Of Mr. Seward's Incompetency I Have Heard Very
Much Among American Politicians; Much Also Of His Ambition.
With
worse offenses than these I have not heard him charged.
* I ought perhaps to state that General Fremont has published an
answer to the charges preferred against him. That answer refers
chiefly to matters of military capacity or incapacity, as to which I
have expressed no opinion. General Fremont does allude to the
accusations made against him regarding the building of the forts;
but in doing so he seem to me rather to admit than to deny the acts
as stated by the committee.
At the period of which I am writing, February, 1862, the long list
of military successes which attended the Northern army through the
late winter and early spring had commenced. Fort henry, on the
Tennessee River, had first been taken, and after that, Fort
Donelson, on the Cumberland River, also in the State, Tennessee.
Price had been driven out of Missouri into Arkansas by General
Curtis, acting under General Halleck's orders. The chief body of
the Confederate army in the West had abandoned the fortified
position which they had long held at Bowling Green, in the
southwestern district of Kentucky. Roanoke Island, on the coast of
North Carolina, had been taken by General Burnside's expedition, and
a belief had begun to manifest itself in Washington that the army of
the Potomac was really about to advance. It is impossible to
explain in what way the renewed confidence of the Northern party
showed itself, or how one learned that the hopes of the
secessionists were waxing dim; but it was so; and even a stranger
became aware of the general feeling as clearly as though it were a
defined and established fact. In the early part of the winter, when
I reached Washington, the feeling ran all the other way. Northern
men did not say that they were despondent; they did not with spoken
words express diffidence as to their success; but their looks
betrayed diffidence, and the moderation of their self-assurance
almost amounted to despondency. In the capital the parties were
very much divided. The old inhabitants were either secessionists or
influenced by "secession proclivities," as the word went; but the
men of the government and of the two Houses of Congress were, with a
few exceptions, of course Northern. It should be understood that
these parties were at variance with each other on almost every point
as to which men can disagree. In our civil war it may be presumed
that all Englishmen were at any rate anxious for England. They
desired and fought for different modes of government; but each party
was equally English in its ambition. In the States there is the
hatred of a different nationality added to the rancor of different
politics. The Southerners desire to be a people of themselves - to
divide themselves by every possible mark of division from New
England; to be as little akin to New York as they are to London, or,
if possible, less so. Their habits, they say, are different; their
education, their beliefs, their propensities, their very virtues and
vices are not the education, or the beliefs, or the propensities, or
the virtues and vices of the North. The bond that ties them to the
North is to them a Mezentian marriage, and they hate their Northern
spouses with a Mezentian hatred. They would be anything sooner than
citizens of the United States. They see to what Mexico has come,
and the republics of Central America; but the prospect of even that
degradation is less bitter to them than a share in the glory of the
stars and stripes. Better, with them, to reign in hell than serve
in heaven! It is not only in politics that they will be beaten, if
they be beaten, as one party with us may be beaten by another; but
they will be beaten as we should be beaten if France annexed us, and
directed that we should live under French rule. Let an Englishman
digest and realize that idea, and he will comprehend the feelings of
a Southern gentleman as he contemplates the probability that his
State will be brought back into the Union. And the Northern feeling
is as strong. The Northern man has founded his national ambition on
the territorial greatness of his nation. He has panted for new
lands, and for still extended boundaries. The Western World has
opened her arms to him, and has seemed to welcome him as her only
lord. British America has tempted him toward the north, and Mexico
has been as a prey to him on the south. He has made maps of his
empire, including all the continent, and has preached the Monroe
doctrine as though it had been decreed by the gods. He has told the
world of his increasing millions, and has never yet known his store
to diminish. He has pawed in the valley, and rejoiced in his
strength. He has said among the trumpets, ha! ha! He has boasted
aloud in his pride, and called on all men to look at his glory. And
now shall he be divided and shorn? Shall he be hemmed in from his
ocean, and shut off from his rivers? Shall he have a hook run into
his nostrils, and a thorn driven into his jaw? Shall men say that
his day is over, when he has hardly yet tasted the full cup of his
success? Has his young life been a dream, and not a truth? Shall
he never reach that giant manhood which the growth of his boyish
years has promised him? If the South goes from him, he will be
divided, shorn, and hemmed in. The hook will have pierced his nose,
and the thorn will fester in his jaw. Men will taunt him with his
former boastings, and he will awake to find himself but a mortal
among mortals.
Such is the light in which the struggle is regarded by the two
parties, and such the hopes and feelings which have been engendered.
It may therefore be surmised with what amount of neighborly love
secessionists and Northern neighbors regarded each other in such
towns as Baltimore and Washington.
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