Читать книгу Campfire and Battlefield - John Clark Ridpath - Страница 19

PARALYSIS OF THE UNION CAUSE—FORTIFYING THE APPROACHES TO THE CAPITAL—WHY THE CONFEDERATES DID NOT ATTEMPT THE CAPTURE OF WASHINGTON—EFFECT OF UNION DEFEAT IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE—SLIDELL AND MASON—CAPTURE OF THE "TRENT"—HENRY WARD BEECHER IN ENGLAND—SYMPATHY OF THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT FOR THE NORTH.

The battle of Bull Run was undertaken with precipitation, fought with much valor on both sides, and terminated with present ruin to the Federal cause. For the moment the Union seemed to stagger under the blow. On the Confederate side there was corresponding exultation; a spirit of defiance flamed up throughout the South.

It is in the nature of things that the initial battle of a war consolidates and crystallizes the sentiments of both the contestants. After Bull Run there was no further hope of peaceable adjustment, but only an increasing and settled purpose to fight out with the sword the great issue which was dividing the Union. For a brief season after the battle there was a paralysis of the Union cause. It was as much as the authorities at Washington could do to make themselves secure against further disaster. Indeed, the Potomac River now gave positive comfort to the Government, since it furnished in some measure a natural barrier to the northward progress of the exultant Confederates. Immediate steps were taken to fortify the approaches to the capital; but while this work was in progress the Government seemed to stand, like an alarmed sentry, on the Long Bridge of the Potomac.

EXAMINING PASSES AT THE GEORGETOWN FERRY.

FORT IN FRONT OF WASHINGTON.

In the South as well as in the North there was much surprise that the Confederates did not pursue the routed Union forces at the battle of Bull Run and capture Washington. Perhaps Gen. Joseph E. Johnston is the best witness on this subject on the Southern side. He says: "All the military conditions, we knew, forbade an attempt on Washington. The Confederate army was more disorganized by victory than that of the United States by defeat. The Southern volunteers believed that the objects of the war had been accomplished by their victory, and that they had achieved all their country required of them. Many, therefore, in ignorance of their military obligations, left the army—not to return. … Exaggerated ideas of the victory, prevailing among our troops, cost us more than the Federal army lost by defeat." In writing this passage General Johnston probably took no account of the effect produced in Europe. The early narratives sent there, in which the panic of retreat was made the principal figure, gave the impression that the result arose from constitutional cowardice in Northern men and invincible courage in Southerners. They also gave the impression that the Confederates were altogether superior in generalship; and the effect was deep and long-enduring. The most notable of these was by a correspondent of the London Times, who had apparently been sent across the Atlantic for the express purpose of writing down the Republic, writing up the South, and enlisting the sympathies of Englishmen for the rebellion. In his second letter from Charleston (April 30, 1861) he had written that men of all classes in South Carolina declared to him: "If we could only get one of the royal race of England to rule over us, we should be content." "The New Englander must have something to persecute; and as he has hunted down all his Indians, burnt all his witches, persecuted all his opponents to the death, he invented abolitionism as the sole resource left to him for the gratification of his favorite passion. Next to this motive principle is his desire to make money dishonestly, trickily, meanly, and shabbily. He has acted on it in all his relations with the South, and has cheated and plundered her in all his dealings, by villanous tariffs." Many an Englishman, counting his worthless Confederate bonds, and trying to hope that he will yet receive something for them, knows he would never have made that investment but for such writing as this, and the accounts from the same pen of the battle of Bull Run.

At the North the spectacle of McDowell's army streaming back in disorder to the national capital produced first a shock of surprise, then a sense of disgrace, and then a calm determination to begin the war over again. It was well expressed by a Methodist minister at a camp-meeting in Illinois, the Rev. Henry Cox. The news of the battle came while he was preaching, and he closed his sermon with the words: "Brethren, we'd better adjourn this camp-meeting and go home and drill."

The effect of this over-discussed battle upon the more confident and boastful of the Southerners was perhaps fairly expressed by an editorial utterance of one of their journals, the Louisville, Ky., Courier: "As our Norman kinsmen in England, always a minority, have ruled their Saxon countrymen in political vassalage up to the present day, so have we, the 'slave oligarchs,' governed the Yankees till within a twelvemonth. We framed the Constitution, for seventy years moulded the policy of the government, and placed our own men, or 'Northern men with Southern principles,' in power. On the 6th of November, 1860, the Puritans emancipated themselves, and are now in violent insurrection against their former owners. This insane holiday freak will not last long, however; for, dastards in fight and incapable of self-government, they will inevitably again fall under the control of a superior race. A few more Bull Run thrashings will bring them once more under the yoke, as docile as the most loyal of our Ethiopian chattels."

THE "SAN JACINTO" STOPPING THE "TRENT."

FORTIFICATION IN FRONT OF WASHINGTON.

France and England had made all haste to recognize the Confederates as belligerents, but had not granted them recognition as an established nation, and never did. There was a constant fear, however, that they would; and the Confederate Government did its utmost to bring about such recognition. Messrs. James M. Mason, of Virginia, and John Slidell, of Louisiana, were sent out by that Government, as duly accredited ministers to London and Paris, in 1861. They escaped the blockaders at Charleston, reached Havana, and there embarked on the British mail steamer Trent for Europe. But Capt. Charles Wilkes (who had commanded the celebrated exploring expedition in Antarctic waters twenty years before) was on the watch for them with the United States steam frigate San Jacinto, overhauled the Trent in the Bahama Channel (November 8), took off the Confederate commissioners, and allowed the steamer to proceed on her way. He carried his prisoners to Boston, and they were incarcerated in Fort Warren. This action, for which Wilkes received the thanks of Congress, was denounced as an outrage on British neutrality. The entire British public bristled up as one lion, and their Government demanded an apology and the liberation of the prisoners. The American public was unable to see any way out of the dilemma, and was considering whether it would choose humiliation or a foreign war, when our Secretary of State, William H. Seward, solved the problem in a masterly manner. In his formal reply he discussed the whole question with great ability, showing that such detention of a vessel was justified by the laws of war, and there were innumerable British precedents for it; that Captain Wilkes conducted the search in a proper manner; that the commissioners were contraband of war; and that the commander of the Trent knew they were contraband of war when he took them as passengers. But as Wilkes had failed to complete the transaction in a legal manner by bringing the Trent into port for adjudication in a prize court, it must be repudiated. In other words, by his consideration for the interests and convenience of innocent persons, he had lost his prize. In summing up, Mr. Seward said: "If I declare this case in favor of my own Government, I must disavow its most cherished principles, and reverse and forever abandon its most essential policy. … We are asked to do to the British nation just what we have always insisted all nations ought to do to us." The commissioners were released, and sailed for England in January; but the purpose of their mission had been practically thwarted. This was a remarkable instance of eating one's cake and keeping it at the same time.

CHARLES A. DANA, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR.

But though danger of intervention was thus for the time averted, and the relations between the British Government and our own remained nominally friendly, so far as moral influence and bitterness of feeling could go the Republic had no more determined enemies in the cotton States than in the heart of England. The aristocratic classes rejoiced at anything that threatened to destroy democratic government or make its stability doubtful. They confidently expected to see our country fall into a state of anarchy like that experienced so often by the Spanish-American republics, and were willing to do everything they safely could do to bring it about. The foremost English journals had been predicting such a disaster ever since the beginning of the century, had announced it as in progress when a British force burned Washington in 1814, and now were surer of it than ever. Almost our only friends of the London press were the Daily News and Weekly Spectator. The commercial classes, in a country that had fought so many commercial wars, were of course delighted at the crippling of a commercial rival whom they had so long hated and feared, no matter what it might cost in the shedding of blood and the destruction of social order. Among the working classes, though they suffered heavily when the supply of cotton was diminished, we had many firm and devoted friends, who saw and felt, however imperfectly, that the cause of free labor was their own cause, no matter on which side of the Atlantic the battlefield might lie.

To those who had for years endured the taunts of Englishmen who pointed to American slavery and its tolerance in the American Constitution, while they boasted that no slave could breathe on British soil, it was a strange sight, when our country was at war over the question, to see almost everything that had power and influence in England arrayed on the side of the slaveholders. A few famous Englishmen—notably John Bright and Goldwin Smith—were true to the cause of liberty, and did much to instruct the laboring classes as to the real nature and significance of the conflict. Henry Ward Beecher, then at the height of his powers, went to England and addressed large audiences, enlightening them as to the real nature of American affairs, concerning which most of them were grossly ignorant, and produced an effect that was probably never surpassed by any orator. The Canadians, with the usual narrowness of provincials, blind to their own ultimate interests, were in the main more bitterly hostile than the mother country.

Louis Napoleon, then the despotic ruler of France, was unfriendly to the United States, and did his utmost to persuade the English Government to unite with him in a scheme of intervention that would probably have secured the division of the country. How far his plans went beyond that result, can only be conjectured; but while the war was still in progress (1864) he threw a French force into Mexico, and established there an ephemeral empire with an Austrian archduke at its head. That the possession of Mexico alone was not his object, is suggested by the fact that, when the rebellion was subdued and the secession cause extinct, he withdrew his troops from Mexico and left the archduke to the fate of other filibusters.

The Russian Government was friendly to the United States throughout the struggle. The imperial manifesto for the abolition of serfdom in Russia was issued on March 3, 1861, the day before President Lincoln was inaugurated, and this perhaps created a special bond of sympathy.