THE ATTACK ON CHARLESTON:—PRIDE OF RACE IN AMERICA.
[Room OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.]
New York, August 29, 1863. IN the middle of Charleston harbour lies a shapeless heap of smouldering ruins, the history of which during the last two years and four months _foretells that of every attempt upon the life or the honour of this Republic,—some success, more or less, at first,—but • in the end destruction. Is this interpretation of the story of Fort Sumter a piece of that Yankee boastfulness of which you, looking acmes an ocean, can see so much, but of which I, on the other side of the water, and judging by your standard, can see among the people of the Free States so little? Consider. Do you know of any power, or any two powers in Europe, that could put 500,000 men upon our soil, who could and- would fight as the rebel armies have fought ? You say, no power would attempt it ; the attack would be mainly by sea. Well ; but could the whole navy of any one or zany two European Powers drive our commerce more effectually from the seas than has been done by three rebel privateers, ,built for the so-called "Confederate States" in a certain island you wot of? And yet we live in comfort, and are getting rich. But our seaports, great and small, would be attacked. Indeed ? Which of the skilful naval con- structors of Europe has yet built a ship that can cross the ocean and enter or come near a harbour where two or three Monitors, such as knocked that floating iron fort the Atlanta to pieces in fifteen minutes, lie at anchor ? My boast is mere history, as to domestic violence ; for that we have mastered, and are now crush- ing, although its proportions were more gigantic than the world had seen before ; as to foreign enemies, it is inference, of the just- ness of which you, perhaps, are the better judges.
Now, what are the people who have done these great things ?— who have, on the one side, set on foot and maintained so long a revolt compared with which all others known to history are but as squabbles in a corner, and on the other put down—at this time, to all intents and purposes put down—that revolt, in spite of domestic faction and foreign enmity? They are English people, not British subjects, but English men, as purely and absolutely English as the people between John o'Groat's and Land's End. My observation of your countrymen leads me to believe that many of the readers of a paper of even such high grade as the Spectator do not know that when they call a man a Yankee they merely call him an Englishman. The American tribes among whom our fore- fathers landed could not say English ; their nearest approach to the sound of the word was Yengee, which soon, and with slight modifica- tion, became Yankees. A Yankee is merely an Englishman born and bred in a commonwealth much like that which once existed in Old England herself; a country without a monarch, or an established church, or a privileged order of any sort, and in which political equality, some land, and a medium education are within the reach of almost every one—a country, nevertheless, in which every existing moral and intellectual force is purely and absolutely English. There is no national or municipal law here, no social custom, no recognized standard of taste, no principle of action, no form of speech, which is not essentially English ; and as to the common law of both countries, that is common to them both. These possessions, mind you, are not something which we owe to you, but which you and we hold in common, deriving them from the same source. This, which is so true and so obvious, that a statement of it ought to seem, and perhaps does seem, mere common-place, you, in judging and in speaking of us, are too apt to forget when you should remember them ; while, on the other hand, you are apt to remember our lineage only when you should take also into consideration circumstances peculiar to our position. You come over here and see, or you see through the eyes of a tourist or a newspaper reporter, something in society or in politics " not at all like what we have at home," and you at once infer that the Englishman has undergone some radical change of nature during the short time that he has been in this country, the truth being that mere accident and circumstance have caused the difference which strikes your attention, and that if you were to take a thou- sand men at random out of Middlesex, and set them down here together to live their lives out, they would before five years were over—at -the end of which time I take it they would be none the less Englishmen than they were at the beginning—be doing just what the Yankees do ; that is, they would be acting out their English nature under the conditions of the Western instead of those of the Eastern hemisphere. The variations, too, would be in no case radical, but would not reach lower than the merest surface matters. This truth no, English _tourist seems to have discovered ; and, indeed, it lies beyond a mere
tourist's range of observation. But I never yet found a man who, born and bred in the mother country, came here to live, and whose intelligence and conduct gave him access to respectable (I do not say fashionable or highly cultivated) society, who did not find, to his surprise sometimes, that he had discovered, or rather imbibed, it in about three years.
It is because of the misjudgment consequent mostly upon the misapprehension just referred to, though partly—pardon me—upon a certain perversity and intolerance of disposition, which belongs to the race, and which has not been entirely bred out here, that there has been so sad an alienation of feeling between the people of the two countries in their aggregate relations. (As individuals it seems to me that they get along remarkably well together.) Pride of race and national pride are strong here beyond their strength elsewhere, except, perhaps, in Old England ; and of the two I think that the pride of race is the stronger. The Republic is great, noble, its government, with all drawbacks, the most beneficent, in our opinion, that has ever existed. But what is citizenship of the United States? A mere political condition ; a condition, too, which. may be shared to the full in all its privileges by the most ignorant and imbruted peasant in Europe. To be of the race of which we are is clearly more a matter of pride, and a matter of more importance to us than even this beneficent political condition ; because it is our English manhood, and only our English manhood, which has made that political condition possible, and which guarantees its preservation. The Irish or the German peasant, when he becomes a citizen of the United States, becomes endowed with privileges purely English in their origin, won for themselves by Englishmen and preserved jealously and absolutely from any other than English influences. Whatever difference there may be between the laws and the customs of the Old England and the New has been produced by the law of development. It has been worked out from within, not imposed from without ; as one should say, "Thus will Englishmen act in these circumstances." The effect of immigration is absolutely nothing. No trace is left upon the laws or customs of any community by the immigrants, however numerous. For, contrary to a notion which seems to prevail in Europe, and which I have seen recently brought forward in regard to the Irish riots in New York, the Irish or German immi- grant (with exceptions so rare as to be unnoticeable) never becomes assimilated in the first generation, and in the second he is entirely absorbed. In the first generation he is a foreigner—a unit of "the foreign vote." Reis more clearly and sharply set aside as a foreigner here than he would be in any other country ; partly from the fact that it is to the interest of the demagogues, and also to his interest, as he thinks, that the foreign vote should be kept together as an isolated compact body, ready to be thrown into the political scale in a lump, but chiefly from the pride of race of which I have just spoken. For although in the second generation the Irishman or the German disappears, and in his place there stands a Yankee, this absorption is not the consequence of intermarriage. Marriage between the Irish and German immigrants and natives of this country is so rare as not to be taken into account. You would naturally suppose that our humbler artizo.ns, shopmen, and farm labourers would find wives among the multitudes of young Irish and German women who come over here, and that their brothers would sometimes marry Yankee girls. As well might you expect them to marry with the Percies, the Stanleys, and the Courtenays I The Yankee, however humble his condition, holds himself loftily aloof from all such alliance. Such marriages must occur, of course, but I never heard of one. But with the second generation, in which, although the blood is unchanged, by some mysterious influence the peasant foreign look disappears, and in the Irishman even the bridge of the nose rises and the gums recede beneath the upper lip, the Yankee of humble position will marry. But to the English immigrant no such exclusion is applied. He is not regarded (except politically) as a foreigner.
Now, these Yankees are the people of this country ; which fact many of you across the water seem to forget, while your heads are filled with the notion that a mixed medley of Irish, Germans, Yankees, and Negroes makes what is oRdly enough called the "American nation." But the immigrants are a mere handful in the enormous mass, and a handful set apart, as I have told you. But because it is set apart, therefore it is seen ; and because it is considerable in itself, and lies in the way of superficial observation, therefore it received much and very undue consideration from travellers here and writers abroad. For the former see almost nothing, and the latter hear almost nothing, of the great, all-powerful mass of the people of this country, who are not to be found in cities, on railways, and in hotels, or at political meet- ings; but who stay at home, mind their business, manage the
affairs of their little townships, and silently control, in the long run, the political action of the nation. I mean those "Northern freeholders," of which so much that is true and sound, and com- paratively so little that is untrue and unsound, was said in the Spectator of August 15th. These men are, as was well said in that article, "the true and ultimate governing class of the North; " only they are not a class. They are the North, at least seven-tenths of it. These men are now struggling between their indomitable and, in my opinion, fully warranted pride of race, and their sense of justice. The character of that struggle was in the main correctly represented in the article in question. Let me state what I think are some of its misapprehensions. It is not at all true that" the American people considered in mass have not yet imbibed any detes- tation of slavery for its effect on the negro," or that "an average American hates slavery without the English addendum that slavery is a crime." On the contrary, it was the detestation of slavery as a great outrage upon humanity, and upon civilization, it was a close and searching conviction of its criminality, among the mass of the people of the Free States, which brought about the present revolu- tion. But—and this truth is one which it seems impossible for a European so to apprehend and remember as to take it into con- sideration when judging this country—outrageous and criminal as slavery was, for the outrage and the crime we of the Free States were not in any way responsible. We had no more responsibility for slavery, no more power over it than the British Government and people. The consciousness that if the Free States attempted to use their power to abolish, or even modify slavery, they would not only cause but justify revolt on the part of the Slave States, and the conviction that it was better, better not only for this country, but in the end for mankind, that slavery should continue where it was already established, than that this Republic should be destroyed, controlled the action of hundreds of thousands of men who never thought or spoke of slavery but as an accursed thing. Outside of these, of course, there were the trading politicians, who, without excepting "the river gamblers," are "the most unprincipled class in America," and who carry the foreign vote in their pockets as the others a marked card in their sleeve. Con- trary to your supposition, it is mainly, if not purely, a question of justice and mercy which the average American has brought himself to decide. It is the "frightful oppression" of slavery . against which he brought himself to protest and—the slaveholders having untied his hands by their defiance of the Constitution—finally to fight. For, mind you, he cannot see, as you seem to see, that he "refuses to stand in the rank with the black man who is dying for him." He thinks, as I do, that he is dying, that the power of his nation shall not be used to perpetuate the oppression of the black man. For that he is willing to fight and to die. And yet you are right in saying that." if he could plant the negroes like Indians on reserved lands, and leave them to die out quietly, he would do it." Because here his pride:of race comes in. This pride has nothing to do, as you suppose it to have, with the condition, free or slave, high or low, of the negro. It is merely the Anglo-Saxon con- sciousness of worth, of superiority, which is shown by your countrymen as well as by mine, and has been shown by our race from time immemorial. You seem to think that negroes are all poor and ragged. But there are hundreds of negroes in New York who dress more expensively than I do, thousands who could buy me over and over. But between them and me there is a solid wall, invisible, but as impassable as the gulf between Lazarus and Dives. Now that the negro shall not be made a slave we are determined ; but we are no less determined that this wall between us shall not be broken down. In the Free States we neither give nor accept challenges, and so your proposition to break down the barrier by making it cowardly to refuse the challenge of a negro soldier must fall to the ground, and in any other way there is not the necessary point of contact for your purpose. We cannot see, as you seem to see, that the negro is "a magnificent man," whether "dressed like an Oriental," or in any other way. The fact is that the more expensively he dresses and the more like a white man he behaves the more ridiculous he is to us. So would it be with you, were the negroes, instead of being rare exotics and, in fact, curi- osities, born on your soil and numberel by the hundred thousand, even by the million. You feel about the negro question as an abstrac- tion. Do you think that if you saw in the future any danger of a House of Commons half negro, a House of Peers half negro, and a negro mother for your grandchildren, your English blood would not revolt? I know it would ; and even as it would with the proudest peer of you all, so does it, and for the same reason, with
A YANKEE.
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