[Concluded.]
"As when a ship, by skilful steersman wrought
Nigh river's mouth or foreland, where the
wind
Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail,—
So varied he, and of his tortuous train
Curl'd many a wanton wreath in sight of
Eve
To lure her eye."
And Eve, alas! yielded to the blandishments of the wily serpent, as we
moderns, in our Art, have yielded to the licentious, specious life-curve
of Hogarth. When I say Art, I mean that spirit of Art which has made us
rather imitative than creative, has made us hold a too faithful mirror
up to Nature, and has been content to let the great Ideal remain
petrified in the marbles of Greece.
I have endeavored to show how this Ideal may be concentrated in a
certain abstract line, not only of sensuous, but of intellectual
Beauty,—a line which, while it is as wise and subtle as the serpent, is
as harmless and loving as the sacred dove of Venus. I have endeavored
to prove how this line, the gesture of Attic eloquence, expresses the
civilization of Pericles and Plato, of Euripides and Apelles. It is now
proposed briefly to relate how this line was lost, when the politeness
and philosophy, the literature and the Art of Greece were chained to the
triumphal cars of Roman conquerors,—and how it seems to have been found
again in our own day, after slumbering so long in ruined temples, broken
statues, and cinerary urns.
The scholar who studies the aesthetical anatomy of Greek Art has
a melancholy pleasure, like a surgeon, in watching its slow, but
inevitable atrophy under the incubus of Rome. The wise, but childlike
serenity and cheerfulness of soul, so tenderly pictured in the white
stones from the quarries of Pentelicus, had, it is true, a certain
sickly, exoteric life in Magna Graecia, as Pompeii and Herculaneum have
proved to us. But the brutal manhood of Rome overshadowed and tainted
the gentle exotic like a Upas-tree. Where, as in these places,
the imported Greek could have some freedom, it grew up into a dim
resemblance of its ancient purity under other skies. It had, I think,
an elegiac plaintiveness in it, like a song of old liberty sung in
captivity. Yet there was added to it a certain fungus-growth, never
permitted by that far-off Ideal whose seeds were indigenous in the
Peloponnesus, but rather springing from the rank ostentation of Rome. In
its more monumental developments, under these new influences, the true
line of Beauty became gradually vulgarized, and, by degrees, less
intellectual and pure, till its spirit of fine and elegant reserve was
quite lost in a coarse splendor. It must be admitted, however, that the
Greek colonies of Italy expressed not a little of the old refinement
in the lamps and candelabra and vases and bijouterie which we have
exhumed from the ashes of Vesuvius.
But, turning to Rome herself, the most casual examination will impress
us with the fact that there the lovely Greek lines were seized by rude
conquerors, and at once were bent to answer base and brutal uses. To
narrow a broad subject down to an illustration, let us look at a single
feature, the Cymatium, as it was understood in Greece and Rome. This
is a moulding of very frequent occurrence in classic entablatures, a
curved surface with a double flexure. Perhaps the type of Greek lines,
as represented in the previous paper on this subject, may be safely
accepted as a fair example of the Greek interpretation of this feature.
The Romans, on the other hand, not being able to understand and
appreciate the delicacy and deep propriety of this line, seized their
compasses, and, without thought or love, mechanically produced a gross
likeness to it by the union of two quarter-circles thus:—
[Illustration:
Greek.
Roman.]
Look upon this picture, and on this!—the one, refined, delicate,
sensitive, fastidious, severe, never repeated; the other, thoughtless,
vulgar, mathematical, common-sense, sensuous, reappearing ever with a
stolid monotony. And such is the sentiment pervading all Roman Art.
The conquerors took the letter from the Greeks, but never had the
slightest feeling for its Ideal. But even this letter, when they
transcribed it, writhed and was choked beneath hands which knew better
the iron caestus of the gladiator than the subtile and spiritual touch
of the artist.
We can have no stronger and more convincing proof that Architecture is
the truest record of the various phases of civilization than we find in
this. There was Greek Art, living and beautiful, full of inductive power
and capacities of new expressions; and there were the boundless wealth
and power of Rome. But Rome had her own ideas to enunciate; and so
possessed was she with the impulse to give form to these ideas, to
her ostentatious brutality, her barbarous pride, her licentious
magnificence, that she could not pause to learn calm and serious lessons
from the Greeks who walked her very forums, but, seizing their fair
sanctuaries, she stretched them out to fit her standard; she took the
pure Greek orders to decorate her arches, she piled these orders one
above the other, she bent them around her gigantic circuses, till at
last they had become acclimated and lost all their peculiar refinement,
all their intellectual and dignified humanity. Every moulding, every
capital, every detail was changed. The Romans had neither time nor
inclination to bestow any love or thought on the expressiveness and
tender meaning of subordinate parts. But out of the suggestions and
reminiscences of Greek lines they made a rigid and inflexible grammar of
their own,—a grammar to suit the mailed clang of Roman speech, which,
in its cruel martial strength, sought no refinements, no delicate
inflections from a distant Acropolis. The result was the coarse splendor
of the Empire. How utterly the still Greek Ideal was forgotten in this
noisy splendor, how entirely the chaste spirituality of the Greek line
was lost in the round and lusty curves which are the inevitable
footprints of Sensual Life, scarcely needs further amplification. I
have referred to the Ionic capital of the Erechtheum as containing a
microcosm of Attic Art, as presenting a fair epitome of the thought and
love which Hellenic artists offered in the worship of their gods. Turn
now to the Roman Ionic, as developed in any one of the most familiar
examples of it, in the Temple of Concord, near the Via Sacra, in the
Theatre of Marcellus, or the Colosseum. What a contrast! How formal,
mechanical, pattern-like it has become! The grace of its freedom, the
intellectual reserve of its strength, the secret humanity that thrilled
through all its lines, the divine Art which obtained such sweet repose
there,—all these are gone. Quality has yielded to quantity, and nothing
is left save those external characteristics which he who runs may read,
and he who pauses to study finds cold, vacant, and unsatisfactory. What
the Ionic capital of Rome wants, and what all Roman Art wants, is the
inward life, the living soul, which gives a peculiar expressiveness
to every individual work, and raises it infinitely above the dangerous
academic formalism of the schools.
In view of our own architecture, that which touches our own experience
and is of us and out of us, the danger of this academic formalism
cannot be too emphatically spoken of. When one carefully examines the
transition from Greek to Roman Art, he cannot but be impressed with the
fact, that the spirit which worked in this transition was the spirit of
a vulgar and greedy conqueror. To illustrate his rude magnificence
and to give a finer glory to his triumph, by right of conquest he
appropriated the Greek orders. But the living soul which was in those
orders, and gave them an infinity of meaning, an ever-varying poetry of
expression, could not be enslaved; nor could the worshipful Love which
created them find a home under the helmet of the soldier. So they became
lifeless; they were at once formally systematized and classified,
subjected to strict proportions and rules, and cast, as it were, in
moulds. This arrangement enabled the conqueror, without waste of time in
that long contemplative stillness out of which alone the beauty of the
true Ideal arises, out of which alone man can create like a god, to
avail himself at once of the Greek orders, not as a sensitive and
delicate means of fine aesthetic expression, but as a mechanical
language of contrasts of form to be used according to the exigencies of
design. The service of Greek Art was perfect freedom; enslaved at Rome,
it became academic. Thus systematized, it is true, it awes us by the
superb redundancy and sumptuousness of its use in the temples and forums
reared by that omnipresent power from Britannia to Baalbec. But the Art
which is systematized is degraded. Emerson somewhere remarks that man
descends to meet his fellows,—meaning, I suppose, that he has to
sacrifice some of the higher instincts of his individuality when he
desires to become social, and to meet his fellows on that low level of
society, which, made up as it is of many individualities, has none of
those secret aspirations which arise out of his own isolation. Society
is a systematic aggregation for the benefit of the multitude, but great
men lift themselves above it into a purer atmosphere. As Longfellow
says, "They rise like towers in the city of God." So with Art,—when we
systematize it for the indiscriminate use of thoughtless and unloving
men, we degrade it. And a singular proof of this is found in the fact
that the Roman academical orders never have anything in them reserved
from the common ken. They are superficial. They say all that they have
to say and express all that they have to express at once, and disturb
the mind with no doubt about any hidden meaning. They are at once
understood. All their intention and purpose are patent to the most
casual observer. He does not pause to inquire what motives actuated the
architect in the composition of any Corinthian capital, because he feels
that it is made according to the dictates of a rigid school created for
the convenience of an unartistic age, and there is no individual love or
aspiration in it.
Virtually, the Roman orders died in the first century of the Christian
era. We all know how, when the authority of the Pagan schools was gone
and the stern Vitruvian laws had become lost in the mists of antiquity,
these orders gradually fell from their strict allegiance, and imbibed a
new and healthy life from that rude but earnest Romanesque spirit, as in
Byzantium and Lombardy. And we know, too, how, in after Gothic times,
the spirit of the forgotten Aphrodite, Ideal Beauty, sometimes
lurked furtively in the image of the Virgin Mary, and inspired the
cathedral-builders with somewhat of the old creative impulse of Love.
But the workings of this impulse are singularly contrasted in the
productions of the Greek and Mediaeval artists. Nature, we have seen,
offered to the former mysterious and oracular Sibylline leaves,
profoundly significant of an indwelling humanity diffused through all
her woods and fields and mountains, all her fountains, streams, and
seas. Those meditative creators sat at her feet, earnest disciples,
but gathering rather the spirit and motive of her gifts than the gifts
themselves, making an Ideal and worshipping it as a deity. But for the
cathedral-builder, Dryads and Hamadryads, Oreads, Fauns, and Naiads did
not exist,—the Oak of Dodona uttered no oracles.
"A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."
To him Nature was an open book, from which he continually quoted with a
loving freedom, not to illustrate his own deep relationships with her,
but to give greater glory to that vast Power which stood behind her
beautiful text and was revealed to him in the new religion from
Palestine. He loved fruits and flowers and leaves because they were
manifestations of the Love of God; and he used them in his Art, not as
motives out of which to create abstract forms, out of which to eliminate
an ideal humanity, but to show his intense appreciation of the Divine
Love which gave them. Had he been a Pantheist, as Orpheus was, it is
probable he would have idealized these things and created Greek lines.
But believing in a distinct God, the supreme Originator of all things,
he was led to a worship of sacrifice and offerings, and needed no Ideal.
So, with a lavish hand, he appropriated the abundant Beauty of Nature,
imitating its external expressions with his careful chisel, and
suffering his sculptured lines to throw their wayward tendrils and
vagrant leaflets outside the strict limits of his spandrels. The life of
Gothic lines was in their sensuous liberty; the life of Greek lines
was in their intellectual reserve. Those arose out of a religion of
emotional ardor; these, out of a religion of philosophical reflection.
Hence, while the former were wild and picturesque, the latter were
serious, chaste, and very human.
Doubtless the nearest approach to ideal abstractions to be found in
Mediaeval Art is contained in that remarkable and very characteristic
system of foliations and cuspidations in tracery, which were suggested
by the leaf-forms in Nature. In this adaptation, when first it was
initiated in the earliest phases of Gothic, there is something like
Greek Love. The simple trefoil aperture seems a fair architectural
version of the clover-leaves. But the propriety of the use of these
clover-lines was hinted by a constructive exigency, the pointed arch.
The inevitable assimilation of the natural forms of leaves with this
feature was too evident not to be improved by such active and ardent
worshippers as the Freemasons. Thus originated Gothic tracery, which
afterwards branched out into such sumptuous and unrestrained luxury as
we find in the Decorated styles of England, the Flamboyant of France,
the late Geometric of Germany. Thus were the masons true to the zealous
and passionate enthusiasm of their religion. They used foliations, not
on account of their subjective significance, as the Greek artists did,
but on account of their objective and material applicability to the
decoration of their architecture. But no natural form was ever made
use of by a Greek artist merely because suggested by a constructive
exigency. It was the inward life of the thing itself which he saw, and
it was his love for it which made him adopt it. This love refined and
purified its object, and never would have permitted it to grow into any
wild and licentious Flamboyant under the serene and quiet skies of the
Aegean.
And so the Greek lines slept in patient marble through the long Dark
Ages, and no one came to awaken them into beautiful life again. No one,
consecrated Prince by the chrism of Nature, wandered into the old land
to kiss the Sleeping Beauty into life, and break the deep spell which
was around her kingdom.
Then came the Renaissance in the fifteenth century. But—alas that we
must say it!—it was fundamentally a Renaissance of error rather than of
truth. It was a revival of Roman Art, and not of Greek. The line which
we call Hogarth's, but which in reality is as old as human life and its
passions, was the key-note of it all. So wanton were the wreaths it
curled in the sight of the great masters of that period, that they all
yielded to its subtle fascinations and sinned,—sinned, inasmuch as they
devoted their vast powers to the revival and refinement of a sensuous
academic formalism, instead of breathing into all the architectural
forms and systems then known (a glorious material to work with) the pure
life of the Ideal. Had such men as Michel Angelo, San Gallo, Palladio,
Scamozzi, Vignola, San Michele, Bernini, been inspired by the highest
principles of Art, and known the thoughtful lines of Greece, so catholic
to all human moods, and so wisely adapted to the true spirit of
reform,—had they known these, all subsequent Art would have felt the
noble impulse, and been developed into that sphere of perfection
which we see rendering illustrious the primitive posts and lintels of
antiquity, and which we picture to ourselves in the imaginary future of
Hope as glorifying a far wider scope of human knowledge and ingenuity.
The Gothic architecture of the early part of the fifteenth century
was ripe for the spirit of healthy reform. It had been actively
accumulating, during the progress of the age of Christianity, a
boundless wealth of forms, a vast amount of constructive resources, and
material fit for innumerable architectural expressions of human power.
But in the last two centuries of this era the Love which gave life to
this architecture in its earlier developments gradually became swallowed
up in the Pride of the workman; and the luscious and abandoned luxury of
line led it farther and farther astray from the true path, till at last
it became like an unweeded garden run to seed, and there was no health
in it. In the year 1555, at Beauvais, the masonic workmen uttered their
last cry of defiance against the old things made new in Italy. Jean Wast
and François Maréchal of that town, two cathedral-builders, said,—"that
they had heard of the Church of St. Peter at Rome, and would maintain
that their Gothic could be built as high and on as grand a scale as the
antique orders of this Michel Angelo." And with this spirit they built a
wonderful pyramid over the cross of their cathedral. But, alas! it fell
in the fifth year of its arrogant pride, and this is the last we hear of
Gothic architecture in those times. Over the wild and picturesque ruins
the spirits of the old conquerors of Gaul once more strode with measured
tread, and began to set up their prevailing standards in the very
strongholds of Gothic supremacy. These conquerors trampled down the true
as well as the false in the Mediaeval régime, and utterly extinguished
that sole lamp of knowledge which had given light to the Ages of
Darkness and had kindled into life and beauty the cathedrals of Europe.
This was the error of the Renaissance. Its apostles would not recognize
the capacities existing in the great architecture they displaced,
for opening into a new life under the careful culture of a revived
knowledge. But they rooted it out bodily, and planted instead an exotic
of the schools. It was the re-birth of an Art system, which in its
former existence had developed in an atmosphere of conquest. It taught
them to kill, burn, and destroy all that opposed the progress of its
triumph. It was eminently revolutionary in its character, and its reign,
to all those multitudinous expressions of life and thought which had
arisen under the intermediate and more liberal dynasty, was one of
terror. Truly, it was a fierce and desolating instrument of reform.
It would be a tempting theme of speculation to follow in the imagination
the probable progress of a Greek, instead of a Roman Renaissance, into
such active, but misguided schools as those of Rouen and Tours in the
latter part of the fifteenth century,—of Rouen, with its Roger Arge,
its brothers Leroux, who built the old and famous Hôtel Bourgtheroulde
there, its Pierre de Saulbeaux, and all that legion of architects and
builders who were employed by the Cardinal Amboise in his castle of
Gaillon,—of Tours, with its Pierre Valence, its François Marchant, its
Viart and Colin Byart, out of whose rich and picturesque craft-spirit
arose the quaint fancies of the palaces of Blois and Chambord, and the
playfulness of many an old Flemish house-front. Such a Renaissance
would not have come among these venial sins of naïveté, this sportive
affluence of invention, to overturn ruthlessly and annihilate. Its
mission would inevitably have been, not to destroy, but to fulfil,—to
invest these strange results of human frailty and human power with that
grave ideal beauty which nineteen centuries before had done a good work
with the simple columns and architraves on the banks of the Ilissus, and
which, under the guidance of Love, would have made the arches and vaults
and buttresses and pinnacles of a later civilization illustrious with
even more eloquent expressions of refinement. For Greek lines do not
stand apart from the sympathies of men by any spirit of ceremonious and
exclusive rigor, as is undeniably the case with those which were adopted
from Rome. They are not a system, but a sentiment, which, wisely
directed, might creep into the heart of any condition of society, and
leaven all its architecture with a purifying and pervading power without
destroying its independence, where an inflexible system could assume a
position only by tyrannous oppression.
Yet when we examine the works of the Renaissance, after the system had
become more manageable and acclimated under later Italian and French
hands, we cannot but admire the skill with which the lightest fancies
and the most various expressions of human contrivance were reconciled to
the formal rules and proportions of the Roman orders. The Renaissance
palaces and civil buildings of the South and West of Europe are so full
of ingenuity, and the irrepressible inventive power of the artist moves
with so much freedom and grace among the stubborn lines of that revived
architecture, that we cannot but regard the results with a sort of
scholastic pride and pleasure. We cannot but ask ourselves, If the
spirit of those architects could obtain so much liberty under the
restrictions of such an unnatural and unnecessary despotism, what would
have been the result, if they had been put in possession of the very
principles of Hellenic Art, instead of these dangerous and complex
models of Rome, which were so far removed from the purity and simplicity
of their origin? Up to a late day, the great aim of the Renaissance has
been to interpret an advanced civilization with the sensuous line; and
so far as this line is capable of such expression, the result has been
satisfactory.
Thus four more weary centuries were added to the fruitless slumbers
of Ideal Beauty among the temples of Greece. Meanwhile, in turn, the
Byzantine, the Northman, the Frank, the Turk, and finally the bombarding
Venetian, left their rude invading footprints among her most cherished
haunts, and defiled her very sanctuary with the brutal touch of
barbarous conquest. But the kiss which was to dissolve this enchantment
was one of Love; and not Love, but cold indifference, or even scorn,
was in the hearts of the rude warriors. So she slept on undisturbed in
spirit, though broken and shattered in the external type, and it was
reserved for a distant future to be made beautiful by her disenchantment
and awakening.
In 1672, a pupil of the artist Lebrun, Jacques Carrey, accompanied the
Marquis Ollier de Nointee, ambassador of Louis XIV., to Constantinople.
On his way he spent two months at Athens, making drawings of the
Parthenon, then in an excellent state of preservation. These drawings,
more useful in an archaeological than an artistic point of view, are
now preserved in the Bibliothèque Impériale of Paris. In 1676, two
distinguished travellers, one a Frenchman, Dr. Spon, the other an
Englishman, Sir George Wheler, tarried at Athens, and gave valuable
testimony, in terms of boundless admiration, to the beauty and splendor
of the temples of the Acropolis and its neighborhood, then quite unknown
to the world. Other travellers followed these pioneers in the traces of
that old civilization. But in 1687 Königsmark and his Venetian forces
threw their hideous bombshells among the exquisite temples of the
Acropolis, and, igniting thereby the powder-magazine with which the
Turks had desecrated the Parthenon, tore into ruins that loveliest of
the lovely creations of Hellas. It was not until the publishing of the
famous work of Stuart and Revett on "The Antiquities of Athens," in
1762, that the world was made familiar with the external expressions
of Greek Architecture. This publication at once created a curious
revolution in the practice of architecture,—a revolution extending in
its effects throughout Europe. A fever arose to reproduce Greek temples;
and to such an extent was this vacant and thoughtless reproduction
carried out, that at one time it bid fair to supplant the older
Renaissance. The spirit of the new Renaissance, however, was one of mere
imitation, and had not the elements of life and power to insure its
ultimate success. No attempt was made to acclimate the exotic to suit
the new conditions it was thus suddenly called upon to fulfil; for the
sentiment which actuated it, and the Love with which it was created,
were not understood. It was the mere setting up of old forms in new
places; and the Grecian porticos and pediments and columns, which were
multiplied everywhere from the models supplied by Stuart and Revett,
and found their way profusely into this New World, still stare upon us
gravely with strange alien looks. The impetuous current of modern life
beats impatiently against that cumbrous solidity of peristyle which
sheltered well in its day the serene philosophers of the Agora, but
which is now the merest impediment in the way of modern traffic and
modern necessities. But presently the spirit of formalism, engendered by
the old Renaissance, took hold of the revived Greek lines, and
stiffened them into acquiescence with a base mathematical system, which
effectually deprived them of that life and reproductive power which
belong only to a state of artistic freedom. They were reduced to rule
and deadened in the very process of their revival.
So the Greek Ideal, though strangely transplanted thus into the noise of
modern streets, was not awakened from its long repose by the clatter and
roaring of our new civilization. As regarded the uses of life, it still
slept in petrifactions of Pentelic marble. And when those petrifactions
were repeated in modern quarries, it was merely the shell they gave; the
spirit within had not yet broken through.
Greek lines, therefore, owed their earliest revival to the vagaries of a
capricious taste, and the desire to give zest to the architecture of the
day by their novelty. It was not for the sake of the new life there was
in them, and of that pliable spirit of refinement so suited to the wise
re-birth of ancient Love in Art. It is not surprising that some of the
more modern masters of the old Renaissance, with whom that system had
become venerable, from its universal use as the vehicle by which
the greatest artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had
expressed their thoughts and inspirations, regarded with peculiar
distrust these outlandish innovations on the exclusive walks of their
own architecture. For they saw only a few external forms which the
beautiful principles of Hellenic Art had developed to fit an old
civilization; the applicability of these primary principles to the
refinement of the architectural expressions of a modern state of society
they could not of course comprehend. About the year 1786, we find Sir
William Chambers, the leading architect of his day in England, in his
famous treatise on "The Decorative Part of Civil Architecture," giving
elaborate and emphatic expression to his contempt of that Greek Art,
which had presented itself to him in a guise well suited to cause
misapprehension and error. "It must candidly be confessed," he says,
"that the Grecians have been far excelled by other nations, not only in
the magnitude and grandeur of their structures, but likewise in point of
fancy, ingenuity, variety, and elegant selection." A heresy, indeed!
Two distinguished German artists—the one, Schinkel of Berlin, born in
1781,—the other, Klenze of Munich, born in 1784—were children when
Chambers uttered these treasonable sentiments concerning Greek Art.
Later, at separate times, these artists visited Greece, and so filled
themselves with the feeling and sentiment of the Art there, so
consecrated their souls with the appreciative study of its divine Love,
that the patient Ideal at last awoke from its long slumbers, entered
into the breathing human temples thus prepared for it by the pure rites
of Aphrodite, and once more lived. Thus in the opening years of the
nineteenth century was a new and reasonable Renaissance, not of an
antique type, but of a spirit which had the gift of immortal youth, and
uttered oracles of prophecy to these chosen Pythians of Art.
Through Schinkel, the pure Hellenic style, only hinted at previously in
the attempts of less inspired Germans, such as Langhaus, who embodied
his crude conceptions in the once celebrated Brandenburg Gate, was
fairly and grandly revived in the Hauptwache Theatre and the beautiful
Museum and the Bauschule and Observatory of Berlin. He competed with
Klenze in a series of designs for the new palace at Athens, rich with a
truly royal array of courts, corridors, saloons, and colonnades. But the
evil fate which ever hangs over the competitions of genius was baleful
even here, and the barrack-like edifice of Gütner was preferred. His
latest conception was a design of a summer palace at Orianda, in the
Crimea, for the Empress of Russia, where the purity of the old Greek
lines was developed into the poetry of terraces and hanging-gardens and
towers, far-looking over the Black Sea. Schinkel was called the Luther
of Architecture; and the spiritual serenity which he breathed into the
pomp and ceremonious luxury of the Art of his day seems to give him some
title to this distinction. Yet, with all the freedom and originality
with which he wrought out the new advent, he was perhaps rather too
timid than too bold in his reforms,—adhering too strictly to the
original letter of Greek examples, especially with regard to the orders.
He could not entirely shake off the old incubus of Rome.
And so, though in a less degree, with Klenze. When, in 1825, Louis of
Bavaria came to the throne, he was appointed Government Architect, and
in this capacity gave shape to the noble dreams of that monarch, in the
famous Glyptothèque, the Pinacothèque, the palace, and those civil and
ecclesiastical buildings which render Munich one of the most monumental
cities of Europe. It was his confessed aim to take up the work of the
Renaissance artists, having regard to our increased knowledge of that
antique civilization of which the masters of the sixteenth century could
study only the most complex developments, and those models of Rome which
were farthest removed from the pure fountain-head of Greece. "To-day,"
he said, "put in possession of the very principles of Hellenic Art,
we can apply them to all our actual needs,—learning from the Greeks
themselves to preserve our independence, and at the same time to be duly
novel and unrestrained according to circumstances." These are certainly
noble sentiments; and one cannot but wish, that, when, in 1830, Klenze
was called upon to prepare plans for the grand Walhalla of Bavaria, he
had remembered his sublime theory and worked up to its spirit, instead
of recalling the Parthenon in his exterior and the Olympian temple of
Agrigentum in his interior. The last effort of this distinguished artist
was the building of three superb palaces for the museum of the Emperor
at St. Petersburg, finished in 1851.
The seed thus planted fell upon good ground and brought forth a
hundred-fold. Then, throughout Germany, the scholastic formalism of the
old Renaissance began to fall into disrepute, and a finer feeling for
the eloquence of pure lines began to show itself. The strict limitations
of the classic orders were no longer recognized as impassable; a
sentiment of artistic freedom, a consciousness of enlarged resources,
a far wider range of form and expression, were evident in town and
country, in civil and ecclesiastical structures; and with all this
delightful and refreshing liberty was mingled that peculiar refinement
of line which was revived from Greece and was the secret of this change.
It was not over monumental edifices alone that this calm and thoughtful
spirit was breathed, but the most playful fancies of domestic
architecture derived from it an increased grace and purity, and the
study of Love moved over them, elegant and light-footed as Camilla.
"The flower she touched on dipped and rose,
And turned to look at her."
This revival of Hellenic principles is now infusing life into modern
German designs; and so well are these principles beginning to be
understood, that architects do not content themselves with the mere
reproduction of that narrow range of motives which was uttered in the
temples of heroic Greece, but, under these new impulses, they gather in
for their use all that has been done in ancient or modern Italy, in the
Romanesque of Europe, in the Gothic period, in Saracenic or Arabic Art,
in all the expressions of the old Renaissance. By the very necessity
of the Greek line, they are rendered catholic and unexcluding in their
choice of forms, but fastidious and hesitating in their interpretation
of them into this new language of Art. Thus the good work is going on in
Germany, and architecture lives there, thanks to those two illustrious
pilgrims who brought back from the land of epics, not only the
scallop-shells upon their shoulders, but in their hearts the
consecration of Ideal Beauty.
According to the usual custom, in the year 1827, a scholar of the École
des Beaux Arts in Paris, having achieved the distinguished honor of
being named Grand Pensionnaire of Architecture for that year,—was
sent to the Académie Française in the Villa Medici at Rome, to pursue
his studies there for five years at the expense of the Government. This
scholar was Henri Labrouste. While in Italy, his attention was directed
to the Greek temples of Paestum. Trained, as he had been, in the
strictest academic architecture of the Renaissance, he was struck by
many points of difference between these temples and the Palladian
formulae which had hitherto held despotic sway over his studies. In
grand and minor proportions, in the disposition of triglyphs in the
frieze, in mouldings and general sentiment, he perceived a remarkable
freedom from the restraints of his school,—a freedom which, so far from
detracting from the grandeur of the architecture, gave to it a degree of
life and refinement which his appreciative eye now sought for in vain
among the approved models of the Academy. Studying these new revelations
with love and veneration, it was not long before the pure Hellenic
spirit, confined in the severe peristyles and cellas of the Paestum
temples, entered into his heart, with all its elastic capacities, all
its secret and mysterious sympathies for the new life which had sprung
up during its long imprisonment in those stained and shattered marbles.
Labrouste, on his return to Paris, in 1830, surprised the grave
professors of the Academy, Le Bas, Baltard, and the rest, by presenting
to them, as the result of his studies, carefully elaborated drawings
of the temples at Paestum. Witnessing, with pious horror, the grave
departures from their rules contained in the drawings of their former
favorite, they charged him with error, even as a copyist. True to their
prejudices, their eyes did not penetrate beyond the outward type, and
they at once began to find technical objections. They told him, never
did such an absurdity occur in classic architecture as a triglyph on a
corner! Palladio and the Italian masters never committed such an obvious
crime against propriety, nor could an instance of it be found in all
Roman antiquities. It was in vain that poor Labrouste upheld the
accuracy of his work, and reminded the Academy that among the Roman
models no instance had been found of a Doric corner,—that this order
occurred only so ruined that no corner was left for examination, or in
the grand circumferences of the Colosseum and the Theatre of Marcellus,
where, from the nature of the case, no corner could be. The professors
still maintained the integrity of their long-established ordinances,
and, to disprove the assertions of the young pretender, even sent
a commission to examine the temples in question. The result was a
confirmation of the fact, the ridicule of Paris, the consequent branding
of the young artist as an architectural heretic, and a continued
persecution of him by the École des Beaux Arts. Undaunted, however,
Labrouste established an atelier in Paris, to which flocked many
intelligent students, sympathizing with the courage which could be
so strong in the conviction of truth as to brave in its defence the
displeasure of the powerful hierarchy of the School.
Thus was founded the new Renaissance in France; and, in this genial
atmosphere, Greek lines began to exercise an influence far more thorough
and healthy than had hitherto been experienced in the whole history of
Art. To the lithe and elegant fancy of the French this Revelation was
especially grateful. For the youth of this nation soon learned that
in these newly opened paths, their invention and sentiment, so long
straitened and confined within the severe limits of the old system,
could move with the utmost freedom, and at the same time be preserved
from licentious excess by the delicate spirit of the new lines. Thus
natural fervor, grace, and fecundity of thought found here a most
welcome outlet.
For some time the designs of the new school were not recognized in the
competitions of the École des Beaux Arts; but when, in the course of
Nature, some two or three of the more strenuous and bigoted professors
of Palladio's golden rules were removed from the scene of contest, the
Romantique (for so the new system had been named) was received at
length into the bosom of the architectural church, and now it may be
justly deemed the distinctive architectural expression of French Art.
Labrouste was not alone in his efforts; but Duban and Constant Dufeux
seconded him with genius and energy. Most of the important buildings
which have been erected in France within the last six or eight years
have either been unreservedly and frankly in the new style, or been
refined by more limited applications of Hellenic principles. Even the
revived Mediaeval school, which, under the distinguished leadership of
M. Viollet le Duc and the lamented M. J.B.A. Lassus, has lately been
strengthened to a remarkable degree in France, and which shared with
the Romantique the displeasure of the Academy,—even this has tacitly
acknowledged the power of Greek lines, and instinctively suffered them
to purify, to a certain degree, the old grotesque Gothic license. Most
of the modern buildings of Paris along the new Boulevards, around the
tower of St. Jacques, and wherever else the activity of the Emperor
has made itself felt in the improvements of the French capital, are by
masters or pupils of the Romantique persuasion, and, in their design,
are distinguished by that tenderness of Love and earnestness of Thought
which are the fountains of living Art. One of the most remarkable
peculiarities of this school is, that it brings out of every mind which
studies and builds in it strong traits of individuality; so that every
work appears as if its author had something particular to express in
it,—something to say with especial grace and emphasis. The ordinary
decorations of windows and doors are not made in conventional shapes,
as of yore, but are highly idiosyncratic. The designer had a distinct
thought about this window or that door,—and when he would use his
thought to ornament these features, he idealized it with his Greek lines
to make it architectural, just as a poet attunes his thought to the
harmony and rhythm of verse. Antique prejudices, bent into rigid
conformity with antique rubrics, are often shocked at the strange
innovations of these new Dissenters from the faith of Palladio and
Philibert Delorme,—shocked at the naked humanity in the new works,
and would cover it with the conventional fig-leaves prescribed in the
homilies of Vignola. Laymen, accustomed to the cold architectural
proprieties of the old Renaissance, and habituated to the formalities
of the five orders, the prudish decorum of Italian window-dressings and
pediments and pilasters and scrolls, are apt to be surprised at such
strange dispositions of unprecedented and heretical features, that the
intention of the building in which they occur is at once patent to the
most casual observer, and the story of its destination told with the
eloquence of a poetical and monumental language. All great revolutions
have proved how hard it is to break through the crust of custom, and
this has been no exception to the rule; yet in justice it must be said
that every intelligent mind, every eye possessing the "gifted simplicity
of vision", to use a happy phrase of Hawthorne's, recognizes the truth
and wisdom there are in the blessed renovations of the Romantique,
and looks upon them as the sweeps of a besom clearing away the dust
and cobwebs which ages of prejudice have spread thickly around the
magnificent art of architecture.
Unlike the unwieldy and ponderous classic or Italian systems, whose
pride cannot stoop to anything beneath the haughtiest uses of life
without being broken into the whims of the grotesque and Rococo, the
Romantique has already exhibited the graceful ease with which it may
be applied to the most playful as well as the most serious employments
of Art. It has decorated the perfumer's shop on the Boulevards with the
most delicate fancies woven out of the odor of flowers and the finest
fabrics of Nature, and, in the hands of Labrouste, has built the great
Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève, the most important work with pure Greek
lines, and perhaps the most exquisite, while it is one of the most
serious, of modern buildings. The lore of the classics and the knowledge
of the natural world, idealized and harmonized by affectionate study,
are built up in its walls, and, internally and externally, it is a work
of the highest Art. The Romantique has also been used with especial
success in funereal monuments. Structures of this character, demanding
earnestly in their composition the expression of human sentiment, have
hitherto been in most cases unsatisfactory, as they have been built
out of a narrow range of Renaissance, Egyptian and Gothic motives,
originally invented for far different purposes, and, since then,
classified, as it were, for use, and reduced to that inflexible system
out of which have come the formal restrictions of modern architecture.
Hence these motives have never come near enough to human life, in its
individual characteristics, to be plastic for the expression of those
emotions to which we desire to give the immortality of stone in memory
of departed friends. The Romantique, however, confined to no rigid
types of external form, out of its noble freedom is capable of giving
"a local habitation and a name" to a thousand affections which hitherto
have wandered unseen from heart to heart, or been palpable only in words
and gestures which disturb our sympathies for a while and then die.
Probably the most remarkable indication of this capacity, as yet shown,
is contained in a tomb erected by Constant Dufeux in the Cimetière du
Sud, near Paris, for the late Admiral Dumont d'Urville. This structure
contains in its outlines a symbolic expression of human life, death,
and immortality, and in its details an architectural version of the
character and public services of the distinguished deceased. The finest
and most eloquent resources of color and the chisel are brought to bear
on the work; and the whole, combined by a very sensitive and delicate
feeling for proportion, thus embodies one of the most expressive elegies
ever written. The tomb of Madame Delaroche, née Vernet, in the
Cimetière Montmartre, by Duban, is another remarkable instance of this
elastic capacity of Greek lines; and though taken frankly, in its
general form, from a common Gothic type, its chaste and graceful
freedom from Gothic restrictions in detail gives it a life and poetic
expressiveness which must be exceedingly grateful to the Love which
commanded its erection.
Paris thus affords us, in its modern architecture, a happy proof of the
inevitable reforming and refining tendencies of the abstract lines
of Greece, when properly understood and fairly applied. Under their
influence old things have been made new, and the coldness and hardness
of Academic Art have been warmed and softened into life. Through the
agency of the Romantique school, perhaps more new and directly
symbolic architectural expressions have been uttered within the last
four years than within the last four centuries combined. Like the
gestures of pantomime, which constitute an instinctive and universal
language, these abstract lines, coming out of our humanity and rendered
elegant by the idealization of study, are restoring to architecture its
highest capacity of conveying thought in a monumental manner. One of the
most dangerous results of that eclecticism which the advanced state of
our archaeological knowledge has made the principal characteristic
of modern design consists in the fatal facility thus afforded us
of availing ourselves of vast resources of forms and combinations
ready-made to suit almost all the exigencies of composition, as we have
understood it. The public has thus been made so familiar with the set
variations of classic orders and Palladian windows and cornices, with
all manner of Gothic chamfers and cuspidations and foliations, and the
other conventional symbols of architecture, which undeniably have more
of knowledge than love in them,—so accustomed have the people
become to these things, that the great art of which these have been the
only language now almost invariably fails to strike any responsive chord
in the human heart or to do any of that work which it is the peculiar
province of the fine arts to accomplish. Instead of leading the age, it
seems to lag behind it, and to content itself with reflecting into our
eyes the splendor of the sun which has set, instead of facing the east
and foretelling the glory which is coming. Architecture, properly
conceived, should always contain within itself a direct appeal to the
sense of fitness and propriety, the common-sense of mankind, which is
ever ready to recognize reason, whether conveyed by the natural motions
of the mute or the no less natural motions of lines. Now history has
proved to us, as has been shown, how, when the eloquence of these
simple, instinctive lines has been used as the primary element of
design, great eras of Art have arisen, full of the sympathies of
humanity, immortal records of their age. It cannot be denied, on the
other hand, that our eclectic architecture, popularly speaking, is not
comprehended, even by the most intelligent of cultivated people; and
this is plainly because it is based on learning and archeology,
instead of that natural love which scorns the limitations of any other
authorities and precedents than those which can be found in the human
heart, where the true architecture of our time is lying unsuspected,
save in those half-conscious Ideals which yearn for free expression in
Art.
Let our artists turn to Greece, and learn how, in the meditative repose
of that antiquity, these Ideals arose to life beneficent with the
baptism of grace, and became visible in the loveliness of a hundred
temples. Let them there learn how in our own humanity is the essence of
form as a language, and that to create, as true artists, we must
know ourselves and our own distinctive capacities for the utterance of
monumental history. After this sublime knowledge comes the necessity
of the knowledge of precedent. The great Past supplies us with the raw
material, with orders, colonnades and arcades, pediments, consoles,
cornices, friezes and architraves, buttresses, battlements, vaults,
pinnacles, arches, lintels, rustications, balustrades, piers, pilasters,
trefoils, and all the innumerable conventionalities of architecture. It
is plainly our duty not to revive and combine these in those cold and
weary changes which constitute modern design, but to make them live and
speak intelligibly to the people through the eloquent modifications of
our own instinctive lines of Life and Beauty.
The riddle of the modern Sphinx is, How to create a new architecture?
and we find the Oedipus who shall solve it concealed in our own hearts.
* * * * *
Virginia, which began by volunteering as peacemaker in our civil
troubles, seems likely to end by being their battleground; as Mr.
Pickwick, interfering between the belligerent rival editors, only
brought upon his own head the united concussion of their carpet-bags.
And as Dickens declares that the warriors engaged far more eagerly in
that mimic strife, on discovering that all blows were to be received
by deputy, so there is evidently an increased willingness to deal hard
knocks on both sides, in the present case, so long as it is clear that
only Virginia will take them. Maryland, under protection of our army,
adroitly contrives to shift the scene of action farther South. The Gulf
States, with profuse courtesies for the Old Dominion, consent to shift
it farther North. The Southern Confederacy has talked about
paying Richmond the "compliment" of selecting it for the seat of
government;—as if a bully, about to be lynched in his own house by the
crowd, should compliment his next-door neighbor by climbing in at his
window. It is very pleasant to have a hospitable friend; but it is
counting on his hospitality rather too strongly, when you make choice of
his apartments to be tarred and feathered in.
Thus fades the fancy of an "independent neutrality" for the Old
Dominion. It ought to fade;—for neutrality is a crime, where one's
mother's life is at stake; and the Border theory of independence only
reminds one of Pitt's definition of an independent statesman, "a
statesman not to be depended on". How sad has been the decline of
Virginia! How strange, that in 1790, of the ten American post-offices
yielding more than a thousand dollars annually, that stately old
commonwealth held five! Now "a poverty-stricken State", by confession of
her own newspapers,—beleaguered, blockaded,—with no imports but
hungry and moneyless soldiers, and no exports save fugitives of all
colors,—what has she to hope from the present warfare? Elsewhere riches
have wings; in Virginia they are yet more transitory, having legs. Two
hundred million dollars' worth of her property has become unsalable, if
not worthless, within two months. She has but two great staples: tobacco
to send North, and slaves to send South. The slaves at present go only
to the wrong point of the compass, at rates remunerative to themselves
alone; and the tobacco-trade, for this season, will not even end in
smoke.
But that which is now the condition of Virginia must ultimately be
the condition of the other seceding States. The tide of Secession has
already turned, and such tides never turn twice. The conspirators in
Maryland and Missouri had but one opportunity, and it was lost; with it
also went the whole cause of the Secessionists. For one week the North
shuddered, knowing the defenceless condition of Washington. Now no
Northern man shudders, except those whose Southern female cousins have
not yet found a refuge with the household gods of the eminent Senator
from Texas.
The man who ever doubted that the first gun fired by the insurgents
would instantly unite the nation against them knew as little of the
American people as if he were editor of the London "Times." There is no
chemical solvent like gunpowder. Even the Mexican War, utterly opposed
to the moral convictions of the majority of Northern men, swept them
away in such a current that the very party which opposed it could find
no path to the Presidency but for its chief hero. Had the present
outbreak occurred far less favorably than it has, had the discretion of
President Lincoln been much less, or that of Mr. Davis much greater,
still the unanimity would have been merely a question of time, and
the danger of Washington would have reconciled all minor feuds. The
Democratic party would inevitably have embraced the war, when once
declared; Douglas would have made speeches for it, Buchanan subscribed
money for it, and Butler joined in it; Bennett would still have floated
triumphant on the tide of zeal, and Caleb Cushing still have offered to
the Government his cavalry company of one. It is a grace not given to
any American party, to stand out long against the enthusiasm of a war.
No doubt the Secession leaders have treated us very handsomely, as to
amount of provocation. It is rare that any great contest begins by a
blow so unequivocal as the bombardment of Fort Sumter; and rare in
recent days for any set of belligerents to risk the ignominy of
privateering. But, after all, it is the startling social theories
announced by the new "government" which form the chief strength of its
enemies. Either slavery is essential to a community, or it must be fatal
to it,—there is no middle ground; and the Secessionists have taken one
horn of the dilemma with so delightful a frankness as to leave us no
possible escape from taking the other. Never, in modern days, has there
been a conflict in which the contending principles were so clearly
antagonistic. The most bigoted royal house in Europe never dreamed of
throwing down the gauntlet for the actual ownership of man by man. Even
Russia never fought for serfdom, and Austria has only enslaved nations,
not individuals. In civil wars, especially, all historic divergences
have been trivial compared to ours, so far as concerned the avowed
principles of strife. In the French wars of the Fronde, the only
available motto for anybody was the Tout arrive en France, "Anything
may happen in France," which gayly recognized the absurd chaos of the
conflict. In the English civil wars, the contending factions first
disagreed upon a shade more or less of royal prerogative, and it took
years to stereotype the hostility into the solid forms with which we now
associate it. Even at the end of that contest, no one had ventured to
claim such a freedom as our Declaration of Independence asserts, on
the one side,—nor to recognize the possibility of such a barbarism
as Jefferson Davis glorifies, on the other. The more strongly the
Secessionists state their cause, the more glaringly it is seen to differ
from any cause for which any sane person has taken up arms since the
Roman servile wars. Their leaders may be exhibiting very sublime
qualities; all we can say is, as Richardson said of Fielding's heroes,
that their virtues are the vices of a decent man.
We are now going through not merely the severest, but the only danger
which has ever seriously clouded our horizon. The perils which harass
other nations are mostly traditional for us. Apart from slavery,
democratic government is long since un fait accompli, a fixed fact,
and the Anglo-American race can no more revert in the direction of
monarchy than of the Saurian epoch. Our geographical position frees us
from foreign disturbance, and there is no really formidable internal
trouble, slavery alone excepted. Let us come out of this conflict
victorious in the field, escaping also the more serious danger of
conquering ourselves by compromise, and the case of free government is
settled past cavil. History may put up her spy-glass, like Wellington at
Waterloo, saying, "The field is won. Let the whole line advance."
There has been a foolish suspicion that the North was strong in
diplomacy and weak in war. The contrary is the case. We are proving
ourselves formidable enough in war to cover our shortcomings in
diplomacy. How narrowly we escaped demoralizing ourselves, at the last
moment before Congress adjourned, by some concession which would have
destroyed our consistency without strengthening our position! If we
could even now bind our generals to imitate our Cabinet in its admirable
and novel policy of silence,—to eschew pen and ink as carefully as if
they were in training for the Presidency! The country is safe so long as
they shut their mouths and open their batteries.
The ordeal by battle is a stern test of the solid power of a nation.
There must always be some great quality to produce great military
superiority,—skill, or daring, or endurance, or numbers, or wealth,
or all together. Except the first two, neither of these special
qualifications has been even claimed by the Secessionists; and these two
have been taken for granted with such superfluous boastfulness as to
yield strong internal evidence against the claim. Certainly their
general strategy, up to this moment, has yielded not a single evidence
of far-sighted judgment or conscious power, while it has shown decided
glimpses of weakness and indecision. Indeed, how can an army like theirs
be strong? Its members mostly unaccustomed to steady exertion or precise
organization; without mechanic skill or invention; without cash or
credit; fettered in their movements by the limited rolling stock of
their scanty railways; tethered to their own homes by the fear of
insurrection;—what element of solid strength have they, to set against
these things? In the present state of the world, strong in peace is
strong in war. In modern times an army of heroes is useless without
facilities for arming, transporting, and feeding it, to say nothing of
the more ignoble circumstance of pay. Considerations of simple political
economy render it almost impossible for a slaveholding army to be strong
collectively, nor do the habits of Southern life usually fit its members
to be strong singly.
In remembering the Battle of New Orleans, we forget that the Southwest
was then a region of hardy pioneers, such as are now rather to be sought
for in Kansas and California. The famous Tennessee riflemen of that day
were not necessarily slaveholders, and their legitimate descendants are
yet to be found among the brave men who rally round the nearest approach
to Andrew Jackson whom the State now boasts,—a tolerable fac-simile
both as to character and etymology,—Andrew Johnson. There is no need of
disparaging the personal courage of any man, and the Southern army has
some good officers,—too good, probably, in spite of themselves, to
bring to bear their clearest judgment and their best energies in
striking down the flag they have all sworn to die for. They have
eminent foreign advisers also, or one at least; for Mr. W.H. Russell,
self-appointed plenipotentiary near the Court of St. Jefferson, is
said to have lent the aid of his valuable military experience to that
commanding officer so appropriately named Captain Bragg. But, Bragg or
no brag, it is almost a moral impossibility that a slaveholding army
should be strong.
The Secessionists have suggested to us a fatal argument. "The superior
race must control the inferior." Very well; if they insist on invoking
the ordeal by battle to decide which is the superior, let it be so. It
will be found that they have made the common mistake of confounding
barbarism with strength. Because the Southern masses are as ignorant of
letters and of arts as the Scottish Highlanders, they infer themselves
to be as warlike. But even the brave and hardy Highlanders proved
powerless against the imperfect military resources of England, a century
ago, and it is not easy to see why those who now parody them should
fare better. The absence of the alphabet does not necessarily prove the
presence of strength, nor is the ignorance of all useful arts the best
preparation for the elaborate warfare of modern times. The nation is
grown well weary of this sham "chivalry," that would sell Bayard or Du
Gueselin at auction, if it could be shown that the mother of either had
a drop of marketable blood in her veins. It had always been charitably
fancied that in South Carolina at least there was some remnant of more
knightly honor, until a kind Providence sent Preston S. Brooks to dispel
the illusion. It may be possible that even a brave man, in some moment
of insane inconsistency, may commit some act which is the consummation
of all cowardice; but it is utterly and absolutely impossible that any
brave community should approve it. Time has long since carried the
perpetrator of that dastardly outrage to a higher tribunal, but nothing
can ever redeem the State of his birth from the crowning shame of its
indorsement.
It is not recorded whether the proverbial English army in Flanders lied
as terribly as they swore; the genius of the nation did not take that
direction. But if they did, they have now met their match in audacity of
falsehood. Captain Bobadil in the play, who submitted a plan of killing
off an army of forty thousand men by the prowess of twenty, each man to
do his twenty per diem in successive single combats, might have raised
his proposed score of heroes among any handful of Secessionists. There
seems to be no one to stop these prodigious fellows as a party of
Buford's men were once checked by their commander, in the writer's
hearing, on their way down the Missouri River, in 1856. "Boys," quoth
the contemptuous official, "you had better shut up. Whenever we came in
sight of the enemy, you always took a vote whether to fight or run,
and you always voted to run." Then the astounding tales they have told
respecting our people, down to the last infamous fabrication of "Booty
and Beauty," as the supposed war-cry for the placid Pennsylvanians!
Booty, forsooth! In the words of the "Richmond Whig," "there is more
rich spoil within a square mile of New York and Philadelphia than can be
found in the whole of the poverty-stricken State of Virginia"; and the
imaginary war-cry suggests Wilkes's joke about the immense plunder
carried off by some freebooter from the complete pillage of seven Scotch
isles: he reëmbarked with three-and-sixpence.
It might not be wise to claim that the probable lease of life for our
soldiers is any longer than for the Secessionists, but it certainly
looks as if ours would have the credit of dying more modestly. Indeed,
the men of the Free States, as was the wont of their ancestors, have
made up their minds to this fight with a slow reluctance which would
have been almost provoking but for the astonishing promptness which
marked their action when once begun. It is interesting to notice how
clearly the future is sometimes foreseen by foreigners, while still
veiled from the persons most concerned. Thus, twelve years before the
Battle of Bunker's Hill, the Duc de Choiseul predicted and prepared for
the separation of the American colonies from England. One month after
that, the Continental Congress still clung to the belief that they
should escape a division. And so, some seven years ago, the veteran
French advocate Guépin, in a most able essay suggested by the "Burns
affair" in Boston, prophesied civil war in America within ten years.
"Une grande lutte s'apprête donc," he wrote; "A great contest is at
hand."
Thus things looked to foreigners, both in 1775 and in 1854, while in
both cases our people were yielding only step by step to the inevitable
current which swept events along. It is the penalty of caution, that it
sometimes appears, even to itself, like irresolution, or timidity. Not a
foolish charge has been brought against Northern energy in this contest,
that was not urged equally in the time of the Revolution. The royal
troops thought Massachusetts as easy to subdue as the South
Carolinians affect to think, and expressed it in almost the same
language:—"Whenever it comes to blows, he that can run the fastest will
think himself best off." The revolutionists admitted that "the people
abroad have too generally got the idea that the Americans are all
cowards and poltroons." A single regiment, it was generally asserted,
could march triumphant through New England. The people took no pains to
deny it. The guard in Boston captured thirteen thousand cartridges at
a stroke. The people did not prevent it. A citizen was tarred and
feathered in the streets by the royal soldiery, while the band played
"Yankee Doodle." The people did not interfere. "John Adams writes, there
is a great spirit in the Congress, and that we must furnish ourselves
with artillery and arms and ammunition, but avoid war, if possible,—if
possible." At last, one day, these deliberate people finally made up
their minds that it was time to rise,—and when they rose, everything
else fell. In less than a year afterwards, Boston being finally
evacuated, one of General Howe's mortified officers wrote home to
England, in words which might form a Complete Letter-Writer for every
army-officer who has turned traitor, from Beauregard downward,—"Bad
times, my dear friend. The displeasure I feel in the small share I have
in our present insignificancy is so great, that I do not know the thing
so desperate I would not undertake, in order to change our situation."
It is fortunate that the impending general contest has also been
recently preceded by a local one, which, though waged under
circumstances far less favorable to the North, yet afforded important
hints by its results. It was worth all the cost of Kansas to have
the lesson she taught, in passing through her ordeal. It was not the
Emigrant Aid Society which gave peace at last to her borders, nor was it
her shifting panorama of evanescent governors; it was the sheer physical
superiority of her Free-State emigrants, after they took up arms. Kansas
afforded the important discovery, as some Southern officers once naïvely
owned at Lecompton, that "Yankees would fight." Patient to the verge
of humiliation, the settlers rose at last only to achieve a victory so
absurdly rapid that it was almost a new disappointment; the contest was
not so much a series of battles as a succession of steeplechases, of
efforts to get within shot,—Missouri, Virginia, and South Carolina
invariably disappearing over one prairie-swell, precisely as the
Sharp's rifles of the emigrants appeared on the verge of the next. The
slaveholders had immense advantages: many of the settlers were in league
with them to drive out the remainder; they had the General Government
always aiding them, more or less openly, with money, arms, provisions,
horses, men, and leaders; they had always the Missouri border to retreat
upon, and the Missouri River to blockade. Yet they failed so miserably,
that every Kansas boy at last had his story to tell of the company of
ruffians whom he had set scampering by the casual hint that Brown or
Lane was lurking in the bushes. The terror became such a superstition,
that the largest army which ever entered Kansas—three thousand men, by
the admission of both sides—turned back before a redoubt at Lawrence
garrisoned by only two hundred, and retreated over the border without
risking an engagement.
It is idle to say that these wore not fair specimens of Southern
companies. They were composed of precisely the same material as the
flower of the Secession army,—if flower it have. They were members of
the first families, planters' sons and embryo Wigfalls. South Carolina
sent them forth, like the present troops, with toasts and boasts and
everything but money. They had officers of some repute; and they had
enthusiasm with no limit except the supply of whiskey. Slavery was
divine, and Colonel Buford was its prophet. The city of Atchison was
before the dose of 1857 to be made the capital of a Southern republic.
Kansas was to be conquered: "We will make her a Slave State, or form a
chain of locked arms and hearts together, and die in the attempt." Yet
in the end there were no chains, either of flesh or iron,—no chains,
and little dying, but very liberal running away. Thus ended the war in
Kansas. It seems impossible that Slavery should not make in this case a
rather better fight, where all is at stake. But it is well to remember
that no Border Ruffian of Secession can now threaten more loudly, swear
more fiercely, or retreat more rapidly, than his predecessors did then.
One does not hear much lately of that pleasant fiction, so abundant a
year or two ago, that North and South really only needed to visit each
other and become better acquainted. How cordially these endearing words
sounded, to be sure, from the lips of Southern gentlemen, as they sat at
Northern banquets and partook unreluctantly of Northern wine! Can those
be the gay cavaliers who are now uplifting their war-whoops with such a
modest grace at Richmond and Montgomery? Can the privations of the
camp so instantaneously dethrone Bacchus and set up Mars? It is to be
regretted; they appeared more creditably in their cups, and one would
gladly appeal from Philip sober to Philip drunk. Intimate intercourse
has lost its charm. New York merchants more than ever desire an
increased acquaintance with the coffers of their repudiating debtors;
but so far as the knowledge of their peculiar moral traits is concerned,
enough is as good as a feast. No Abolitionist has ever dared to pillory
the slave-propagandists so conspicuously as they are doing it for
themselves every day. Sumner's "Barbarism of Slavery" seemed tolerably
graphic in its time, but how tamely it reads beside the "New Orleans
Delta"!
A Scotchman once asked Dr. Johnson what opinion he would form of
Scotland from what strangers had said of it.
"Sir," said the Doctor, "I should think it a region of the earth to be
avoided, so far as convenient."
"But how," persisted the patriot, "if you listened to what its natives
say of it?"
"Then, Sir," roared Old Obstinacy, "I should avoid it altogether."
Take the seceded States upon their own showing, and it is absurd to
suppose that they can ever resume their former standing in the nation.
Are there any stronger oaths than their generals have broken, any closer
ties to honesty than their financiers have spurned, any deeds more
damning than their legislatures have voted thanks for? No one supposes
that the individual traitors can be restored to confidence, that Twiggs
can re-dye his reputation, or any deep-sea-soundings fish up Maury's
drowned honor. But the influence of the States is gone with that of
their representatives. They may worship the graven image of President
Lincoln in Mobile; they may do homage to the ample stuffed regimentals
of General Butler in Charleston; but it will not make the nation forget.
Could their whole delegation resume its seat in Congress to-morrow, with
the three-fifths representation intact, it would not help them. Can we
ever trust them to build a ship or construct a rifle again? No time,
no formal act can restore the past relations, so long as slavery shall
live. It is easy for the Executive to pardon some convict from the
penitentiary; but who can pardon him out of that sterner prison of
public distrust which closes its disembodied walls around him, moves
with his motions, and never suffers him to walk unconscious of it
again? Henceforth he dwells as under the shadow of swords, and holds
intercourse with men only by courtesy, not confidence. And so will they.
Not that the United States Government is yet prepared to avow itself
anti-slavery, in the sense in which the South is pro-slavery. We
conscientiously strain at gnats of Constitutional clauses, while they
gulp down whole camels of treason. We still look after their legal
safeguards long after they have hoisted them with their own petards. But
both sides have trusted themselves to the logic of events, and there is
no mistaking the direction in which that tends. In times like these, men
care more for facts than for phrases, and reason quite as rapidly as
they act. It is impossible to blink the fact that Slavery is the root
of the rebellion; and so War is proving itself an Abolitionist, whoever
else is. Practically speaking, the verdict is already entered, and the
doom of the destructive institution pronounced, in the popular mind.
Either the Secessionists will show fight handsomely, or they will fail
to do so. If they fail to do it, they are the derision of the world
forever,—since no one ever spares a beaten bully,—and thenceforward
their social system must go down of itself. If, on the other hand, they
make a resistance which proves formidable and costly, then the adoption
of the John-Quincy-Adams policy of military emancipation is an ultimate
necessity, and there is nobody more likely to put it in effective
operation than a certain gentleman who lately wrote an eloquent
letter to his Governor on the horrors of slave-insurrection. No doubt
insurrection is a terrible thing, but so is all war, and every man of
humanity approaches either with a shudder. But if the truth were told,
it would be that the Anglo-Saxon habitually despises the negro because
he is not an insurgent, for the Anglo-Saxon would certainly be one in
his place. Our race does not take naturally to non-resistance, and has
far more spontaneous sympathy with Nat Turner than with Uncle Tom. But
be it as it may with our desires, the rising of the slaves, in case of
continued war, is a mere destiny. We must take facts as they are.
Insurrection is one of the risks voluntarily assumed by Slavery,—and
the greatest of them. The slaves know it, and so do the masters. When
they seriously assert that they feel safe on this point, there is really
no answer to be made but that by which Traddles in "David Copperfield"
puts down Uriah Heep's wild hypothesis of believing himself an innocent
man. "But you don't, you know," quoth the straightforward Traddles;
"therefore, if you please, we won't suppose any such thing." They cannot
deceive us, for they do not deceive themselves. Every traveller who has
seen the faces of a household suddenly grow pale, in a Southern
city, when some street tumult struck to their hearts the fear of
insurrection,—every one who has seen the heavy negro face brighten
unguardedly at the name of John Brown, though a thousand miles away
from Harper's Ferry,—has penetrated the final secret of the military
weakness which saved Washington for us and lost the war for them.
It is time to expose this mad inconsistency which paralyzes common sense
on all Southern tongues, so soon as Slavery becomes the topic. These
same negroes, whom we hear claimed, at one moment, as petted darlings
whom no allurements can seduce, are denounced, next instant, as fiends
whom a whisper can madden. Northern sympathizers are first ridiculed
as imbecile, then lynched as destructive. Either position is in itself
intelligible, but the combination is an absurdity. We can understand
why the proprietor of a powder-house trembles at the sight of flint
and steel; and we can also understand why some new journeyman, being
inexperienced, may regard the peril without due concern. But we should
decide either to be a lunatic, if he in one breath proclaimed his
gunpowder to be incombustible, and at the next moment assassinated a
visitor for lighting a cigar on the premises. A slave population is
either contented and safe, or discontented and unsafe; it cannot at the
same time be friendly and hostile, blissful and desperate.
The result described is inevitable, should the Secessionists dare to
tempt the ordeal by battle long enough. If it stop short of this, it
will be because the prestige of Southern military power is so easily
broken down that there is no temptation to declare the Adams policy.
But even this consummation must have the most momentous results, and
entirely modify the whole anti-slavery movement of the nation. Should
the war cease to-morrow, it has inaugurated a new era in our nation's
history. The folly of the Gulf States, in throwing away a political
condition where the conservative sentiment stood by them only too well,
must inevitably recoil on their own heads, whether the strife last a day
or a generation. No man can estimate the new measures and combinations
to which it is destined to give rise. There stands the Constitution,
with all its severe conditions,—severe or weak, however, according to
its interpretations;—which interpretations, again, will always prove
plastic before the popular will. The popular will is plainly destined
to a change; and who dare predict the results of its changing? The
scrupulous may still hold by the letter of the bond; but since the
South has confessedly prized all legal guaranties only for the sake of
Slavery, the North, once free to act, will long to construe them, up to
the very verge of faith, in the interest of Liberty. Was the original
compromise, a Shylock bond?—the war has been our Portia. Slavery long
ruled the nation politically. The nation rose and conquered it with
votes. With desperate disloyalty, Slavery struck down all political
safeguards, and appealed to arms. The nation has risen again, ready to
meet it with any weapons, sure to conquer with any Twice conquered, what
further claim will this defeated desperado have? If it was a disturbing
element before, and so put under restriction, shall it be spared when it
has openly proclaimed itself a destroying element also? Is this to be
the last of American civil wars, or only the first one? These are the
questions which will haunt men's minds, when the cannon are all bushed,
and the bells are pealing peace, and the sons of our hearth-stones come
home. The watchword "Irrepressible Conflict" only gave the key, but War
has flung the door wide open, and four million slaves stand ready to
file through. It is merely a question of time, circumstance, and method.
There is not a statesman so wise but this war has given him new light,
nor an Abolitionist so self-confident but must own its promise better
than his foresight. Henceforth, the first duty of an American legislator
must be, by the use of all legitimate means, to weaken Slavery. Delenda
est Servitudo. What the peace which the South has broken was not doing,
the war which she has instituted must secure.
* * * * *
The modern world differs from the world of antiquity in nothing more
than in the existence of a brotherhood of nations, which was unknown to
the ancients, who seem to have been incapable of understanding that it
was impossible for either good or evil to be confined within certain
limits. The attempts of the Persians to extend their dominion into
Europe did for a time cause some faint approach to ideas and practices
that are common to the moderns; but, as a general rule, every monarchy
or people had its own system, to which it adhered until it was worn out
by internal decay, or was overthrown by foreign conquest. It was owing
to this exclusiveness, and to the inability of ancient statesmen to work
out an international system, that the Romans were enabled to extend
their dominion until it comprehended the best parts of the world. Had
the rulers and peoples of Carthage, Macedonia, Greece, and Syria been
capable of forming an alliance for common defence, the conquests of Rome
in the East might have been early checked, and her efforts have been
necessarily confined to the North and the West. But no international
system then existed, and the rude attempts at mutual assistance that
were occasionally made, as the conquering race strode forward, were of
no avail; and the swords of the legionaries reaped the whole field. It
is singular that what is so well known to the moderns, and was known
to them at times when they were far inferior to the best races of
antiquity, should have remained unknown to the latter. The chief reason
of this want of combining power in men who have never been surpassed in
ability is to be found in the then prevailing idea, that every stranger
was an enemy. There was a total want of confidence in one another among
the peoples of the ante-Christian period. Differences of race were
augmented by differences in religion, and by the absence of strong
business interests. Christianity had not been vouchsafed to man, and
commerce had very imperfectly done its work, while war was carried on in
the most ruthless and destructive manner.
The modern world differs in this matter entirely from the ancient world;
and though the change is perfect only in Christendom, the effect of it
is felt in countries where the Christian religion does not prevail, but
into which Christian armies and Christian merchants have penetrated.
Christendom is the leading portion of the world, and is fast giving
law to lands in which Christianity is still hated. It is the policy of
Christendom that orders the world. A Christian race rules over the whole
of that immense country, or collection of countries, which is known as
India. Another Christian race threatens to seize upon Persia. Christians
from the extreme West of Europe have dictated the terms of treaties to
the Tartar lords of China; and Christians from America have led the way
in breaking through the exclusive system of Japan. Christian soldiers
have for a year past acted as the police of Syria, Christianity's early
home, but now held by the most bigoted and cruel of Mussulmans; and it
is only the circumstance that they cannot agree upon a division of the
spoil that prevents the five great powers of Europe—the representatives
of the leading branches of the Christian religion—from partitioning
the vast, but feeble Ottoman Empire. The Christian idea of man's
brotherhood, so powerful in itself, is supported by material forces so
vast, and by ingenuity and industry so comprehensive and so various in
themselves and their results, that it must supersede all others, and
be accepted in every country where there are people capable of
understanding it. From the time of the first Crusade there has been a
steady tendency to the unity of Christian countries; and notwithstanding
all their conflicts with one another, and partly as one of the effects
of those conflicts, they have "fraternized," until now there exists a
mighty Christian Commonwealth, the members of which ought to be able to
govern the world in accordance with the principles of a religion that is
in itself peace. Under the influence of these principles, the Christian
nations, though not in equal degrees, have developed their resources,
and a commercial system has been created which has enlisted the material
interests of men on the same side with the highest teachings of the
purest religion. Selfishness and self-denial march under the same
banner, and men are taught to do unto others as they would that others
should do unto them, because the rule is as golden economically as it is
morally. This teaching, however, it must be allowed, is very imperfectly
done, and it encounters so many disturbing forces to its proper
development that an observer of the course of Christian nations might be
pardoned, if he were at times to suppose there is little of the spirit
of Christianity in the ordering of the policy of Christendom, and also
that the true nature of material interests is frequently misunderstood.
Still, it is undeniable that there is a general bond of union in
Christendom, and that no part of that division of the world can be
injured or improved without all the other parts of it being thereby
affected. What is known as "the business world" exists everywhere, but
it is in Christendom that it has its principal seats, and in which its
mightiest works are done. It forms one community of mankind; and what
depresses or exalts one nation is felt by its effects in all nations.
There cannot be a Russian war, or a Sepoy mutiny, or an Anglo-French
invasion of China, or an emancipation of the serfs of Russia, without
the effect thereof being sensibly experienced on the shores of Superior
or on the banks of the Sacramento; and the civil war that is raging in
the United States promises to produce permanent consequences to the
inhabitants of Central India and of Central Africa. The wars, floods,
plagues, and famines of the farthest East bear upon the people of the
remotest West. The Oregon flows in sympathy with the Ganges; and a very
mild winter in New England might give additional value to the ice-crop
of the Neva. So closely identified are all nations at this time, that
the hope that there may be no serious difficulties between the United
States and the Western powers of Europe, as a consequence of the Federal
Government's blockade of the Southern ports of the Union, is based as
much upon the prospect of the European food-crops being small this year
as upon the sense of justice that may exist in the bosoms of the rulers
of France and England. If those crops should prove to be of limited
amount, peace could be counted upon; if abundant, we might as well make
ample preparation for a foreign war. Nations threatened with scarcity
cannot afford to begin war, though they may find themselves compelled
to wage it. A cold season in Europe would be the best security that we
could have that we shall not be vexed with European intervention in
our troubles; for then Europeans would desire to have the privilege
of securing that portion of our food which should not be needed for
home-consumption. This is the fair side of the picture that is presented
by the bond of nations. There is another side to the picture, which is
far from being so agreeable to us, and which may be called the Cotton
side; and it is because England, and to a lesser degree France, is
of opinion that American cotton must be had, that our civil troubles
threaten to bring upon us, if not a foreign war, at least grave disputes
and difficulties with those European nations with which we are most
desirous of remaining on the best of terms, and to secure the friendship
of which all Americans are disposed to make every sacrifice that is
compatible with the preservation of national honor.
From the beginning of the troubles in this country that have led to
civil war, the desire to know what course would be pursued by the
principal nations of Europe toward the contending parties has been very
strongly felt on both sides; but the feeling has been greater on the
side of the rebels than on that of the nation, because the rebellion has
depended even for the merest chance of success upon the favorable view
of European governments, and the nation has got beyond the point of
caring much for the opinions or the actions of those governments. The
Union's existence depends not upon European friendship or enmity; but
without the aid of the Old World, the new Confederacy could not look for
success, had it received twice the assistance it did from the Buchanan
administration, and were it formed of every Slaveholding State, with
not a Union man in it to wound the susceptible minds of traitors by his
presence. The belief among the friends of order was, that Europe would
maintain a rigid neutrality, not so much from regard to this country as
from disgust at the character of the Confederacy's polity, and at the
opinions avowed by its officers, its orators, and its journals, opinions
which had been most forcibly illustrated in advance by acts of the
grossest robbery. That any civilized nation should be willing to afford
any countenance, and exclusively on grounds of interest, to a band of
ruffians who avowed opinions that could not now find open supporters
in Bokhara or Barbary, was what the American people could not believe.
Conscious that the Southern rebellion was utterly without provocation,
and that it had been brought about by the arts of disappointed
politicians, most of us were convinced that the rebels would be
discountenanced by the rulers of every European state to whom their
commissioners should apply either for recognition or for assistance.
We knew the power of King Cotton was great, though much exaggerated in
words by his servile subjects; but we did not, because we could not,
believe that he was able to control the policy of old empires, to
subvert the principle of honor upon which aristocracies profess to rely
as their chief support, and to turn whole nations from the roads in
which they had been accustomed to travel. That Cotton has done this we
do not assert; but it has done not a little to show how feeble; the
regard of certain classes in Europe for morality, when adherence to
principle may possibly cause them some trouble, and perhaps lead to some
loss. If the Southern plant has not become the tyrant of Europe, as for
a long time it was of America, it has certainly done much in a brief
time to unsettle English opinion, and to convert the Abolitionists of
Great Britain, the men who could tax the whites of their empire in the
annual interest of one hundred million dollars in order that the slavery
of the blacks in that empire might come to an end, into the supporters
of American slavery, and of its extension over this continent, which
might be made into a Cotton paradise, if the supply of negroes from
Africa should not be interrupted; and the logical conclusion from the
position laid down by Lord John Russell is, that the slave-trade must
be revived, as that is what his "belligerent" friends of the Southern
Confederacy are contending for. The American people had long been
taunted by the English with their subserviency to the slaveholding
interest, and with their readiness to sacrifice the welfare of a weak
and wronged race on the altars of Mammon. Whether these taunts were
well deserved by us, we shall not stop to inquire; but it is the most
melancholy of facts, that, no sooner have we given the best evidence
which it is in our power to give of our determination to confine slavery
within its present limits, and to put an end to the abuse of our
Government's power by the slaveholders, than the Government of Great
Britain, acting as the agent and representative of the British nation,
places itself directly across our path, and prepares to tell us to
stay our hand, and not dare to meddle with the institution of slavery,
because from the success of that institution proceeds cotton, and upon
the supply of cotton not being interfered with depend the welfare and
the strength of the liberty-and-order loving and morality-and-religion
worshipping race! So far as they have dared to do it, the British
ministers have placed their country on the side of those men who have
revolted in America because they saw that they could no longer make use
of slavery to misgovern the Union; and we must wait to see how far they
are to be supported by the opinion of that country, before a distinction
can be made between the ministers and the people. Left to themselves,
and unbiased by any of those selfish motives that go to make up the sum
of politics, we have not the slightest doubt that the English people, in
the proportion of ten to one, would decide in behalf of the supporters
of freedom in this country; but we are by no means so sure that the
ministers would not be sustained, were they to plunge their country into
a third American War, and sustained, too, in sending fleets to raise
our blockade of the American coast of Africa, and armies to fight the
battles of Slavery in Virginia and the Carolinas, where British officers
stole negroes eighty years ago, and sent them to the West India markets,
and found that that kind of commerce flourished well in war. A war for
the maintenance of American slavery, and to secure for slaveholders
the full and perfect enjoyment of all the "rights" of their "peculiar"
property, would be no worse than was the war which was waged against our
ancestors of the Revolution, or than those wars which were carried on
against Republican and Imperial France, ostensibly for the preservation
of order, but really for the restoration of a despotism which cannot now
find a single apologist on earth. There is often a wide distinction to
be made between a nation and its government, as our own recent history
but too deplorably proves; and the men who govern England may be enabled
to do that now which has more than once been done by their predecessors,
array their country in support of evil against that country's sense and
wishes. We should be prepared for this, and should look the evil that
threatens us fairly in the face, as the first thing to be done to
prevent it from getting beyond the threatening-point. The words of Sir
Boyle Roche, that the best way to avoid danger is to meet it plump, are
strikingly applicable to our condition. If we would not have a foreign
war on our hands before we shall have settled with the rebels, we should
make it very clear to foreigners that to fight with us would be a sort
of business that would be sure not to pay.
That war may follow from the course which England has elected to pursue
toward the parties to our civil conflict will not appear a strange view
of affairs to those who know something of the history of Great Britain
and the United States in the early part of this century. That which the
British Government is now doing bears strong resemblance to the course
which the same Government, with different ministers, pursued toward the
United States during the war with Napoleon I., and which led to the
contest of 1812,—a contest which Franklin had predicted, and which he
said would be our War of Independence, as that of 1775-83 had been
our War of Revolution. The same ignorance of America, and the same
disposition to insult, to annoy, and to injure Americans, that were so
common under the ministries of Pitt, Portland, and Perceval, and which
move both our mirth and our indignation when we read of them long after
the tormentors and the tormented have gone to their last repose, are
exhibited by the Palmerston Ministry,—though it is but justice to Lord
Palmerston to say, that he has borne himself more manfully toward us
than have his associates. England treats us as she would not dare to
treat any European power, making an exception in our case to her
general policy, which has been, since 1815, to truckle before her
contemporaries. She has crouched before France repeatedly, when she
had much better ground for fighting her than she now has for taking
preliminary steps to fight us. We are not entitled to the same treatment
that she thinks is due to the nations of the continent of Europe. She
cannot rid herself of the feeling that we still are colonists, and that
the rules which apply to her intercourse with old nations cannot apply
to her intercourse with us, the United States having been a portion of
the British Empire within the recollection of persons yet living. No
sooner, therefore, had a state of things arisen here that seemed to
warrant a renewal of the insulting treatment that was a thing of course
in 1807, than we were made to see how hollow were those professions of
friendship for America that were not uncommon in the mouths of British
statesmen during the ten or twelve years that preceded the advent of
Secession. So long as we were deemed powerful, we received assurances of
"the most distinguished consideration"; but we have at last ascertained
that those assurances were as false as they are when they are appended
to the letter of some diplomatist who is engaged in the work of cheating
some one who is neither better nor worse than himself. It is positively
mortifying to think how shockingly we have been taken in, and that the
"cordial understanding" that had, apparently, been growing up between
the two nations was a misunderstanding throughout, though we were
sincere in desiring its existence. Perhaps, when the evidences of the
strength that we possess, in spite of Secession, shall have all been
placed before the rulers of England, they will be found less ready to
quarrel with the American people than they were a month ago. A nation
that is capable of placing a quarter of a million of men in the field in
sixty days, and of giving to that immense force a respectable degree of
consistency and organization, is worth being conciliated after having
been insulted. But would any amount of conciliation suffice to restore
the feeling that existed here when the Prince of Wales was our guest? We
fear that it would not, and that for some years to come the sentiment
in America toward England will be as hostile as it was in the last
generation, when it was in the power of any politician to make political
capital by assailing the mother-land. The belief is created that England
in her heart hates us as profoundly as ever she did, that the forty-six
years' peace has produced no change in her feeling with respect to us,
and that she is watching ever for an opportunity to gratify the grudge
of which we are the object. Practically it will matter very little
whether this belief shall be well founded or not, so long as English
ministers, whether from want of judgment or from any other cause, shall
omit no occasion for the insulting and annoying of the United States. An
opinion that is sincerely held by the people of a powerful nation is in
itself a fact of the first importance, no matter whether it be founded
in truth or not; and if the blundering of another powerful nation shall
help to maintain that opinion, that nation would have no right to
complain of any consequences that should follow from its inability to
comprehend the condition of its neighbor. This country will not submit
to the degradation which England would inflict upon it, and which no
other European nation appears inclined to aid the insular empire in
inflicting. Even Spain, proverbially foolish in her foreign policy, and
seemingly unable to get within a hundred years of the present time,
observes a decorum in the premises to which Great Britain is a stranger.
The manner of proceeding on the part of the British Government, and
the arguments which have been put forward in justification of its
pro-slavery policy, are serious aggravations of its original offence.
The first declaration of Lord John Russell, Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs, was to the effect that England would not show any favor
to the Secessionists. His subordinate (Lord Wodehouse, Under-Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs) was even more emphatic than his chief in
speaking to the same purpose. Suddenly, the Foreign Secretary turned
about, with a facility and promptness for which men had not been
prepared even by his rapid changes on the questions of the Russian War
and Italian Nationality, and said that the Southern Confederacy would be
recognized as a belligerent, which is, to all intents and purposes of a
practical character, the same thing as acknowledging it to be a nation.
What was the cause of this sudden change? We have only to look at the
dates of the events that, followed the fall of Fort Sumter to find an
answer. Lord John Russell believed that the capital of the United States
had fallen into the hands of the rebels, and he was anxious to please
the masters of the cotton-fields by showing them that he had not waited
to hear of their victory to behold their virtues. There was some excuse
for his belief that the raid upon Washington had succeeded; for down to
the 27th of April there was but too much reason for supposing that that
city was in serious danger of becoming the prey of the Confederates,
who might have taken it, if they had been half as forward in their
preparations for war as they were supposed to have been by the chiefs of
the British Government. But this belief that the rebels had delivered
an effective blow at the Union only places the meanness of Lord John
Russell and his associates in a worse light than we could view it in,
if they had acted solely upon principle. Their political opinions had
pledged them to oppose the principles of the Secessionists; but they
were in a hurry to give all the support they could to those principles,
because they had come to the conclusion that victory was to be with the
Secessionists. They desired to appropriate the merit of being the first
of European statesmen to welcome the destroyers of the American Union
into the family of nations. Had the event justified their expectations,
they would have gained much by their action, and would have enjoyed
whatever of glory the European world might have been disposed to accord
to the allies of American pirates.
The Royal Proclamation of May 13th, in which the neutrality of England
is peremptorily laid down, and all British subjects are forbidden to
take any part in the war "between the Government of the United States of
America and certain States calling themselves the Confederate States of
America," is a paper in many respects most offensive to the people of
this country, though probably it was better in its intention than it
is in its execution. That part of it which most concerns us is the
recognition of "any blockade lawfully and actually established by or on
behalf of either of the said contending parties." It is important to us
that the British Government has admitted our right to blockade the ports
of the rebels, provided we shall do so in force; and though Lord Derby
has exhibited his ignorance of our naval power by saying that we cannot
enforce the blockade we have declared and instituted, we shall show to
the world, before the next cotton-crop shall be ready for exportation,
that we are fully up to the work that is demanded of us, by having at
least one hundred vessels, strongly armed and well manned, employed in
watching every part of the Southern coast to which any foreign ship
would think of going with a cargo or for the purpose of receiving one.
The naval strength of the Union is as capable of vast and effective
development as its military strength; and there is no reason why we
should not have afloat, and ready for action, by the beginning of
autumn, fleets sufficient to close up the Confederate ports as
thoroughly as the Allies closed those of Russia in 1854-6, and the
advanced guard of other fleets to be made ready to contend with the
forces that insolent foreign nations may send into the waters of America
for the purpose of fighting the battles of the slaveholders.
With the single exception of the admission of the right of blockade, the
Royal Proclamation is unfriendly to the United States. It admits the
right of the Confederacy's Government to issue letters of marque, from
which it follows that American ships captured by cruisers of the rebels
could be taken into English ports, and there sold, after having been
condemned by prize courts sitting at any one of the places belonging
to the Confederacy. This is no light aid to the pirates; for there are
English ports on every sea, and on almost every one of the ocean's
tributaries. Vessels belonging to America, and captured by the
Confederacy's privateers in the Mediterranean, could be taken into
Gibraltar, into Valetta, and into Corfu, all of which are English ports.
Those captured in the Mexican Gulf and the Caribbean could be sent into
any one of the many ports that belong to England in the West Indies.
If captured in the North Atlantic, or the Baltic, or any other of the
waters of Northern Europe, they could be sent into the ports of England,
Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In the South Atlantic are St. Helena and
Cape Town, which would afford shelter to Mr. Davis's privateers and
their prizes. In the East Indies British ports are numerous, from Aden
to the last places wrested from the Chinese, and they would be all open
to the enterprise of the Confederacy's cruisers. In the Pacific are
the English harbors on the Northwest Coast; and in Australia there are
British ports that ought, considering their origin, to be particularly
friendly to men who should enter the navy of the Secessionists. England
has in advance provided places for the transaction of all the business
that shall be necessary to render privateering profitable to the
"lawless brood" of the whole world. Into all of her thousand seaports
could the lucky Confederates go, and dispose of their captures, just as
the old Buccaneers used to sell their prizes in the ports of the English
colonies. Nor could all the efforts of all the navies of the world
prevent privateers from preying upon our commerce, as they are to be
commissioned in foreign countries, and will sail from the ports of those
countries. The East Indian seas, the Levant, and the Caribbean are the
old homes and haunts of pirates; and under the encouragement which
England is disposed to afford to piracy, for the especial benefit
of Slavery, the buccaneering business could not fail to flourish
exceedingly. True, our Government would not allow privateers to be
fitted out in our ports, during the Russian War, to prey upon the
commerce of France and England; but what of that? One good turn does
not deserve another, according to the public morality of nations so
orderly and pious as are England and France.
According to the Royal Proclamation, the blockade of any one of the
Northern ports by one of the ships of the Secessionists would be as
lawful an act as the blockade of Charleston by a dozen of the Union's
cruisers; and England allows that a privateer from Pensacola could seize
an English ship that should be engaged in bringing arras to New York or
Philadelphia. Thus are the two "parties" to the war placed on the same
footing by the decision of the English Government, though the one party
is a nation having treaties with England, and engaged in maintaining the
cause of order, and the other is only a band of conspirators, who have
established their power through the institution of a system of terror,
much after the fashion of Monsieur Robespierre and his associates, whose
conduct was so offensive to all Britons seven-and-sixty years ago. But
Montgomery is much farther from England than Paris, and the French had
no cotton to tempt the British statesmen of 1793-4 to strike an account
between manufacturing and morality. Distance and time appear to have
united their powers to make things appear fair in the eyes of Russell
that inexpressibly horrible to those of "the monster Pitt."
The Royal Proclamation forbids Englishmen affording the Union assistance
in any way. No British gunmaker can sell us a weapon, no English
merchant can use one of his ships to send us the cannon and rifles we
have purchased in his country, and no English subject of any degree can
lawfully carry a despatch for our Government. Never was there—a
more forbidding state-paper put forth; and the arid language of the
Proclamation is rendered doubly disagreeable by the purpose for which
it is employed. We are placed by its terms on the level of the men of
Montgomery, who must be vastly pleased to see that they are held in as
much esteem in England as are the constitutional authorities of the
United States. If we were to seek for a contrast to this extraordinary
document, we should find it in the proclamation put forth by our own
Government at the time of the "Canadian Rebellion," and in which it was
not sought to convey the impression that we had the right to regard
rebels and loyalists as men entitled to the same treatment at our hands.
It is a source of pride to Americans, that nothing in their own history
can be quoted in justification of the cold-blooded conduct of the
British Government.
It has been sought to defend the action of England by referring to
precedents. We are reminded by Lord John Russell of the acknowledgment
of the Greeks as belligerents by England; and others have pointed to her
acknowledgment of the Belgians, and of those Spanish—Americans who had
revolted against the rule of Old Spain. We cannot go into an extended
examination of these precedents, for the purpose of showing that they do
not apply to the present case; but we may say, and an examination into
the facts will be found to justify our assertion, that England was in
no such hurry to acknowledge the Greeks, the Belgians, and the
Spanish-Americans as she has been to acknowledge the Secessionists.
Years elapsed after the beginning of the struggle in Greece before the
English Government professed to regard the parties to that memorable
conflict even with indifference. The British historian of the Greek
Revolution, writing of the year 1821, says,—"Among the European
Governments, England was probably, next to Austria, the one most hostile
to Greece at that period, when her foreign policy was guided by a spirit
akin to that of Metternich; the hired organs of Ministry were loud in
defence of Islam, and gall dropped from their pens on the Christian
cause." And when, some years later, England did profess neutrality
between the "parties" to the war, it was less to prevent the Greeks
from falling into the hands of the Turks than to prevent the Turks from
falling into the hands of the Russians. Another object she had in view
was the suppression of that horrible piracy which then raged in the
Hellenic seas. She was then as anxious to suppress piracy because it was
injurious to her commerce, as, apparently, she is now anxious to promote
it because its existence would be injurious to our commerce. The famous
Treaty of London, made in 1827, the parties to which were Russia,
France, and England, was justified on the ground of "the necessity of
putting an end to the sanguinary contest which, by delivering up the
Greek provinces and the isles of the Archipelago to the disorders
of anarchy, produces daily fresh impediments to the commerce of the
European states, and gives occasion to piracies which not only expose
the subjects of the contracting powers to considerable losses, but
render necessary burdensome measures of suppression and protection."
In the autumn of the same year, an Order in Council decreed that "the
British ships in the Mediterranean should seize every vessel they saw
under the Greek flag, or armed and fitted out at a Greek port, except
such as were under the immediate orders of the Greek Government." The
object of this strong measure was the suppression of piracy. Thus
England had to interfere to put down the Greek pirates; and if she means
to insist upon there being any resemblance between the case of the
Greeks and that of the Secessionists, (President Lincoln to appear as
the Grand Turk, or Sultan Mahmoud II., the destroyer of the Janizaries,)
we should not object, so far as relates to the finale of the piece,
which is very likely, through her most injudicious action, to produce
a large crop of Selims and Abdallahs, by whom any amount of sea-roving
will be done, but as much at Britain's expense as at ours.
The case of Belgium is not at all to the point, the Dutch being by no
means anxious that the foolish arrangement made at Vienna, by which
Holland and Belgium had been formally united, should be continued,
though the House of Orange was averse to the loss of so much of its
dominions. The disputes that followed the expulsion of the Dutch from
Belgium were about details, and the whole matter was finally settled by
the action of the Great Powers, and England was not then in a condition
to decide it, had it been left for her decision. The makers of the
Kingdom of the Netherlands destroyed their own work, after it had been
found to be a bad job, and had had fifteen years and upward of fair
trial. England had no choice in the matter,—especially as the effect
of determined opposition on her part would have thrown Belgium into the
arms of France, and have brought about a French war, which would have
extended to the whole of Europe, with the revolutionists in every
country for the allies of France. Louis Philippe either would have been
overthrown very speedily after his elevation, or he would have been
enabled to wear his new crown only by placing the old bonnet rouge
above it.
That England recognized the Spanish-Americans is true; but why did
she recognize them? Because she had to choose between doing that and
allowing the Holy Alliance to enter upon the reconquest of the Spanish
colonies. Mr. Canning declared that he had called a new world into
existence to redress the balance of the old,—and that, if France, as
the tool of the Holy Alliance, should have Spain, it should not be
"Spain—with the Indies." This was in 1823, though it was not until 1826
that Mr. Canning made use of the language quoted; and so serious was the
matter, that our country was prepared to make common cause with England
in resisting the interference of the Allies and their dependants in the
affairs of Spanish-America. The question was one which did not relate to
English interests alone, but concerned those of the whole world; and it
was not decided with reference to the interests of any one country,
but after it had been ascertained that its decision would closely and
immediately affect the welfare of Christendom. England had to choose
between diplomatic resistance to the Continental Powers and the support
of a policy which she could not adopt without degrading herself.
Naturally she elected to resist, and she did so with success. The
Spanish-American countries, however, were freed from the rule of Spain
long before she recognized them, and Spain had not the means of subduing
them. England, therefore, did not acknowledge them as against Spain, but
as against France, and in opposition to the Holy Alliance, the decrees
of which France was engaged in enforcing at the expense of the Spanish
Constitutionalists, and which process of enforcement the French
Government was prepared to extend to Peru and Mexico, and to the whole
of that part of America which had belonged to the Spanish Bourbons. Mr.
Canning's conduct was statesmanlike, but it was also spiteful; and had
England been in the condition to send sixty thousand men to Spain,
probably the recognition of the independence of Spanish-America would
have been much longer delayed. He had to strike a blow at a mighty
enemy, and he delivered it skilfully at that enemy's only exposed point,
where it told at once, and where it is telling to this day. But his
action affords no precedent to the present rulers of England for the
treatment of our case, for he moved not until after the colonies had
achieved their independence. Now the British Government proclaims its
purpose to acknowledge the Southern Confederacy in less than a month
after the beginning of the attack on Fort Sumter, and in about a week
after it had heard of the fall of that ill-used fortress! Is there not
some difference between the two cases?
England did not admit the Poles to the honors she has allowed to the
American Secessionists, after their revolt from the Czar, in 1830-31,
though their cause was popular in that country, and they had achieved
such successes over the Russian armies as the Secessionists have not
won over the armies of the Union. Neither did she acknowledge the
Hungarians, in 1849, though they had actually won their independence,
which they would have preserved but for the intervention of Russia. It
was not for her interest that Austria should be weakened. Is it for her
interest that the United States should be weakened? Is it the purpose of
her Government to give our rebels encouragement, step by step, in order
that the American nation may be thrown back to the place it held twenty
years ago?
The Cottonocracy of England, and those who for reasons of political
interest support them, proceed erroneously, we think, when they assume
that American cotton is the chief necessary of English life, and that
without a full supply of it there must ensue great suffering throughout
the British Empire. That it would be better for England to receive her
cotton without interruption may be admitted, without its following that
she must be ruined if there should be a discontinuance of the American
cotton-trade. Men are so accustomed to think that that which is must
ever continue to be, or all will be lost, that it is not surprising that
British manufacturers should suppose change in this instance to be ruin.
They are quite ready to innovate on the British Constitution, because in
that way they hope to obtain political power, and to injure the landed
aristocracy; but the idea of change in modes of business strikes them
with terror, and hence all their wonted sagacity is now at fault.
Lancashire is to become a Sahara, because President Lincoln, in
accordance with the demands of twenty million Americans, proclaims the
ports of the rebels under blockade, and enforces that blockade with a
fleet quite sufficient to satisfy even Lord John Russell's notions as to
effectiveness. We have never believed, and we do not now believe, that
it is in the power of any part of America thus to control the condition
of England. We would not have it so, if we could, as we are sure that
the power would be abused. If America really possessed the ability to
rule England that her cotton-manufacturers assert she possesses, all
Englishmen should rejoice that events have occurred here that promise to
work out their country's deliverance from so degrading a vassalage. But
it is not so, and England will survive the event of our conflict, no
matter what that event may be. The nation that triumphed over the
Continental System of Napoleon, and which was not injured by our Embargo
Acts of fifty years ago, should be ashamed to lay so much stress upon
the value of our cotton-crop, when it has its choice of the lands of the
tropics from which to draw the raw material it requires. As to France,
it would be most impolitic in her to seek our destruction, unless she
wishes to see the restoration of England's maritime supremacy. The
French navy, great and powerful as it now is, can be regarded only as
the result of a skilful and most costly forcing process, carried on by
Bourbons, Orleanists, Republicans, and Imperialists, during forty-six
years of maritime peace. It could not be maintained against the attacks
of England, which is a naval country by position and interest. We never
could be the rival of France, but we could always be relied upon to
throw our weight on her side in a maritime war; and while our policy
would never allow of our having a very large navy in time of peace, we
have in abundance all the elements of naval power. Nor should England
be indifferent to the aid which we could afford her, were she to be
assailed by the principal nations of Continental Europe. Strike the
American Union out of the list of the nations, or cause it to be
sensibly weakened, or treat it so as to revive in force the old American
hatred of England, and it is possible that the predictions of those who
see in Napoleon III. only the Avenger of Napoleon I. may be justified by
the event.
* * * * *
We marched up the hill, and when the dust opened there was our Big Tent
ready pitched.
It was an enormous tent,—the Sibley pattern modified. A simple soul in
our ranks looked up and said,—"Tent! canvas! I don't see it: that's
marble!" Whereupon a simpler soul informed us,—"Boys, that's the
Capitol."
And so it was the Capitol,—as glad to see the New York Seventh Regiment
as they to see it. The Capitol was to be our quarters, and I was pleased
to notice that the top of the dome had been left off for ventilation.
The Seventh had had a wearisome and anxious progress from New York, as I
have chronicled in the June "Atlantic." We had marched from Annapolis,
while "rumors to right of us, rumors to left of us, volleyed and
thundered." We had not expected that the attack upon us would be merely
verbal. The truculent citizens of Maryland notified us that we were to
find every barn a Concord and every hedge a Lexington. Our Southern
brethren at present repudiate their debts; but we fancied they would
keep their warlike promises. At least, everybody thought, "They will
fire over our heads, or bang blank cartridges at us." Every nose was
sniffing for the smell of powder. Vapor instead of valor nobody looked
for. So the march had been on the qui vive. We were happy enough that
it was over, and successful.
Successful, because Mumbo Jumbo was not installed in the White House. It
is safe to call Jeff. Davis Mumbo Jumbo now. But there is no doubt that
the luckless man had visions of himself receiving guests, repudiating
debts, and distributing embassies in Washington, May 1, 1861. And as to
La' Davis, there seems to be documentary evidence that she meant to be
"At Home" in the capital, bringing the first strawberries with her from
Montgomery for her May-day soirée. Bah! one does not like to sneer at
people who have their necks in the halter; but one happy result of this
disturbance is that the disturbers have sent themselves to Coventry. The
Lincoln party may be wanting in finish. Finish comes with use. A little
roughness of manner, the genuine simplicity of a true soul like Lincoln,
is attractive. But what man of breeding could ever stand the type
Southern Senator? But let him rest in such peace as he can find! He and
his peers will not soon be seen where we of the New York Seventh were
now entering.
They gave us the Representatives Chamber for quarters. Without running
the gauntlet of caucus primary and election, every one of us attained
that sacred shrine.
In we marched, tramp, tramp. Bayonets took the place of buncombe. The
frowzy creatures in ill-made dress-coats, shimmering satin waistcoats,
and hats of the tile model, who lounge, spit, and vociferate there, and
name themselves M.C., were off. Our neat uniforms and bright barrels
showed to great advantage, compared with the usual costumes of the usual
dramatis personae of the scene.
It was dramatic business, our entrance there. The new Chamber is
gorgeous, but ineffective. Its ceiling is flat, and panelled with
transparencies. Each panel is the coat-of-arms of a State, painted on
glass. I could not see that the impartial sunbeams, tempered by this
skylight, had burned away the insignia of the malecontent States. Nor
had any rampant Secessionist thought to punch any of the seven lost
Pleiads out from that firmament with a long pole. Crimson and gold are
the prevailing hues of the decorations. There is no unity and breadth of
coloring. The desks of the members radiate in double files from a white
marble tribune at the centre of the semicircle.
In came the new actors on this scene. Our presence here was the
inevitable sequel of past events. We appeared with bayonets and bullets
because of the bosh uttered on this floor; because of the bills—with
treasonable stump-speeches in their bellies—passed here; because of
the cowardice of the poltroons, the imbecility of the dodgers, and the
arrogance of the bullies, who had here cooperated to blind and corrupt
the minds of the people. Talk had made a miserable mess of it. The
ultima ratio was now appealed to.
Some of our companies were marched up-stairs into the galleries. The
sofas were to be their beds. With their white cross-belts and bright
breastplates, they made a very picturesque body of spectators for
whatever happened in the Hall, and never failed to applaud in the right
or the wrong place at will.
Most of us were bestowed in the amphitheatre. Each desk received its
man. He was to scribble on it by day, and sleep under it by night. When
the desks were all taken, the companies overflowed into the corners and
into the lobbies. The staff took committee-rooms. The Colonel reigned in
the Speaker's parlor.
Once in, firstly, we washed.
Such a wash merits a special paragraph. I compliment the M.C.s, our
hosts, upon their water-privileges. How we welcomed this chief luxury
after our march! And thenceforth how we prized it! For the clean face
is an institution which requires perpetual renovation at Washington.
"Constant vigilance is the price" of neatness. When the sky here is not
travelling earthward in rain, earth is mounting skyward in dust. So much
dirt must have an immoral effect.
After the wash we showed ourselves to the eyes of Washington, marching
by companies, each to a different hotel, to dinner. This became one of
the ceremonies of our barrack-life. We liked it. The Washingtonians were
amused and encouraged by it. Three times a day, with marked punctuality,
our lines formed and tramped down the hill to scuffle with awkward
squads of waiters for fare more or less tolerable. In these little
marches, we encountered by-and-by the other regiments, and, most
soldierly of all, the Rhode Island men, in blue flannel blouses and
bersaglière hats. But of them hereafter.
It was a most attractive post of ours at the Capitol. Spring was at its
freshest and fairest. Every day was more exquisite than its forerunner.
We drilled morning, noon, and evening, almost hourly, in the pretty
square east of the building. Old soldiers found that they rattled
through the manual twice as alert as ever before. Recruits became old
soldiers in a trice. And as to awkward squads, men that would have been
the veriest louts and lubbers in the piping times of peace now learned
to toe the mark, to whisk their eyes right and their eyes left, to drop
the butts of their muskets without crushing their corns, and all the
mysteries of flank and file,—and so became full-fledged heroes before
they knew it.
In the rests between our drills we lay under the young shade on the
sweet young grass, with the odors of snowballs and horse-chestnut blooms
drifting to us with every whiff of breeze, and amused ourselves with
watching the evolutions of our friends of the Massachusetts Eighth, and
other less experienced soldiers, as they appeared upon the field. They,
too, like ourselves, were going through the transformations. These
sturdy fellows were then in a rough enough chrysalis of uniform. That
shed, they would look worthy of themselves.
But the best of the entertainment was within the Capitol. Some three
thousand or more of us were now quartered there. The Massachusetts
Eighth were under the dome. No fear of want of air for them. The
Massachusetts Sixth were eloquent for their State in the Senate Chamber.
It was singularly fitting, among the many coincidences in the history of
this regiment, that they should be there, tacitly avenging the assault
upon Sumner and the attempts to bully the impregnable Wilson.
In the recesses, caves, and crypts of the Capitol what other legions
were bestowed I do not know. I daily lost myself, and sometimes when
out of my reckoning was put on the way by sentries of strange corps, a
Reading Light Infantry man, or some other. We all fraternized. There was
a fine enthusiasm among us: not the soldierly rivalry in discipline that
may grow up in future between men of different States acting together,
but the brotherhood of ardent fellows first in the field and earnest in
the cause.
All our life in the Capitol was most dramatic and sensational.
Before it was fairly light in the dim interior of the Representatives
Chamber, the réveilles of the different regiments came rattling
through the corridors. Every snorer's trumpet suddenly paused. The
impressive sound of the hushed breathing of a thousand sleepers, marking
off the fleet moments of the night, gave way to a most vociferous
uproar. The boy element is large in the Seventh Regiment. Its slang
dictionary is peculiar and unabridged. As soon as we woke, the pit began
to chaff the galleries, and the galleries the pit. We were allowed noise
nearly ad libitum. Our riotous tendencies, if they existed, escaped
by the safety-valve of the larynx. We joked, we shouted, we sang, we
mounted the Speaker's desk and made speeches,—always to the point; for
if any but a wit ventured to give tongue, he was coughed down without
ceremony. Let the M.C.s adopt this plan and silence their dunces.
With all our jollity we preserved very tolerable decorum. The regiment
is assez bien composé. Many of its privates are distinctly gentlemen
of breeding and character. The tone is mainly good, and the esprit de
corps high. If the Colonel should say, "Up, boys, and at 'em!" I know
that the Seventh would do brilliantly in the field. I speak now of its
behavior in-doors. This certainly did it credit. Our thousand did the
Capitol little harm that a corporal's guard of Biddies with mops and
tubs could not repair in a forenoon's campaign.
Perhaps we should have served our country better by a little Vandalism.
The decorations of the Capitol have a slight flavor of the Southwestern
steamboat saloon. The pictures (now, by the way, carefully covered)
would most of them be the better, if the figures were bayoneted and the
backgrounds sabred out. Both—pictures and decorations—belong to that
bygone epoch of our country when men shaved the moustache, dressed like
parsons, said "Sir," and chewed tobacco,—a transition epoch, now become
an historic blank.
The home-correspondence of our legion of young heroes was illimitable.
Every one had his little tale of active service to relate. A decimation
of the regiment, more or less, had profited by the tender moment of
departure to pop the question and to receive the dulcet "Yes." These
lucky fellows were of course writing to Dulcinea regularly, three meals
of love a day. Mr. Van Wyck, M.C., and a brace of colleagues were kept
hard at work all day giving franks and saving threepennies to the ardent
scribes. Uncle Sam lost certainly three thousand cents a day in this
manner.
What crypts and dens, caves and cellars there are under that great
structure! And barrels of flour in every one of them this month of May,
1861. Do civilians eat in this proportion? Or does long standing in the
"Position of a Soldier" (vide "Tactics" for a view of that graceful
pose) increase a man's capacity for bread and beef so enormously?
It was infinitely picturesque in these dim vaults by night. Sentries
were posted at every turn. Their guns gleamed in the gaslight. Sleepers
were lying in their blankets wherever the stones were softest. Then in
the guard-room the guard were waiting their turn. We have not had much
of this scenery in America, and the physiognomy of volunteer military
life is quite distinct from anything one sees in European service. The
People have never had occasion until now to occupy their Palace with
armed men.
We were to be sworn into the service of the United States the afternoon
of April 26th. All the Seventh, raw men and ripe men, marched out
into the sweet spring sunshine. Every fellow had whitened his belts,
burnished his arms, curled his moustache, and was scowling his manliest
for Uncle Sam's approval.
We were drawn up by companies in the Capitol Square for mustering in.
Presently before us appeared a gorgeous officer, in full fig. "Major
McDowell!" somebody whispered, as we presented arms. He is a General,
or perhaps a Field Marshal, now. Promotions come with a hop, skip, and
jump, in these times, when demerit resigns and merit stands ready to
step to the front.
Major-Colonel-General McDowell, in a soldierly voice, now called the
roll, and we all answered, "Here!" in voices more or less soldierly. He
entertained himself with this ceremony for an hour. The roll over, we
were marched and formed in three sides of a square along the turf. Again
the handsome officer stepped forward, and recited to us the conditions
of our service. "In accordance with a special arrangement, made with the
Governor of New York," says the Major, "you are now mustered into the
service of the United States, to serve for thirty days, unless sooner
discharged"; and continues he, "The oath will now be read to you by the
magistrate."
Hereupon a gentleman en mufti, but wearing a military cap with an
oil-skin cover, was revealed. Until now he had seemed an impassive
supernumerary. But he was biding his time, and—with due respect be it
said—saving his wind, and now in a Stentorian voice he ejaculated,—
"The following is the oath!"
Per se this remark was not comic. But there was something in the
dignitary's manner which tickled the regiment. As one man the thousand
smiled, and immediately adopted this new epigram among its private
countersigns.
But the good-natured smile passed away as we listened to the impressive
oath, following its title.
We raised our right hands, and, clause by clause, repeated the solemn
obligation, in the name of God, to be faithful soldiers of our country.
It was not quite so comprehensive as the beautiful knightly pledge
administered by King Arthur to his comrades, and transmitted to our time
by Major-General Tennyson of the Parnassus Division. We did not swear,
as they did of yore, to be true lovers as well as loyal soldiers. Ça va
sans dire in 1861,—particularly when you were engaged to your Amanda
the evening before you started, as was the case with many a stalwart
brave and many a mighty man of a corporal or sergeant in our ranks.
We were thrilled and solemnized by the stately ceremony of the oath.
This again was most dramatic. A grand public recognition of a duty. A
reavowal of the fundamental belief that our system was worthy of the
support, and our Government of the confidence, of all loyal men. And
there was danger in the middle distance of our view into the future,
—danger of attack, or dangerous duty of advance, just enough to keep
any trifler from feeling that his pledge was mere holiday business.
So, under the cloudless blue sky, we echoed in unison the sentences of
the oath. A little low murmur of rattling arms, shaken with the hearty
utterance, made itself heard in the pauses. Then the band crashed in
magnificently.
We were now miserable mercenaries, serving for low pay and rough
rations. Read the Southern papers and you will see us described.
"Mudsills,"—that, I believe, is the technical word. By repeating a form
of words after a gentleman in a glazed cap and black raiment, we had
suffered change into base assassins, the offscouring of society,
starving for want of employment, and willing to "imbrue our coarse fists
in fraternal blood" for the sum of eleven dollars a month, besides hard
tack, salt junk, and the hope of a Confederate States bond apiece for
bounty, or free loot in the treasuries of Florida, Mississippi, and
Arkansas, after the war. How carefully from that day we watched the
rise and fall of United States stocks! If they should go low among
the nineties, we felt that our eleven dollars per mensem would be
imperilled.
We stayed in our palace for a week or so after April 26th, the day of
the oath. That was the most original part of our duty thus far. New York
never had so unanimous a deputation on the floor of the Representatives
Chamber before, and never a more patriotic one. Take care, Gentlemen
Members of Congress! look to your words and your Acts honestly and
wisely in future! don't palter with Liberty again! it is not well that
soldiers should get into the habit of thinking they are always to
unravel the snarls and cut the knots twisted and tied by clumsy or
crafty fingers. The traitor States already need the main de fer,—yes,
and without the gant de velours. Let us beware, and keep ourselves
worthy of the boon of self-government, man by man! I do not wish to
hear, "Order arms!" and "Charge bayonets!" in the Capitol. But this
present defence of Free Speech and Free Thought ends, let us hope, that
danger forever.
When we had been ten days in our showy barracks we began to quarrel with
luxury. What had private soldiers to do with the desks of law-givers?
Why should we be allowed to revel longer in the dining-rooms of
Washington hotels, partaking the admirable dainties there?
The May sunshine, the birds and the breezes of May, invited us to
Camp,—the genuine thing, under canvas. Besides, Uncles Sam and Abe
wanted our room for other company. Washington was filling up fast with
uniforms. It seemed as if all the able-bodied men in the country were
moving, on the first of May, with all their property on their backs, to
agreeable, but dusty lodgings on the Potomac.
We also made our May move. One afternoon, my company, the Ninth, and the
Engineers, the Tenth, were detailed to follow Captain Vielé, and lay out
a camp on Meridian Hill.
As we had the first choice, we got, on the whole, the best site for a
camp. We occupy the villa and farm of Dr. Stone, two miles due north of
Willard's Hotel. I assume that hotel as a peculiarly American point of
departure, and also because it is the hub of Washington,—the centre of
an eccentric, having the White House at the end of its shorter, and the
Capitol at the end of its longer radius,—moral, so they say, as well
as geometrical.
Sundry dignitaries, Presidents and what not, have lived here in times
gone by. Whoever chose the site ought to be kindly remembered for his
good taste. The house stands upon the pretty terrace commanding the
plain of Washington. From the upper windows we can see the Potomac
opening southward like a lake, and between us and the water ambitious
Washington stretching itself along and along, like the shackly files of
an army of recruits.
Oaks love the soil of this terrace. There are some noble ones on the
undulations before the house. It may be permitted even for one who is
supposed to think of nothing but powder and ball to notice one of these
grand trees. Let the ivy-covered stem of the Big Oak of Camp Cameron
take its place in literature! And now enough of scenery. The landscape
will stay, but the troops will not. There are trees and slopes of
green-sward elsewhere, and shrubbery begins to blossom in these bright
days of May before a thousand pretty homes. The tents and the tent-life
are more interesting for the moment than objects which cannot decamp.
The old villa serves us for head-quarters. It is a respectable place,
not without its pretensions. Four granite pillars, as true grit as if
the two Presidents Adams had lugged them on their shoulders all the way
from Quincy, Mass., make a carriage-porch. Here is the Colonel in the
big west parlor, the Quartermaster and Commissary in the rooms with
sliding-doors on the east, the Hospital upstairs, and so on. Other
rooms, numerous as the cells in a monastery, serve as quarters for the
Engineer Company. These dens are not monastic in aspect. The house is,
of course, a Certosa, so far as the gentler sex are concerned; but no
anchorites dwell here at present. If the Seventh disdained everything
but soldiers' fare,—which it does not,—common civility would require
that it should do violence to its disinclination for comfort and luxury,
and consume the stores sent down by ardent patriots in New York. The
cellars of the villa overflow with edibles, and in the greenhouse is a
most appetizing array of barrels, boxes, cans, and bottles, shipped here
that our Sybarites might not sigh for the flesh-pots of home. Such trash
may do very well to amuse the palate in these times of half-peace,
half-hostility; but when
"war, which for a space does fail,
Shall doubly thundering swell the gale,"
then every soldier should drop gracefully to the simple ration, and
cease to dabble with frying-pans. Cooks to their aprons, and soldiers to
their guns!
Our tents are pitched on a level clover-field sloping to the front
for our parade-ground. We use the old wall tent without a fly. It is
necessary to live in one of these awhile to know the vast superiority of
the Sibley pattern. Sibley's tent is a wrinkle taken from savage life.
It is the Sioux buffalo-skin, lodge, or Tepee, improved,—a cone
truncated at the top and fitted with a movable apex for ventilation. A
single tent-pole, supported upon a hinged tripod of iron, sustains the
structure. It is compacter, more commodious, healthier, and handsomer
than the ancient models. None other should be used in permanent
encampments. For marching troops, the French Tente d'abri is a capital
shelter.
Still our fellows manage to be at home as they are. Some of our
model tents are types of the best style of temporary cottages. Young
housekeepers of limited incomes would do well to visit and take heed. A
whole elysium of household comfort can be had out of a teapot,—tin; a
brace of cups,—tin; a brace of plates,—tin; and a frying-pan.
In these days of war everybody can see a camp. Every one who stays at
home has a brother or a son or a lover quartered in one of the myriad
tents that have blossomed with the daffodil-season all over our green
fields of the North. I need not, then, describe our encampment in
detail,—its guard-tent in advance,—its guns in battery,—its
flagstaff,—its companies quartered in streets with droll and fanciful
names,—its officers' tents in the rear, at right angles to the lines of
company-tents,—its kitchens, armed with Captain Vielé's capital army
cooking-stoves,—its big marquees, "The White House" and "Fort Pickens,"
for the lodging and messing of the new artillery company,—its barbers'
shops,—its offices. The same, more or less well arranged, can be seen
in all the rendezvous where the armies are now assembling. Instead of
such description, then, let me give the log of a single day at our camp.
I would rather not believe it; but it is—yes, it is—the morning gun,
uttering its surly "Hullo!" to sunrise.
Yes,—and, to confirm my suspicions, here rattle in the drums and pipe
in the fifes, wooing us to get up, get up, with music too peremptory
to be harmonious.
I rise up sur mon séant and glance about me. I, Private W., chance, by
reason of sundry chances, to be a member of a company recently largely
recruited and bestowed all together in a big marquee. As I lift myself
up, I see others lift themselves up on those straw bags we kindly call
our mattresses. The tallest man of the regiment, Sergeant K., is on one
side of me. On the other side I am separated from two of the fattest men
of the regiment by Sergeant M., another excellent fellow, prime cook and
prime forager.
We are all presently on our pins,—K. on those lengthy continuations of
his, and the two stout gentlemen on their stout supporters. The deep
sleepers are pulled up from those abysses of slumber where they had been
choking, gurgling, strangling, death-rattling all night. There is for a
moment a sound of legs rushing into pantaloons and arms plunging into
jackets.
Then, as the drums and fifes whine and clatter their last notes, at the
flap of our tent appears our orderly, and fierce in the morning sunshine
gleams his moustache,—one month's growth this blessed day. "Fall in,
for roll-call!" he cries, in a ringing voice. The orderly can speak
sharp, if need be.
We obey. Not "Walk in!" "March in!" "Stand in!" is the order; but "Fall
in!" as sleepy men must. Then the orderly calls off our hundred. There
are several boyish voices which reply, several comic voices, a few
mean voices, and some so earnest and manly and alert that one says to
himself, "Those are the men for me, when work is to be done!" I read the
character of my comrades every morning in each fellow's monosyllable
"Here!"
When the orderly is satisfied that not one of us has run away and
accepted a Colonelcy from the Confederate States since last roll-call,
he notifies those unfortunates who are to be on guard for the next
twenty-four hours of the honor and responsibility placed upon their
shoulders. Next he tells us what are to be the drills of the day. Then,
"Right face! Dismissed! Break ranks! March!"
With ardor we instantly seize tin basins, soap, and towels, and invade a
lovely oak-grove at the rear and left of our camp. Here is a delicious
spring into which we have fitted a pump. The sylvan scene becomes
peopled with "National Guards Washing,"—a scene meriting the notice of
Art as much as any "Diana and her Nymphs." But we have no Poussin
to paint us in the dewy sunlit grove. Few of us, indeed, know how
picturesque we are at all times and seasons.
After this beau idéal of a morning toilet comes the ante-prandial
drill. Lieutenant W. arrives, and gives us a little appetizing exercise
in "Carry arms!" "Support arms!" "By the right flank, march!" "Double
quick!"
Breakfast follows. My company messes somewhat helter-skelter in a big
tent. We have very tolerable rations. Sometimes luxuries appear of
potted meats and hermetical vegetables, sent us by the fond New
Yorkers. Each little knot of fellows, too, cooks something savory. Our
table-furniture is not elegant, our plates are tin, there is no silver
in our forks; but à la guerre, comme à la guerre. Let the scrubs
growl! Lucky fellows, if they suffer no worse hardships than this!
By-and-by, after breakfast, come company-drills, bayonet-practice,
battalion-drills, and the heavy work of the day. Our handsome Colonel,
on a nice black nag, manoeuvres his thousand men of the line-companies
on the parade for two or three hours. Two thousand legs step off
accurately together. Two thousand pipe-clayed cross-belts—whitened with
infinite pains and waste of time, and offering a most inviting mark to
a foe—restrain the beating bosoms of a thousand braves, as they—the
braves, not the belts—go through the most intricate evolutions
unerringly. Watching these battalion movements, Private W., perhaps,
goes off and inscribes in his journal,—"Any clever, prompt man, with a
mechanical turn, an eye for distance, a notion of time, and a voice
of command, can be a tactician. It is pure pedantry to claim that the
manoeuvring of troops is difficult: it is not difficult, if the troops
are quick and steady. But to be a general, with patience and purpose and
initiative,—ah!" thinks Private W., "for that you must have the man of
genius; and already in this war he begins to appear out of Massachusetts
and elsewhere."
Private W. avows without fear that about noon, at Camp Cameron, he takes
a hearty dinner, and with satisfaction. Private W. has had his feasts
in cot and chateau in Old World and New. It is the conviction of said
private that nowhere and no-when has he expected his ration with more
interest, and remembered it with more affection, than here.
In the middle hours of the day it is in order to get a pass to go to
Washington, or to visit some of the camps, which now, in the middle
of May, begin to form a cordon around the city. Some of these I may
criticize before the end of this paper. Our capital seems arranged by
Nature to be protected by fortified camps on the circuit of its hills.
It may be made almost a Verona, if need be. Our brother regiments have
posts nearly as charming as our own in these fair groves and on these
fair slopes on either side of us.
In the afternoon, comes target-practice, skirmishing-drill, more
company- or recruit-drill, and, at half-past five, our evening parade.
Let me not forget tent-inspection, at four, by the officer of the day,
when our band plays deliciously.
At evening parade all Washington appears. A regiment of ladies,
rather indisposed to beauty, observe us. Sometimes the Dons
arrive,—Secretaries of State, of War, of Navy,—or military Dons,
bestriding prancing steeds, but bestriding them as if "'twas not their
habit often of an afternoon." All which,—the bad teeth, pallid skins,
and rustic toilets of the fair, and the very moderate horsemanship of
the brave,—privates, standing at ease in the ranks, take note of, not
cynically, but as men of the world.
Wondrous gymnasts are some of the Seventh, and after evening parade they
often give exhibitions of their prowess to circles of admirers. Muscle
has not gone out, nor nerve, nor activity, if these athletes are to be
taken as the types or even as the leaders of the young city-bred men of
our time. All the feats of strength and grace of the gymnasiums are to
be seen here, and show to double advantage in the open air.
Then comes sweet evening. The moon rises. It seems always full moon
at Camp Cameron. Every tent becomes a little illuminated pyramid.
Cooking-fires burn bright along the alleys. The boys lark, sing, shout,
do all those merry things that make the entertainment of volunteer
service. The gentle moon looks on, mild and amused, the fairest lady of
all that visit us.
At last, when the songs have been sung and the hundred rumors of the day
discussed, at ten the intrusive drums and scolding fifes get together
and stir up a concert, always premature, called tattoo. The Seventh
Regiment begins to peel for bed: at all events, Private W. does; for
said W. takes, when he can, precious good care of his cuticle, and never
yields to the lazy and unwholesome habit of soldiers,—sleeping in the
clothes. At taps—half-past ten—out go the lights. If they do not,
presently comes the sentry's peremptory command to put them out. Then,
and until the dawn of another day, a cordon of snorers inside of a
cordon of sentries surrounds our national capital. The outer cordon
sounds its "All's well"; and the inner cordon, slumbering, echoes it.
And that is the history of any day at Camp Cameron. It is monotonous, it
is not monotonous, it is laborious, it is lazy, it is a bore, it is a
lark, it is half war, half peace, and totally attractive, and not to be
dispensed with from one's experience in the nineteenth century.
Meantime the weeks went on. May 23d arrived. Lovely creatures with their
taper fingers had been brewing a flag for us. Shall I say that its red
stripes were celestial rosy as their cheeks, its white stripes virgin
white as their brows, its blue field cerulean as their eyes, and its
stars scintillating as the beams of the said peepers? Shall I say this?
If I were a poet, like Jeff. Davis and each and every editor of each
and every newspaper in our misbehaving States, I might say it. And
involuntarily I have said it.
So the young ladies of New York—including, I hope, her who made my
sandwiches for the march hither—had been making us a flag, as they
have made us havelocks, pots of jelly, bundles of lint, flannel
dressing-gowns, embroidered slippers for a rainy day in camp, and other
necessaries of the soldier's life.
May 23d was the day we were to get this sweet symbol of good-will. At
evening parade appeared General Thomas, as the agent of the ladies, the
donors, with a neat speech on a clean sheet of paper. He read it with
feeling; and Private W., who has his sentimental moments, avows that he
was touched by the General's earnest manner and patriotic words. Our
Colonel responded with his neat speech, very apropos. The regiment
then made its neat speech, nine cheers and a roar of tigers,—very brief
and pointed.
There had been a note of preparation in General Thomas's remarks,—a
"Virginia, cave canem!" And before parade was dismissed, we saw our
officers holding parley with the Colonel.
Something in the wind! As I was strolling off to see the sunset and the
ladies on parade, I began to hear great irrepressible cheers bursting
from the streets of the different companies.
"Orders to be ready to march at a moment's notice!"—so I learned
presently from dozens of overjoyed fellows. "Harper's Ferry!" says one.
"Alexandria!" shouts a second. "Richmond!" only Richmond will content
a third. And some could hardly be satisfied short of the hope of a
breakfast in Montgomery.
What a happy thousand were the line-companies! How their suppressed
ardors stirred! No want of fight in these lads! They may be rather
luxurious in their habits, for camp-life. They may be a little impatient
of restraint. They may have—as the type regiment of militia—the type
faults of militia on service. But a desire to dodge a fight is not one
of these faults.
Every man in camp was merry, except two hundred who were grim. These
were the two artillery companies, ordered to remain in guard of our
camp. They swore as if Camp Cameron were Flanders.
I by rights belonged with these malecontent and objurgating gentlemen;
but a chronicler has privileges, and I got leave to count myself into
the Eighth Company, my old friend Captain Shumway's. We were to move,
about midnight, in light marching order, with one day's rations.
It has been always full moon at our camp. This night was full moon at
its fullest,—a night more perfect than all perfection, mild, dewy,
refulgent. At one o'clock the drum beat; we fell into ranks, and marched
quietly off through the shadowy trees of the lane, into the highway.
I have heretofore been proud of my individuality, and resisted, so
far as one may, all the world's attempts to merge me in the mass.
In pluribus unum has been my motto. But whenever I march with the
regiment, my pride is that I lose my individuality, that I am merged,
that I become a part of a machine, a mere walking gentleman, a No. 1
or a No. 2, front rank or rear rank, file-leader or file-closer. The
machine is so steady and so mighty, it moves with such musical cadence
and such brilliant show, that I enjoy it entirely as the unum and lose
myself gladly as a pluribus.
Night increases this fascination. The outer world is vague in the
moonlight. Objects out of our ranks are lost. I see only glimmering
steel and glittering buttons and the light-stepping forms of my
comrades. Our array and our step connect us. We move as one man. A
man made up of a thousand members and each member a man is a grand
creature,—particularly when you consider that he is self-made. And the
object of this self-made giant, men-man, is to destroy another like
himself, or the separate pigmy members of another such giant. We have
failed to put ourselves—heads, arms, legs, and wills—together as a
unit for any purpose so thoroughly as to snuff out a similar unit. Up to
1861, it seems that the business of war compacts men best.
Well, the Seventh, a compact projectile, was now flinging itself along
the road to Washington. Just a month ago, "in such a night as this,"
we made our first promenade through the enemy's country. The moon of
Annapolis,—why should we not have our ominous moon, as those other
fellows had their sun of Austerlitz?—the moon of Annapolis shone over
us. No epithets are too fine or too complimentary for such a luminary,
and there was no dust under her rays.
So we pegged along to Washington and across Washington,—which at that
point consists of Willard's Hotel, few other buildings being in sight. A
hag in a nightcap reviewed us from an upper window as we tramped by.
Opposite that bald block, the Washington Monument, and opposite what was
of more importance to us, a drove of beeves putting beef on their bones
in the seedy grounds of the Smithsonian Institution, we were halted
while the New Jersey brigade—some three thousand of them—trudged by,
receiving the complimentary fire of our line as they passed. New Jersey
is not so far from New York but that the dialects of the two can
understand each other. Their respective slangs, though peculiar, are of
the same genus. By the end of this war, I trust that these distinctions
of locality will be quite annulled.
We began to feel like an army as these thousands thronged by us. This
was evidently a movement in force. We rested an hour or more by the
road. Mounted officers galloping along down the lines kept up the
excitement.
At last we had the word to fall in again and march. It is part of the
simple perfection of the machine, a regiment, that, though it drops to
pieces for a rest, it comes together instantly for a start, and nobody
is confused or delayed. We moved half a mile farther, and presently a
broad pathway of reflected moonlight shone up at us from the Potomac.
No orders, at this, came from the Colonel, "Attention, battalion! Be
sentimental!" Perhaps privates have no right to perceive the beautiful.
But the sections in my neighborhood murmured admiration. The utter
serenity of the night was most impressive. Cool and quiet and tender the
moon shone upon our ranks. She does not change her visage, whether it be
lovers or burglars or soldiers who use her as a lantern to their feet.
The Long Bridge thus far has been merely a shabby causeway with
waterways and draws. Shabby,—let me here pause to say that in Virginia
shabbiness is the grand universal law, and neatness the spasmodic
exception, attained in rare spots, an aeon beyond their Old Dominion
age.
The Long Bridge has thus far been a totally unhistoric and prosaic
bridge. Roads and bridges are making themselves of importance and
shining up into sudden renown in these times. The Long Bridge has done
nothing hitherto except carry passengers on its back across the Potomac.
Hucksters, planters, dry-goods drummers, Members of Congress, et ea
genera omnia, have here gone and come on their several mercenary
errands, and, as it now appears, some sour little imp—the very reverse
of a "sweet little cherub"—took toll of every man as he passed,—a
heavy toll, namely, every man's whole store of Patriotism and Loyalty.
Every man—so it seems—who passed the Long Bridge was stripped of his
last dollar of Amor Patriae, and came to Washington, or went home,
with a waistcoat-pocket full of bogus in change. It was our business now
to open the bridge and see it clear, and leave sentries along to keep it
permanently free for Freedom.
There is a mile of this Long Bridge. We seemed to occupy the whole
length of it, with our files opened to diffuse the weight of our column.
We were not now the tired and sleepy squad which just a moon ago had
trudged along the railroad to the Annapolis Junction, looking up a
Capital and a Government, perhaps lost.
By the time we touched ground across the bridge, dawn was breaking,—a
good omen for poor old sleepy Virginia. The moon, as bright and handsome
as a new twenty-dollar piece, carried herself straight before us,—a
splendid oriflamme.
Lucky is the private who marches with the van! It may be the post of
more danger, but it is also the post of less dust. My throat, therefore,
and my eyes and beard, wore the less Southern soil when we halted half a
mile beyond the bridge, and let sunrise overtake us.
Nothing men can do—except picnics, with ladies in straw flats with
feathers—is so picturesque as soldiering. As soon as the Seventh halt
anywhere, or move anywhere, or camp anywhere, they resolve themselves
into a grand tableau.
Their own ranks should supply their own Horace Vernet. Our groups
were never more entertaining than at this halt by the roadside on the
Alexandria road. Stacks of guns make a capital framework for drapery,
and red blankets dot in the lights most artistically. The fellows lined
the road with their gay array, asleep, on the rampage, on the lounge,
and nibbling at their rations.
By-and-by, when my brain had taken in as much of the picturesque as it
could stand, it suffered the brief congestion known as a nap. I was
suddenly awaked by the rattle of a horse's hoofs. Before I had rubbed
my eyes the rider was gone. His sharp tidings had stayed behind him.
Ellsworth was dead,—so he said hurriedly, and rode on. Poor Ellsworth!
a fellow of genius and initiative! He had still so much of the boy in
him, that he rattled forward boyishly, and so died. Si monumentum
requiris, look at his regiment. It was a brilliant stroke to levy it;
and if it does worthily, its young Colonel will not have lived in vain.
As the morning hours passed, we learned that we were the rear-guard of
the left wing of the army advancing into Virginia. The Seventh, as the
best organized body, acted as reserve to this force. It didn't wish
to be in the rear; but such is the penalty of being reliable for an
emergency. Fellow-soldier, be a scalawag, be a bashi-bazouk, be a
Billy-Wilsoneer, if you wish to see the fun in the van!
When the road grew too hot for us, on account of the fire of sunshine
in our rear, we jumped over the fence into the Race-Course, a big field
beside us, and there became squatter sovereigns all day. I shall be
a bore, if I say again what a pretty figure we cut in this military
picnic, with two long lines of blankets draped on bayonets for parasols.
The New Jersey brigade were meanwhile doing workie work on the ridge
just beyond us. The road and railroad to Alexandria follow the general
course of the river southward along the level. This ridge to be
fortified is at the point where the highway bends from west to south.
The works were intended to serve as an advanced tête du pont,—a
bridge-head, with a very long neck connecting it with the bridge. That
fine old Fabius, General Scott, had no idea of flinging an army out
broadcast into Virginia, and, in the insupposable case that it turned
tail, leaving it no defended passage to run away by.
This was my first view of a field-work in construction,—also, my first
hand as a laborer at a field-work. I knew glacis and counterscarp on
paper; also, on paper, superior slope, banquette, and the other dirty
parts of a redoubt. Here they were, not on paper. A slight wooden
scaffolding determined the shape of the simple work; and when I arrived,
a thousand Jerseymen were working, not at all like Jerseymen,—with
picks, spades, and shovels, cutting into Virginia, digging into
Virginia, shovelling up Virginia, for Virginia's protection against
pseudo-Virginians.
I swarmed in for a little while with our Paymaster, picked a little,
spaded a little, shovelled a little, took a hand to my great
satisfaction at earth-works, and for my efforts I venture to suggest
that Jersey City owes me its freedom in a box, and Jersey State a basket
of its finest Clicquot.
Is my gentle reader tired of the short marches and frequent halts of
the Seventh? Remember, gentle reader, that you must be schooled by such
alphabetical exercises to spell bigger words—skirmish, battle, defeat,
rout, massacre—by-and-by.
Well,—to be Xenophontic,—from the Race-Course that evening we marched
one stadium, one parasang, to a cedar-grove up the road. In the grove
is a spring worthy to be called a fountain, and what I determined by
infallible indications to be a lager-bier saloon. Saloon no more! War
is no respecter of localities. Be it Arlington House, the seedy palace
of a Virginia Don,—be it the humbler, but seedy, pavilion where the
tired Teuton washes the dust of Washington away from his tonsils,—each
must surrender to the bold soldier-boy. Exit Champagne and its goblet;
exit lager and its mug; enter whiskey-and-water in a tin pot. Such are
the horrors of civil war!
And now I must cut short my story, for graver matters press. As to
the residence of the Seventh in the cedar-grove for two days and two
nights,—how they endured the hardship of a bivouac on soft earth and
the starvation of coffee sans milk,—how they digged manfully in the
trenches by gangs all these two laborious days,—with what supreme
artistic finish their work was achieved,—how they chopped off their
corns with axes, as they cleared the brushwood from the glacis,—how
they blistered their hands,—how they chafed that they were not
lunging with battailous steel at the breasts of the minions of the
oligarchs,—how Washington, seeing the smoke of burning rubbish, and
hearing dropping shots of target-practice, or of novices with the musket
shooting each other by accident,—how Washington, alarmed, imagined a
battle, and went into panic accordingly,—all this, is it not written
in the daily papers?
On the evening of the 26th, the Seventh travelled back to Camp Cameron
in a smart shower. Its service was over. Its month was expired. The
troops ordered to relieve it had arrived. It had given the other
volunteers the benefit of a month's education at its drills and parades.
It had enriched poor Washington to the tune of fifty thousand dollars.
Ah, Washington! that we, under Providence and after General Butler,
saved from the heel of Secession! Ah, Washington, why did you charge us
so much for our milk and butter and strawberries? The Seventh, then,
after a month of delightful duty, was to be mustered out of service, and
take new measures, if it would, to have a longer and a larger share in
the war.
I took advantage of the day of rest after our return to have a gallop
about the outposts. Arlington Heights had been the spot whence the
alarmists threatened us daily with big thunder and bursting bombs. I was
curious to see the region that had had Washington under its thumb.
So Private W., tired of his foot-soldiering, got a quadruped under him,
and felt like a cavalier again. The horse took me along the tow-path of
the Cumberland Canal, as far as the redoubts where we had worked our
task. Then I turned up the hill, took a look at the camp of the New York
Twenty-Fifth at the left, and rode along for Arlington House.
Grand name! and the domain is really quite grand, but ill-kept. Fine
oaks make beauty without asking favors. Fine oaks and a fair view make
all the beauty of Arlington. It seems that this old establishment, like
many another old Virginian, had claimed its respectability for its
antiquity, and failed to keep up to the level of the time. The road
winds along through the trees, climbing to fairer and fairer reaches of
view over the plain of Washington. I had not fancied that there was any
such lovely site near the capital. But we have not yet appreciated what
Nature has done for us there. When civilization once makes up its mind
to colonize Washington, all this amphitheatre of hills will blossom with
structures of the sublimest gingerbread.
Arlington House is the antipodes of gingerbread, except that it is
yellow, and disposed to crumble. It has a pompous propylon of enormous
stuccoed columns. Any house smaller than Blenheim would tail on
insignificantly after such a frontispiece. The interior has a certain
careless, romantic, decayed-gentleman effect, wholly Virginian. It was
enlivened by the uniforms of staff-officers just now, and as they rode
through the trees of the approach and by the tents of the New York
Eighth, encamped in the grove to the rear, the tableau was brilliantly
warlike. Here, by the way, let me pause to ask, as a horseman, though a
foot-soldier, why generals and other gorgeous fellows make such guys of
their horses with trappings. If the horse is a screw, cover him thick
with saddle-cloths, girths, cruppers, breast-bands, and as much brass
and tinsel as your pay will enable you to buy; but if not a screw, let
his fair proportions be seen as much as may be, and don't bother a lover
of good horseflesh to eliminate so much uniform before he can see what
is beneath.
From Arlington I rode to the other encampments,—the Sixty-Ninth, Fifth,
and Twenty-Eighth, all of New York,—and heard their several stories
of alarms and adventures. This completed the circuit of the new
fortification of the Great Camp. Washington was now a fortress. The
capital was out of danger, and therefore of no further interest to
anybody. The time had come for myself and my regiment to leave it by
different ways.
I should have been glad to stay and see my comrades through to their
departure; but there was a Massachusetts man down at Fortress Monroe,
Butler by name,—has any one heard of him?—and to this gentleman it
chanced that I was to report myself. So I packed my knapsack, got my
furlough, shook hands with my fellows, said good-bye to Camp Cameron,
and was off, two days after our month's service was done.
Under Providence, Washington owes its safety, 1st, To General Butler,
whose genius devised the circumvention of Baltimore and its rascal rout,
and whose utter bravery executed the plan;—he is the Grand Yankee of
this little period of the war. 2d, To the other Most Worshipful Grand
Yankees of the Massachusetts regiment who followed their leader, as he
knew they would, discovered a forgotten colony called Annapolis, and
dashed in there, asking no questions. 3d, And while I gladly yield the
first places to this General and his men, I put the Seventh in, as
last, but not least, in saving the capital. Character always tells. The
Seventh, by good, hard, faithful work at drill, had established its fame
as the most thorough militia regiment in existence. Its military and
moral character were excellent. The mere name of the regiment carried
weight. It took the field as if the field were a ball-room. There were
myriads eager to march; but they had not made ready beforehand. Yes,
the Seventh had its important share in the rescue. Without our support,
whether our leaders tendered it eagerly or hesitatingly, General
Butler's position at Annapolis would have been critical, and his forced
march to the capital a forlorn hope,—heroic, but desperate.
So, honor to whom honor is due.
Here I must cut short my story. So good-bye to the Seventh, and thanks
for the fascinating month I have passed in their society. In this pause
of the war our camp-life has been to me as brilliant as a permanent
picnic.
Good-bye to Company I, and all the fine fellows, rough and smooth, cool
old hands and recruits verdant but ardent! Good-bye to our Lieutenants,
to whom I owe much kindness! Good-bye, the Orderly, so peremptory on
parade, so indulgent off! Good-bye, everybody!
And so in haste I close.