The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 49, November, 1861

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But who shall reckon up the countless circumstances which lie like a depressing burden on the energies of men, and make them work at that disadvantage which we have thought of under the figure of carrying weight in life? There are men who carry weight in a damp, marshy neighborhood, who, amid bracing mountain air might have done things which now they will never do. There are men who carry weight in an uncomfortable house: in smoky chimneys: in a study with a dismal look-out: in distance from a railway-station: in ten miles between them and a bookseller's shop. Give another hundred a year of income, and the poor struggling parson who preaches dull sermons will astonish you by the talent he will exhibit when his mind is freed from the dismal depressing influence of ceaseless scheming to keep the wolf from the door. Let the poor little sick child grow strong and well, and with how much better heart will its father face the work of life! Let the clergyman who preached, in a spiritless enough way, to a handful of uneducated rustics, be placed in a charge where weekly he has to address a large cultivated congregation, and, with the new stimulus, latent powers may manifest themselves which no one fancied he possessed, and he may prove quite an eloquent and attractive preacher. A dull, quiet man, whom you esteemed as a blockhead, may suddenly be valued very differently when circumstances unexpectedly call out the solid qualities he possesses, unsuspected before. A man devoid of brilliancy may on occasion show that he possesses great good sense, or that he has the power of sticking to his task in spite of discouragement. Let a man be placed where dogged perseverance will stand him in stead, and you may see what he can do when he has but a chance. The especial weight which has held some men back, the thing which kept them from doing great things and attaining great fame, has been just this: that they were not able to say or to write what they have thought and felt. And, indeed, a great poet is nothing more than the one man in a million who has the gift to express that which has been in the mind and heart of multitudes. If even the most commonplace of human beings could write all the poetry he has felt, he would produce something that would go straight to the hearts of many.

It is touching to witness the indications and vestiges of sweet and admirable things which have been subjected to a weight which has entirely crushed them down,—things which would have come out into beauty and excellence, if they had been allowed a chance. You may witness one of the saddest of all the losses of Nature in various old maids. What kind hearts are there running to waste! What pure and gentle affections blossom to be blighted! I dare say you have heard a young lady of more than forty sing, and you have seen her eyes fill with tears at the pathos of a very commonplace verse. Have you not thought that there was the indication of a tender heart which might have made some good man happy, and, in doing so, made herself happy, too? But it was not to be. Still, it is sad to think that sometimes upon cats and dogs there should be wasted the affection of a kindly human being! And you know, too, how often the fairest promise of human excellence is never suffered to come to fruit. You must look upon gravestones to find the names of those who promised to be the best and noblest specimens of the race. They died in early youth,—perhaps in early childhood. Their pleasant faces, their singular words and ways, remain, not often talked of, in the memories of subdued parents, or of brothers and sisters now grown old, but never forgetting how that one of the family, that was as the flower of the flock, was the first to fade. It has been a proverbial saying, you know, even from heathen ages, that those whom the gods love die young. It is but an inferior order of human beings that makes the living succession to carry on the human race.

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WHY HAS THE NORTH FELT AGGRIEVED WITH ENGLAND?

We have chosen a guarded and passionless wording for a topic on which we wish to offer a few frankly spoken, but equally passionless remarks. With the bitterness and venom and exaggeration of statement which both English and American papers have interchanged in reference to matters of opinion and matters of feeling connected with our national troubles we do not now intermeddle. We would not imitate it: we regret it, and on our own side we are ashamed of it. We have read editorials and communications in our own papers so grossly vituperative and stinging in the rancor of their spirit, that it would not have surprised us, if some Englishmen, of a certain class, had organized a hostile association against us in revenge for our truculent defiance. The real spirit of bullyism, of the cockpit and the pugilistic ring, has been exhibited in this interchange of newspaper opinion. The more is the reason why we should not overlook or be blind to the real grievances in the case, nor fail to give expression to them in the strongest way of which their emphatic, but unembittered, statement will admit. Whether the London "Times" is or is not an authoritative vehicle for the utterance of average English opinion, and an index, in its general tone, of the prevailing sentiment of that people, is a question which, so far from wishing to decide, we must decline to entertain, as mainly irrelevant to our present purpose. As a matter of fact, however, if we did accept that print as an authority and a standard in English opinion, we should throw more of temper than we hope to prevent escaping through our words into the remarks which are to follow. That paper evidently represents the opinion of one class, perhaps of more than one class of Englishmen. An intelligent American reader of its comments on our affairs can always read it, as even the best-informed Englishman cannot, with the skill and ability to discern its spirit, often covertly mean, and to detect its misrepresentations, some of the grossest of which are made the basis of its arguments and inferences. From the very opening of our strife to the last issue of that print which has crossed the water, its comments and records relating to our affairs have presented a most ingenious and mischievous combination of everything false, ill-tempered, malignant, and irritating. It is at present exercising itself upon the financial arrangements of our Government, and uttering prophecies, falsified before they have come to our knowledge, about the inability or the unwillingness of our loyal people to furnish the necessary money.

But enough of the London "Times." We have in view matters not identified with the spirit and comments of a single newspaper, however influential. We have in view graver and more comprehensive facts,—facts, too, more significant of feelings and opinion. Stating our point in general terms, which we shall reduce to some particulars before we close, we affirm frankly and emphatically, that the North, we might even say this Nation, as a government standing in solemn treaty relations with Great Britain, has just cause of complaint and offence at the prevailing tone and spirit of the English people, and press, and mercantile classes, towards us, in view of the rebellion which is convulsing our land. That tone and spirit have not been characterized by justice, magnanimity, or true sympathy with a noble and imperilled cause; they have not been in keeping with the professions and avowed principles of that people; they have not been consistent with the former intimations of English opinion towards us, as regards our position and our duty; and they have sadly disappointed the hopes on whose cheering support we had relied when the dark hours which English influence had helped to prepare for us should come.

Before we proceed to our specifications, let us meet the suggestion often thrown out, that we have been unduly and morbidly sensitive to English opinion in this matter; and let us gratefully allow for the exceptions that may require to be recognized in the application of our charges against the English people or press as a whole. It has been said that we have shown a timid and almost craven sensitiveness to the opinions pronounced abroad upon our national struggle, especially those pronounced by our own kinsfolk of England. It is urged, that a strong and prosperous and united people, if conscious of only a rightful cause, and professing the ability to maintain it, should be self-reliant, independent of foreign judgment, and ready to trust to time and the sure candor and fulness of the expositions which it brings with it, to set us right before the eyes of the world. But what if another nation, supposed to be friendly, known even to have recommended and urged upon us the very cause for which we are contending, represents it in such a contumelious and disheartening way as to show us that we have not even her sympathy? Further, what if there is a spirit and a tone of treatment towards us which suggests the possibility that at some critical moment she may interfere in a way that will embarrass us and encourage our enemies? The sensitiveness of a people to the possible power of mischief that may lie against them in the hands of a jealous neighbor, ready to be used at the will or caprice of its possessor, may indicate timidity or weakness. But Great Britain, knowing very well what the feeling is, ought to understand that it may consist with real strength, courage, and right purposes. It is notorious now to all the civilized world, as a fact often ludicrously and sometimes lugubriously set forth, that millions of sturdy English folk have lived for many years, and live at this hour, in a state of quaking trepidation as to the designs of a single man of "ideas" across their Channel. What bulletin have the English people ever read from day to day with such an intermittent pulse as that with which they peruse quotations from the "Moniteur"? The English people, whatever might have been true of them once, are now the last people in the world—matched and overawed as they are by the French—to charge upon another people a timid sensitiveness for even the slightest intimations of foreign feeling and possible intentions.

We must allow also for exceptions to the sweep of the specific charges under which we shall express our grievances at the general course of English treatment towards us. There have been messages in many private letters from Englishmen and Englishwomen of high public and of dignified private station, there have been editorials and communications in a few English papers, there have been brief utterances in Parliament, and from leading speakers at political, mercantile, literary, and religious assemblies, which have shown a full appreciation of the import of our present strife, and have conveyed to us in words of most precious and grateful encouragement the assurance that many hearts are beating with ours across the sea. That the truculence and venom of some of our own papers may have repressed the feeling and the utterance of this same sympathy in many individuals and ways where it might otherwise have manifested itself is not unnatural, and is very probable. We acknowledge most gratefully the cheer and the inspiration which have come to us from every word, wish, and act from abroad that has recognized the stake of our conflict; and we will take for granted the real existence and the glowing heartiness of much of the same which has not been expressed, or has not reached us. Farther even than this we will go in tempering or qualifying the utterance of our grievances. We will take for granted that very much of the coldness, or antipathy, or contemptuousness, or misrepresentation which we have recognized in the general treatment of us and our cause by Englishmen is to be accounted to actual ignorance or a very partial understanding of our real circumstances and of the conditions of the conflict, and of the relations of parties to it. De Tocqueville is universally regarded among us as the only foreigner who ever divined the theoretical and the practical method of our institutions. Englishmen, English statesmen even, have never penetrated to the mystery of them. Many intelligent British travellers have seemed to wish to do so, and to have tried to do so. But the study bothers them, the secret baffles them. They give it up with a gruff impatience which writes on their features the sentence, "You have no right to have such complicated and unintelligible arrangements in your governments, State and Federal: they are quite un-English." Our foreign kinsfolk seem unwilling to realize the extent of our domain, and the size of some of our States as compared with their own island, and incapable of understanding how different institutions, forms, limitations, and governmental arrangements may exist in the several States, independently of, or in subordination to, the province and administration of the Federal Government. Nearly every English journal which undertakes to refer to our affairs will make ludicrous or serious blunders, if venturing to enter into details. The "Edinburgh Review" kindly volunteered to be the champion of American institutions and products in opposition to the extreme Toryism of the "Quarterly." Sydney Smith took us, our authors and early enterprises, under his special patronage, and he wrote many favorable articles of that character. One would have supposed, that, in the necessary preparation for such labors, he would have acquired some geographical, statistical, and other rudimentary knowledge about us, enough to have kept him from gross blunders. Unluckily, for him and for us, for the sake of getting here on his money double the interest which he could get at home, and not considering that the greater the promised profit the greater the risk, he made investments in some of our stock companies and bonds. When these investments proved disastrous, he raved and fumed, calling upon our Government—which had nothing more to do with the matter than had the English Parliament—to make good his losses.

We are tempted for a moment to drop the graver thread of our theme to relate an anecdote in illustration of our present point. It happened a few years ago that we had as a household guest for two or three weeks an English gentleman, well-informed, courteous, and excellent, who had been for several years the editor of a London paper. On the day after his domestication with us, which was within the first week of his arrival at New York, sitting where we are now writing, after breakfast, he announced that "he had a commission to execute for a friend, with a person residing in Springfield." Opening his note-book, he handed us a slip of paper bearing the gentleman's name and address, "Springfield, Ohio." Furnishing him with writing-materials, we were about turning to our own occupation, when, suddenly, with a quick exclamation, as if recalling something, he said, "Sure, I have been in Springfield. I remember a short, a very short time was allowed for dinner, as I came from New York." We explained, or tried to explain to him, that the Springfield through which he had passed and the Springfield to which he was writing were in different States widely separated, and that there were also several other "Springfields." To this he demurred, protesting that it made matters quite confusing to foreigners to have the same names repeated in different parts of the Country. In vain did we suggest that all confusion was avoided by adding the abbreviated name of the State. No! "It was very confusing." Suddenly, a thought occurred to us, and, refreshing our memory by a glance at the Index of our English "Road-Book," we suggested triumphantly that names were repeated for different localities in England: thus, there are four Ashfords, two Dorchesters, six Hortons, seven Newports, etc., etc. Our guest, with an air and vehemence that quite outvied our triumph, exclaimed,—"Oh! but they are in different shi_rrr_hes, in different shi_rrr_hes!" Sure enough, one of his own shires is a larger thing to an Englishman than one of our States. He lives on an island which is to him larger than all the rest of the world, though any one starting from the centre of it, on a fast horse, unless he crossed the border into Scotland, could scarcely ride in any direction twenty-four hours without getting overboard.

To the actual ignorance or obfuscation of mind of the majority of the English people, as regards our country and its institutions, we are doubtless to refer much of the ill-toned and seemingly unfriendly comments made upon our affairs in their organs. Thus, it is intimated to us by many English writers, that they regard the North now as simply undertaking to patch up a Union founded and sustained by mean compromises, an object which has already led us into many humiliating concessions,—and that the moment we announce that we are striking a blow for Liberty, we shall have their sympathy without stint or measure. No Englishman who really understood our affairs would talk in that way. One of the chief lures which instigated and encouraged the Southern rebellion was the assurance, adroitly insinuated by the leading traitors into their duped followers, that opposition by the rest of the country to their schemes would take the form of an anti-slavery crusade, in which form the opposition would be put down by the combined force of those who did not belong to the Republican party. They were deceived. Opposition to them took the form of a rallying by all parties to the defence of the Constitution, the maintenance of the Union. For any anti-slavery zeal to have attempted to divert the aroused patriotism of the land to a breach of one of its fundamental constitutional provisions would have been treacherous and futile. The majority of our enlisted patriotic soldiers would have laid down their arms. If the leadings of Providence shall direct the thickening strife into an exterminating crusade against slavery, doubtless our patriots will wait on Providence. But we could not have started in our stern work avowing that as an object of our own. And as to the meanness of our concessions and compromises for Union, we have to consider what woes and wrongs that Union has averted. Has England no discreditable passages in her own Parliamentary history? Have her attempts at governing large masses of men, Christian and heathen, Roman Catholic and Protestant, and of all sects, privileged and oppressed, never led her into any truckling or tyrannical legislation, any concessions or compromises of ideal or abstract right?

But we must come to our specifications, introducing them with but a single other needful suggestion. We have not to complain of any acts or formal measures of the English Government against us,—nor even of the omission of any possible public manifestation which might have turned to our encouragement or service. But it will be admitted that we have grievances to complain of, if the tone and the strain of English opinion and sentiment have been such as to inspirit the South and to dispirit the North. If English comments have palliated or justified the original and the incidental measures of the Rebellion,—if they have been zealous to find or to exaggerate excuses for it, to overstate the apparent or professed grounds of it, to wink at the meannesses and outrages by which it has thriven,—if they have perverted or misrepresented the real issue, have ridiculed or discouraged the purposes of its patriotic opponents, have embarrassed or impeded their hopes of success, or have prejudged or foreclosed the probable result,—it will be admitted, we say, that we have grievances against those who have so dealt by us in the hour of our dismay and trial. And it is an enormous aggravation of the disappointment or the wrong which we are bearing, that it is visited upon us by England just as we have initiated measures for at least restraining and abating the dominant power of that evil institution for our complicity in the support of which she has long been our unsparing censor. We complain generally of the unsympathizing and contemptuous tone of England towards us,—of the mercurial standard by which she judges our strife,—of the scarcely qualified delight with which she parades our occasional ill-successes and discomfitures,—of the baste which she has made to find tokens of a rising despotism or a military dictatorship in those measures of our Government which are needful and consistent with the exigencies of a state of warfare, such as the suspension, on occasions, of the habeas corpus, the suppression of disloyal publications, the employment of spies, and the requisition of passports,—and finally, of the contemptible service to which England has tried to put our last tariff, and of her evident unwillingness to have us find or furnish the finances of our war. Not to deal, however, with generalities, we proceed to make three distinct points of an argument that crowds us with materials.

Foremost among the grievances which we at the North may allege against our brethren across the water—foremost, both in time and in the harmful influence of its working—we may specify this fact, that the English press, with scarce an exception, made haste, in the very earliest stages of the Southern Rebellion, to judge and announce the hopeless partition of our Union, as an event accomplished and irrevocable. The way in which this judgment was reached and pronounced, the time and circumstances of its utterance, and the foregone conclusions which were drawn from it, gave to it a threatening and mischievous agency, only less prejudicial to our cause, we verily believe, than would have been an open alliance between England and the enemies of the Republic. This haste to announce the positive and accomplished dissolution of our National Union was forced most painfully upon our notice in the darkest days of our opening strife. Those who undertook to guide and instruct English opinion in the matter had easy means of informing themselves about the strangely fortuitous and deplorable, though most opportune and favoring combination of circumstances under which "Secession" was initiated and strengthened. They knew that the Administration, then in its last days of power, was half-covertly, half-avowedly in sympathy and in active cooperation with the cause of rebellion. The famous "Ostend Conference" had had its doings and designs so thoroughly aired in the columns of the English press, that we cannot suppose either the editors or the readers ignorant of the spirit or intentions of those who controlled the policy of that Administration. Early information likewise crossed the water to them of the discreditable and infamous doings and plottings of members of the Cabinet, evidently in league with the fomenting treachery. They knew that the head of the Navy Department had either scattered our ships of war to the ends of the earth, or had moored them in helpless disability at our dockyards,—that the head of the War Department had been plundering the arsenals of loyal States to furnish weapons for intended rebellion,—that the head of the Treasury Department was purloining its funds,—and that the President himself, while allowing national forts to be environed by hostile batteries, had formally announced that both Secession itself and all attempts to resist it were alike unconstitutional,—the effect of which grave opinion was to let Secession have its way till Coercion would seem to be not only unconstitutional, but unavailing. Our English kinsfolk also knew that our prominent diplomatic agents abroad, representing solemn treaty relations with them of this nation as a unit, under sacred oaths of loyalty to it, and living on generous grants from its Treasury, were also in more or less of active sympathy with traitorous schemes. So far, it must be owned, there was little in the promise of whatever might grow from these combined enormities to engage the confidence or the good wishes of true-hearted persons on either side of the water.

But whatever power of mischief lay in this marvellous combination of evil forces, so malignly working together, the Administration in which they found their life and whose agencies they employed was soon to yield up its fearfully desecrated trust. A new order of things, representing at least the spirit and purpose of that philanthropy and public righteousness to which our English brethren had for years been prompting us, was to come in with a new Administration, already constitutionally recognized, but not as yet put into power. It was asking but little of intelligent foreigners of our own blood and language, that they should make due allowance for that recurring period in the terms of our Government—as easily turned to mischievous influences as is an interregnum in a monarchy—by which there is a lapse of four months between the election and the inauguration of our Chief Magistrate. A retiring functionary may work and plan and provide an immense amount of disabling, annoying, and damaging experience to be encountered by his successor. That successor may at a distance, or close at hand, be an observer of all this influence; but whether it be simply of a partisan or of a malignant character, he is powerless to resist it, and good taste and the proprieties of his position seem to suggest that he make no public recognition of it. Every Chief Magistrate of this Republic, before its present head, acceded to office with its powers and dignities and facilities and trusts unimpaired by his predecessor. We have thought that among the thorns of the pillow on which a certain "old public functionary" lays his head, as he watches the dismal working of elements which he had more power than any other to have dispelled, not the least sharp one must be that which pierces him with the thought of the difference between the position which his predecessors prepared for him and that which he prepared for his successor. Not among the least of the claims which that successor has upon the profound and respectful sympathy of all good men everywhere is the fact that there has been no public utterance of complaining or reproachful words from his lips, reflecting upon his predecessor, or even asking indulgence on the score of the shattered and almost wrecked fabric of which we have put him in charge. We confess that we have looked through the English papers for months for some magnanimous and high-souled tribute of this sort to the Man who thus nobly represents a sacred and imperilled cause. If such tribute has been rendered, it has escaped our notice.

Now, as we are reflecting upon the tone and spirit of the English press at the opening of the Rebellion, we have to recall to the minds of our readers the fact, that in all its early stages, even down to and almost after the proclamation of the President summoning a volunteer force to resist it, we ourselves, at the North, utterly refused to consider the Seceders as in earnest. We may have been stupid, besotted, infatuated even, in our blindness and incredulity. But none the less did we, that is, the great majority of us, regard all the threats and measures of the South as something less formidable and actual than open war and probable or threatening revolution. We were persuaded that the people of the South had been wrought up by artful and ambitious leaders to wild alarm that the new Administration would visit outrages upon them and try to turn them into a state of vassalage. Utterly unconscious as we were of any purpose to trespass upon or reduce their fullest constitutional rights, we knew how grossly our intentions were misrepresented to them. We applied the same measure to the distance between their threats and the probability that they would carry them out which we knew ought to be applied to the difference between our supposed and our real intentions. In a word,—for this is the simple truth,—we regarded the manifestations of the seceding and rebelling States—or rather of the leaders and their followers in them—as in part bluster and in part a warning of what might ensue, though it would not be likely to ensue when their eyes were open to the truth. We were met by bold defiance, by outrageous abuse, and with an almost overwhelming venting of falsehoods. There was boastfulness, arrogance, assured claims of sufficient strength, and daring prophecies of success, enough to have made any cause triumphant, if triumph comes through such means. Still we were incredulous, perhaps foolishly and culpably so,—but incredulous, and unintimidated, and confident, none the less. We believed that wise, forbearing, and temperate measures of the new Administration would remove all real grievances, dispel all false alarms, and at least leave open the way to bloodless methods of preserving the Union. Part of our infatuation consisted in our seeing so plainly the infatuation of the South, while we did not allow for the lengths of wild and reckless folly into which it might drive them. We could see most plainly that either success in their schemes, or failure through a struggle to accomplish them, would be alike ruinous to them; that no cause standing on the basis and contemplating the objects recognized by them could possibly prosper, so long as the throne of heaven had a sovereign seated upon it. Full as much, then, from our conviction that the South would not insist upon doing itself such harm as from any fear of what might happen to us, did we refuse to regard Secession as a fixed fact. At the period of which we are speaking, there was probably not a single man at the North, of well-furnished and well-balanced mind—who stood clear in heart and pocket of all secret or interested bias toward the South—that deliberately recognized the probability of the dissolution of the Union. Very few such men will, indeed, recognize that possibility now, except as they recognize the possibility of the destruction of an edifice of solid blocks and stately columns by the grinding to powder of each large mass of the fabric, so that no rebuilding could restore it.