be excelled by any section of the
same extent in this country. A considerable
part of the district is composed
of islands, which are supposed to be of
a comparatively recent formation, many
of them beautiful to the eye, and rich in
agricultural facilities; they are in number
upwards of fifty, not less than thirty
of them being of large size. Upon the
sea-coast are Reynolds, Prentice, Chaplins,
Eddings, Hilton Head, Dawfuskie,
Turtle, and the Hunting Islands. Behind
these lie St. Helena, Pinckney,
Paris, Port Royal, Ladies’, Cane, Bermuda,
Discane, Bells, Daltha, Coosa,
Morgan, Chissolm, Williams Harbor,
Kings, Cahoussue, Fording, Barnwell,
Whale, Delos, Hall, Lemon, Barrataria,
Lopes, Hoy, Savage, Long, Round, and
Jones Islands. These are from one to
ten miles in length, and usually a proportional
half in width. St. Helena is
over twenty miles in extent, and could
well support an agricultural population
of twenty thousand. Port Royal is next
in size, but, being of a more sandy formation,
is not so fertile. These islands are
all of an alluvial formation,—the result
of the action of the rivers and the sea.
There is no rock of any kind, not even
a pebble stone, to be found in the whole
district.

The soil of these islands is composed
mostly of a fine sandy loam, very easily
cultivated. In most of them are swamps
and marshes, which serve to furnish muck
and other vegetable deposits for fertilizing;
but the idea of furnishing anything
to aid the long over-worked soil seems
to these proprietors like returning to the
slave some of the earnings taken from
him or his ancestors, and is seldom done
till nature is at last exhausted, and then
it is allowed only a few years’ repose.
Situated under the parallel of 32°, there
is scarcely a product grown in our country,
of any value, that can not be produced
here. Previous to the Revolution
the principal staple for market was
indigo, and that raised in this district always
commanded the highest price. It
was from the proceeds of this plant that
the planters were enabled for a long
period to purchase slaves and European
and northern American productions.
Soon after the Revolution their attention
was turned to cotton; but the difficulty
of separating it from the seed
seemed to make it impossible to furnish
it in any profitable quantity, for so slow
was the process then followed that, with
the utmost diligence, a negro could not,
by hand labor, clean over a few pounds
per day. The genius of Whitney, however,
opened a new era to the cotton
planters, who were much more eager to
avail themselves of his invention than to
remunerate him. It was soon perceived
that the cotton raised on these islands
was far superior to that produced in the
interior, which is still called Upland,
only to distinguish it from the ‘Sea Island.’

It was also noticed that while
the common variety produced a seed
nearly green with a rough skin, the seed
of the islands soon became black with a
smooth skin; the effect entirely of location
and climate, as it soon resumes its
original color when transported back to
the interior. The cultivation of this variety
is limited to a tract of country of
about one hundred and fifty miles in
length, and not over twenty-five miles
in breadth, mostly on lands adjacent to
the salt water, the finest ‘grades’ being
confined to the islands within this district.
It is true that black-seed cotton
is cultivated to some extent along the
coast from Georgetown, S.C., to St. Augustine,
but a great part of it is of an inferior
quality and staple, and brings in
the market less than one-half the price
of the real ‘Sea Island.’ This plant

seems to delight in the soft and elastic
atmosphere from the Gulf Stream, and,
after it is ‘well up,’ requires but a few
showers through the long summer to
perfect it. It is of feeble growth, particularly
on the worn-out lands, and two
hundred pounds is a good yield from an
acre. An active hand can tend four
acres, besides an acre of corn and
‘ground provisions;’ but with a moderate
addition of fertilizers and rotation
of crops no doubt these productions
would be doubled. If the yield seems
small, the price, however, makes it one
of the most profitable products known.
The usual quotations for choice Sea Islands
in Charleston market has been for
many years about four times as great as
for the middling qualities of Uplands,—probably
an average of from thirty-five
to forty-five cents per pound; and for
particular brands3 sixty to seventy
cents is often paid. The writer has
seen a few bales, of a most beautiful
color and length of staple, which sold
for eighty cents, when middling Uplands
brought but ten cents per pound. It is
mostly shipped to France, where it is
used for manufacturing the finest laces,
and contributes largely to the texture
of fancy silks, particularly the cheaper
kinds for the American market. After
passing above the flow of the salt water,
but within the rise of the tide, there is a
wide alluvial range along the rivers and
creeks, which, by a system of embankments,
can be flowed or drained at pleasure.
This is cultivated with rice, and,
if properly cared for, yields enormous
crops, sometimes of sixty bushels to an
acre. The land is composed of a mass
of muck, often ten feet deep and inexhaustible,
and never suffers from drought.
This land is very valuable, one hundred
dollars often being paid per acre for
large plantations. Much rice land, however,
remains uncleared for want of the
enterprise and perseverance necessary
to its improvement.

Farther in the interior the land is
principally of a sandy formation, most
of it underlaid with clay. Very little
effort is, however, made by planters to
cultivate it, although it is very easily
worked, and with a little manuring
yields fair crops of corn and sweet potatoes.
The cereal grains are seldom cultivated,
but no doubt they would yield
well. A large portion of the main-land
is composed of swamps, of which only
enough have been reclaimed to make it
certain that here is a mine of wealth to
those gifted with the energy to improve
it. The soil is as fertile as the banks of
the Nile, and nowhere could agricultural
enterprise meet with such certainly profitable
returns. Recurring again to the
agricultural capacity of the islands, it is
certain that good crops of sugar-cane
can be grown on them. During the war
of 1812, the planters turned their attention
to it, and succeeded well, since
which time many of them have continued
to plant enough for their own
use; but this plant soon exhausts such a
soil, unless some fertilizer is used, and
they therefore prefer cotton, which
draws a large part of its sustenance
from the atmosphere alone. The sweet
and wild orange grows here, and some
extensive groves are to be seen. Figs
are produced in abundance from September
till Christmas. Gardens furnish
abundant vegetables, yielding green peas
in March and Irish potatoes in May,
while numerous tribes of beautiful flowers
hold high carnival for more than
half the year.

This seems to be the true home of
the rose, which is found blooming from
March until Christmas. Many of the
rare climbing varieties of this flower,
which we see at the North only as small
specimens in green-houses, grow here
in wild profusion. The grape is represented
by many species indigenous to
this State alone, and could, no doubt, be
cultivated and produced in greater variety
and perfection than elsewhere on
this continent, as the climate is more
equable. A species of Indian corn,
called ‘white flint corn,’ and which

when cooked is very nutritious and
white as snow, seems indigenous to
these islands. It is much superior to
the common varieties.

Of the sylva we will only say, it is
equal in value and variety to that of
any section of our country. Here is the
home of the palmetto4 or cabbage tree,
the only palm in our wide country. The
live oak, once so abundant, has, however,
been largely cut off, mostly to supply
our navy-yards, and some of the ships
built from it are now blockading the
very harbors from which it was carried.
The pitch pine is the common growth
of the interior, and under a new system
would form a valuable article of commerce
as lumber, and as yielding the
now so much required turpentine. Of
wild animals and birds, here are to be
found a large variety. The Hunting Islands
and others are well stocked with
deer. During the winter wild, geese
and ducks abound, and a variety of fish,
with fine oysters, can be had at all seasons.

We now come to consider the present
inhabitants of this district. The whites
are almost entirely the descendants of
the earliest settlers of this State, who
were English,5 Scotch, and Protestant
Irish, with a slight infusion of the Huguenot
and Swiss elements. A century
and a half has rendered them homogeneous.
As there has never been any
interest here other than agriculture, and
as every man may be said to own the
plantation he cultivates, there has been
as little change of property or condition
as possible, and therefore the same land
and system of cultivation has passed from
father to son through four or five generations.
Had there been any emigration
or change of population, some alterations,
and most likely new enterprise
and vigor, would have been infused, and
more modern and national feeling have
been instituted for their narrow and sectional
prejudices. No doubt our national
character has been much influenced
by the division of land. Where this has
been nearly equal, as in our New England
towns, a republican form of government
has been almost a necessity. But
at the South an entirely different arrangement
has prevailed. Land was at
first distributed in large bodies fitted to
accommodate a state of slavery; and
the consequence was that a feudal system
was inaugurated from the settlement,
which has continued with increasing
power. This has been one of the
permanent causes of Southern pride
and exclusiveness.

The inhabitants of South Carolina
and Virginia previous to the Revolution
were very supercilious towards the North,
and even to their less opulent neighbors
of Georgia and North Carolina; a feeling
which was often the cause of much antagonism
among the officers and soldiers
during the war. Charleston and Williamsburg
gave the tone to good society,
and it was haughty and aristocratic in
the extreme. While Virginia has for
the last half century been in a state of
comparative decay, South Carolina has,
by its culture of cotton and rice, just
been able to hold its own; but the pride
and exclusiveness of its people have increased
much faster than its material
interests. Although the Constitution of
the United States guarantees to every
State a republican form of government,
no thinking person who has resided for
a single week within the limits of
South Carolina can have failed to see

and feel that a tyranny equal to that of
Austria exists there. The freedom of
opinion and its expression were not permitted.
Strangers were always under
espionage, and public opinion, controlled
by an oligarchy of slave-holders,
overruled laws and private rights. Nowhere,
even in South Carolina, was this
feeling of hauteur so strong as in that
portion of the State which we are describing.
On the large plantations the
owners ruled with power unlimited over
life and property, and could a faithful
record be found it would prove one of
vindictive oppression, productive oftentimes
of misery and bloodshed. Most
of the wealthier planters in the district
have residences at Beaufort, to which
they remove during the summer months
to escape the malaria arising from the
soil around their inland houses. This
place may be considered the home of
the aristocracy. Here reside the Barnwells,6
Heywards, Rhetts7(formerly
called Smiths,) Stuarts, Means, Sams,
Fullers,8 Elliots,9 Draytons and others,
altogether numbering about fifty families,
but bearing not more than twenty
different names, who rule and control
the country for forty miles around. This
is the most complete and exclusive approach
to ‘nobility’ of blood and feeling
on our continent. Nowhere else is
family pride carried to such an extent.
They look with supercilious disdain on
every useful employment, save only the
planting of cotton and rice. Nothing in
any of our large cities can equal the display
of equipages, with their profusion
of servants in livery, exhibited on pleasant
afternoons, when the mothers and
daughters of these cotton lords take
their accustomed airing. So powerfully
has this feeling of exclusiveness prevailed
that no son or daughter dares
marry out of their circle. For a long
series of years has this custom prevailed,
and the consequence is that the families
above named are nearly of a common
blood; and it needs no physiologist to
tell us the invariable effect arising from
this transgression of natural laws, on the
physical and mental faculties of both
sexes. In such a state of society is it
strange that the present generation
should have grown up with ideas better
suited to the castes of India than to
those of republican America? As a consequence
they consider their condition
more elevated than that of their neighbors
in the adjoining States, and of almost
imperial consideration. But no

language can express their bitter contempt
for the people of the North, more
particularly for those of New England
birth.

In perusing the history and progress
of any portion of our country, the statistics
of population become an interesting
study. Let us glance over a brief table,
showing what the increase has been in
this district for the past forty years, and
its miserable deficiency in physical means
of strength and defense. In 1820 the
district contained 32,000 souls, of which
there were 4,679 whites and 27,339
slaves, and 141 free blacks. In 1860
there were 6,714 whites and 32,500
slaves, and 800 free blacks, making a
total of 40,014,—an increase of whites
of 2,035, of slaves 5,161, of free blacks
650:—total increase 7,855 in forty
years. Here we have nearly the largest
disproportion of whites to slaves
in any part of the South. Of the
6,714 whites, about 1,000 are probably
men over twenty-one years of age,
and it is not to be presumed that an
equal number are capable of bearing
arms. Is it possible to find anywhere
a community more helpless for its own
protection or defense? It is one of the
truths of science and philosophy that
nature, when forced beyond its own
powers and laws, will react, and again
restore its own supremacy. So we here
find a magnificent space of country,
rich in all natural requisites, and unsurpassed
in its capabilities of producing
not only the necessaries of life, but
its luxuries, having an exclusive right
to some of the most valuable staples
of the world, which has been for a
century and a half the abode of an imperious
few, who have, by tyrannical
power, wrung from the bones and muscles
of generations of poor Africans the
means to sustain their luxury, power,
and pride. They have also robbed from
the mother earth the fertility of its soil
to its utmost extent, leaving much of it
completely exhausted. This state of
things has reacted on them; it has made
them proud, domineering, ambitious, and
revengeful of fancied injuries. It has
hurried them into rebellion against the
best government the world ever saw,—and
this has at last brought with it its
own punishment and retribution. It has
placed their soil, their mansions, their
crops and poor slaves in the possession
of the hated men of the North, and under
the laws and control of the government
they affected to despise. When
the last gun had sounded from the ramparts
at Port Royal, and the Stars and
Stripes again resumed their supremacy
on the soil of South Carolina, a new era
dawned over these beautiful islands and
waters, and the day that witnessed the
retreat of the rebel forces should hereafter
mark, like the flight of Mahomet,
the inauguration of a new dispensation
for this land and its people. Let us,
therefore, in continuing our chronicles,
cast the horoscope, and, without claiming
any spirit of prophecy, show the duties
of our nation in this contingency,
and the beneficial results that must flow
from it, if carried out with the energy,
perseverance, and practical Christianity
due to our country and the age in which
we live.

The accession to any government of
new territory brings with it new duties,
which it is always important should be
performed with energy and decision, so
that the greatest good, to the greatest
number, may be the result. A good
Providence has placed the domain under
consideration in our possession. Its
political condition is to us unique, and
almost embarrassing. If the question is
asked, ‘Can we hold and dispose of a
part, or whole, of a sovereign State as a
conquered province?’ the answer must
be in the affirmative. Government is
supreme, and must be exercised, particularly
to protect the weak, and for the
general good of the whole nation. Here
is a region, as fair as the sun shines upon,
now in a great measure deserted and
lying waste. What is to be done with
it? and what is our duty in this exigency?
The first want is a government,
for without a proper one no progress can
be made. Let Congress then at once establish
a territorial government over so

much of the State as we now have in
our possession, and over what we may
in future obtain;—not a government to
exhibit pomp, and show, but one practical
and useful, with a court and its
proper officers. Let every large unrepresented
estate be placed in the hands
of a temporary administrator, who should
be a practical and honest man, and
held to a strict account for all properties
entrusted to his keeping, and who should
act also as guardian to the slaves belonging
to the estate. Then enforce the collection
of a tax; and if the owner comes
forward within sixty days, pays the tax,
takes the oath of allegiance, and agrees
to remain in the territory and assist in
enforcing and executing the laws, during
that and the succeeding year, let
him resume his property, and be protected
in all his rights. But in default
of any loyal response from the proprietor,
the property should be disposed of,
in moderate quantities, to actual settlers,
who should be bound to do duty for its
defense, whenever called upon.

But then comes the great difficulty,
the disposition of the slaves,—the great
question which has so long been discussed
as a theory, and which now has
to be met as a practical measure. Let
us meet it as men and patriots, and, rising
above the clamor of fanatics, or the
proclamations of new-fangled and demagoguing
brigadiers, look at the permanent
result to our whole country, and
the real good of the African race.

Humanity, society, and property, all
have claims and acknowledged rights;
let them all be considered. It is well
known that the slaves on these islands
have always been kept in a state of
greater ignorance of the world and all
practical matters than those inhabiting
the border States, or where there is a
larger proportion of whites, with whom
they often labor and associate. To
emancipate them at once would be to
do a great wrong to the white man, to
the property, in whatever hands it might
be, and a still greater injury to the
slave. There can be but one way of disposing
of this question which will satisfy
the nation, and quiet the fears of the
conservative, and preserve the hopes of
the radical, which is, to pursue a middle
course—a policy which shall as nearly
as possible equalize the question to all
parties. Let the slave be retained on
the plantation where he is found; and,
as no race are so much attached to their
own locality, so let them remain, place
them under a proper system of APPRENTICESHIP,
with a mild code of
laws, where every right shall be protected,
where suitable instruction, civil
and religious, shall be given, and where
the marriage rite shall be administered
and respected. Under such laws and
beneficent institutions, this territory
would soon be settled by men from the
West, the North, and from Europe, intelligent,
enterprising, and industrious,
who would retrieve its worn-out fields,
and introduce new systems of culture,
with all the modern labor-saving utensils.
With kind treatment and new
hopes, the simple sons of Africa would
have inducements to labor and to await
with patient hope the future and its rewards.
Then would Beaufort District
become what the Giver of all good designed
it to be—the abode of an industrious,
peaceful, and prosperous community.
The production of its great
staple, ‘Sea-Island cotton,’ would be immensely
increased, and its quality improved,
till it rivaled the silks of the
Old World. The yield of rice would be
doubled, and its gardens and orchards
would supply the North with fruits now
known only to the tropics.

So soon as the new government was
fairly inaugurated, and the condition of
the land and its future cultivation settled,
a movement would of necessity be
made to found here a city which would
be the great commercial metropolis of
the South.

Charleston was ‘located’ at the wrong
place, simply with the object of being as
distant as possible from the Spanish settlements,
and has always suffered from
an insufficient depth of water on its bars
to accommodate the largest class of merchant
ships. It has barely sixteen feet

of water at high tide, and ships loaded
as lightly as possible have often been
obliged to wait for weeks to enter or
leave the port. A decrease of one or
two feet in its main channel would, in
its palmiest days, have been fatal to its
prosperity. The sinking of a dozen
ships loaded with stone has no doubt
placed a permanent barrier to the entrance
of all but a small class of vessels.
The ships themselves may soon be displaced
or destroyed by the sea-worm, but
the New England granite will prove a
lasting monument to the folly and madness
of the rebellion. The destruction
of the best part of the city by fire seems
also to show that Providence has designed
it to be ranked only with the
cities of the past.

The productions of South Carolina
have always been large and valuable,
and since the completion of their system
of railroad facilities they have greatly
increased; therefore a commercial city
is a necessity, and Port Royal must be
its locality. Here is the noblest harbor
south of the Chesapeake, with a draught
of water of from twenty-five to thirty
feet, enough for the largest-sized ships,
and sufficient anchorage room for all the
navies of the world. Our government
should here have a naval depot to take
the place of Norfolk, since there is no
more suitable place on the whole coast.
In this connection the name, Royal Port,
is truly significant.

The precise locality for the new city
can not now be indicated, but we would
suggest the point some two miles south-west
of Beaufort, which would give it
a position not unlike New York. It
would have the straight Broad River for
its Hudson, with a fine channel on the
south and east communicating with numerous
sounds and rivers. Its situation
on an island of about the same length as
Manhattan completes the parallel.

The value of the produce conveyed
over the sounds and rivers connecting
with Port Royal, by sloops and steamers,
must be counted by millions of dollars.
We may estimate the crop of Sea-Island
cotton at about fifteen thousand
bales, or six millions of pounds, and of
rice about fifty million pounds. Yankee
enterprise would soon double the amount,
and add to it an immense bulk of naval
stores and lumber.

But this is but a moiety of what the
exports would be. A branch railroad
only ten miles long would connect this
port with all the railroads of South Carolina
and Georgia, which, diverging
from Charleston and Savannah, spread
themselves over a large part of five
States. This road would make tributary
to this place a vast district of country.

Savannah, which has for the last few
years competed with Charleston for this
trade, will soon feel the power of the
government, and it must yield up a
large part of its business to the more
favorable location of the new city.

A few short years, and what a change
may come over these beautiful islands
and the waters that hold them in its embrace!
A fair city, active with its commerce
and manufactures, wharves and
streets lined with stores and dwellings,
interspersed with churches and schools,
inhabited by people from every section
of our country, and from every part of
Europe, all interested to improve their
own condition, and all combining to add
strength and wealth to the Union which
they agree to respect, love, honor, and
defend!

The Ante-Norse Discoverers Of America.

The Spur Of Monmouth.

The Fatal Marriage Of Bill The Soundser.

Reader, possibly you do not know
what a ‘Soundser’ is. Then I will tell
you. In the coastwise part of the State
of New Jersey in which I live, numerous
sounds and creeks everywhere divide
and intersect the low, sea-skirting
lands, wherein certain people are wont
to cruise and delve for the sake of securing
their products, and hence come
to be known in our homely style as
Soundsers. The fruitage afforded by
these sounds is both manifold and of
price. Throughout all the pleasant
weather, they yield, with but little intermission,
that gastronomic gem, the
terrapin; the succulent, hard-shell clam,
and the ‘soft’ crab; the deep-lurking,
snowy-fleshed hake, or king-fish; the
huge, bell-voiced drum, and that sheen-banded
pride of American salt-water
fishes, the sheepshead. During the
waning weeks of May, and also with
the continuance of dog-days, this already
profuse bounty receives a goodly
accession in the shape of vast flocks of
willets, curlews, gray-backs, and other
marine birds, which, with every ebb
tide, resort to their shoaler bars and
flats, to take on those layers of fat
which the similarly well-conditioned old
gentleman of the city finds so inexpressibly
delicious. When the summer is
once, over, and while the cold weather
prevails, they furnish another and quite
new set of dainties. Then the span-long,
ripe, ‘salt’ oyster is to be had
for the raking of their more solidly-bottomed
basins; and all along their more
retired nooks and harbors, the gunner,
by taking proper precautions, may bring
to bag the somewhat ‘sedgy’ but still
well-flavored black duck, the tender
widgeon, the buttery little bufflehead,
the incomparable canvas-back, and the
loud-shrieking, sharp-eyed wild goose.
All this various booty is industriously
secured by the ‘soundsers,’ to find, ere
long, a ready market in the larger inland
towns and cities. But united to
this shooting, fishing, and oyster-catching,
they have another ‘trade’ whose
scene is on the waters, though it connects
itself with the sea, rather than
the sounds, and this is ‘wrecking.’

They are prompt for this service whenever
the occasion requires; indeed, I
sometimes think they prefer it, dangerous
though it be, before all others. Inured
as they are to every sort of exposure,
they are of course a tough and
rugged race; and what with their diversity
of occupation, calling, as it does,
for a constant interchange of the use
of the gun, net, boat, fishing line, and
some one or other arm or edge tool,
they are usually, nay, almost invariably,
handy and quick-witted.

By far the most notable ‘soundser’
our neighborhood ever bred was my
hero, BILL. Physically, at least, he
was a true wonder. He stood full six
feet two, weighed eleven score pounds,
and at the same time carried no more
flesh than sufficed to hide the exact
outline of his bones. Another man so
strong as he I have never seen. I have
repeatedly known him to lift and walk
off with anchors weighing five and six
hundred weight; and those big, thick
hands of his could twist any horseshoe
as if it were a girl’s wreath. Certainly
he was not in the least graceful; that
‘ponderosity’ of his could in no way be
repressed. But he was still of rude
comeliness, his shape being squarely fitted
and tolerably proportioned, while his
broad, red-maned visage wore a constant
glow of plain, though sincere,
kindliness and good-humor.

As his physical man was uncommon,
so he had uncommon mental endowments.
He was the only ‘soundser’ I
ever knew who understood farming. He
had inherited a farmstead of some twenty-five
or thirty acres, and this he soon
had blooming as the rose. When occasion

required, he wrought on it, day and
night. He divided it, with truest judgment,
into proper fields, experimented
successfully with various kinds of novel
manures (most of which he obtained
from the sea), grew stock, planted, in
rotation, and, with only here and there
a sympathizer, gave in his full adherence
to the theory of root culture.
And he was a mechanic. He could
build house or barn to the last beam,
and ship or boat to the last joint; nay,
he once devised the model of a self-righting
life-boat, which I have often
heard shipmasters, and even real shipwrights,
descant upon in the highest
terms of praise. Moreover, I can affirm
that he was a navigator. It is
true that the science of seamanship,
as set forth in books, he had never
mastered. But he knew right well
what winds of a certain force and direction
foretold, what waves of a certain
height and aspect meant; and this
knowledge, combined with a squint,
now and then, at his pocket compass,
sufficed to enable him to take a vessel
with safety anywhere along our coast.

But while my old pal showed high
abilities in other arts, as a ‘soundser’
and wrecker he was not to be matched.
He brought to the first of these pursuits
a clearness of observation which
would have met the approbation of
many an acknowledged man of science.
He knew every sort of food which bird
and fish fed upon, where it was to be
found, and the circumstances favorable
to its production. He knew why the
game resorted to certain spots yesterday,
and avoided them to-day; what circumstances—and
they are very many—impelled
it to joyousness or quietude;
and what were most of its minor instincts.
And all this was done thoroughly,
withal. There was no haphazard
or uncertainty in any of his
conclusions. Taking thought of sundry
conditions, he could tell at any
time when such a thing was applicable;
how many sheepsheads one could
catch in the sounds; whether the honk
of the wild goose, flying overhead, announced
that he was on his way to a
fresh-water pool or a bar of gravel;
whether the black ducks were cooling
their thirsty gizzards in a woodland
pond, sitting scattered about the marshes,
or huddling together on the bosom
of the sea. In a word, his mind had
gathered unto itself every law, of the
least importance, affecting the existence
of such wild creatures about us
as cost any pains to bring to hand;
and thus he was literally master over
them, and held their lives subject to
his will. That this power was really
surprising, will hardly be disputed; and
since we, his associates, could in no
way possess ourselves of the like, it
passed among us for something almost
miraculous.

Still, brilliant ‘soundser’ as old Bill
was, he was far greater as a wrecker;
since I am now about to relate an occurrence
in the line which proves him
a veritable hero. As is perfectly well
known, our American coast is often
the scene of fearful storms, which deal
out wide-spread destruction to mariners.
With us, these gales are commonest
in February, and hence this
month is held in marked dread. Some
years ago, in the season referred to, a
storm burst upon our shores, whose
like only a few of the older among us
had ever known. After fitfully moaning
from the northward and eastward
for a day or two, the wind, one morning,
finally settled due north-east,—thus
sweeping directly upon the land,—and
blew a hurricane. It was excessively
cold, too, yet not so cold but that a
fine, dry snow was falling, though from
the fury of the wind this could settle
nowhere, but was driven, whirling and
surging, before the blast in dense clouds.
In short, it was a time of truly unearthly
wildness; and our hearts sank the
deeper in us, since we knew what ere
long must inevitably occur. At last,
within an hour or two of nightfall, the
sound of a ship’s bell, rung hurriedly,
pealed towards us along the uproar of
the tempest, and by this we were made
aware that a vessel had been wrecked

on a certain shoal rising up in the
ocean, about two miles from that part
of the beach nearest our village. To
go to the rescue of this vessel, at this
time, was absolutely impossible. For, to
say nothing of the wrath of the winds,
the air was so thick with snow that, in
the speedily advancing hours of darkness,
in which we should not fail to
be entrapped, we would be powerless
to find our way at sea a foot. There
was no help for it; the poor victims
of the shipwreck must that very night
know death in one or another most
terrifying shape, ‘if it was the will
of the Lord.’ With this mournful
conviction, about twenty of us gathered
at old Bill’s house with the closing
in of a darkness as of Tartarus,
and kept its watches. The anger of
the storm abated in no way whatever
till morning, and then the sole change
that took place was a somewhat thinner
aspect of the driving snow. Yet,
even when this was discerned, every
man of us hastened to draw over his
ordinary winter garb an oil-cloth suit
which enveloped him from head to foot,
and soberly announced himself ready
to do his duty in the strait. That we
should be exposed to the greatest dangers
was absolutely certain; and whether
a single survivor of the terrors of
that awful night yet clung to the few
frail timbers in the sea, for us to rescue,
none but Heaven knew; still, the
manhood of each demanded that what
was possible to be done in the matter
we should at least attempt.

And so we started; the leader being
old Bill, who to some end, that I could
not then divine, bore a boat-sail bundled
on his back. Our first business
was to make way to our surf or life boat.
This lay about three miles from the village,
reckoning as the crow flies, and
was sheltered under a rude house which
stood on the shores of a bay opening by
an inlet into the sea. Our common
way of gaining this house was through
a circuitous passage of the sounds; but
these we soon discovered, in consonance
with a previous prediction of old Bill’s,
were entirely frozen over save in certain
parts of their channels; and hence, this
route being unnavigable for such boats
as were at hand, which, without exception,
were light gunning and fishing
skiffs, we were forced to avail ourselves
of a barely practicable land track of
which we knew, and which, as it led
about among the marshes, was also circuitous.
And the necessity of choosing
this land path added to our difficulties,
in that we were forced to provide ourselves
with a small batteau and drag it
behind us, to be able to cross many
ditches and sloughs with which it was
barred, and which, particularly along
their edges, were never really frozen.
After toiling and battling for a long period,
and at the same time having to
face the most painfully cutting wind
that burst unobstructedly over the level
area of the marshes, we at last reached
the house wherein the life-boat lay, and
when old Bill had scrutinized its oars,
and stored it with a mingled collection
of cordage, canvas and spars, we ran
it into the water. But now another
trouble arose. The bay, like the sounds
of which indeed it formed a part, was
covered with ice,—either in solid sheets,
or that thick slush, peculiar to ocean estuaries,
which is chiefly known as ‘porridge
ice,’—and, from its comparative
shallowness, covered so densely, too,
that if we had trusted to getting our
boat out of it by sheer rowing, it would
have taken us the entire day so to do.
In this emergency nothing would serve
but that we must advance bodily into
the water, and, crushing and clearing
away the ice with our feet, drag the
boat, in a depth at least sufficient for
her to float, to the entrance of the inlet,
where the current ran so strongly that
no ice could gather. After a severely
trying amount of labor, this point was
finally gained, and we stood fairly in
front of the tall, thundering breakers;
whereupon each man nimbly jumped to
his place in the craft, that of steersman
being the post of old Bill.

As we gave way on our oars, we shot
along the inlet without much difficulty;

and presently old Bill announced that,
he caught a faint sight of the wreck in
the distance—to all appearance ‘most
all gone but the hull.’ But we had little
or no opportunity to indulge in speculation
or remark on the discovery, for
in a moment or two we began to oppose
the wildness of the open main, and the
hour of our real trial set in. For the
first time we could now appreciate the
full force of the gale. Good Heavens,
how it blew! The waters seemed alive
and in direst convulsion. Everywhere
huge walls of breakers were constantly
upheaved to be felled and shattered
with a roar as of some terrific cannonade;
while the air became the arena for
a helter-skelter tossing of sheets of spray,
clots of froth, and spirts of brine, which
plentifully assailed our poor boat in their
madness, and, besides partially filling her
with slush, encased every man in a complete
coating of ice. If our craft had
not been modeled with the very highest
degree of skill, and if our steersman had
not been one of a thousand, we could
have made no headway at all in this
appalling tumult. As it was, our advance
was of the weakest, and its success
seemed very doubtful, let our efforts
be what they might. Not but
what we could sufficiently hold our own
in the swirl of the vanquished waves;
but when they swooped upon us in their
full stature, they not only sent the boat
back as if she had been a mere feather,
but with a second’s awkwardness on the
part of old Bill they would have flung
her clean over from stem to stern, and
our places among the living would have
been vacant. Having strained every
nerve for nearly two hours, we were
still but part way through the breakers,
while some of the men began to complain
of fatigue; with which old Bill
seized a favorable opportunity to put
the boat about, and we were swept
ashore on the beach as in the twinkling
of an eye. Here, we secured our boat
by hauling her high and dry on the
strand; freed her from the slush and
water which had gained in her bottom;
and then retired to the leeward of a
range of sand hills near by, to recruit
our energies.

With full leisure to ponder over the
difficulties confronting our expedition,
some few of the crew now began to

‘speak it foully,’ and even to emit gruff
proposals to return homewards. But to
these waverers old Bill at once administered
the sternest rebuke; and, as they
at last held their peace, he averred with
a gay smile (for he dearly loved the
presence of danger, and could never be
brought to look on it other than as a
rough sort of irresponsible horse-play,
over which he was sure in one way or
another to gain the mastery), that he
had now weighed all the conditions of
the pass, and that the next time we attempted
it we should assuredly prevail.
This assertion, coming from such a source,
encouraged one and all very greatly;
and ere long we cheerfully launched
our boat once more, and again began to
tug at the quivering oars. In a very
little while it became apparent enough
that the tactics that Bill intended to
adopt in our present venture were very
different from those put in practice with
the last. Instead of boldly facing the
breakers as he had heretofore done, he
now began his maneuvering by laying
us directly in the trough of the sea,—planting
the boat a little crosswise, however,
so as to prevent an untoward swell
from riding over her side and thus filling
her,—and the instant he saw an advancing
breaker beginning to fracture,
as a prelude to its downfall and destruction,
he boldly sped us, when the thing
was at all practicable, straight in the
teeth of the gap, and as it proceeded to
widen, we shot through it, with the surf
leaping and tossing on either hand high
above our heads. This stroke could have
been possible only to a steersman possessed
of herculean strength, combined
with the rarest daring and coolness;
and, as the result of these qualities, it
was exceedingly effective. It lessened
the danger of our being capsized almost
entirely. Indeed, the sole mishap
that was threatened by so doing, was
the liability to being swamped by the

falling fragments of the breakers; but
this peril old Bill declared we might
safely trust he would also avert. It being
the nature of humanity to experience
a mood of high exaltation with the
surmounting of any serious obstacle, we
now worked our way with minds light
and cheery, and with all thoughts of anything
like fatigue completely forgotten.
Though our course was on the whole a
zigzag one, and though we certainly
met with one or two serious rebuffs, we
were constantly gaining headway, and
in something over an hour forced the
last line of the breakers, and stemmed
what on ordinary occasions would have
been simply the blue body of the Atlantic.
But even here a huge commotion
was reigning, though our progress was
far less tedious than it had previously
been; and with about another hour’s labor
we were alongside the wreck, and
had climbed to her deck.

The plight of the vessel was mournful
enough. She had evidently been built
for a three-masted schooner, but, as Bill
had observed when he first obtained a
view of her, everything about her was
well-nigh gone save her hull. Her bulwarks
had been thoroughly crushed, and
so the sea had successively torn away
her boats, shivered her galley and wheelhouse,
and filled her cabin and hold.
Her masts were also destroyed, the fore
and mizzen masts being carried away
from their steppings, and the main-mast
broken completely in twain just above
the cross-trees. But a sight still more
desolate, as well as harrowing, yet awaited
us, as, in overhauling the sail-encumbered
shrouds of the partially standing
mast, we discovered several ice-bound
figures rigidly hanging therein, which,
being cut away and lowered to our boat,
proved to be the body of a negro perfectly
stark and dead, and three most
pitiable white sailors, whose life was so
far extinguished that they could neither
move hand nor foot, nor utter more than
the feeblest moans.

When we had covered the face of the
dead and sheltered the well-nigh dead as
best we could in the bottom of our boat,
of course our chief thought was to return
to the shore as swiftly as possible. But
on this head there was no call to entertain
the smallest solicitude; for after old
Bill, from a motive that we could not
yet name, had ‘stepped’ a mast through
one of the foremost thwarts of the boat,
and rigged a sail all ready to be spread,
we cast off from the wreck, and presently,
dropping into the full strength of the
wind, were swept onward like an arrow,
with scarce the least use of any other
oar than that in the hands of our stalwart
steersman. Speedily crossing the
outer waters, we leaped and bounded
over the breakers; and when old Bill, as
we were rushing along the inlet, gave
orders for the hoisting of the sail, we
not only hastened to obey him, but immediately
saw an all-important reason
for the command. For we were now
about entering the ice of the sounds;
and as the boat flew in its midst, her
stiff, tight sail drove her through the
stubborn obstruction as easily and in
much the same manner as the steam
plow rips up the matted bosom of the
prairies. In due season we reached the
landing where we usually disembarked
from the sounds, and where we found a
wagon awaiting us, to which we bore
our sad freightage, and led the way for
old Bill’s house. On arriving, we laid
the corpse in an outbuilding and carried
the sailors into a bedroom. But what
was to be next done? To tell the
truth, most of us knew no more than so
many children. But here our leader
again showed his knowledge. Strongly
condemning the lighting of a fire in the
apartment,—which some one was about
to do,—he set us busily at work bringing
him a good supply of tubs, and
buckets of cold water, into which he
dipped the naked persons of the sufferers;
and as this treatment, combined
with a patient, gentle chafing, which
was also administered, at last restored
the flow of their vital forces, he gave
them a few spoonfuls of broth apiece,
and, while they looked a gratefulness
they could nowise express, lifted them
like babes with his giant arms to warm

beds, where they fell into what was at
first a fitful, broken slumber, but finally
a childlike, placid sleep. They were
saved!

If the reader is now curious to know
why a man like old Bill was not a patrician
and captain in the campaign of
life, rather than the mere private and
plebeian he was, I can answer that there
were several things which impeded that
consummation. His character, though
of wonderful height and force in some
respects, was, after all, without true discipline,
and presented many glaring incongruities.
Thus, whatever he had of
what could really be named ambition
was satisfied when he had surprised us
‘soundsers;’ and our praise—and we
lavished it upon him in full measure, as
we knew he liked it—was all the praise
he seemed to desire. Then, he was altogether
one of us in his notions of pleasure
and recreation. Like the rest of us,
he cordially appreciated the sparkling
product of the New England distilleries,
and far more than any of us—to such
a pitch did his animal spirits rule—he
relished our broad sea-side jokes and
songs, and as well our rattling jigs and
hornpipes. As for others attempting to
elevate him to a more exalted station,
the thing was simply impossible. When
led of his own accord to seek other society
than ours, he could by no means
content himself with the companionship
of staid practical persons, who on account
of his latent worth would have
readily countenanced, and with the least
opportunity even served him, but he invariably
paid his court to adventurers;
such creatures, for instance, as seedy
‘professors’ of one kind or another, who,
in the inevitable shawl and threadbare
suit of black, were constantly dismounting
at the village tavern, with proposals
either to ‘lecture’ on something, or
‘teach’ somewhat, as the case might
happen to be, and who, having no affinity
whatever with the brawny, awkward
Viking who fondly hung on their shabby-genteel
skirts, amused themselves at his
greenness, or pooh-pooh’d him altogether,
as they saw fit. And when, as it not unfrequently
happened, official and influential
individuals at a distance were
moved by the story of his renown to pay
him their respects in person, and listen
courteously and gravely to his opinions,
his discrimination stood him in no better
stead, for as soon as he possibly could
he bent the conference towards a sailor’s
revel, and astonished his stately visitants
by singing the spiciest songs, and sometimes
even by a Terpsichorean display
in full costume; for he was excessively
proud of his accomplishments in this
line, and implicitly believed that the
shaking of his elephantine limbs, and the
whirling of his broad, coatless flanks,
formed a spectacle so tasteful and entertaining,
that no one could fail to enjoy
it to the utmost. Assuredly I have
now said enough as to old Bill’s incapacities
for a grander role in life. In
reality that part of a lofty manhood to
which he at first sight seemed fitted, was
not his; for, properly speaking, he was
not an actual man, but a boy—a grand
and glorious boy, if you will, but yet a
very boy; and at length he met the fate
of a boy, as we shall learn.

Once more we were engaged upon a
wreck. But this time it was in no hyperborean
tempest that we were called
forth, but when the very sweetest airs
of June were blowing. The case demanding
our aid was that of a wrecking
schooner which had gaily left her
moorings in New York harbor to pick
up a summer’s living along the coast,
but had inadvertently cut up some of
her capers rather too near our beach,
and so with one fine ebb tide found herself
stranded. As it was an instance of
sickness in the regularly graduated and
scientific college itself, our whole shore
was intensely ‘tickled’ at the accident.
And again, as this doctress, like many
another ailing leech, was quite incapable
of curing her own suffering, her toddy-blossom-faced
bully of a New York captain
was pleased to salute old Bill with
cup high in air, and beg that he would
take a sufficient force and heave the
distressed craft into deep water. Thus
a crew of us were called together and

set to work at the vessel. As the
weather was so warm and beautiful, and
as bed and board were at this time to
be had on the beach, we agreed among
us that our convenience would be the
better served by taking up our temporary
quarters near the scene of our labors.
Now, the place where we were
offered the necessary accommodation
consisted of an ancient plank-built tenement,
which stood behind a sand-ridge
that a far younger Atlantic than ours
had piled up, and then, retreating, abandoned.
In winter this rude domicile was
bare and tenantless; but in the summer
months it was usually occupied by some
thriftless gammer or gaffer from the
main-land, who, having stocked it with
a few of the coarsest household goods,
and whatever provisions came to hand,
offered entertainment to such wreckers
and ‘soundsers’ as happened to be in
its vicinity. The present incumbent of
the hostel was a woman, claiming to be
a widow, of the name of Rose; bearing
in most respects no resemblance whatever
to any of her predecessors. Where
she was born, or had hitherto resided,
none of us knew: all that gossip could,
gather was that she had unexpectedly
descended from a passing vessel with
her effects and entered directly the
abandoned house. When questioned as
to the scene of her earlier life, she
vaguely gave answer that she had disported
herself largely in ‘Philadelphy;’
but as no ‘Philadelphy’ woman that
ever walked through a doorway was or
is able to compound a chowder or bake
a clam pie worthy of the name, and as
Madame Rose understood how to prepare
both these luxuries to a charm, her
statement must have been false; she was,
undoubtedly, a ‘coast-wise’ lady, and
one who knew who Jack was as well as
he himself did. Her appearance was,
on the whole, agreeable. She was tall,
slender, of regular features, and, though
indisputably on the shady side of forty,
was still free from any signs that would
proclaim her charms to be on the wane.
I remember in particular that she had
long, white and regular teeth, thereby
strongly contrasting with our native women,
who as a rule lose their teeth early.
Her manners were very novel to us.
She was invariably of a simpering, ducking
turn, and interlarded her curt speech
with curiously hard words. In dress she
carried matters with an incomparably
high hand. She wore hoops ‘all day
long,’—a freak then never even so
much as thought of in our village,—adorned
her fingers with many rings,
and her throat with large florid brooches,
and in the evening, after having brought
her household duties to a close, sat here
or there with her sewing, in silks (though
perhaps not of the newest), or other
highly-civilized stuffs.

Most of our crew regarded their hostess
with greatly mingled feelings; but
old Bill entertained but one sentiment
for her,—that of unqualified admiration.
As we only ‘wrought’ at the
stranded schooner on the high water,—some
five hours out of the twenty-four,—he
had plenty of opportunity to dangle
after his dearie, and did so unremittingly.
While the rest of us were either
napping, dancing the lively ‘straight
four,’ hunting herns’ eggs among the
sand-hills, and so on, according to our
inclination, he, in far more romantic
mood, seized all possible opportunities
to quickly gather fire-wood for his
charmer, fill her tea-kettle, open whatever
clams and oysters she was about to
cook, and, above all, to recount for her
delight one of those inimitable yarns of
his, at whose points he himself was sure
to laugh till the rafters of the house
shook and the plates in the dresser rattled
again. But this was merely the
first stage of his passion. Before long,
as is not unusual in such cases, it took
another and more bodeful turn. That
inextinguishable laughter of his was
heard no more, or at best gave place to
a feeble tittering; his stories dropped
from his lips with but flat pungency;
and instead of performing his lady-love’s
‘chores’ with a mirthful readiness,
he went through them in a heartsick
way, the while directing towards
her furtive looks of supplication. The

true state of matters was now obvious
to all Old Bill was another fatally-stricken
victim of that spooney archer-boy
who next to death holds dominion
over men; and with his case, thus momentous,
we could but feel a renewed
interest in his behalf, and busy our
tongues about him. I, for my part,
thought that as he was a widower, and
needful of a wife to comfort him in his
advancing age, and that as the present
object of his affections, if not a highly

‘forcible’ woman, seemed at all events
to be one of whom no great harm was to
be feared, there could be no valid objection
to his being joined to her; particularly
if nothing was divulged proving
her to be other than what she seemed.
But this view I found to be on the whole
unacceptable to my auditory. Almost
to a man they condemned the propriety
of the match. It could not actually be
said that they disliked Mrs. Hose, but
they were jealous of her, as, in her manner
and style of array, she considerably
dimmed the lustre of their own women;
and they distrusted her as she was a
stranger; it being a marked habit with
most of our folks to distrust all strangers
save those from whom they expect pecuniary
awards. But meanwhile, notwithstanding
this criticism, the little
idyl in our midst was developing itself
apace. On the afternoon of one beautiful
Sunday, a day in which we of
course ordinarily did no work, when
the dinner-table had been well cleared
away, what should we see but old Bill
swinging forth with his sailor gait from
the house, and arrayed as jauntily as his
check shirt and pea-jacket (his only suit
of apparel at hand) would permit, to be
speedily followed by Mrs. Rose, who
with one set of finger-tips held up the
light folds of a sweetly blue lawn skirt,
and with the other bore aslant before
her a bewitching pink parasol. Undoubtedly
there was a great indulgence
in sly winks and suppressed titterings
on the part of such of us as chanced to
be witnesses of this at once festal and
sentimental sally; but the twain heeded
naught whatsoever of these manifestations,
but struck off along the snow-white
strand where the sea was droning its
hymn so lazily that it would have inevitably
put itself to sleep, if the fish-hawks
had not so continually disturbed it by
mischievously diving headlong into its
bosom. At last they returned again;
and we soon became aware that the
stroll had not been without great results
to both; since Mrs. Rose affected to be
laboring under a high degree of emotion,
and retired to the privacy of her apartment,
while old Bill was by no means
the dolorous swain of a few hours before,
but, making his way among us, with his
wide mouth stretching its best, proceeded
formally to shake hands with one and
all as though he had finally got back from
a long and arduous voyage; and then,
merrily calling for a certain brown jug
which was among our stores, removed
the corn-cob which served as a cork,
and having wetted his great heart with
a draught which I have no doubt measured
a full pint, fell, entirely regardless
of the day, to performing his most spirited
hoe-down, while the most of us looked
on with a mirth that knew no bounds.

Yes, old Bill was now ‘a happy man,’
Mrs. Rose could but accept such a suitor
as he, if but from the fact that; his ardor
and his pain were of the freshest complexion,
and of an amplitude fully proportioned
to that of his extraordinary
physical bulk. As we tendered him our
congratulations upon his happy state, he
received the courtesy with extreme complacency.
But, to tell the truth, those
who did thus congratulate him were but
few. Most of the men remained of their
old mind as to the proposed match; indeed,
I ere long found that they looked
upon it with less favor than ever. It
appeared that they had been inflamed
with a rumor that Mrs. Rose intended
to beguile her adorer to a foreign shore,
where a scion or two of her brilliant
house found happy sustenance; and that
nothing but evil could accrue from such
an act, was of course as clear as noonday.
Now, when I came to trace this
rumor to its source, I became apprised
that it owed its publicity to an old man

of our number known by the nickname
of ‘Mister,’ who was remarkable for a
rare amount of credulity, self-conceit,
and obstinacy, and at the same time for
being the invariable butt of his company.
This wiseacre averred that he
had succeeded in wringing from Mrs.
Rose the confession that directly she and
old Bill were made man and wife, they
were to depart for Hatteras Inlet, on the
coast of North Carolina, where the lady
gay possessed ‘relations;’ and this narrative,
wofully muttered about among
our crew, and accompanied with a due
amount of sighs and head-shakings, had
depressed them most fearfully, not withstanding
the character of the narrator.

The fact of the matter was, that most
of the men were actually desirous that
a betrothal, contracted directly in the
face of public opinion, and without the
smallest deference to anybody, as that of
old Bill and Mrs. Rose had been, should
come to some kind of grief or other, and
they were fain to believe that it would
do so. As for me, I was without true
concern on the subject, as I had ever
been. If it should indeed fall out that
old Bill was to take a trip to Hatteras
with his bride, I was convinced that he
would enjoy himself famously among the
great abundance of fish and game said
to abound in that place, and that in the
end he would return to us again, to rule
over us in greater splendor than ever;
as for his sweetheart or any of her like
doing him any actual injury, the idea
seemed so preposterous to me, that whenever
an opportunity presented itself I
did not fail to ridicule it to the utmost.
Still, in order to do my whole duty in
the matter, I hastened to impress old
Bill with the importance of his becoming
acquainted with the antecedents of
his lady-love, and thus saving himself
from the possibility of a misstep. But
this counsel did no farther good than to
bring a clouded brow to my dear old
friend, and so I did not persist in it.
Indeed, we communed together but little
more in any way; for very shortly
after he resigned his place as our ‘boss,’
and left post-haste for the main-land.
Here, as was revealed to me in due season,
he amazed the neighborhood by incontinently
renting his farmstead to a
son with whom he had been on indifferent
terms for years; dispatching his
daughter, who had heretofore acted as
his housekeeper, off to a distant town
to become an apprentice to a milliner’s
trade; and stowing his clothes and a
shot-bag of hard money which he was
known to possess into a sailor’s chest,
with which, together with his gun and a
Methodist preacher, he again hurried off
for the asylum of his beloved. Arrived
once more in the witching presence, he
waited till evening (yet how he was
constrained so to do is more than I can
tell), and then, as we made it a duty to
be gathered about him once more, the
wedding took place.

The occasion was one of such interest,
that the preacher could but make the
most of it. After the nuptial benediction
had been pronounced, he straightway
launched forth into a homily of
such graciousness and force, that but
few of us missed being forcibly wrought
upon, while Mrs. Rose was stirred apparently
to the depths of her being.
On the day succeeding the marriage,
our light-hearted Benedict abandoned
himself to another jollification. But the
next morning, a schooner headed in
towards the beach, and, slackening the
peaks of her sails, sent ashore a yawl,
whose crew saluted Mrs. Rose as an old
and familiar friend, and with whose apparition,
without the least regard as to
what shift we wreckers were to make, a
great packing was begun in the house.
Bedsteads were taken down, beds were
bundled up in sheets, crockery was thrust
away in barrels, and all borne one after
the other to the yawl, where the bride,
with her potent parasol full spread, and
pretending to shudder at the sight of the
gently heaving breakers through which
she was soon to pass, mincingly threw
herself in the thick of the luggage, and
old Bill mounted the stern, with his
huge palm extended for a good-by
shake. ‘Good-by, old chap,’ said I, as
I took his hand the last of all, ‘good-by!

You’re not half mean enough to
stay away from us forever; so in the
meantime do your best to show the Hatteras
boys what a nice thing it is to be
somebody in the world!’ And thus the
boat put off, and, reaching the schooner
in a few moments, was hoisted to her
decks. In a few moments more the
vessel had reset her sails, and, with a
free wind, bore straight to the southward
out of sight.

Now comes the singular part of my
story. In a few weeks from the time of
their sailing, we heard that old Bill and
his wife had safely landed at Hatteras
Inlet, and rented a small house on one
of the beaches there, with the intention
of opening a kind of tavern; but no
sooner were they fairly settled in their
new abode than old Bill was found one
morning dead in his bed, with evident
signs of having met with foul play;
though what kind of death these indications
pointed at was very uncertain.

The closest and shrewdest investigation
failed to attach a well-grounded
suspicion to any one. Poor Bill was
dead—and nothing more was ever
known. Singular enough, the conduct
of his widow was such as to entirely
avert even from her enemies hints of
complicity in the crime,—if crime there
was,—though none doubted that there
had been a murder, and that murder in
a few attendant circumstances seemed
to indicate female aid. Shortly after this
catastrophe, Madame Rose made ‘a vendue’
of her deceased husband’s gun and
apparel, packed up her own worldly
goods, and vanished, to be heard of no
more.

And so our shore lost its best ‘soundser’—a
man of mark in his way, great
of frame and heart, and one long to be
recalled in our humble annals of wrecking
and of sport. He was one of those
vigorous out-croppings of sturdy Northern
physique recalling in minute detail
the stories told of those giant children,
the Vikings and Goths of the fighting
ages, and which the blood, though as
healthy as ever,—witness the glorious
exploits of our soldiers even as I write,—produces
less frequently in these days
of culture. Such as I have described
was the character of Bill the Soundser,
and such was literally and truly his mysterious
death.

Columbia To Britannia.

VIA SHAKSPEARE.

KING JOHN, III. 1.

General Lyon.

To-day all the Northland shouts for
joy, flashes its announcements of victory
along myriad leagues of wire, hurls
them from grim cannon mouths out over
broad bays till the seas tremble with
sympathy, huzzas in the streets, flames
in bonfires, would even clash the clouds
together and streak the heavens with
lightning—and for what? The flag
waves again in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama,
Arkansas, and the cause is safe!
The cause—have we all learned what
that means, brother Americans? Something
broader than mere Union, the
pass-word of so many thousands to suffering
and death, something more than
the freedom of the press and the ballot-box.
It means Progress; and until we
acknowledge this, all freedom is a vast
injustice, luring men on to Beulahs which
Fate—the fate they worship—will never
have them reach. It would be little
enough to regain our foothold upon
Southern territory, or repossess Southern
forts, even if forts and territory have
been wrested from us by treason and perjury,
if with every mile of advance we
did not gain a stronghold of principle.
We are not straining every nerve, struggling
under immense financial burdens,
wrenching away tender household ties,
sacrificing cheerfully and eagerly private
interests, brilliant prospects, and
high hopes, only to prove that twenty
millions of men are physically stronger
than twelve. God forbid! This is no
latter-day Olympic game, whoso victors
are to be rewarded with the applause
of a party or a generation. All the
dead heroes and martyrs of the past will
crowd forward to offer their unheard
thanks; all the years to come will embalm
with blessings the memory of the
patriots who open the door to wide advancement,
prosperous growth, and high
activity of a universal intelligence.

And among these brave men, whom
the world shall delight to honor, let our
deepest grief and our justest pride be
for LYON. We have given his honest
life too little notice;—this man whose
sincerity was equalled only by his zeal;
who, in a rarely surpassed spirit of self-abnegation,
was content to lie down and
die in the first heat of the great conflict,
and to leave behind for more favored
comrades the triumphal arches and rose-strewn
paths of victory. The world has
known no truer martyr than he who fell
at Wilson’s Creek, August 10th, 1861.

‘The history of every man paints his
character,’ says Goethe; and scanty and
imperfect as are the recorded details of
General Lyon’s life, enough is known to
prove him to have been high-minded
and brave as a soldier, with a perseverance
and a penetration that analyzed at
once the platforms of contending factions,
and read in their elements the
principles which are to govern the future
of our nation.

He came of the stout Knowlton stock
of Connecticut, a family of whom more
than one served England in the old
French war, and afterward distinguished
themselves against her in the Revolution.
We hear of the gallant Captain Knowlton
at Bunker Hill, throwing up, in default
of cotton, the breastwork of hay,
which proved such an efficient protection
to the provincials during the battle.
Once more he appears as colonel, at
Harlem Plains, rushing with his Rangers
(‘Congress’ Own’) upon the enemy on
the Plains, and, cut off shortly from retreat
by reinforcements, fighting bravely
between the foes before and their reserves
behind, and, falling at last, borne
away by sorrowing comrades, and buried
at sunset within the embankments. ‘A
brave man,’ wrote Washington, ‘who
would have been an honor to any country.’

With the memory of such a hero
engrafted upon his earliest childhood,
we can not wonder at the bent of the
boy Lyon’s inclinations. ‘Daring and

resolute, and wonderfully attached to
his mother,’ it is easy to imagine what
lessons of endurance and decision he
learned from her, whose just inheritance
was the stout-hearted patriotism that
had flowered into valorous deeds in her
kindred, and was destined to live again
in her son. It was, an ordinary childhood,
and a busy, uneventful youth,
passed for the most part in the old red
farm-house nestled between two rocky
hills near Eastport, where he was born.
In 1837 he entered the Military Academy
at West Point, and was a graduate,
with distinction, four years later. Of
the years immediately following, we have
little information; but we can fancy the
young soldier laying, in his obscurity,
the foundation for that practical military
knowledge which so eminently distinguished
his late brilliant career. During
his years of service in the Everglades
of Florida, and on our Western frontier,
he had ample opportunity to gain a thorough
insight into his profession.

He first appears in the history of the
country in the Mexican war, is present
at the bombardment of Vera Cruz,
dashes after the enemy at Cerro Gordo,
capturing on the crest of the hill a battery
which he turns upon the discomfited
foe. At Contreras his command
proves as impenetrable as a phalanx of
Alexander; and when at last the victorious
Americans fight their way into Mexico,
the city of fabulous treasures and associations
well-nigh classical, for the first
time he receives a wound. He was breveted
captain for his gallantry at Cherubusco,
and at the end of the war received
the rank of full captain, and was ordered
with his regiment to California. No appointment
could have been more felicitous.
In the guerilla mode of warfare
demanded by the peculiar nature of the
country and its inhabitants, his habits of
quick decision, and the experience of a
war with an enemy equally unscrupulous
though less undisciplined, were absolutely
invaluable. Here was no scope
for the conception and excitation of
deep-laid schemes; the movements of the
enemy were too rapid. Plans that would
elsewhere have been matured only in
the process of a long campaign, were
here often originated and completed in
a single night. Simple strategy was
of more avail than the most intricate
display of military science, and the impulse
of a moment more to be relied upon
than the prudent forethought of a
month. He had to combat, in the newly-acquired
territory, the cunning of tribes
whose natural ferocity was sharpened
into vindictiveness by the encroachments
upon their soil of a new and
strange people; and every association
with the intruders, who were for the
most part men of little reputation and
less principle, had developed in the Indians
only the fiercest and most decided
animosity. To encounter their vigilance
with watchfulness as alert, to confound
their swift counsels with sudden alarm,
to penetrate their ambuscades and anticipate
their cunning with incessant activity,
to be, in short, ubiquitous, was
the duty of Captain Lyon.

After years spent in the uncertain
tactics of this half barbaric warfare, he
was removed, in the height of political
strife in Kansas, to its very centre.
Here, while comparatively free from the
wearisome requirements of active service
such as had been demanded in California,
and at a time when events the
most portentous proved clearly to the
great minds of the country the advance
of a political crisis whose consequences
must be most important, involving—should
deep-laid conspiracy be successful—the
bankruptcy of principle and
that high-handed outrage, the triumph,
of a minority,—Captain Lyon had full
liberty and abundant opportunity to settle
for himself the great questions mooted
in the Missouri Compromises, the Lecompton
Constitutions and the Dred
Scott decisions of the day. To a mind
unprejudiced, except as the honest impulses
of every honest man’s heart are
always prejudiced in favor of the right,
there was but a single decision. Disgusted
with the heartless policy which
democracy had for so many years pursued,
and which now threatened to culminate

either in its utter degradation at
the North, or in the establishment in the
South of an oligarchy which would annihilate
all free action and suppress all free
opinion, he severed his connection with
that party,—a step to which he was
also impelled by the injustice that was
then seeking to force upon the people
of Kansas an institution which they condemned
as unproductive and expensive,
to say nothing of their moral repugnance
to the very A B C of its principles.
It was at this time that Captain
Lyon contributed to the Manhattan Express,
a weekly journal of the neighborhood,
a series of papers in which he took
an earnest, manly and decided stand in
favor of the principles which his thoughtful
mind recognized as alone ‘reliable,’

and harmonious with the grand design
and end of the great Republic of the
West. To these articles we shall hereafter
refer, at present hastening through
the career, so striking and so sad, which
a few brief months cut short, leaving
only the memory of General Lyon as a
legacy to the country his single aim and
wise counsels would have saved.

The guns of Fort Sumter had flashed
along our coast an appeal whose force
no words can ever compute. The days
had been busy with the assembling of
armies, the nights restless with their solemn
marches, and forge and factory
rang with the strokes of the hammer
and the whirr of flying shafts, whose
echoes seemed measured to the air of
some new Marseillaise. From our homes
rushed forth sons, husbands, brothers,
fathers, followed by the prayers and
blessings of dear women, who yielded
them early but willingly to their country.
And while regiments clustered
along the Potomac, and Washington lay
entrenched behind white lines of tents,
we find our soldier, fresh from Kansas
strifes, in command of the United States
Arsenal at St. Louis; and to his prompt
action and decided measures at this important
juncture the early success of the
Union cause in Missouri is to be attributed.
For a time St. Louis was the theatre
of action. The police commissioners,
backed by Governor and Legislature,
in the demanded the removal of the Union
troops from the grounds of the arsenal,
claiming it as the exclusive property of
the State, and asserting that the authority
usurped by the general government
as but a partial sovereignty, and limited
to the occupation, for purposes exclusively
military, of the certain tracts of
land now pending in this novel court of
chancery. This highly enigmatical exposition
of State rights, pompous and inflated
though it was, failed to convince
or convert Captain Lyon, who, being
unable to detect, in his occupancy of the
arsenal, any exaggeration of the rights
vested by the Constitution in the general
government, declined to abandon his
post, and proceeded to call out the Home
Guard, then awaiting the arrival of General
Harney, and temporarily under his
command. His little army of ten thousand
men was then drawn up upon the
heights commanding Camp Jackson, then
occupied by the Missouri militia under
Col. Frost, whoso command had been
increased by the addition of numerous
individuals of avowed secession principles.
Uninfluenced by the reception of
a note from this officer asserting his integrity
and his purpose to defend the
property of the United States, and disavowing
all intention hostile to the force
at the arsenal, Captain Lyon replied
by a peremptory summons for an unconditional
surrender. He found it incredible
that a body assembled at the instigation
of a traitorous governor, and
acting under his instructions and according
to the ‘unparalleled legislation’ of a
traitorous legislature, receiving under
the flag of the Confederate States munitions
of war but lately the acknowledged
property of the general government,
could have any other than the
as most unfriendly designs upon its enemies.
The force of Camp Jackson (which
notwithstanding its professed character,
boasted its streets Beauregard and Davis)
being numerically inferior, and perhaps
not entirely prepared to do battle
for a cause whose legitimacy must still
have been a question with many of

them, decided, after a council of war,
to comply with the demands of Capt.
Lyon, and became his prisoners. A few
days afterward General Harney arrived,
and Captain Lyon was elected Brigadier
General by the 1st Brigade Missouri
Volunteers.

Convinced of the imminence of the
crisis and the peril of delay, Gen. Lyon
immediately commenced active operations
against the secessionists at Potosi,
and ordered the seizure of the steamer
which had supplied the offensive army
with material of war from the United
States property at Baton Rouge. In
the meantime, Gen. Harney, with a
culpable blindness, had made an extraordinary
arrangement with Gen. Price,
by which he pledged himself to desist
from military movements so long as the
command of Gen. Price was able to preserve
order in the State. Upon his removal
by the authorities at Washington,
nine days later, Gen. Lyon was left in
command of the department. At this
time the rebel general took occasion, in
a proclamation to the people of Missouri,
to feel assured that ‘the successor of Gen.
Harney would certainly consider himself
and his government in honor bound
to carry out this agreement (the Harney-Price)
in good faith.’ But his assurance
was without foundation. The
temper of the new commander had been
tried in the Camp Jackson affair, and an
interview between Price, Jackson and
other prominent secessionists and Gen.
Lyon, resulted, after a few hours’ consultation,
in the declaration of the Union
general that the authority of his government
would be upheld at any cost and
its property protected at all hazards.
Three days later, Jackson fled to Booneville,
fearing an attack upon Jefferson
City, which was immediately occupied
by Gen. Lyon, who was received with
acclamation by the citizens. Unwilling
to grant by delay what he had refused to
an underhand diplomacy,—opportunity
to the enemy to possess the government
property, or entrench themselves strongly
in their new quarters,—the general,
with characteristic promptness, ordered
an advance upon Booneville. The rebel
force was stationed above Rockport, but
retreated, after a skirmish which did not
assume the proportions of a battle; and
the Union army, two thousand strong,
entered the town, where the national
colors and the welcomes of the inhabitants
testified their joy at the change.

The army of General Lyon, amounting
at one time to ten thousand, had
decreased by the first of August—the
term of enlistment of many of the soldiers
having expired—to six thousand;
and it was with this number that, having
swept the south-west, and believing
the enemy intended to attack him at
Springfield, he advanced to meet them
at Dug Springs. The army of the enemy
was larger and their position a
strong one, but they were unable to hold
it, and, after a sharp skirmish, fled in disorder,
while Gen. Lyon continued his
march toward Springfield. His situation
had now become a critical one.
The reinforcements for which he had telegraphed
in vain, and in vain sent messengers
to entreat from the chief of the
department, Gen. Fremont, then in St.
Louis, did not arrive. His army was
subsisting on half rations, and wearied
with exhausting marches over the uneven
country in the extreme heat of
midsummer. And now, for the first time,
hope seemed to desert the general. Under
his direction the cause had hitherto
triumphed in Missouri. Now, with zeal
unabated and courage unflinching, he
must fall before the enemy he had so
successfully opposed, or retreat where retreat
was disaster, disgrace, and defeat.
No wonder that, as from day to day he
looked for the expected aid as men in
drought for the clouds that are to bless
them, he grew restless and perplexed
and despairing; no wonder that the face
that had never before worn the lines of
indecision, should now lose its accustomed
cheerfulness and glance of calm purpose,
and challenge sympathy and pity for the
heart that had never before asked more
than admiration and respect. He felt
that the hour had its demands, and that
they must be met. Action, even in the

face of disaster, was less a defeat than
an inglorious retirement. The public,
surely unaware of the fearful odds against
him, clamored for an engagement; the
State expected it of its hero; the government
awaited it, and with a brave
heart, but no hope, Gen. Lyon prepared
for the attack. The result all the world
knows. Was it a victory where the conquerors
were obliged to retire from the
field, and carry out their wounded under
a flag of truce? Was it a defeat
where the enemy had been thrice repulsed,
once driven from the ground,
had burned their baggage train, and
made no pursuit of the retreating army?

But most mournful are those last moments
of the faithful soldier’s life; most
solemn those last tones of his voice as
his orders rang out on that misty morning
amid the smoke and shouts of the
battle-field. He stands here bare-headed,
the blood streaming from two wounds
which he does not heed, the cloud of
perplexity settling over his face like a
pall, his troubled eyes fixed upon the
enemy. He turns to head a regiment
which has lost its colonel—”Forward!
men; I will lead you!” A moment, and
he lies there: no more striving for victory
here; no more anxious hours of weary
watching for the succor that never
came; no more goadings from an exacting
public, nor any more appeals to an
unheeding chief. Even the triumphant
hush of life could not smooth out those
lines cut by unwonted care upon his
face, or answer the mute questioning of
that painful indecision there. So from
the West they brought him, by solemn
marches, to the East, and colors hung at
half-mast, and bells were tolled as the
flag-draped hero was borne slowly by.
And to the music of tender dirges, he,
whose whole life had been, inspired by
the whistling of fifes and rolling of drums,
was laid to rest. A handful of clods falling
upon his breast, their hollow sound
never thrilling the mother heart that lay
again so near her son’s, a volley fired
over the grave, and all was over. Of all
the brave men gone, no fate has seemed
to us so sad. Winthrop, young and ardent,
with the tide of great thoughts rashing
in upon his princely heart, died in
the flush of hope with the fresh enthusiasm
of poetry and undimmed patriotism
shining in his eyes, and we laid our soldier
to sleep under the violets. Ellsworth
fell forward with the captured flag
of treason in his hand, and the whole
nation cheering him on in his early sally
upon the ‘sacred’ Virginia soil. Brave
and honorable, with fine powers cultured
by study and earnest thought, death
took from him no portion of the fame
life would have awarded him. Baker
rode into the jaws of death in that fatal
autumn blunder; but the ignominy of defeat
rested upon other shoulders. His
only to obey, even while ‘all the world
wondered.’ But he did not fall before
the honor of a country’s admiration and
the meed of her grateful thanks were
his. Soldier, orator and statesman, he
had gained in a brilliant career a glory
earned by few, and could well afford to
die, assured of a memory justified from
all reproach. But to Lyon, whom there
were so few to mourn, death in the
midst of anticipated defeat was bitter
indeed. No time to retrieve the losses
and disasters the cruel remissness of others
had entailed upon him; the fruit of
the anxious toil of months wrested from
him even as it began to ripen; all his glad
hopes chilled by suspicion, but his faith,
we may well believe, still strong in the
ultimate success of the cause he loved.
A whole life he had given to his country,
and she had not thought it worth
while to redeem it from disgrace with the
few thousands that he asked. He had outlived
the elasticity of youth, when wrongs
are quickly remedied, and new impulses
spring, like phoenixes, from the ashes of
the old. Uncertain whether he were
the victim of a conspiracy, the tool of
a faction, or the martyr to some unknown
theory, he died, and as the country had
been to him wife and children, he left
her his all.

It was known to but few that the
soldier, whose career had been rather
useful than brilliant, had, when the
scheming of politicians and their doubly-refined

arguments threatened to deceive
and ruin the country, put by his sword
and taken up the pen. In a series of articles,
short, concise, and to the point, he
effectually canvassed the State. They
are addressed to thinking men everywhere.
Free from all trickery, strictly
impartial, relying entirely upon the
soundness of his premises for success,—for
elegance of diction he had not, and
he was too honest even to become a sophist,—these
papers manifest at once the
true patriot and the intelligent man.
Thousands of adherents the Republican
cause had in 1860, but not one more indefatigable
or more heartily in earnest
than Lyon. Outside the limits of party
interests, and uninfluenced personally by
the predominance of either faction, he
had worked out in his own way the problem
of national life, and now spread its
solution before his readers. ‘Our cause,’
said he, ‘is to honor labor and elevate
the laborer.’ Here we have the kernel
of the whole matter; the spirit, if not the
letter, of the whole republican system of
government. The secret that philosophers
have elaborated from the unconquerable
facts of physics, ethics, and
psychology, that men of genius have
evolved with infinite difficulty from the
mass of crude aesthetic associations that
cluster around every object of nature or
of art, Lyon, working and thinking alone
as a citizen, has discovered, with the
sole aid of common sense and the habit
of practical observation. Carey and
Godwin have proved by statistics for
unbelievers the reasonableness of the
doctrine enunciated by Lyon. Now,
thanks to the untiring efforts of a few
stout-hearted patriots, it is no new one
to the North; but in the late presidential
contest it was a strange weapon glittering
in strong hands. Our society, diluted
and weakened by the Southern element,
revolted at first from the creed
that is to prove its salvation. Not alone
in our border States had the dragon crept,
searing our fair institutions with his hot
breath, but even upon the sturdy old
Puritan stock were engrafted many of the
petty notions that pass for ‘principles’
in Dixie. True, we were educated, all
of us, into a sort of decent regard for
the good old element of labor,—we call
it industry,—more antique, since antiquity
is a virtue, than aristocracy, for it
began in Paradise. But this was a feature
of our Northern character that was
to be hurried out of sight, ignominiously
buried without candle or bell, when
the giant of Southern chivalry stalked
across our borders. The bravado and
gentlemanly ruffianism of youthful F.F.V-ism
at college, and the supercilious condescension
of incipient Southern belledom
in the seminary, impressed young
North America with a respect that was
indeed unacknowledged, but that grew
with its growth and strengthened with
its strength. But this mock romance of
ancestry, this arrogant assumption by
the South of all the social virtues and
courtesies of which the nation, or indeed
the universe, could boast, was like the
flash of an expiring candle to Lyon. He
had little to do with first families North
or South; his mission was to the people.
His practical mind gathered in, sheaf
after sheaf, a whole harvest of political
facts. He saw that the government of
the United States, originally intended
to be administered by the people, had
been for years in the power of the minority.
Against this perversion of the
purpose of the founders of the republic,
this outrage to the memory of men who
labored for its defense and welfare, he
entered his earnest protest. The shallow
effort of the Democratic party to
establish upon constitutional grounds the
monstrous phantom of justice they called
government, was met by his hearty indignation.
He says, ‘With the artfulness
of a deity and the presumption of a
fiend, our own Constitution is perversely
claimed by the Democracy as the ægis
for the establishment of a slave autocracy
over our country.’

No element more fatal to our growth
or freedom could Lyon conceive than
this slave autocracy. It sapped the
very foundations of republicanism, and,
stealthily advancing to the extreme limits
of the law, enjoyed the confidence of

the people, while it plotted their subjugation.
All the varied machinery of the
new social system, falsely styled government,
had for its object the extinction
of individual rights and the deification
of capital. Church and state united in
the unholy effort to Crush the masses,
and intriguing politicians, by dint of dazzling
rhetoric and plausible promises,
lured the people on to secure their own
downfall at the polls. The only remedy
for this Lyon saw in the elevation of
the masses. ‘It is the greatest political
revolution yet to be effected,’ he says,
‘to bring the laboring man to know that
honest industry is the highest of merits,
and should be awarded the highest
honor; and, properly pursued, contributes
to his intelligence and morality,
and to the virtues needed for official
station.’ ‘The calamity,’ says an eminent
writer from his far Platonean
heights, ‘is the masses;’ but liberty is a
new religion that is to sweep over the
world and regenerate them. And to
this end Lyon boldly advocated emancipation
for the sake of the white man.
If to-day, when patriotism is at a premium,
men tremble before the acknowledged
necessity of this measure, and are
either too cowardly or too indolent to
meet the demands of the times, it required
no little boldness in 1860 to advance
a theory so decided, even in a
Kansas newspaper. But Lyon knew
the inefficiency of half-way measures,
and the moral degradation they inevitably
entail upon the community so weak
or so deluded as to adopt them. The
hue and cry of abolitionism did not disturb
him; he was not afraid of names.
Conservatism that sat in state at Washington,
and pulled the wires all over the
country,—a tremendous power, none
the less fearful in that it was only a galvanized
one,—was a dead letter to
him, its dignity departed with the age
that had demanded it. Conservatism
would have resented no impositions, established
no new landmarks, asserted
no independence; would carry its mails
on horseback, creep over the ocean in
schooners, fight by sea in piked brigantines,
and by land with spear and battle-axe;
it would have emancipated no
slaves in Great Britain and France, and
no serfs in Russia. But if freedom means
anything, it means Progress,—liberty
to advance, never to retrograde. ‘Nothing
in the world will ever go backward,’

said the old lizard to Heine. All the
authority of a new Areopagus could
never sanction that; and yet this liberty
the South claims, nay, has already acted
upon, so that the world may see the result
of the experiment, and against its
continuance Lyon protests. In the long
silent years of preparation for the fray
he has nursed strange thoughts on the
ultimate destiny of man. He has seen
in dreams, prophetic of a mighty accomplishment,
his country growing great,
and vigorous, and powerful, extending
to struggling humanity everywhere the
protection of her friendship, building up
noble institutions, encouraging science
and the useful arts, and leading the van
in the world’s great millennial march;
and this not through any miraculous interposition
of Providence, but by means
of an exalted intelligence and the power
of thought stimulating to action, and that
of the noblest kind.

But you argue the unfitness of the
masses for this destiny. Lyon answers,—not
in any musically-rounded sentences,
in phrases nicely balanced; the
man is plain and outspoken,—’This is a
truth of philosophy and political economy,
that man rises to a condition corresponding
to the rights, duties and responsibilities
devolved upon him; and
therefore the only true way to make a
man is to invest him with the rights, duties
and responsibilities of a man, and
he generally rises in intellectual and
moral greatness to a position corresponding
to these circumstances.’ It is a mistake
to suppose the great body of the
people ignorant of their position, or unconscious
of their growing importance
and dignity as representatives of a
mighty empire. Vice and poverty have
indeed well-nigh quenched humanity in

thousands in our great cities, but these
are but a drop in the ocean. Behind
lies our vast West, with its teeming
population, sturdy, active and energetic.
All our mountain districts are alive with
men who, thanks to the press, are beginning
to feel their power. Every advantage
of physical development their hardy
life gives them, and the growing consciousness
and comprehension of freedom,
blooming under a munificent free-school
dispensation, will do the rest.
Our internal manufacturing and agricultural
elements at the North, already
powerful and irrepressible, will soon exercise
a tremendous influence in our
government. Shall it be the influence
of ignorance played upon by the sophistry
of demagogues and helping to rebuild
the vicious doctrines that have
stood firmly for so many years, or the
healthful influence of intelligent industry
tending to our greatness and prosperity?
This our war is to decide.
No peaceful solution of the great question
could be made. This Lyon foresaw
in the truckling of politicians North to
win the unit of Southern political sympathy:
the main end and aim of the
South being the appointment of Southern
men to the Presidency, ‘as security
on the one hand against unfavorable
executive action toward slavery, and on
the other against executive patronage
adverse to its interests, the democratic
party North succeeded, by trimming
party sails and decking party leaders,
in suiting their fastidious Southern leaders.’
The question once at issue, even
a peaceful separation was impossible,
though an amendment of the Constitution
should sanction it. War was inevitable.
The great bugbear of slavery
would still exist; fugitive slave laws be
forever upon the political carpet; formidable
jealousies spring up between two
nations founded upon such diverse principles,
yet united by very natural circumstance
of language and climate; internal
wrangling would destroy all unity,
conspiracies give the death-blow to all
prosperity and all hope of advancement.
All this if there were no great party at
the North to rise upon the vast ground
of humanity, claiming for its millions
the privilege of an unfettered life, for
its children a fair start in the future.
Only one remedy Lyon knew, and he
stood there, the early apostle of Emancipation,
and preached it. His doctrine
was not accepted then, it is not accepted
now; but the time must come, when
millions shall have been expended, and
blood shall have flowed like water only
to delay it, when we will fly to it for salvation.
Let those who still cry ‘Peace,
peace,’ when there is no peace, learn
what is to be its price—Emancipation.
It will be a bitter draught; well, so was
the independence of her colonies to England.
And every day makes it more bitter;
the gall in the cup rises to the brim;
a few more months and it will overflow;
the people will take the matter into their
own hands and legislate slavery into the
swamps of Florida.

It is a lame and blind philanthropy
that cries for a respite. ‘A little more
sleep, a little more slumber. After us
the deluge.’ And meanwhile the damnable
lies gain ground, and a new generation
is lost to its due development.
Have we yet to learn that we are no
longer individuals, but parts of a mighty
nation, and responsible in some sort,
every one, women and men, for its destiny?
Poland has learned this lesson.
Her eyes are upon us now. Shall she,
still struggling, find that blood and treasure,
and all the thousand dear blessings
of peace, have been sacrificed in vain?
If you cry ‘War is an evil!’ we grant
it; but is it reserved for the nineteenth
century to discover a creed for which
there shall be no martyrs? What great
gift has the world ever won that was
not bought with blood? When has independence
of action or thought been
purchased otherwise than at the cost of
persecution,—more revolution? Then
let us not slander revolutions. They are
the throes of nature undergoing her purification;
if it is as by fire, oh! let us
have courage and stand beside her in

her hour of trial. St. George will not
fight forever; the dragon of oppression is
dying.

And, after all, the demon of war is not
so black as we have painted him. We
do not shudder to-day as we read of the
siege of Troy or the downfall of Carthage,
or the Romance of the Cid. The
song of Deborah, ‘of the avenging of
Israel when the people willingly offered
themselves,’ is one glorious burst of praise
to God and gratitude to the martyrs.
There was war in heaven when ambition
was cast out:—what quiet pastoral
appeals to our noblest impulses as Paradise
Lost does? Wisely and well speaks
the English clergyman when he says:—

‘But the truth is that here, as elsewhere,
poetry has reached the truth,
while science and common sense have
missed it. It has distinguished—as, in
spite of all mercenary and feeble sophistry,
men ever will distinguish—war
from mere bloodshed. It has discerned
the higher feelings which lie beneath its
revolting features. Carnage is terrible.
The conversion of producers into destroyers
is a calamity. Death, and insults
to women worse than death—and
human features obliterated beneath the
hoof of the war-horse—and reeking
hospitals, and ruined commerce, and violated
homes, and broken hearts—they
are all awful. But there is something
worse than death: cowardice is worse.
And the decay of enthusiasm and manliness
is worse. And it is worse than
death, aye, worse than one hundred
thousand deaths, when a people has
gravitated down into the creed, that the
“wealth of nations” consists, not in generous
hearts, “fire in each breast, and
freedom on each brow,” in national virtues,
and primitive simplicity, and heroic
endurance, and preference of duty to
life—not in men, but in silk and cotton,
and something that they call “capital.”
Peace is blessed—peace arising out of
charity. But peace springing out of the
calculations of selfishness is not blessed.
If the price to be paid for peace is this,
that wealth accumulate and men decay,
better far that every street, in every
town of our once noble country, should
run blood.’11

As we write, every telegram proves
the vaunted unity of the South a sham,
a visionary political bugbear, no longer
strong or hideous enough to frighten
the most inveterate conservative dough-face.
But a few victories do not end
the war; still earnestness and effort and
sacrifice, for the sick man of America
will fight even when his ‘brains are out.’
Not until we have proved to Breckenridge,
the traitor, that we are not ‘fighting
for principles that three-fourths of
us abhor,’ and that the Union is not only
‘a means of preserving the principles
of political liberty,’ but that in it is irrevocably
bound up every living principle
of all liberty, social, religious and individual;
that in its shelter only we have
security against wrong at home and insult
from abroad; not until Emancipation
has instituted a new order of things
in society as well as in politics, will the
death of the out-spoken patriot and
brave man, Lyon, be avenged, and the
Struggle be at an end. ‘Genius is patient,’
but patience has had her perfect
work, and the days of Rebellion are
numbered. On with the crusade!

Maccaroni And Canvas.

II.

The voice of Rome is baritone, always
excepting that of the Roman locomotive,—the
donkey,—which is deep
bass, and comes tearing and braying
along at times when it might well be
spared. In the still night season, wandering
among the moonlit ruins of the
Coliseum, while you pause and gaze upon
the rising tiers of crumbling stone
above you, memory retraces all you have
read of the old Roman days: the forms
of the world-conquerors once more people
the deserted ruin; the clash of ringing
steel; hot, fiery sunlight; thin, trembling
veil of dust pierced by the glaring
eyes of dying gladiators; red-spouting
blood; screams of the mangled martyrs
torn by Numidian lions; moans of the
dying; fierce shouts of exultation from
the living; smiles from gold-banded girls
in flowing robes, with floating hair, flower-crowned,
and perfumed; the hum of
thrice thirty thousand voices hushed
to a whisper as the combat hangs on an
uplifted sword; the—

Aw-waw-WAUN-ik! WAW-NIK!
WAUN-KI-w-a-w-n! comes like blatant
fish-horn over the silent air, and your
dream of the Coliseum ends ignominiously
with this nineteenth-century song
of a jackass.

At night you will hear the shrill cry
of the screech-owl sounding down the silent
streets in the most thickly-populated
parts of the city. Or you will perhaps
be aroused from sleep, as Caper often
was, by the long-drawn-out cadences of
some countryman singing a rondinella
as he staggers along the street, fresh
from a wine-house. Nothing can be
more melancholy than the concluding
part of each verse in these rondinellas,
the voice being allowed to drop from
one note to another, as a man falling
from the roof of a very high house may
catch at some projection, hold on for a
time, grow weak, loose his hold, fall,
catch again, hold on for a minute, and
at last fall flat on the pavement, used
up, and down as low as he can reach.

But the street-cries of this city are
countless; from the man who brings
round the daily broccoli to the one who
has a wild boar for sale, not one but is
determined that you shall hear all about
it. Far down a narrow street you listen
to a long-drawn, melancholy howl—the
voice as of one hired to cry in the most
mournful tones for whole generations of
old pagan Romans who died unconverted;
poor devils who worshiped wine
and women, and knew nothing better
in this world. And who is their mourner?
A great, brawny, tawny, steeple-crowned
hat, blue-breeched, two-fisted
fish-huckster; and he is trying to sell,
by yelling as if his heart would break, a
basket of fish not so long as your finger.
If he cries so over anchovies, what would
he do if he had a whale for sale?

Another primo basso profundo trolls
off a wheelbarrow and a fearful cry at
the same time; not in unison with his
merchandise, for he has birds—quail,
woodcock, and snipe—for sale, besides
a string of dead nightingales, which he
says he will ‘sell cheap for a nice stew.’

Think of stewed nightingales! One
would as soon think of eating a boiled
Cremona violin.

But out of the way! Here comes,
blocking up the narrow street, a contadino,
a countryman from the Campagna.
His square wooden cart is drawn by a
donkey about the size of, and resembling,
save ears, a singed Newfoundland
dog; his voice, strong for a vegetarian,—for
he sells onions and broccoli, celery
and tomatoes, finocchio and mushrooms,—is
like tearing a firm rag: how long
can it last, subjected to such use?

It is in the game and meat market,
near the Pantheon, that you can more
fully become acquainted with the street

cries of Rome; but the Piazza Navona
excels even this. Passing along there
one morning, Caper heard such an extraordinary
piece of vocalization, sounding
like a Sioux war-whoop with its back
broken, that he stopped to see what it
was all about. There stood a butcher
who had exposed for sale seven small
stuck pigs, all one litter; and if they
had been his own children, and died
heretics, he could not have howled over
them in a more heart-rending manner.

About sunrise, and even before it,—for
the Romans are early risers,—you
will hear in spring-time a sharp ringing
voice under your window, ‘Acqua chetosa!
Acqua, chetosa!‘ an abridgment
of acque accetosa, or water from the
fountain of Accetosa, considered a good
aperient, and which is drank before
breakfast. Also a voice crying out,

‘Acqua-vi-ta!‘ or spirits, drank by the
workmen and others at an expense of
a baioccho or two the table-spoonful,
for that is all the small glasses hold.
In the early morning, too, you hear the
chattering jackdaws on the roofs; and
then, more distinctly than later in the
day, the clocks striking their odd way.
The Roman clocks ring from one to six
strokes four times during the twenty-four
hours, and not from one to twelve strokes,
as with us. Sunset is twenty-four o’clock,
and is noted by six strokes; an hour after
sunset is one o’clock, and is noted by
one stroke; and so on until six hours
after, when it begins striking one again.
As the quarter hours are also rung by
the clocks, if you happen to be near one
you will have a fine chance to get in a
muddle trying to separate quarters from
hours, and Roman time from your own.
Another noise comes from the game
of morra. Caper was looking out of his
window one morning, pipe in mouth,
when he saw two men suddenly face
each other, one of them bringing his
arm down very quickly, when the other
yelled as if kicked, ‘Dué!‘ (two), and
the first shouted at the top of his lungs,
‘Tre!‘ (three). Then they both went
at it, pumping their hands up and down
and spreading their fingers with a quickness
which was astonishing, while all
the time they kept screaming, ‘One!’
‘Four!’ ‘Three!’ ‘Two!’ ‘Five!’ etc.,
etc. ‘Ha!’ said Caper, ‘this is something
like; ’tis an arithmetical, mathematical,
etcetrical school in the open air.
The dirtiest one is very quick; he will
learn to count five in no time. But I
don’t see the necessity of saying “three”
when the other brings down four fingers,
or saying “five” when he shows two.
But I suppose it is all right; he hasn’t
learned to give the right names yet.’

He learned later that they were gambling.

While these men were shouting, there
came along an ugly old woman with a
tambourine and a one-legged man with
a guitar, and seeing prey in the shape
of Caper at his window, they pounced
on him, as it were, and poured forth the
most ear-rending discord; the old lady
singing, the old gentleman backing up
against a wall and scratching at an accompaniment
on a jangling old guitar.
The old lady had a bandana handkerchief
tied over her head, and whilst she
watched Caper she cast glances up and
down the street, to see if some rich stranger,
or milordo, was not coming to throw
her a piece of silver.

‘What are you howling about?’ shouted
Caper down to her.

‘A new Neapolitan canzonetta, signore;
all about a young man who grieves
for his sweetheart, because he thinks
she is not true to him, and what he says
to her in a serenade.’ And here she
screechingly sung,—

CHORUS.

‘Well,’ said Caper, ‘if this is Italian
music, I don’t see it.’

The one-legged old gentleman clawed
away at the strings of the guitar.

‘I say,’llustrissimo,’ shouted Caper

down to him, ‘what kind of strings are
those on your instrument?’

‘Excellenza, catgut,’ he shouted, in
answer.

‘Benissimo! I prefer cats in the original
packages. There’s a paolo: travel!’

Caper had the misfortune to make the
acquaintance of a professor of the mandolin,
a wire-strung instrument, resembling
a long-necked squash cut in two,
to be played on with a quill, and which,
with a guitar and violin, makes a concert
that thrills you to the bones and
cuts the nerves away.

But the crowning glory of all that is
ear-rending and peace-destroying, is
carried around by the Pifferari about
Christmas time. It is a hog-skin, filled
with wind, having pipes at one end, and
a jackass at the other, and is known in
some lands as the bagpipe. The small
shrines to the Virgin, particularly those
in the streets where the wealthy English
reside, are played upon assiduously by
the pifferari, who are supposed by romantic
travelers to come from the far-away
Abbruzzi Mountains, and make a
pilgrimage to the Eternal City to fulfil a
vow to certain saints; whereas it is sundry
cents they are really after. They are for
the most part artists’ models, who at this
season of the year get themselves up à
la pifferari, or piper, to prey on the romantic
susceptibilities and pockets of
the strangers in Rome, and, with a pair
of long-haired goat-skin breeches, a
sheepskin coat, brown rags, and sandals,
or cioccie, with a shocking bad conical
black or brown hat, in which are
stuck peacock’s or cock’s feathers, they
are ready equipped to attack the shrines
and the strangers.

Unfortunately for Caper there was a
shrine to the Virgin in the second-story
front of the house next to where he
lived; that is, unfortunately for his musical
ear, for the lamp that burned in
front of the shrine every dark night was
a shining and pious light to guide him
home, and thus, ordinarily, a very fortunate
arrangement. In the third-story
front room of the house of the shrine
dwelt a Scotch artist named MacGuilp,
who was a grand amateur of these
pipes, and who declared that no sound in
the world was so sweet to his ear as the
bagpipes: they recalled the heather,
haggis, and the Lothians, and the mountain
dew, ye ken, and all those sorts of
things.

One morning at breakfast in the Café
Greco he discoursed at length about the
pleasure the pifferari gave him; while
Caper, taking an opposite view, said
they had, during the last few days,
driven him nearly crazy, and he wished
the squealing hog-skins well out of town.

MacGuilp told him he had a poor ear
for music: that there was a charm about
the bagpipes unequalled even by the
unique voices of the Sistine Chapel;
and there was nothing he would like
better than to have all the pipers of
Rome under his windows.

Caper remembered this last rash
speech of Master MacGuilp, and determined
at an early hour to test its truth.
It happened, the very next morning at
breakfast, that MacGuilp, in a triumphant
manner, told him that he had received
a promise of a visit from the Duchess
of ——, with several other titled
English; and said he had not a doubt of
selling several paintings to them. MacGuilp’s
style was of the blood-and-thunder
school: red dawns, murdered kings,
blood-stained heather, and Scotch plaids,
the very kind that should be shown to
the sweet strainings of hog-skin bagpipes.

In conversation Caper found out the
hour at which the duchess intended to
make her visit. He made his preparations
accordingly. Accompanied by
Rocjean, he visited Gigi, who kept a costume
and life school of models, found out
where the pipers drank most wine, and
going there and up the Via Fratina and
down the Spanish Steps, managed to
find them, and arranged it so that at
the time the duchess was viewing MacGuilp’s
paintings, he should have the
full benefit of a serenade from all the
pifferari in Rome.

The next morning Caper, pipe in
mouth, at his window, saw the carriage

of the duchess drive up, and from it the
noble English dismount and ascend to
the artist’s studio. The carriage had
hardly driven away when up came two
of the pipers, and happening to cast
their eyes up they saw Caper, who
hailed them and told them not to begin
playing until the others arrived. In a
few moments six of the hog-skin squeezers
stood ready to begin their infernal
squawking.

‘Go ahead!’ shouted Caper, throwing
a handful of baiocchi among them; and
as soon as these were gathered up, the
pipers gave one awful, heart-chilling
blast, and the concert was fairly commenced.
Squealing, shrieking, grunting,
yelling, and humming, the sounds
rose higher and higher. Open flew the
windows in every direction.

‘C’est foudroyante!‘ said the pretty
French modiste.

‘What the devil’s broke loose?’
shouted an American.

‘Mein Gott im himmel! was ist das?‘
roared the German baron.

‘Casaccio! cosa faceste?‘ shrieked
the lovely Countess Grimanny.

‘In nomine Domine!‘ groaned a fat
friar.

‘Caramba! vayase al infierno!‘
screamed Don Santiago Gomez.

‘Bassama teremtete!‘ swore the Hungarian
gentleman.

Louder squealed the bagpipes, their
buzz filled the air, their shrieks went
ringing up to MacGuilp like the cries of
Dante’s condemned. The duchess found
the sound barbarous. MacGuilp opened
his window, upon which the pipers
strained their lungs for the Signore Inglese,
grand amateur of the bagpipes.
He begged them to go away. ‘No, no,
signore; we know you love our music;
we won’t go away.’

The duchess could stand it no longer,
her Servant called the carriage, the English
got in and drove off.

Still rung out the sounds of the six
bagpipes. Caper threw them more baiocchi.

Suddenly MacGuilp burst out of the
door of his house, maul-stick in hand,
rushing on the pifferari to put them to
flight.

‘Iddio giusto!‘ shouted two of the pipers;
‘it is, IT IS the Cacciatore! the
hunter; the Great Hunter!’

‘He is a painter!’ shouted another.

‘No, he isn’t; he’s a hunter. Gran
Cacciatore! Doesn’t he spend all his
time after quails and snipe and woodcock?
Haven’t I been out with him
day after day at Ostia? Long live the
great hunter!’

MacGuilp was touched in a tender
spot. The homage paid him as a great
hunter more than did away with his anger
at the bagpipe serenade. And the
last Caper saw of him he was leading six
pifferari into a wine shop, where they
would not come out until seven of them
were unable to tell the music of bagpipes
from the music of the spheres.

So ends the music, noises, and voices,
of the seven-hilled city.

Howe’s Cave.

Few persons, perhaps, are aware that
Schoharie County, N.Y., contains a cave
said to be nine or ten miles in extent,
and, in many respects, one of the most
remarkable in America. Its visitors are
few,—owing, probably, to its recent discovery,
together with its comparative
inaccessibility;—yet these few are well
rewarded for its exploration.

In the month of August, 1861, I
started, with three companions, to visit
this interesting place.

I will not weary the reader by describing
the beauty of the Hudson and
the grandeur of the Catskills; yet I
would fain fix in my memory forever
one sunrise, seen from the summit of a
bluff on the eastern bank of the river,

when the fog, gradually lifting itself
from the stream, and slowly breaking
into misty fragments, unveiled broad,
smiling meadows, dark forests, village
after village, while above all, far in the
distance, rose the Catskills, clear in the
sunlight.

After two days crowded with enjoyment,
we arrived in Schoharie, where
we passed the night. Having given
orders to be called at five, we took
advantage of the leisure hour this arrangement
gave us to view, the next
morning.

---

Potential Moods

The True Interest Of Nations.

For a litigious, quarrelsome, fighting
animal, man is very fond of peace. He
began to shed blood almost as soon as he
began to go alone in company with his
nearest relatives; and when Abel asked
of Cain, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’
the latter, instead of giving him the
hug fraternal, did beat him to death.
Cain’s only object, it should seem, was a
quiet life, and Abel had disturbed his repose
by setting up a higher standard of
excellence than the elder brother could
afford to maintain. It was only to ‘conquer
a peace’ that Cain thus acted. He
desired ‘indemnity for the past and security
for the future,’ and so he took up
arms against his brother and ended him.
He loved peace, but he did not fear war,
because he was the stronger party of the
two, his weapons being as ready for action
as the British navy is ready for it to-day;
and Abel was as defenceless as we
were a twelvemonth ago. Cain is the
type of all mankind, who know that
peace is better than war, but who rush
into war under the pressure of envy and
pride. Ancient as violence is, it is not
so old as peace; and it is for peace that
all wars are made, at least by organized
communities. All peoples have in their
minds the idea of a golden age, not unlike
to that time so vividly described by
Hesiod, when men were absolutely good,
and therefore happy; living in perfect
accord on what the earth abundantly
gave them, suffering neither illness nor
old age, and dying as calmly as they had
lived. Historical inquiry has so far
shaken belief in the existence of any
such time as that painted by the poet,
that men have agreed to place it in the
future. It has never been, but it is to be.
It will come with that ‘coming man,’

who travels so slowly, and will be by him
inaugurated, a boundless millennial time.
In the mean time contention prevails;
‘war’s unequal game’ is played with
transcendent vigor, and at a cost that
would frighten the whole human race
into madness were it incurred for any
other purpose. But, while fighting, men
have kept their eyes steadily fixed upon
peace, which is to be the reward of their
valor and their pecuniary sacrifices. Every
warlike time has been followed by a
period in which strenuous exertions
have been made to make peace perpetual.
Never was there a more profound
desire felt for peace than that which
prevailed among the Romans of the
Augustan age, after a series of civil and
foreign wars yet unparalleled in the history
of human struggles. One poet
could denounce the first forger of the
iron sword as being truly brutal and iron-hearted;
and another could declare it to
be the ‘mission’ of the Romans only to
impose terms of peace upon barbarians,
who should be compelled to accept quiet
as a boon, or endure it as a burden.
Strange sentiments were these to proceed
from the land of the legions, but
they expressed the current Roman opinion,
which preferred even dishonor to
war. So was it after the settlement of
Europe in 1815. A generation that had
grown up in the course of the greatest
of modern contests produced the most
determined and persistent advocates of
the ‘peace-at-any-price’ policy; and for
forty years peace was preserved between
the principal Christian nations, through
the exertions of statesmen, kings, philanthropists,
and economists, who, if they
could agree in nothing else, were almost
unanimous in the opinion that war was
an expensive folly, and that the first
duty of a government was to prevent its
subjects from becoming military-mad.
Perhaps there never was a happier time
in Christendom than it knew between
the autumn of 1815 and the spring of
1854, after Napoleon had gone down
and before Nicholas had set himself up
to dictate law to the world. It was the
modern age of the Antonines, into which

was crowded more true enjoyment than
mankind had known for centuries; and
they are beginning to learn its excellence
from its loss,—war raging now in
the New World, while Europe lives in
hourly expectation of its occurrence.
There were wars, and cruel wars, too,
in those years, but they faintly affected
Europe and the United States, and probably
added something to men’s happiness,
for the same reason that a storm to
which we are not exposed increases our
sense of comfort. Their thunders were
remote, and they furnished materials for
the journals. So we saw a Providence
in them, and thanked Heaven, some of
us, that we no longer furnished examples
of the folly of contention.

The friends of peace were actuated by
various motives. With statesmen and
politicians peace was preferred because
it was cheaper than war, and all countries
were burdened with debt. England
has sometimes been praised because
she so uniformly threw her influence
on the side of peace, after she had accomplished
her purpose in the war
against imperial France. Time and
again, she might have waged popular
wars, and in which she would have probably
been successful; but she would help
neither the Spaniards against France
and the Holy Alliance, nor the Turks
against the Russians, nor the Poles
against the Czar, nor the Hungarians
against the Austrians, nor the Italians
against the Kaiser, nor the Greeks
against the Turks. She settled all her
disputes with the United States by negotiation,
and showed no disposition to
fight with France, except when she had
all the rest of Europe on her side. But
this praise has not been deserved. England
did not quarrel with powerful countries,
because she could not afford to enter
upon costly warfare. She had gone
to the extent of her means when her
debt had reached to four thousand million
dollars, and she could not increase
that debt largely until she should also
have increased her wealth. Time was
required to add to her means, and to
lessen her debt; and to such a state had
her finances been reduced, that it is now
twenty years since she began to derive
a portion of her revenue from an income
tax, which, imposed in the time of peace,
was increased when war became inevitable.
The bonds she had given to keep
the peace were too great to admit of her
breaking it. She did not fight, because
she doubted her ability to fight successfully.
She had no wish to behold another
suspension of cash payments by her
national bank; and a general war would
be sure to bring suspension. But she
was as ready as she had ever been to
contend with the weak. The Chinese
and the Afghans did not find her very
forbearing, though with neither of those
peoples had she any just cause for war.

With the disunited States she has been
as prompt to quarrel as she was slow to
contend with the United States; and
now she is one of the high contracting
parties to the crusade against Mexico.
We say nothing of the Sepoy war, for
that was a contest for ’empire,’ as Earl
Russell would say. She could not, in the
days of Clyde, give up what she had acquired
in the days of Clive; and no one
ought to blame her for what she did in
India, though it can not be denied that
the mutiny was the consequence of her
own bad conduct in the East. With Russia,
Austria, and Prussia to back her, in
1840, she went to the verge of a war
with France; but, in so doing, the government
did that which the English nation
by no means warmly approved;
and the fall of the whig ministry, in
1841, was in no small part due to Lord
Palmerston’s policy in the preceding
year. The Russian war was brought
about by the action of the English people,
who were angry with the Czar because
his empire had the first place in
Europe. The government would have
prevented that war from breaking out
if it could, but popular pressure was too
strong for it, and it had to give way.
The event has proved that the English
government was wiser than were the
English people, France alone having
gained anything from the departure
from what had become the policy of

Europe; and for France to gain is not
altogether for the benefit of England.

Of the motives of the philanthropists,
we have little to say. They are always
respectable, and it is a pity that the
world should be too wicked to appreciate
them. But those of the economists are
open to remark, and the more so because
there has been so much claimed
for them. They reduced everything to
a matter of interest. Peace, they reasoned,
is for the welfare of all men;
and, if an enlightened self-interest could
be made to prevail the world over, war
would be rendered an impossibility.
Wars between civilized countries have
mostly grown out of mistaken views of
interest on the part of governments and
peoples. Once enlighten both rulers
and ruled, and make them understand
that war can not pay, and selfishness will
accomplish what religion, and morality,
and benevolence, and common sense
have failed to accomplish. Cutting
throats may be a very agreeable pastime;
but no man ever yet paid for anything
more than it was worth, with his eyes
wide open to the fact that he was not
buying a bargain, but selling himself.
Nations would be as wise as individuals,
unless it be true that the sum of intelligence
is not so great as the items that
compose it; and when it should have
been made indisputably clear that to
make war was to make losses, while
peace should be as indisputably profitable,
there would be no further occasion
to expend, annually, immense sums upon
the support of great armaments, such as
were not kept up, even in times of war,
by the potentates of earlier days. The
reason of mankind was to be appealed to,
and they were to be made saints through
the use of practical logic. Neighborhood,
instead of being regarded as cause
for enmity, was to be held as ground
for good feeling and liberal intercourse.
Under the old system it had been the
custom to call France and England ‘natural
enemies,’ words that attributed to
the Creator the origin of discord. Under
the new system, those great countries
were to become the best of friends,
as well as the closest of neighbors; and
one generation of free commerce was to
do away with the effects of five centuries
of disputes and warfare. England was
to forget the part which France took in
the first American war, and France was
to cease to recollect that there had been
such days as Crécy and Agincourt, Vittoria
and Waterloo; and also that England
had overthrown her rule in North
America, and driven her people from
India. But it was not France and England
only that were to enter within the
charmed circle; all nations were to be
admitted into it, and the whole world
was to fraternize. It was to be Arcadia
in a ring-fence, an Arcadia solidly based
upon heavy profits, with consols, rentes,
and other public securities—which in
other times had a bad fashion of becoming
very insecure—always at a good
premium. Quarter-day was to be the day
for which all other days were made, and
it would never be darkened by the imposition
of new taxes, by repudiation, or
by any other of those things that so often
have lessened the felicity of the fund-holder.

That the new Temple of Peace might
be enabled to rise in proper proportions,
it became necessary to destroy some old
edifices, and to remove what was considered
to be very rubbishy rubbish. Protection,
tariffs, and so forth, once worshiped
as evidences of ancestral wisdom,
were to be got rid of with all possible
speed, and free trade was to be substituted,
that is, trade as free as was compatible
with the raising of enormous revenues,
made necessary by the foolish
wars of the past. In due time, perfect
freedom of trade would be had; but a
blessing of that magnitude could not be
expected to come at once to the relief
of a suffering world. England, which
had taken the lead in supporting protection,
and whose commercial system had
been of the most illiberal and sordid
character, became the leader in the
grand reform, pushing the work vigorously
forward, and, with her usual consideration
for the feelings and rights of
others, ordering the nations of Europe

and America to follow her example.
She had discovered that she had been
all in the wrong since the day when Oliver
St. John’s wounded pride led him to
the conclusion that it was the duty of
every patriotic Englishman to do his
best to destroy the commerce of Holland.
She was very impatient of those
peoples who were shy of imitating her,
forgetting that her conduct through six
generations had made a strong impression
on the world’s mind, and that her
sudden conversion could not immediately
avail against her long persistence
in sinning against political economy, if
indeed she had so sinned; and the question
was one that admitted of some dispute,
free trade being but an experiment.
Gradually, however, men came
round to the British view, in theory at
least; and among the intelligent classes
it was admitted that commerce without
restriction was the true policy of nations,
which must be gradually adopted as the
basis of all future action, due regard to
be paid to those potent disturbing forces,
vested interests. France was slow to
yield in practice, though she had produced
some of the cleverest of economical
writers; for she is as little given to
change in matters of business as she is
ready to rush into political revolutions.
But even France at last gave signs of
her intention to abandon her ancient
practice in deference to modern theories;
and Napoleon III. and Mr. Cobden
laid their wise heads together to form
plans for the completion of the ‘cordial
understanding,’ on the basis of free
trade. Less than forty years had sufficed
to effect a gradual change of human
opinion, and protection seemed
about to be sent to that limbo in which
witchcraft, alchemy, and judicial astrology
have been so long undisturbedly reposing.

Death, we are told, found his way into
Arcadia; and disappointment was not
long in coming to disturb the modern
Arcadians, who had as much to do with
cotton as their predecessors with wool.
The dream of universal peace, a peace
that was to endure because based on enlightened
selfishness,—that is to say
on buying in cheap markets and selling
in dear ones,—was as rudely dispelled
as had been all earlier dreams of the
kind. Interest, it was found, could no
more make men live lovingly together
than principle could cause them to do so
in by-gone times. If there were two nations
that might have been insured not
to fight each other, because interest was
sufficient to prevent men from having
resort to war, those nations were Russia
and England. They were in no sense
rivals, according to the definition of
rivalry in the circles of commerce. Between
them there was much buying
and selling, to the great profit of both.
England is an old nation, with the arts
of industry developed among her people
to an extent that is elsewhere unknown.
The division of labor that prevails among
her working people is so extensive and
so minute, that in that respect she defies
comparison. Other countries may have
as skillful laborers as she possesses, but
their industry is of a far less various
character. Russia is a new country,
and she requires what England has to
dispose of; and England finds her account
in purchasing the raw materials
that are so abundantly produced in
Russia. Commercially speaking, therefore,
these two nations could not fall
out, could not quarrel, could not fight,
if they would. In all other respects,
too, they could be counted upon to set
a good example to all other communities.
They had more than once been
allies, each had done the other good services
at critical tunes, and they had had
the foremost places in that grand alliance
which had twice dethroned Napoleon
I. The exceptions to their general
good understanding belong to those exceptions
which are supposed to be useful
in proving a given rule. When the
tory rulers of England became alarmed
because of the success of Catharine II.
in her second Turkish war, and proposed
doing what was done more than sixty
years later,—to assist the Osmanlis,—the
opposition to their policy became so
powerful that even the strong ministry

of William Pitt had to listen to its voice;
which shows that the tendency of English
opinion was then favorable to Russia.
The hostility of Czar Paul to England,
in his last days, is attributed to the
failure of his mind; and the immediate
resumption of good relations between the
two countries after his death, establishes
the fact that the English and the Russians
were not sharers in the Czar’s feelings.
During the five years that followed
Tilsit, Russia appeared to be the
enemy of England, and war existed for
some time between the two empires; but
this was owing to the ascendency of the
French, Alexander having to choose between
England and France. The nominal
enemies did each other as little injury
as possible; and, in 1812, they became
greater friends than ever. Most
Englishmen were probably of Lord Holland’s
opinion, that England’s interest
dictated a Russian connection; and in
the eighteenth century England was, in
some sense, the nursing mother of the
new empire, though once or twice she
was inclined to do as other nurses have
done,—administer some punishment to
the rude and healthy child she was fostering,
and not without reason. So harmonious
had been the relations of these two
magnificent states, that an eminent Russian
author, Dr. Hamel, writing in 1846,
could say: ‘Nearly three hundred years
have now elapsed since England greeted
Muscovy at the mouth of the Dwina. So
great have been the benefits to trade,
the arts, and industry in general, arising
from the friendly relations between England
and Russia, which, in 1853, will
have completed the third century of
their continuance, that one might expect
to see this period closed, in both countries,
with a jubilee to commemorate so
remarkable an example of uninterrupted
amicable intercourse between nations.’

The year 1853 came; but, instead of being
a jubilee to the old friends of three
centuries’ standing, it brought the beginning
of that contest which is known as
the Russian war. That was a proper
way, indeed, to notice the happy return
of the three-hundredth anniversary of
the establishment of ‘uninterrupted amicable
intercourse’ between the nations,
whose soldiers were soon slaughtering
each other with as much energy as if
they had been ‘natural enemies’ from
immemorial time. Interest had no power
to turn aside the storm of war. The
English people were angry with Russia
because the iron-willed Czar had carried
matters in Europe with a very high
hand, and was, in fact, virtually master
of the Old World, and suspected of being
on uncommonly good terms with the
masters of the New World. Nicholas
had succeeded to the place of Napoleon
in their ill graces. They liked the Cossackry
of the one as little as they had
liked the cannonarchy of the other. It
was a case of pure jealousy. Russia was
too powerful to suit the English idea of
the fitness of things, and therefore it
was necessary that she should be chastised
and humbled. Fear of Russia
there could have been none in the English
mind. It has been thought that
England contended for the safety of her
Eastern dominions; but then the Czar
offered her Egypt and Candia, possession
of which would not only have much
strengthened her Indian empire, but
have been the means of making her
more powerful at home. Nothing better
could have been offered for her acceptance,
if valuable territories would have
satisfied her feelings; and much praise
has been bestowed upon her because she
did not close with the Czar’s proposition
‘to share and share alike’ the lands of
the House of Othman; but that praise
is not quite deserved, the desire not to
see Russia aggrandized being a stronger
sentiment with her than was the desire
to aggrandize herself. Had the question
been left for British statesmen alone
to settle,—had the British premier been
as free to act for England as the Czar
was for Russia,—poor, sick Turkey
would have been cut and carved most
expeditiously and artistically; she would
have been partitioned as perfectly as
Poland, and Abdul Medjid would have
experienced the fate of Stanislaus Poniatowski.
But English ministers hold

power only on condition of doing the
will of the English nation, and that nation
had contracted an aversion to Russia
that was uncontrollable, and before
its hostility its ministers had to give way,
slowly and reluctantly; and the half-measures
they adopted, like the half-measures
of our own government toward
the secessionists, explain the disasters
of the war. The English people
were determined that there should be an
end, for the time at least, to the Russian
hegemony, and threw themselves into
the arms of France with a vivacity that
would have astonished any other French
ruler but Napoleon III., who had lived
among them, and who knew them well.
The war was waged, and, when over,
what had England gained? Nothing
solid, it must be admitted. The territory
of Russia remained unimpaired, and
there is not the slightest evidence that
her influence in the East was lessened
by the partial destruction of Sebastopol.
The Russian navy of the Euxine had
ceased to exist; but as it consisted principally
of vessels that were not adapted
to the purposes of modern warfare, the
loss of the Russians in that respect was
not of a very serious character. Russia’s
European leadership was suspended;
but her power and her resources,
which, if properly employed, must soon
reinstate her, were not damaged. England

had fought for an idea, and had
fought in vain.

France had as little interest in the
Russian war as England, and the French
people had no wish to fight the Czar.
They would have preferred fighting the
English, in connection with the Czar,—an
arrangement that would have been
more profitable to their country. But
the emperor had a quarrel with his arrogant
brother at St. Petersburgh, and
he availed himself of the opportunity
afforded by that brother’s obstinacy to
teach him a lesson from which he did
not live to profit. Nicholas had cut the
new emperor, and had caused him to be
taboo’d by most of the sovereigns of Europe;
and the Frenchman determined
to cut his way to consideration. This
he was enabled to do, with the aid of the
English; and ever since the war’s close
he has held the place which became vacant
on the death of Nicholas—that of
Europe’s arbiter. The French fought
well, as they always do, but their heart
was not in the war. The emperor had
the war party pretty much to himself.
Exactly the opposite state of things existed
in France to that which existed in
England. In the former country, the
government was for war, and the people
were for peace; in the latter, the government
was for peace, and the people
were for war. In each country power
was in the hands of the war party, and
so war was made, in spite of the wishes
of the French people and of English
statesmen. When Napoleon III. had accomplished
his purpose, he ordered the
English to make peace, and peace was
made. In this way he satisfied his subjects,
showing them that he had no intention
of making England more powerful
than she had been, or Russia weaker.
He had prevented Russia from extending
her dominion, but he had also
prevented England from lessening that
dominion.

The Italian war was waged in opposition
to the sentiments of the French people,
which was one of the leading causes
of its sudden termination, with its object,
only half accomplished, and much to the
damage of the emperor’s reputation for
statesmanship and courage. Whether,
in a comprehensive sense, that war was
entered upon for purposes adverse to the
interests of France, may well be doubted;
but it is certain that it was an unpopular
measure in that country. The
French had no objection to the humiliation
of Austria; but it would be a grave
error to suppose that they have any wish
to behold Italy united and powerful. The
kingdom of Italy, should it become all
that is desired for it by its friends in this
country, would be to France a source
of annoyance, and probably of danger.
The emperor’s power was shaken by his
Italian policy, and hence it was that he
played the confederature game so long,
to the astonishment of foreigners, and got

possession of Savoy and Nice, to the astonishment
and anger of England; and
hence it is that he is seeking Sardinia
and other portions of Italy. Thus, the
Italian war was begun against the interests
of the French people, or what that
people believe to be their interests,
though this is the age in which there is
to be peace, because that is not to be
broken except when popular interests
require that it shall no longer be preserved.

But the most remarkable instance of
the fallacy of the idea that regard for the
true interests of nations must banish hostilities
from the world, is afforded by the
coarse of France and England toward
this country since the beginning of the
secession war. Both those countries
have great interest not only in the preservation
of peace with the United
States, but in the preservation of peace
in the United States; and yet they have
done all that it lies in their power to do
to encourage our rebels, and have been
on the verge of war with us: and war
with them, and with Spain, is exported
by many Americans, who judge of the
future by the present and the past.
England had a vast trade with the
American Union, buying at the South,
and selling to the North, and hence any
disturbances here were sure to operate
adversely to her interests; but no sooner
had it become apparent that our troubles
were to be of a serious character,
than her weight was thrown on to the
side of the rebels, who never would have
been able to do much but for the encouragement
they have received from
abroad. The trade of France was not
so great with America as that of England;
yet it was valuable, and the
French have suffered much from its suspension,
perhaps we should say its loss.
The North has purchased but little from
Europe for a year, and the South has
sold less to Europe in that time. There
has been a trade in food between the
North and some European countries, in
which grain has been exchanged for
gold, though it would have been better
for both parties could anything else
than gold have been brought to America,
true commerce consisting in the interchange
of commodities. For all the
sufferings that have been experienced
by Englishmen and Frenchmen, they
have none but themselves and their governments
to censure. That peace has
not been preserved is not our fault; and
the war that has been blown into so fierce
a flame has been fed from Europe; it
has been fanned by breezes from France
and England. When it was first seen
that there was danger of civil war, the
governments of those countries, if they
had really had any regard for the true
interests of their countries, would have
discouraged the rebels in the most public
and pointed manner imaginable, not
because they cared for us, but for the
simple reason that they were bound so
to act as should best promote the welfare
of their own peoples. War in
America meant suffering to the artisans
and laborers of Europe, who, thus far,
have suffered more from the war than
have any portion of the American people,
except the residents of Southern
cities. Napoleon III. and Lord Palmerston
should have said to the agents of the
Confederacy, and have taken care to
publish their words, ‘We can afford you
neither aid in deeds nor encouragement
in words. Our relations with both sections
of the American nation are such,
that our respective countries must suffer
immensely from the course which you
are about to pursue, not because you
have been oppressed, or fear oppression,
but because you have been beaten in an
election, and power, for the time, has
been taken from your hands. You ask
us to act hostilely against the established
government of the United States, that
government having given us no cause of
offense,—to become the patrons of a
revolution that has no cause, but the
consequences of which may be boundless.
To revolutions we are averse; and one
of our governments exists in virtue of
opposition to the party of disorder in
Europe. You ask us to do that which
would lessen the means of livelihood to
millions of our people; for, granting

that you should succeed, still there would
necessarily be so great a change produced
by your action, and by our intervention
in American affairs, that for
years America would not be the good
customer to France and England that
she has been for a generation. With the
merits of your cause we can have nothing
to do, our true interests pointing to
the maintenance of the strictest neutrality
in the contest between you and the
federal government; and the dictates
of interest are fortified by the suggestions
of principle. Your movement is
essentially disorderly in its character,
and it is undertaken avowedly in the interest
of slavery; and not only are we
the supporters of the existing order of
things the world over, but we are hostile
to slavery, having abolished it in all
parts of our dominions. Our advice to
you is, to submit to the federal government,
and to seek for the redress of your
grievances, if such you have, by means
recognized in the constitution and laws
of your country. From us you can receive
no aid, and you should dismiss all
expectation of it from your minds at
once and forever. We are indifferent
to the form of the American government,
and its internal policy can not concern
us; but the interests of our peoples
require that we should live in peace with
the people of America, whether they be
of the South or of the North, slave-holders
or abolitionists; and we shall not
quarrel with any portion of them for the
sake of facilitating the erection of a republic
to be founded on the basis of the
divine nature of slavery, the first time
that so preposterous a pretension was
ever put forward by the audacity or the
impudence of men.’ Had something like
this been said to the agents of the rebels,
and had the English press supported the
same views, the rebellion would have
been at an end ere this, and the commercial
relations of America and Europe
would have experienced no sensible interruption.
English interests, in an especial
sense, demanded that the rebels
should be discouraged, and discouragement
from London would have rendered
rebellion hopeless, and have promoted
peace in Savannah and New Orleans.

But it was not in England’s nature to
pursue a course that would have been as
much in harmony with her material interests
as with that high moral character
which she claims as being peculiarly
her own. There appeared to have presented
itself an opportunity to effect the
destruction of the American Republic,
and England could not resist the temptation
to strike us hard: and, for almost
a year, she has been to the Union a
more deadly foe than we have found in
the South. We do not allude to the
Trent question, for in that we were
clearly in the wrong, and Mason and
Slidell should have been released on the
16th of November, and not have been
detained in captivity six weeks. Secretary
Seward has placed the point so
emphatically beyond all doubt, that we
must all be of one mind thereon, whether
in England or America. England
might have been moderate in her action,
in view of her repeated outrages on the
rights of neutrals, but no intelligent
American can condemn her position. It
is to other things that we must look for
evidence of her determination to effect
our extinction as a nation. She has,
while dripping with Hindoo blood, and
while yet men’s ears are filled with accounts
of the blowing of sepoys from the
muzzles of cannon by her military executioners,
absolutely demanded of us an acknowledgment
of the Southern Confederacy’s
independence, on the ground
that it is inhuman to wage war for the
maintenance of our national life. She
has compared our mild and forbearing
government with the savage proconsulate
of Alva in the Netherlands! She
has charged us with waging war against
civilization, because we have employed
stone fleets to close entrances to the harbor
of Charleston, though her own history
is full of instances of their employment
for similar purposes! She has
encouraged her traders and seamen to
furnish the rebels with arms of all kinds,
and stores of every description! She
has excluded our ships-of-war from her

ports, refusing to allow them to coal at
places at which she had granted us the
privilege, in time of peace, of establishing
stations for fuel! She has given
shelter and protection to the privateers
of the rebels, vessels that had violated
her own laws almost within sight of her
own shores, and certainly within the narrow
seas! She has acknowledged the
belligerent character of the South, which
is virtually an acknowledgment of its
independence, for none but nations can
lawfully wage war. She has, through
her Minister for Foreign Affairs, declared
that our war with the secessionists
is of the same character as the war
which the Spaniards carried on with
their American colonists, and that there
is no difference between it and the
attempt of the Turks to subdue the
Greeks! Monstrous perversions of history
for even Earl Russell to be guilty of!
Her leading periodicals and journals,
with few exceptions, have denounced our
country, our course, and our government
in the bitterest language, and to the
manifest encouragement of the rebels,
who see in their language the rapid
growth and prompt exhibition of a sentiment
of hostility to this country, and
which must, sooner or later, end in war;
and war between England and America
would be sure to lead to the success of
the Confederates, even if we should
come out of it victoriously.

Thus we see that the attempt to establish
peace on the basis of the true interests
of nations has not only failed, but
that it has failed signally and deplorably.
The solid Doric Temple of Mammon
has no more been able to stand
against the storms of war than has the
Crystal Palace of Sentiment. The fair
fabric which was the type of materialism
has fallen, and it would be most unwise
to seek its reconstruction. That
which was to have stood as long and
as firmly as the Pyramids has fallen
before the first moss could gather upon
it. Nor is the reason of this fall far
to seek, as it lies upon the surface, and
ought to have been anticipated—would
have been, only that men are so ready
to believe in what they wish to believe.
England, as a nation, has two interests
to consult, and which do not always accord.
She has her commercial interest
and her imperial interest; and, when
the two conflict, the last is sure to become
first. Her position as a nation was
threatened only by the United States
and Russia. The dynastic disputes of
France, which are far from being at an
end, and the generally unsettled character
of French politics, must long prevent
that country from becoming the permanent
rival of England. France is great
to-day, and England acts wisely in preparing
to meet her in war; but to-morrow
France may become weak, and her
voice be feeble and her weight light in
Europe and the world. Three houses
claim her throne, and the Republicans
may start up into active life again, as
we saw they did in 1848. Neither Austria
nor Prussia can ever furnish England
cause of alarm. With Russia the
case is very different, as her government
is solidly established; her resources are
vast, and in the course of steady development,
and her desire to establish her
supremacy in the East is a fixed idea
with both rulers and ruled. Unchecked,
she would have thrown England into
the background, and supposing that she
had resolved not to allow that country
a share of the spoil of Turkey. The
hard character and harsh policy of
Nicholas ended in furnishing to England
an opportunity to throw Russia herself
into the background for the time, and
that opportunity she made use of, but
not to the extent that she had determined
upon, owing to her dependence
upon France, which became the shield
of Russia after having been the sword
of England. The United States were a
formidable rival of England; and, but
for the breaking out of our troubles, we
should have been far ahead of her by
1870, and perhaps have stripped her of
all her American possessions. When
those troubles began, she proceeded to
take the same advantage of them that
she had taken of the Czar’s blunder.
To sever the American nation in twain is

her object, as some of her public men
have frankly avowed; and she believes
that the disintegrating process, once commenced,
would not stop with the division
of the country into the Northern Union
and the Southern Confederacy. She
expects, should the South succeed, to see
half a dozen republics here established,
and is not without hope that not even
two States would remain together; and
for this hope she has very good foundation.
The American nation destroyed,
England would become as great in the
West as she is in the East, and would
hold, with far greater means at her command,
the same position that was hers
in the last days of George II., when the
French had been expelled from America
and India. She would have no commercial
rival, and there would no longer
be an American navy susceptible of gigantic
increase. She would be truly the
sea’s sovereign; and whoso rules the
sea has power to dictate to the land.
‘Whosoever commands the sea,’ says
Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘commands the
trade of the world; whosoever commands
the trade of the world, commands
the riches of the world, and consequently
the world itself.’ England never
would have gone to war with the United
States to prevent their growth; but, now
that they have instituted civil war, it is
certain that she will do all that lies in
her power to prevent the reconstruction
of the Union. The war of words has
been begun, and it is but preliminary to
the war of swords. The savage music
of the British press is the overture to the
opera. The morality of England may
be neither higher nor lower than that of
all other countries,—may be no worse
than our own,—but there is so much
that is offensive in her modes of exhibiting
her destitution of principle, that she
is more hated than all other powerful
countries that ever have existed. She
not only sins as badly as other nations,
but manages to make herself as odious
for her manner of sinning as for the sins
themselves. There is no crime that she
is not capable of, if its perpetration be
necessary to promote her own power.
When Sir William Reid was governor
of Malta, he said to Mr. Lushington, ‘I
would let them (i.e. the heathen) set up
Juggernaut in St. George’s Square (in
Edinburgh), if it were conducive to England’s
holding Malta.’ And as this
time-blue Presbyterian was ready to allow
the solemnization of the bloodiest
rites of paganism in the most public
place of the Christian city of Edinburgh,
if that kind of tolerance would be conducive
to England’s retention of Malta,—of
which she holds possession, by the
way, in consequence of one of the grossest
breaches of faith mentioned even in
her history,—so do we find the Christian
people, peers, and priests of England
ready to become the allies of slave-holders
and the supporters of slavery, if
thereby the American Republic can be
destroyed, as they believe that its existence
may become the source of danger
to the ascendency of their country.

The last intelligence from England
allows us to believe that that country has
adopted a more liberal policy, and that
her government will do nothing to aid
the rebels. Some of the language of
Ministers is friendly, and altogether the
change is one of a character that can
not be otherwise than agreeable to us.
France, too, has declared her neutrality
as strongly as England. These declarations
were made before intelligence of
our military and naval successes had
reached Europe, which renders them all
the more weighty. Peace between
America and Europe may, therefore, be
counted upon, unless some very great
reverses should befall our arms.

Among The Pines.

The ‘Ole Cabin’ to which Jim had
alluded as the scene of Sam’s punishment
by the Overseer, was a one-story
shanty in the vicinity of the stables.
Though fast falling to decay, it had more
the appearance of a decent habitation
than the other huts on the plantation.
Its thick plank door was ornamented
with a mouldy brass knocker, and its
four windows contained sashes, to which
here and there clung a broken pane, the
surviving relic of its better days. It was
built of large unhewn logs, notched at
the ends and laid one upon the other,
with the bark still on. The thick, rough
coat which yet adhered in patches to the
timber had opened in the sun, and let
the rain and the worm burrow in its sides,
till some parts had crumbled entirely
away. At one corner the process of decay
had gone on till roof, superstructure,
and foundation had rotted down
and left an opening large enough to admit
a coach and four horses. The huge
chimneys which had graced the gable-ends
of the building were fallen in, leaving
only a mass of sticks and clay to tell
of their existence, and two wide openings
to show how great a figure they had
once made in the world. A small space
in front of the cabin would have been a
lawn, had the grass been willing to grow
upon it; and a few acres of cleared land
in its rear might have passed for a garden,
had it not been entirely overgrown with
young pines and stubble. This primitive
structure was once the ‘mansion’ of that
broad plantation, and, before the production
of turpentine came into fashion
in that region, its rude owner drew his
support from its few surrounding acres,
more truly independent than the present
aristocratic proprietor, who, raising only
one article, and buying all his provisions,
was forced to draw his support from the
Yankee or the Englishman.

Only one room, about forty feet square,
occupied the interior of the cabin. It
once contained several apartments, vestiges
of which still remained, but the
partitions had been torn away to fit it
for its present uses. What those uses
were, a moment’s observation showed
me.

In the middle of the floor, which was
mostly rotted away, a space about fifteen
feet square was covered with thick pine
planking, strongly nailed to the beams.
In the centre of this planking an oaken
block was firmly bolted, and to it was
fastened a strong iron staple that held a
log-chain, to which was attached a pair
of shackles. Above this, was a queer
frame-work of oak, somewhat resembling
the contrivance for drying fruit I have
seen in Yankee farm-houses. Attached
to the rafters by stout pieces of timber,
were two hickory poles, placed horizontally,
and about four feet apart, the
lower one rather more than eight feet
from the floor. This was the whipping-rack,
and hanging to it were several
stout whips with short hickory handles,
and long triple lashes. I took one down
for closer inspection, and found burned
into the wood, in large letters, the words
‘Moral Suasion.’ I questioned the appropriateness
of the label, but the Colonel
insisted with great gravity that the
whip is the only ‘moral suasion’ a darky
is capable of understanding.

When punishment is inflicted on one
of the Colonel’s negroes, his feet are confined
in the shackles, his arms tied above
his head, and drawn by a stout cord up
to one of the horizontal poles; then, his
back bared to the waist, and standing
on tip-toe, with every muscle stretched
to its utmost tension, he takes ‘de lashes.’

A more severe but more unusual punishment
is the ‘thumb-screw.’ In this
a noose is passed around the negro’s
thumb and fore-finger, while the cord
is thrown over the upper cross-pole, and
the culprit is drawn up till his toes barely
touch the ground. In this position

the whole weight of the body rests on the
thumb and fore-finger. The torture is
excruciating, and strong, able-bodied
men can endure it but a few moments.
The Colonel naively told me that he had
discontinued its practice, as several of his
women had nearly lost the use of their
hands, and been incapacited for field
labor, by its too frequent repetition.
‘My —— drivers,’12 he added, ‘have no
discretion, and no humanity; if they
have a pique against a nigger, they show
him no mercy.’

The old shanty I have described was
now the place of the Overseer’s confinement.
Open as it was at top, bottom, and
sides, it seemed an unsafe prison-house;
but Jim had rendered its present occupant
secure by placing ‘de padlocks on
him.’

‘Where did you catch him?’ asked
the Colonel of Jim, as, followed by every
darky on the plantation, we took our
way to the old building.

‘In de swamp, massa. We got Sandy
and de dogs arter him—dey treed
him, but he fit like de debil.’

‘Any one hurt?’

‘Yas, Cunnel; he knifed Yaller Jake,
and ef I hadn’t a gibin him a wiper,
you’d a had anudder nigger short dis
mornin’—shore.’

‘How was it? tell me,’ said his master,
while we paused, and the darkies gathered
around.

‘Wal, yer see, massa, we got de ole
debil’s hat dat he drapped wen you had
him down; den we went to Sandy’s fur
de dogs—dey scented him to onst, and
off dey put for de swamp. ‘Bout twenty
on us follored ’em. He’d a right smart
start on us, and run like a deer, but de
hounds kotched up wid him ’bout whar
he shot pore Sam. He fit ’em and cut
up de Lady awful, but ole Caesar got a
hole ob him, and sliced a breakfuss out
ob his legs. Somehow, dough, he got
away from de ole dog, and clum a tree.

‘T was more’n an hour afore we kotched
up; but dar he war, and de houns baying
‘way as ef dey know’d wat an ole
debil he am. I’d tuk one ob de guns—you
warn’t in de hous, massa, so I cudn’t
ax you.’

‘Never mind that; go on,’ said the
Colonel.

‘Wal, I up wid de gun, and tole him
ef he didn’t cum down I’d gib him suffin’

dat ‘ud sot hard on de stummuk. It tuk
him a long w’ile, but—he cum down.’
Here the darky showed a row of ivory
that would have been a fair capital for
a metropolitan dentist.

‘Wen he war down,’ he resumed, ‘Jake
war gwine to tie him, but de ole ‘gator,
quicker dan a flash, put a knife enter
him.’

‘Is Jake much hurt?’ interrupted the
Colonel.

‘Not bad, massa; de knife went fru
his arm, and enter his ribs, but de ma’am
hab fix him up, and she say he’ll be
’round bery sudden.’

‘Well, what then?’ inquired the Colonel.

‘Wen de ole debil seed he hadn’t finished
Jake, he war gwine to gib him
anoder dig, but jus den I drap de gun on
his cocoa-nut, and he neber trubble us
no more. ‘Twar mons’rous hard work
to git him out ob de swamp, ’cause he
war jes like a dead man, and we had to
tote him de hull way; but he’m dar now,
massa (pointing to the old cabin), and
de bracelets am on him.’

‘Where is Jake?’ asked the Colonel.

‘Dunno, massa, but reckon he’m to
hum.’

‘One of you boys go and bring him to
the cabin,’ said the Colonel.

A negro-man went off on the errand,
while we and the darkies resumed our
way to the Overseer’s quarters. Arrived
there, I witnessed a scene that
words can not picture.

Stretched at full length on the floor,
his clothes torn to shreds, his coarse carroty
hair matted with blood, and his
thin, ugly visage pale as death, lay the
Overseer. Bending over him, wiping
away the blood from his face, and swathing
a ghastly wound on his forehead, was
the negress Sue; while at his shackled
feet, binding up his still bleeding legs,
knelt the octoroon woman.

‘Is she here?’ I said, involuntarily, as
I caught sight of the group.

‘It’s her nature,’ said the Colonel,
with a pleasant smile; ‘if Moye were the
devil himself, she’d do him good if she
could; another such woman never lived.’

And yet this woman, with all the instincts
that make her sex angel-ministers
to man, lived in daily violation of the
most sacred of all laws,—because she
was a slave. Will Mr. Caleb Cushing
or Charles O’Conner please tell us why
the Almighty invented a system which
forces his creatures to break the laws of
His own making?

‘Don’t waste your time on him, Alice,’
said the Colonel, kindly; ‘he isn’t worth
the rope that’ll hang him.’

‘He was bleeding to death; he must
have care or he’ll die,’ said the octoroon
woman.

‘Then let him die, d—— him,’ replied
the Colonel, advancing to where the
Overseer lay, and bending down to satisfy
himself of his condition.

Meanwhile more than two hundred
dusky forms crowded around and filled
every opening of the old building. Every
conceivable emotion, except pity, was
depicted on their dark faces. The same
individuals whose cloudy visages a half-hour
before I had seen distended with a
wild mirth and careless jollity, that made
me think them really the docile, good-natured
animals they are said to be, now
glared on the prostrate Overseer with
the infuriated rage of aroused beasts
when springing on their prey.

‘You can’t come the possum here.
Get up, you —— hound,’ said the Colonel,
rising and striking the bleeding
man with his foot.

The fellow raised himself on one elbow
and gazed around with a stupid, vacant
look. His eye wandered unsteadily for
a moment from the Colonel to the throng
of cloudy faces in the doorway; then, his
recent experience flashing upon him, he
shrieked out, clinging wildly to the skirts
of the octoroon woman, who was standing
near, ‘Keep off them cursed hounds,—keep
them off, I say—they’ll kill
me!—they’ll kill me!’

One glance satisfied me that his mind
was wandering. The blow on the head
had shattered his reason, and made the
strong man less than a child.

‘You shan’t be killed yet,’ said the
Colonel. ‘You’ve a small account to settle
with me before you reckon with the
devil.’

At this moment the dark crowd in the
doorway parted, and Jake entered, his
arm bound up and in a sling.

‘Jake, come here,’ said the Colonel;
‘this man would have killed you. What
shall we do with him?’

”Tain’t fur a darky to say dat, massa,’
said the negro, evidently unaccustomed
to the rude administration of justice
which the Colonel was about to inaugurate;
‘he did wuss dan dat to Sam, mass—he
orter swing for shootin’ him.’

‘That’s my affair; we’ll settle your
account first,’ replied the Colonel.

The darky looked undecidedly at his
master, and then at the Overseer, who,
overcome by weakness, had sunk again
to the floor. The little humanity in him
was evidently struggling with his hatred
of Moye and his desire of revenge, when
the old nurse yelled out from among the
crowd, ‘Gib him fifty lashes, Massa Davy,
and den you wash him down.13 Be
a man, Jake, and say dat.’

Jake still hesitated, and when at last
he was about to speak, the eye of the
octoroon woman caught his, and chained
the words to his tongue, as if by magnetic
power.

‘Do you say that, boys;’ said the Colonel,
turning to the other negroes;
‘shall he have fifty lashes?’

‘Yas, massa, fifty lashes—gib de ole
debil fifty lashes,’ shouted about fifty
voices.

‘He shall have them,’ quietly said the
master.

The mad shout that followed, which
was more like the yell of demons than
the cry of men, seemed to arouse the
Overseer to a sense of the real state of
affairs. Springing to his feet, he gazed

wildly around; then, sinking on his knees
before the octoroon, and clutching the
folds of her dress, he shrieked, ‘Save me,
good lady, save me! as you hope for
mercy, save me!’

Not a muscle of her face moved, but,
turning to the excited crowd, she mildly
said, ‘Fifty lashes would kill him. Jake
does not say that—your master leaves
it to him, and he will not whip a dying
man—will you, Jake?’

‘No, ma’am—not—not ef you go
agin it,’ replied the negro, with very evident
reluctance.

‘But he whipped Sam, ma’am, when
he was nearer dead than he am,’ said
Jim, whose station as house-servant allowed
him a certain freedom of speech.

‘Because he was brutal to Sam, should
you be brutal to him? Can you expect
me to tend you when you are sick, if you
beat a dying man? Does Pompey say
you should do such things?’ said the lady.

‘No, good ma’am,’ said the old preacher,
stepping out, with the freedom of an
old servant, from the black mass, and
taking his stand beside me in the open
space left for the ‘w’ite folks;’ ‘de ole
man dusn’t say dat, ma’am; he tell ’em
de Lord want ’em to forgib dar en’mies—to
lub dem dat pursyskute em;’ then,
turning to the Colonel, he added, as he
passed his hand meekly over his thin
crop of white wool and threw his long
heel back, ‘ef massa’ll ‘low me I’ll talk
to ’em.’

‘Fire away,’ said the Colonel, with
evident chagrin. ‘This is a nigger trial;
if you want to screen the d—— hound
you can do it.’

‘I dusn’t want to screed him, massa,
but I’se bery ole and got soon to gwo,
and I dusn’t want de blessed Lord to ax
me wen I gets dar why I ‘lowed dese
pore ig’nant brack folks to mudder a
man ‘fore my bery face. I toted you,
massa, fore you cud gwo, I’se worked for
you till I can’t work no more; and I
dusn’t want to tell de Lord dat my massa
let a brudder man be killed in cole
blood.’

‘He is no brother of mine, you old
fool; preach to the nigs, don’t preach to
me,’ said the Colonel, stifling his displeasure,
and striding off through the black
crowd, without saying another word.

Here and there in the dark mass a
face showed signs of relenting; but much
the larger number of that strange jury,
had the question been put, would have
voted—DEATH.

The old preacher turned to them as
the Colonel passed out, and said, ‘My
chil’ren, would you hab dis man whipped,
so weak, so dyin’ as he am, of he war
brack?’

‘No, not ef he war a darky—fer
den he wouldn’t be such an ole debil,’ replied
Jim, and about a dozen of the other
negroes.

‘De w’ite ain’t no wuss dan de brack—dey’m
all ‘like—pore sinners all ob ’em.
De Lord wudn’t whip a w’ite man no
sooner dan a brack one—He tinks de
w’ite juss so good as de brack (good
Southern doctrine, I thought). De porest
w’ite trash wudn’t strike a man wen
he war down.’

‘We’se had ‘nough of dis, ole man,’
said a large, powerful negro (one of the
drivers), stepping forward, and, regardless
of the presence of Madam P—— and
myself, pressing close to where the Overseer
lay, now totally unconscious of what
was passing around him. ‘You needn’t
preach no more; de Cunnul hab say
we’m to whip ole Moye, and we’se gwine
to do it, by ——.’

I felt my fingers closing on the palm
of my hand, and in a second more they
would have cut the darky’s profile, had
not Madam P—— cried out, ‘Stand back,
you impudent fellow: say another word,
and I’ll have you whipped on the spot.’

‘De Cunnul am my massa, ma’am—he
say ole Moye shall be whipped, and I’se
gwine to do it—shore.’

I have seen a storm at sea—I have
seen the tempest tear up great trees—I
have seen the lightning strike in a dark
night—but I never saw anything half
so grand, half so terrible, as the glance
and tone of that woman as she cried out,
‘Jim, take this man—give him fifty
lashes this instant.’

Quicker than thought, a dozen darkies

were on him. His hands and feet were
tied and he was under the whipping-rack
in a second. Turning then to the other
negroes, the brave woman said, ‘Some of
you carry Moye to the house, and you,
Jim, see to this man—if fifty lashes don’t
make him sorry, give him fifty more.’

This summary change of programme
was silently acquiesced in by the assembled
darkies, but many a cloudy face
scowled sulkily on the octoroon, as, leaning
on my arm, she followed Junius and
the other negroes, who bore Moye to the
mansion. It was plain that under those
dark faces a fire was burning that a
breath would have fanned into a flame.

We entered the house by its rear door,
and placed Moye in a small room on the
ground floor. He was laid on a bed, and
stimulants being given him, his senses
and reason shortly returned. His eyes
opened, and his real position seemed suddenly
to flash upon him, for he turned to
Madam P——, and in a weak voice,
half-choked with emotion, faltered out,
‘May God in heaven bless ye, ma’am;
God will bless ye for bein’ so good to a
wicked man like me. I doesn’t desarve it,
but ye woant leave me—ye woant leave
me—they’ll kill me ef ye do!’

‘Don’t fear,’ said the Madam; ‘you
shall have a fair trial. No harm shall
come to you here.’

‘Thank ye, thank ye,’ gasped the
Overseer, raising himself on one arm,
and clutching at the lady’s hand, which
he tried to lift to his lips.

‘Don’t say any more now,’ said Madam
P——, quietly; ‘you must rest and
be quiet, or you won’t get well.’

‘Shan’t I get well? Oh, I can’t die—I
can’t die now!’

The lady made a soothing reply, and
giving him an opiate, and arranging the
bedding so that he might rest more easily,
she left the room with me.

As we stepped into the hall, I saw
through the front door, which was open,
the horses harnessed in readiness for
‘meeting,’ and the Colonel pacing to and
fro on the piazza, smoking a cigar. He
perceived us, and halted in front of the
doorway.

‘So, you’ve brought that d—— blood-thirsty
villain into my house!’ he said to
Madam P——, in a tone of strong displeasure.

‘How could I help it? The negroes are
mad, and would kill him anywhere else,’
replied the lady, with a certain self-confidence
that showed she knew her power
over the Colonel.

‘Why should you interfere between
them and him? Has he not insulted
you often enough to make you let him
alone? Can you so easily forgive his
taunting you with’—He did not finish
the sentence, but what I had learned
on the previous evening from the old
nurse gave me a clue to its meaning.
A red flame flushed the face and neck
of the octoroon woman—her eyes literally
flashed fire, and her very breath
seemed to come with pain; in a moment,
however, this emotion passed away, and
she quietly said, ‘Let me settle that in
my own way. He has served you well—you

have nothing against him that the
law will not punish.’

‘By ——, you are the most unaccountable
woman I ever knew,’ exclaimed the
Colonel, striding up and down the piazza,
the angry feeling passing from his face,
and giving way to a mingled expression
of wonder and admiration. The conversation
was here interrupted by Jim, who
just then made his appearance, hat in
hand.

‘Well, Jim, what is it?’ asked his
master.

‘We’se gib’n Sam twenty lashes,
ma’am, but he beg so hard, and say he
so sorry, dat I tole him I’d ax you ‘fore
we gabe him any more.’

‘Well, if he’s sorry, that’s enough; but
tell him he’ll get fifty another time,’ said
the lady.

‘What Sam is it?’ asked the Colonel.

‘Big Sam, the driver,’ said Jim.

‘Why was he whipped?’

‘He told me you were his master, and
insisted on whipping Moye,’ replied the
lady.

‘Did he dare to do that? Give him a
hundred, Jim, not one less,’ roared the
Colonel.

‘Yas, massa,’ said Jim.

The lady looked significantly at the
negro and shook her head, but said
nothing, and he left.

‘Come, Alice, it is nearly time for
meeting, and I want to stop and see
Sandy on the way.’

‘I reckon I won’t go,’ said Madam
P——.

‘You stay to take care of Moye, I suppose,’
said the Colonel, with a slight
sneer.

‘Yes,’ replied the lady; ‘he is badly
hurt, and in danger of inflammation.’

‘Well, suit yourself. Sir. K——, come,
we’ll go—you’ll meet some of the natives.’

The lady retired to the house, and the
Colonel and I were soon ready. The
driver brought the horses to the door,
and as we were about to enter the carriage,
I noticed Jim taking his accustomed
seat on the box.

‘Who’s looking after Sam?’ asked the
Colonel.

‘Nobody, Cunnul; de ma’am leff him
gwo.’

‘How dare you disobey me? Didn’t
I tell you to give him a hundred?’

‘Yas, massa, but de ma’am tole me
notter.’

‘Well, another time you mind what I
say—do you hear?’ said his master.

‘Yas, massa,’ said the negro, with a
broad grin, ‘I allers do dat.’

‘You never do it, you d—— nigger;
I ought to have flogged you long ago.’

Jim said nothing, but gave a quiet
laugh, showing no sort of fear, and we
entered the carriage. I afterwards learned
from him that he had never been whipped,
and that all the negroes on the plantation
obeyed the lady when, which was
seldom, her orders came in conflict with
their master’s. They knew if they did
not, the Colonel would whip them.

As we rode slowly along the Colonel
said to me, ‘Well, you see that the best
people have to flog their niggers sometimes.’

‘Yes, I should have given that fellow
a hundred lashes, at least. I think the
effect on the others would have been
bad if Madam P—— had not had him
flogged.’

‘But she generally goes against it. I
don’t remember of her having it done in
ten years before. And yet, though I’ve
the worst gang of niggers in the district,
they obey her like so many children.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Well, there’s a kind of magnetism
about her that makes everybody love
her; and then she tends them in sickness,
and is constantly doing little things
for their comfort; that attaches them to
her. She is an extraordinary woman.’

‘Whose negroes are those, Colonel?’
I asked, as, after a while, we passed a
gang of about a dozen, at work near the
roadside. Some were tending a tar-kiln,
and some engaged in cutting into fire-wood
the pines which a recent tornado
had thrown to the ground.

‘They are mine, but they are working
now for themselves. I let such as
will, work on Sunday. I furnish the “raw
material,” and pay them for what they
do, as I would a white man.’

‘Would’nt it be better to make them
go to hear the old preacher; could’nt
they learn something from him?’

‘Not much; Old Pomp never read
anything but the Bible, and he don’t
understand that; besides, they can’t be
taught. You can’t make “a whistle out
of a pig’s tail;” you can’t make a nigger
into a white man.’

Just here the carriage stopped suddenly,
and we looked out to see the cause.
The road by which we had come was a
mere opening through the pines; no
fences separated it from the wooded land,
and being seldom traveled, the track
was scarcely visible. In many places it
widened to a hundred feet, but in others
tall trees had grown up on its opposite
sides, and there was scarcely width
enough for a single carriage to pass
along. In one of these narrow passages,
just before us, a queer-looking vehicle
had upset, and scattered its contents in
the road. We had no alternative but to
wait till it got out of the way; and we
all alighted to reconnoitre.

The vehicle was a little larger than an

ordinary hand-cart, and was mounted on
wheels that had probably served their
time on a Boston dray before commencing
their travels in Secessiondom. Its
box of pine boarding and its shafts of
rough oak poles were evidently of Southern
home manufacture. Attached to it by
a rope harness, with a primitive bridle of
decidedly original construction, was—not
a horse, nor a mule, nor even an alligator,
but a ‘three-year-old heifer.’

The wooden linch-pin of the cart had
given way, and the weight of a half-dozen
barrels of turpentine had thrown the
box off its balance, and rolled the contents
about in all directions.

The appearance of the proprietor of
this nondescript vehicle was in keeping
with the establishment. His coat, which
was much too short in the waist and
much too long in the skirts, was of the
common reddish gray linsey, and his
nether garments, of the same material,
stopped just below the knees. From
there downwards, he wore only the covering
that is said to have been the fashion
in Paradise before Adam took to
fig-leaves. His hat had a rim broader
than a political platform, and his skin a
color half way between that of tobacco-juice
and a tallow candle.

‘Wal, Cunnul, how dy’ge?’ said the
stranger, as we stepped from the carriage.

‘Very well, Ned; how are you?’

‘Purty wal, Cunnul; had the nagur
lately, right smart, but’m gittin’ ‘roun.’

‘You’re in a bad fix here, I see.
Can’t Jim help you?’

‘Wal, p’raps he moight. Jim, how
dy’ge?’

‘Sort o’ smart, ole feller. But come,
stir yerseff; we want ter gwo ‘long,’ replied
Jim, with a manifest lack of courtesy
that showed he regarded the white man
as altogether too ‘trashy’ to be treated
with much ceremony.

With the aid of Jim, a new linch-pin
was soon whittled out, the turpentine
rolled on to the cart, and the vehicle
put in a moving condition.

‘Where are you hauling your turpentine?’

asked the Colonel.

‘To Sam Bell’s, at the “Boro’.”‘

‘What will he pay you?’

‘Wal, I’ve four barr’ls of “dip,” and
tu of “hard.” For the hull, I reckon
he’ll give three dollars a barr’l.’

‘By tale?’

‘No, for two hun’red and eighty pound.’

‘Well, I’ll give you two dollars and a
half by weight.’

‘Can’t take it, Cunnel; must get three
dollar.’

‘What, will you go sixty miles with
this team, and waste five or six days, for
fifty cents on six barrels—three dollars?’

‘Can’t ‘ford the time, Cunnel, but
must git three dollar a barr’l.’

‘That fellow is a specimen of our “natives,”‘
said the Colonel, as we resumed
our seats in the carriage. ‘You’ll see
more of them before we get back to the
plantation.’

‘He puts a young cow to a decidedly
original use,’ I remarked.

‘Oh no, not original here; the ox and
the cow with us are both used for labor.’

‘You don’t mean to say that cows are
generally worked here?’

‘Of course I do. Our breeds are good
for nothing as milkers, and we put them
to the next best use. I never have cow’s
milk on my plantation.’

‘You don’t! why, I could have sworn
it was in my coffee this morning.’

‘I wouldn’t trust you to buy brandy
for me, if your organs of taste are not
keener than that. It was goat’s milk.’

‘Then how do you get your butter?’

‘From the North. I’ve had mine from
my New York factors for over two years.’

We soon arrived at Sandy the negro-hunter’s,
and halted to allow the Colonel
to inquire as to the health of his family
of children and dogs,—the latter the
less numerous, but, if I might judge by
appearances, the more valued of the two.

Southern Aids To The North.

II.

If war did little else, it would have
its value from the fact that it acts so
extensively as an institution for the dissemination
of useful knowledge. Every
murmur of political dissension sends thousands
to consult the map, and repair their
early neglect of geography. Perhaps if
atlases and ethnographical works were
more studied we should have less war.
And it is by no means impossible that
the mutual knowledge which has been
or is to be acquired by the people of the
South and the North during this present
war will eventually aid materially in
establishing a firm bond of union.

That we have much to learn is shown
in the firm faith with which so many
have listened to the threats of ‘a united
South.’ Until recently the fierce and
furious assurances of the rebel press,
that south of Mason and Dixon’s line all
were wedded heart and soul to their
cause, were taken almost without a
doubt. Who has forgotten the late
doleful convictions of the dough-faces
that the South would hold together to
the last in spite of wind or weather,
concluding invariably with the old refrain,—’Suppose
we conquer them—what
then?’ Had the country at large
known in detail, as it should have
known from a common-school education,
what the South really is,—or from
experience of life what human nature
really is,—it would never have believed
that this boasted unanimity was based
on aught save ignorance or falsehood.
The Southern press itself, almost without
an exception, betrays gross ignorance of
its own country, and is very superficial
in its statistics, inclining more than any
other to warp facts and figures to suit
preconceived views. We, like it, have
tacitly adopted the belief that south of
a certain line a certain climate invariably
prevailed, and that under its influences,
from the Border to the Gulf of
Mexico, there has been developed a race
essentially alike in all its characteristics.
The planter and the slave-owner, or the
city merchant, has been the type with
which our writers have become familiar
at the hotel and the watering-place, or
in the ‘store,’ and we have accepted
them as speaking for the South, quite
forgetful that in America, as in other
countries, the real man of the middle
class travels but little, and when he
does, is seldom to be found mingling in
the ‘higher circles.’ Yet even this
Southern man of the middle class and
of ‘Alleghania,’ when at the North
frequently affects a ‘Southern’ air, which
is not more natural to him than it is to
the youthful scions of Philadelphia and
New York, who, when in Europe, so
often talk pro-slavery and bowie knife,
as though they lived in the very heart
of planterdom. But the truth is that
when we search the South out closely
we find that in reality there is a very
great difference between its districts and
their inhabitants, and, in fact, as has
been very truly said, ‘not only is there
no geographical boundary between the
free and slave States, but no moral and
intellectual boundary.’

In the great temperate region which,
parting from either side of the Alleghanies,
extends from Virginia to Alabama,
and is still continued in the pleasant
level of Texas, slavery has rolled
away from either mountain side like a
flood, leaving it the home of a hardy
population which regards with jealousy
and dislike both the wealthy planter
and the negro. James W. Taylor, in
his valuable collection of facts, claims
that through the whole extent of the
Southern Alleghania slavery has relatively
diminished since 1850, and that
the forthcoming census tables will establish
the assertion. ‘The superintendent
of the census,’ he says, ‘would furnish a

document, valuable politically and for
military use, if he would anticipate the
publication of this portion of his voluminous
budget.’ If government, indeed,
were to communicate to the public
what information it now holds, and has
long held, relative to the numbers and
strength of the Union men of the South,
an excitement of amazement would thrill
through the North. It was on the basis
of this knowledge that our great campaign
was planned,—and it can not be
denied that thousands of stanch Union
men were greatly astonished at the revelations
of sympathy which burst forth
most unexpectedly in districts where
the stars and stripes have been planted.
But the Cabinet ‘knew what it knew’
on this subject. Much of its knowledge
never can be revealed, but enough will
come to-night to show that in our darkest
hour we had an enormous mass of aid,
little suspected by those weaker brethren
who stood aghast at the Southern bugbear,
and who, falling prostrate in nerveless
terror at the windy spectre, quaked
out repeated assurances that they had
no intention of ‘abolitionizing the war,’

and even earnestly begged and prayed
that the emancipationists might all be
sent to Fort Warren,—so fearful were
the poor cowards lest the united South,
in the final hour of victory, might include
them in its catalogue of the doomed.
What would they say if they knew the
number and power of the ABOLITIONISTS
OF THE SOUTH,—a body of no
trifling significance, whose fierce grasp
will yet be felt on the throat of rebellion
and of slavery? It is grimly amusing
to think of the aid which the South
counted on receiving from these Northern
dough-faces,—little thinking that
within itself it contained a counter-revolutionary
party, far more dangerous
than the Northern friends were helpful.

It should be borne in mind that where
such an evil as slavery exists there will
be numbers of grave, sensible men, who,
however quiet they may keep, will have
their own opinions as to the expediency
of maintaining it. The bigots of the
South may rave of the beauty of ‘the
institution,’ and make many believe that
they speak for the whole,—a little scum
when whipped covers the whole pail,—but
beneath all lies a steadily-increasing
mass of practical men who would readily
enough manifest their opposition should
opportunity favor free speech. Such
people, for instance, are not insensible
to the enormously corrupting influence
of negroes on their children. Let the
reader recall Olmsted’s experiences,—that,
for example, where he speaks of
three negro women who had charge of
half a dozen white girls of good family,
‘from three to fifteen years of age.’

The Southern Cultivator for June,
1855, speaks of many young men and
women who have ‘made shipwreck of all
their earthly hopes, and been led to the
fatal step by the seeds of corruption
which in the days of childhood and
youth were sown in their hearts by the
indelicate and lascivious manners and
conversation of their fathers’ negroes.’
If we had no other fact or cause to cite,
this almost unnamable one might convince
the reader that there must be a
groundwork somewhere in the South
among good, moral, and decent people,
for antipathy to slavery,—human nature
teaches us as much. And such
people exist, not only among the hardy
inhabitants of the inland districts, who
are not enervated by wealth and ‘exclusiveness,’

but in planterdom itself.

There are few in the North who realize
the number of persons in the South
who silently disapprove of slavery on
sound grounds, such as I have mentioned.
Does it seem credible that
nearly ten millions of people should socially
sympathize with some three hundred

thousand slave-holders, who act
with intolerable arrogance to all non-slave-holders?
‘Even in those regions
where slavery is profitable,’ as a writer
in the Boston Transcript well expresses
it, ‘the poor whites feel the slaveocracy
as the most grinding of aristocracies.’

As I write, every fresh thunder of war
and crash of victory is followed by murmurs
of amazement at the enthusiastic
receptions which the Union forces meet
in most unexpected strongholds of the
enemy, in the very heart of slavedom.
Yet it was known months ago, and prophesied,
with the illustration of undeniable
facts, that this counter-revolutionary
element existed. One single truth was
forgotten,—that these Southern friends
of the Union, even while avowing that
slavery must be supported, had no love
of it in their hearts. Emancipation has
been sedulously set aside under pretence
of conciliating them; but it was needless,—’old
custom’ had made them cautious,
and mindful of ‘expediency;’ but
the mass of them hate ‘the institution.’

It is for the traitorous Northern dough-faces,
and the paltry handful of secessionists,
‘on a thin slip of land on the
Atlantic,’ that slavery is, at present,
cherished. The great area of the South
is free from it,—and ever will be.

It has frequently been insisted on that
the mere geographical obstacles to disunion
are such as to render the cause of
slavery hopeless in the long run. Yet
to this most powerful Southern aid to
the North, men seem to have been
strangely blind during the days of doubt
which so long afflicted us. These obstacles
are, briefly, the enormous growing
power of the West, and its inevitable
outlet, the Mississippi river. ‘For
it is the mighty and free West which
will always hang like a lowering thunder-cloud
over them.’14 On this subject
I quote at length from an article, in the
Danville (Ky.) Review, by the Rev. R.
J. Breckenridge, D.D.:—

It is not a strong point, but it is worth
noting, that even in South Carolina
there is an Alleghanian area of 4,074
square miles, equal to the State of Connecticut,
in which the diminished proportion
of slaves, with other local causes,
are sufficient to indicate the Union feeling
which indeed struggles there in secret.
These counties are:—

	FREE.	SLAVE.
Spartanburgh,	18,311	8,039
Greenville,	13,370	6,691
Anderson,	13,867	7,514
Pickens,	13,105	3,679

Slavery is here large, as compared to
the other counties of ‘Alleghania,’ but
the great proportion of free inhabitants,
as contrasted with the districts near the
Atlantic, makes it worth citing. In accordance
with a request, I give from
Jas. W. Taylor’s collection, illustrating
this subject, the table of population in
East Tennessee:—

COUNTIES.	FREE.	SLAVE.	COTTON, 400 lb. bales.
Johnson,	3,485	206	0
Carter,	5,911	353	0
Washington,	12,671	930	0
Sullivan,	10,603	1,004	153
Hancock,	5,447	202	2
Hawkins,	11,567	1,690	0
Greene,	16,526	1,093	0
Cocke,	7,501	719	3
Sevier,	6,450	403	0
Jefferson,	11,458	1,628	0
Granger,	11,170	1,035	1
Knox,	16,385	2,193	0
Union, new county,
Claiborne,	8,610	660	0
Anderson,	6,391	503	0
Campbell,	5,651	318	1
Scott,	1,808	37	0
Morgan,	3,301	101	9
Cumberland, new county,
Roane,	10,525	1,544	121
Blount,	11,213	1,084	6
Munroe,	10,623	1,188	0
McMinn,	12,286	1,568	2,821
Polk,	5,884	400	29
Bradley,	11,478	744	1,600
Meigs,	4,480	395	2
Hamilton,	9,216	672	0
Rhea,	3,951	436	0
Bledsoe,	5,036	827	0
Sequatche, new county,
Van Buren,	2,481	175	2
Grundy,	2,522	236	24
Marion,	5,718	551	24,413
Franklin,	10,085	3,623	637
Lincoln,	17,802	5,621	2,576

Massachusetts,	7,800 square miles.
Connecticut,	4,674 square miles.
Rhode Island,	l,306 square miles.
	———
	13,180 square miles.

Yet it is not many months since even
this Tennessee region, it was generally
feared, would be false to the Union, on
account of its attachment to slavery.

The reader who has studied the facts
which I have cited, indicating the existence
of a powerful Union party at the
South (and the facts are few and weak
compared to the vast mass which exist,
and which are known to government),
may judge for himself whether that
party is Union in spite of pro-slavery
principles, as so many would have us believe.
Let him see where these Union
men are found, where they have come
forth with the greatest enthusiasm, and

then say that he believes they are friends
to slavery. Let him bear in mind the
hundreds of thousands of acres, the vast
tracts, equal in extent to whole Northern
States, in the South, which are unfitted
for slave labor, and reflect whether
the inhabitants of these cool, temperate
regions are not as conscious of their inadaptability
to slave labor as he is himself;
and whether they are so much attached
to the institution which fosters
the Satanic pride, panders to the passions,
and corrupts the children of the
planter of the low country.

Since writing the above, the long-expected
declaration of President LINCOLN
has appeared in favor of adopting a plan
which may lead to the gradual abolishment
of slavery. He proposes that the
United States shall coöperate with such
slave States as may desire Emancipation,
by giving such pecuniary aid as may
compensate for any losses incurred. No
interference with State rights or claims
to rights in the question is intended.

It is evident that this message is directed
entirely to the strengthening and
building up of the Union party of the
South, and has been based quite as much
on their demands and on a knowledge
of their needs, as on any Northern pressure.
And it will have a sure effect. It
will bring to life, if realized, those seeds
of counter-revolution which so abundantly
exist in the South. The growth may
be slow, but it will be certain. So long
as the certainty exists that compensation
may be obtained, there will be a party
who will long for it; and where there
is a will there is a way. The executive
has finally officially recognized the truth
of the theory of Emancipation, and
thereby entitled itself to the honor of
having taken the greatest forward step
in the glorious path of Freedom ever
made even in our history.