New York, March 11, 1865.
THE Richmond folk guard well any knowledge they may possess of General Sherman's movements, which gives, I think, more reason- able ground of anxiety in regard to him than if they were " re- pulaing " and " destroying " him every other day. We learn this morning that refugees to our lines say that he is within forty miles of Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, and that he is well received and well fed by a large proportion of the people on his route, which may be true. The disintegration of the so-called Confederacy seems to be going on rapidly without a doubt. Those of the Confederated people who are strenuous in endeavouring to keep it up declare themselves sick of their pet doctrine of State sovereignty, now that it proves to be an obstacle to their ambitious plans. The Confederate Government is begging food as a gift from the people of North Carolina and Virginia to feed its armies, and on the other hand the rank and file, and even the inferior officers of that army, are deserting to the national lines and taking the oath of allegiance at.the rate of more than two hundred a day. I tell you this not upon rumour or newspaper report, but upon authority that cannot be disputed. Thus is passing away this shadow without substance, for which some misguided and some moonstruck men have fought so gallantly.
The inaugural ceremonies of the 4th of March (probably the most unceremonious ceremonies the world ever saw) were distin- guished from all those which preceded them by an incident which I would gladly pass over in silence. But should I do so I should fail to be as candid in my comments upon our affairs as I intend to be, and should also lose an opportunity of remarking upon some characteristic traits of our people and our public men. The Vice-President of the United States is a personage of whom foreign nations hear very little, except in case of the death of the President, when he assumes the office thus vacated. But he holds a very important and dignified position--that of presiding officer of the Senate of the United States. It is customary for the Vice- President upon taking the oath of office, which is administered to him by the Vice-President whom he is to succeed, to make a speech, which according to custom should be brief, formal, and having reference merely to the occasion on which it is pronounced. Above all things it should be marked with the dignity becoming the presiding officer of the most important and venerable legis- lative body in the land. But on Saturday last, Mr. Johnson, presenting himself to take his oath of office, acted and spoke in such a manner as to insult the Government of which he was a member, the representatives of foreign Governments who were present, the body over which he had been called to preside, and the nation which had placed him in that position. To waste no needless words, Mr. Johnson's speech was the foolish and inco- herent gabble of a drunken blackguard. He addressed the members of the Cabinet individually in a most offensive manner ; and when he came to repeat the oath of office, his utterance was so thick, and his brain so muddled, that he could not utter the words until after repeated efforts.
This painful and disgraceful exhibition was allowed to go on only, I suppose, because no such contingency having been contemplated as possible, no provision was made to meet it ; and on the sudden emergency (as the time for the inauguration ceremonies is fixed by law, and only physical impossibility can be accepted as a suffi- cient reason for their not taking place), the Senate was at a non- plus, and did not know what to do under such shocking and un- precedented circumstances. As it was, shame and indignation filled the Chamber. All possible means were used to abridge the subsequent proceedings, and the sitting soon broke up to take part in the inauguration of President Lincoln. The readers of The Spectator may remember that only a few weeks ago I told them that Mr. Johnson was not a man whose early training, or whose instincts and subsequent self-culture had made him an ac- ceptable companion in society where decorum was mach regarded. Of this indeed he himself boasted in the most offensive manner on the occasion in question—offending none more than the many men around him who had risen from humble origin to public dis- tinction and to an honoured position in such society. I confess, however, that low as I rated him in this respect, I was not pre- pared for such a humiliating and disgusting exhibition as he made of himself on the 4th of March. The whole country was shocked and shamed by his conduct. Comparatively little has been said about it in the newspapers, on account of the office in which the offender is, if he choose, fixed as firmly for four years as a king upon his throne. But in society, in the clubs, and in the street conversation, it has been made the subject of indignant comment far and wide. I can say this with personal knowledge, for I have travelled more than four hundred miles since the occurrence. Nowhere have I heard any other opinion expressed than that Mr. Johnson ought to resign immediately. Judging by the past, his conduct will be held up in Europe as a fair specimen of morals and manners in the United States; and nothing will be said of the fact that that conduct has not been accepted by us as suited to our tastes and notions of decency, but has shocked and shamed the whole nation. And I admit that, judging us, as it is not un- natural that you should, by your own standard of conduct in public men, your conclusion must be damnably against us. You put your men of highest culture and lest social position into your most prominent public positions ; and you will say, "What must that religion be of which the god is a monkey ?" But we, as a general thing, do not put our most cultivated men into such positions. Even our very highest executive officer is not the god of our political religion ; he is not even our ruler, he is our servant. Mr. Buchanan, who had been many years Senator, then Minister to Great Britain, and then President, spoke of himself in one of his last messages rather queerly, but still very truly, as "an old public functionary." He was right, he was nothing more,— a sort of magnified Mr. Bumble, dealing with a larger parish. We are trying here to do away with Government—that is, with the management of the affairs of the many by the few—and it must be admitted that although in our opinion the end in view is worth all the sacrifices we are making for its attainment, the process is in many respects not a pleasant one to look upon. Few processes are. One circumstance common to this occurrence and to another of somewhat similar nature which recently took place at Washington,—I mean the assault made by one member of the House of Representatives upon another, on account of a denial by the latter of the former's right to his seat—has at- tracted attention here. In both instances the offenders were from a Slave State ; in one from Tennessee, in the other from Louisiana. And the delegate to the Chicago Convention, who, you may re- member, knocked another down in open session for words spoken in debate, was also from the abode of negro-whipping chivalry. Indeed it is noteworthy that since secession took the slaveholding members from the floor of Congress a degree of decorum unwonted there of late years has obtained, and now that they begin to come back again, it would seem as if they bring confusion with them. The North does not pretend to send its best men, its aris- tocracy, so to speak, to Washington, except to the Senate, but the South does ; and yet although men of small minds, of low moral tone, and of inferior breeding, have gone there from the North, they have not been drunken brawlers and baffles, they have not defied the laws of decorum, although they may have been ignorant of those of good taste. It cannot be said that Mr. Johnson is the fruit of Yankee influence at the South ; for he was a Senator from Tennessee before secession was attempted. Let me not be understood as bringing a sweeping charge of indecorous behaviour against the members from the slaveholding States. It is from the south-western, the pioneer Slave States, that most of these rude, drunken brawlers come. They furnished both the recent offenders. Saving a disposition to arrogant self-assertion, I have met no better-bred men than some of those from Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia, and yet from South Carolina came that brutal bully Preston Brooks. Yet as a general thing it will be found that the members of Con- gress whose conduct at Washington, in private as well as in pub- lic, disgraces and misrepresents the nation are from places which bear the same relation to those which may be justly regarded as exhibiting our social development as in the British Empire Australia does to England.
I see that not few people in England, among them noble lords, honourable baronets, and able editors, are much concerned as to the future of Canada after the cessation of our civil war. Let me assure you, as I have assured you before, that there is neither intention nor desire in this country to set on foot a hostile exitedition against Canada, or to appropriate one square mile of
Canadian territory. I do not speak merely of mea of my oi=vit habits of life and way of thinking, but of the people generally. I have brought the subject up many times, and recently among perfect strangers and men in all conditions of life; and never heard the slightest expression of that desire to "annex Canada"
which some of you seem to think is an ever-present thought with us. Let me tell you also, however, of a danger, if so it must be called, which does exist in that quarter. In what are called the eastern counties of Canada, which lie between the United States and the river St. Lawrence, there is a very strong inclination to- wards annexation to the United States, which might be productive of trouble 'upon sufficient occasion. This I know upon general report, and also upon authority which my readers will hardly dis- pute. A British officer of rank, a very estimable and intelligent man who had twice visited these counties and remained some time in them, told me that he found the disposition which I have mentioned manifested in various ways and in a very unmis-
takeable manner. I trust, however, that movement towards Canadian unity which has since been made may have awakened a feeling which will counteract this disintegrating force. For we of the Free States have not, never had, any fever of annexation. Read the following extract from General Dix's speech on Monday last, to which day a pouring rain compelled the postponement of
the celebration which was to have taken place on the previous Saturday :—
" But there are one or two considerations arising out of the European view of this domestic contest, to which I wish briefly to call your atten- tion. It is very strange that many of those who have been looking on across the Atlantic should all at once have forgotten that the national wrongs, for which the United States have been so much reproached by Europeans in past years, are all of Southern growth—slavery, filibus- tering, and repudiation. From this threefold exfoliation of political evil—the noxious growth of the Southern hot-bed—the darker crime of rebellion has sprang up. We of the North, though participating in the odium of the three firsts by virtue of our common brotherhood with the South, have in truth no responsibility for either. We hold no slaves—we have never set on foot a piratical expedition against a friendly Power ; Mississippi, the home of Jefferson Davis, is the only one of the United States which has persisted for a quarter of a century in repudiating her debts. Those abroad who have taken part against us have ranged ttemselvcs on the side of all this political wrong, vir- tually sustaining now what in the past they have been most vociferous to condemn. No motive could be strong enough to account for such a choice but a desire to see us broken up for the purpose of weakening our power. Lord Brougham, in a sketch of the life of Jefferson, written twenty-five years ago, alluded to the existence of such a feeling in Europe."
Now General Dix is a man to whom you may well look for the best and the truest exposition of the affairs and of the feelings of this country. He is not, as you may possibly have supposed, a hot-headed military politician, seeking popular favour by pandering to excited popular feeling. He is a white-haired man, of high culture and literary tastes, of great sobriety and dignity of character, of large acquaintance of the world abroad as well as at home, of competent fortune, and of a socia position from which he would step down into any society brought about him by political distinction. What he says you may accept as an expression of the deliberate conviction and the earnest feeling of the best-educated and sedatest people of this country. If they all knew this I think that the noble lords, and the honourable baronets, and the able editors would see that the future of Canada and the relations of Great Britain to this republic depend not so much upon us as upon themselves ; in fact, that they have the power of perpetual peace in their own hands, and that without calling upon Mr. Gladstone for a pound sterling. As to what The New York. Herald reports General Sherman as having said, trust his good sense if not my assurance
Previous page
