The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862

The young man is not, like her, deprived of the organs of speech; but his proficiency in the finger-language is perfectly marvellous. It surpasses even her own in rapidity of movement and graceful ease. It is most interesting to watch them, as, their eyes glancing from hand to face, they carry on their silent conversation; the dumb girl occasionally bursting into a hearty laugh, at some remark of her companion. Nothing could exceed the devoted and tender attention of the brother. Whenever any object worthy of notice in the scenery presented itself, he would touch her lightly on the shoulder to attract attention, and then with a few rapid movements of his fingers, direct her eyes to it, and give an explanation of it. If she required refreshment, he would hurry from the car, and hurry back again, with art anxious, eager look, as if he feared something might have befallen her in his absence. She seemed to repose implicit confidence in him; and well was he worthy of it. Heaven's blessing rest upon you, noble young man! for your earnest devotion to that afflicted one.

At one place, where the cars stopped, I witnessed an affecting scene—a soldier parting from his children. Two young girls, the one about fifteen, the other some years younger, stood in the door of the station room, their faces swoln and discolored with weeping. Their mother, pale and sad, stood near them; while the father, a fine looking, strongly-built man of forty, in the uniform of an artilleryman, went forward to see to the stowage of his knapsack and other 'traps.'

The eldest girl had succeeded in subduing her grief into 'a kind of quiet;' but the younger—poor thing! how my heart bled to see her! She did not sob, or cry out; but every muscle of her face quivered with irrepressible emotion, and her trembling limbs seemed scarcely able to support her. There was more than the sorrow of parting there; there was of ever seeing her father again. Her sister tried to soothe hers. Her mother spoke sharply to her; then, with true maternal instinct, went forward to the baggage car, and brought her father back to her. The mother herself did not shed a tear; but her parting time had not come, for she was to accompany her husband on his journey.

"Oh, father!" sobbed the poor girl; and that was all she could say, as she flung her arms around his neck, and clung to him with a convulsive grasp.

He spoke to her soothingly, reasoned with her, sought to calm her; but, in the midst of his tender offices, the inexorable whistle sounded; and tearing himself from her embrace, he sprang into the cars, accompanied by his wife, and took a seat just in front of me. Something rose in my throat as I looked at them, and the unbidden tears sprang to my eyes. The man's fine, expressive countenance, sun-burnt and heavily bearded, grave yet calm, gave evidence of the suffering the past scene had cost him. But the face of the woman was a study. She was evidently determined not to weep. She was resolved, by at least an outward cheerfulness, to sustain her husband in his noble self-sacrificing patriotism. How it would be when her own parting hour arrived, heaven knows; but then the thought of that was resolutely driven away. As we rode along, they conversed much together, and I saw her more than once in calling back a smile to the grave, sad face of her husband.

Brave man! tearing asunder your heart's dearest chords, to deliver your country from the parricidal stroke of fierce rebellion. Brave woman! concealing with Spartan fortitude the sorrow in your heart, that your gallant husband may be strengthened in his noble aim—shall these things be done and suffered in vain? No, no; believe it not. The clouds may gather, reverses may come, but of this be well assured: The right will triumph!

Toward the latter part of my journey, the monotony of the scene was enlivened by a row in the cars. Cause—a woman.

During our short pause in the city of P., two men, who had been seated together, went out, leaving some of their travelling gear on the seat. While they absent, a lady, accompanied by a little boy, entered the car; and, contrary to the etiquette of railroad travel, displaced their baggage, and took possession of the seat. She was a rather coarse-looking woman of about thirty; richly but not very appropriately attired, in a handsome black silk dress, with a sacque or outer garment of the same material, reaching almost to her feet. Her jet black hair hang in thick, short curls all around her head, and was surmounted by one of those little round hats, familiarly known as 'jockeys,' which are so pretty and becoming on young girls, so hideous on elderly women.

Very soon, the two men came in, and claimed their seat. But the lady refused to move. My attention was first directed to them by hearing one of the men exclaim, in loud and angry tones:

'It's no use talking. Your business, ma'am, is to get out!'

But an image carved in ebony could not have been more immovable than the lady in the black silk dress.

In vain the aggrieved gentlemen represented to her that the seat was theirs, that their baggage was there, that she had no right to take it, etc.; she paid no attention to them.

The cars started; and the two men, there being no seat vacant, stood over her, with wrath and defiance in their looks, waiting in grim silence until she should comply with their request. But she gave no sign of compliance.

After a while the conductor made his appearance. To him they excitedly stated their grievance, but received, apparently, no redress.

Some time had elapsed, and I had forgotten the circumstance, when my attention was suddenly aroused by seeing one of the men, now worked up into an ungovernable passion, seize the lady by the shoulder, and attempt to put her out by force. In a moment all was uproar and confusion. The lady screamed. The little boy roared with fright. Every man in the car started to his feet, and loud cries of 'Put him out!' 'Knock him down!' 'Shame! shame! to touch a woman!' resounded on every side. Half a dozen rough hands seized the man by the collar and arms, and amid the most indescribable noise and tumult, he was unceremoniously hustled out of the car.

The lady seemed to regard herself as a martyr. I heard her excitedly narrating her wrongs to one of her neighbors, finishing off with:

'I was never treated so before; never! never!'

'H'm!' said the person addressed, as if not quite coinciding with her views of the case.

An elderly man, who sat beside me, and whose appearance and manners plainly indicated his title to

 
'The grand old name of gentleman,'
 

had started to his feet with the rest, but having been out when the affair commenced, was unable to comprehend what the row was about. As he turned to me with a bewildered and inquiring look, I explained to him the cause of the trouble, at the same time expressing my opinion that the man had been unjustly thrust out, and that the lady was entirely to blame.

'Certainly she was,' said he, with emphasis, 'but the conductor was still more so. He ought to have given the men their seat, and found another for the lady.' Then glancing contemptuously at her, the old gentleman said:

'Oh, she's no lady—she's some common person—no lady would behave in that manner.'

As I was more than half of the old gentleman's opinion, I did not gainsay him. After a pause, he continued, with a self-complacency that amused me:

'Ah, I am a pretty good judge of women; and I don't believe that any lady would travel with a thing like that on her head. No, no; she's some common person, depend upon it.'

It was evident to me that the old gentleman felt very strongly on the subject of 'jockeys;' for, not content with this sweeping thrust, he shortly afterward renewed the subject. It happened that in this particular car there was an appendage affixed to the back of each seat, for the purpose of adding to the comfort of passengers, but which signally failed of that end, as far as the bonnet-wearing part of the community was concerned. As I was much incommoded by it, I requested the old gentleman to turn it down for me. As he did so, he glanced again at our neighbor in the black silk dress, who had taken off her 'jockey,' and was comfortably reposing her raven locks on the aforesaid appendage, and said, jocularly:

'Now, if you would wear such a thing as that, you could take it off, and be quite comfortable.'

And he laughed, quietly but heartily, at what he evidently considered the preposterousness of such an idea.

'Why is it,' continued the old gentleman, who was evidently a philosopher, 'why is it that women must all dress exactly alike? Why can't they dress to suit themselves, as men do? Now just look around this crowded car—no two men have the same kind of head-covering,' It was true; there were hats of every shape and hue; hats of felt, hats of beaver, hats of straw, caps, military and civil—an endless variety. 'But the womens' bonnets,' added he, 'are all just alike in shape.'

'No, there are some exceptions,' said I, with a sly glance at the owner of the jockey.' On which the old gentleman laughed again, and was about to reply; when arrival of the train at its destination brought our conversation to a sudden stop, and the motley assemblage, whether crowned with hat or cap, bonnet or 'jockey,' parted company, never to meet again on this side of the Dark River.

THE OBSTACLES TO PEACE

A LETTER TO AN ENGLISH FRIEND

My dear Sir:—I have your late letter inquiring, as did several of its predecessors, how soon this terrible Civil War is to end, and why we do not close it at once by consenting to Disunion. These inquiries are natural from your point of view; I have briefly answered them already; but the subject is of vast importance, and we have good reason for our desire that correct views respecting it should prevail among the enlightened and just in Europe. We feel that we are entitled to the earnest and active sympathy of such men as you are in every country and of every creed. We feel that we have unjustly, by artful misrepresentations, been deprived of this, and that we have suffered grievously in consequence. Let me endeavor, then, to restate our position somewhat more fully, and to show wherein and why we impeach the justice of the criticisms to which we have been subjected even by humane and fair-minded Englishmen.

I need not, at this late day, prove to you that Slavery is the animating soul of the Rebellion. The fact that no compromise or adjustment of the quarrel was proposed from any quarter during the inception and progress of Secession, which did not relate directly and exclusively to Slavery, is conclusive on this point. Projects for arresting the impending calamity were abundant throughout the winter of 1860-61. Congress was gorged with them; a volunteer 'Peace Congress' was simultaneously held on purpose to arrest the dreaded disruption, and attended by able Delegations from all the Border Slave and most of the Free States, many of the former now fighting in the Rebel ranks; but no one suggested that any conceivable legislation on any subject but Slavery was desired or would be of the least avail. Mr. Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, and, perhaps, the ablest man in it, who resisted Secession until overborne and carried away by the swelling tide, in his first elaborate speech justifying the movement, ably and candidly set forth the natural fitness, justice, humanity, beneficence, and perpetuity of Slavery as the corner-stone of the new National edifice. The 'Peace Convention' presented the Crittenden Compromise,—that is, the positive establishment by act of Congress of Slavery in all present and future Territories of the United States, south of the parallel of 36° 30' north latitude—as its sole panacea for our national ills. Nobody suggested in that Congress or any similar conference that a permanent abolition of all duties on imports, or any other measure unrelated to slavery, would be of the least use in reclaiming the States which had seceded, or in arresting the secession of others. The sole pretext for the Rebellion was and is that the Free States had not been faithful in spirit and letter to their constitutional obligations respecting Slavery, and could not be trusted to do better in the future than they had done in the past. We are involved in deadly war precisely and only because the Free States, through the action at the ballot-box of a majority of their citizens, refused to coöperate in or make themselves a voluntary party to the further extension or diffusion of Human Slavery.

Bearing this fact in mind, I think you will more readily realize the moral impossibility of our assent, save under the impulse of a last dire necessity, to a Disunion Peace, and for these reasons:

I. Such a peace will naturally secure to Slavery the precise object, for which the Rebellion was fomented. If we consent to divide our country, the victorious Rebels will very fairly say, 'Give us our share of the Federal Territories.' In other words, 'Surrender to Slavery, through Disunion, the very thing which you refused to concede to it to prevent Disunion.' And that demand, if we concede the right and the fact of Secession, can with difficulty be resisted. Yet its concession involves the moral certainty that Mexico and Cuba will in time be overrun, conquered, absorbed, and devoted to Slavery, by the martial, aggressive, ambitious despotism to 'which we shall have succumbed. Read Prof. Cairnes's recent essay on 'The Slave Power,' and you will have a clearer idea of the wolf we now hold by the ears, and which is far less dangerous while so held than he must be if let go.

II. The boundary which Secession proffers is an unnatural and impossible one. It not only alienates from the Union Western Texas, East Tennessee, and other regions wherein a majority have ever been and still are devoted to the old flag, but insists on wresting from us West Virginia—that is, that portion of the old State of Virginia which slopes toward the Ohio river—a region larger in area than three of the States left in the Union put together—a region which, never having been practically slaveholding save to a very limited extent, has ever been preponderately and earnestly loyal—a region mainly held to-day, as it has almost uniformly been held, by the Unionists—a region which, if surrendered to the Confederacy, interposes a wedge of foreign territory between Pennsylvania and Ohio, the East and the West—leaving them connected by a shred (see map) not one hundred miles broad, and rendering a farther and more fatal disruption of the Union wellnigh inevitable. When the Baltimore and Ohio railroad shall traverse for the most part a foreign country—when the Mississippi, through all the lower part of its course, shall have been surrendered by us to a power inevitably hostile to our growth and jealous of our prosperity—when Wheeling and Memphis shall have become foreign ports, and Cincinnati and St. Louis frontier cities—the gravitation of the Free West toward the country to which her rivers are hastening and through which her bulky staples find their natural outlet to the great highway of nations, will be all but irresistible.

III. And this brings me to a vital point, which Europeans have seemed determined not to comprehend—that of the extremely artificial and fragile character of the political structure which our architects of national ruin are laboring to construct. Mr. Chancellor Gladstone is pleased to favor us with his opinion that Slavery cannot long survive the recognition and perfect establishment of the Southern Confederacy. I beg leave to assure him, in turn, that the Confederacy would not long survive the downfall of Slavery. Let Slavery fall, and a million of bayonets could not keep the North and South disunited even twenty years. Apart from Slavery and its fancied necessities, there is not a Disunionist between New Brunswick and Mexico, Canada and Cuba. The Union is the darling of our affections, the seal of our security, the palladium of our strength. No American ever tolerated the idea of disunion except as he intensely loved or hated Slavery, and regarded the Union as an obstacle to the realization of his wishes respecting it. Were Slavery universal and supreme among us, or were it abolished and its influence effaced, you could find more Thugs in Scotland than Disunionists in America.

IV. And here your statesmen are making a mistake which some of them will live to realize and rue. They suppose that our country, once fairly divided and arrayed under two hostile governments, recognizing and no longer at war with each other, must ever thereafter remain divided. They never reckoned more wildly. Were their wishes fully realized this day, and the Confederacy an undisputed fact, a party would instantly arise—nay, a party already exists—throughout the country, demanding reunion on any terms. Archbishop Hughes has already in either hemisphere struck the keynote of this cry. He truly says that our country cannot be permanently divided. He unworthily adds that, if it cannot be united under the old Constitution, it must be under a new one—in other words, under that of the Confederacy. The Democratic party of the Free States, abandoning the creed of its founders, which has lately ruled the Union by virtue of a close alliance with the Slave Power of the South,—would, the day after we had made peace by acknowledging the Southern Confederacy, reorganize and reagitate under the banner of 'Reconstruction.' Hatred to negroes is the talisman whereby it secures the votes by pandering to the prejudices of the most ignorant and vicious Whites—by hostility to negro immigration (from the South), negro suffrage, negro competition in the labor market, and to negro humanity in general. That Slavery is the natural and fit condition of negroes everywhere and at all times—that the abolition of Southern Slavery would be a great calamity to the white laborers of the North—such is the political philosophy assiduously dispensed and greedily imbibed in the grogshops and 'back slums' of every Northern city, and which politicians and journalists pretending to sense and decency do not hesitate for their party's and their ambition's sake to indorse and disseminate. And there are clashes less debased, though scarcely more heartless, who countenance this inhuman logic. The average mercantile sentiment of this and other great Northern cities runs thus: 'True, Slavery is unjust and barbarous—it is at once a wrong and a mistake—but it is not our blunder. Its perils are braved and its evils endured by those who cherish it, hundreds of miles away; while to us it is a positive advantage. By obstructing the mechanical and manufacturing development of the South, it dooms her products, her commerce, her navigation, to build up Northern marts and factories; by its restriction of Southern industry mainly to the plantation, it opens broad avenues for the disposal of our wares. The sin and the sorrow are monopolized by the South: the gain and the good enure to the North.' How short-sighted and fallacious is this calculation, I need not here demonstrate: suffice it that it is very generally made, and that the result is not merely a general mercantile callousness to the iniquities of the slave-holding system, but a current sentiment which regards it with active and positive favor.

V. Disunion being an accepted fact, and peace restored on that basis, the Republican party, which has ineffectually resisted the aggressions of the Slave Power and directed the national effort to maintain and preserve the Union, is beaten and prostrate. The Democratic party rallies under the banner of 'Reunion at any price.' What price will be accepted? Simply and obviously, Adoption of the Montgomery Constitution, and application for admission under it into the Southern Confederacy. True, that Constitution inexorably prescribes that

'The citizens of each State shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not thereby be impaired.'

'Sojourn in any State,' you perceive—'not for a day, but for all time.' That clause alone makes Slavery universal and imperative throughout the Confederacy, and no State can evade or override it. But again:

'The Confederate States may acquire new territory * * * * in all such territory, negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognised and protected by Congress and by the territorial government; and the inhabitants of the Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.'

There are more provisions like these; but they are not needed to make every State that adheres to the Confederacy a Slave State, and every foot of territory which may be conceded to or acquired by it, slave soil.

To abasement at the footstool of this triumphant wickedness, everything venal and sordid in the yet Free States would inevitably and intensely gravitate: commerce seeking customers; manufactures eager for markets; shipping greedy of cargoes and freights; but, above all, Democratic politicians hungry for power and pelf, and having the strong instinct of American unity and nationality as their fulcrum. They would gradually but surely undermine the mutilated fabric of our once glorious Union, and tear away its pillars to strengthen and extend the pile whereof Slavery is the acknowledged corner-stone. The Union would gradually crumble and disappear, and the slaveholders' Confederacy be built up from its ruins; the Slave Power would resume its arrested march toward the equator, dragging the Republic behind its triumphal chariot wheels; Mexico, Central America, Cuba, Hayti, &c., would be gradually 'annexed' by it; domestic opposition to its dictates would be summarily suppressed as treason or 'abolition;' the masses of our people would become like the Roman populace under the Cæsars; the forms of a republic might for a season be preserved, but the essence would speedily evaporate, leaving a vast, powerful, rapacious Slave Empire, ruled by some master spirit of the slaveholding oligarchy, and wielding all the power of the nation for the gratification and aggrandizement of that grasping, unscrupulous aristocracy. Having ceased to be the refuge of the hunted and the cynosure of the oppressed, this country would thenceforth awe the nations of the Old World by its military power, and shock them by its profligacy, whereof the Ostend Circular and the murders and forgeries of Kansas were but foretastes, until God in His righteous wrath should bring upon it some visitation like the present, and hurl it from its pinnacle in mercy to mankind.

My friend! we must fight on till we conquer. We have no alternative but absolute ruin. Our triumph is far nearer than it seems, if we can but animate the loyal States to put forth their whole strength for the contest. Our armies are mustered; our leaders are chosen; our munitions provided; and the Proclamation of Freedom is an immense make-weight thrown into the right scale. We must and shall conquer, and save the civilized world from a scourge more baleful than any Alaric or Attila.

Yours, truly,

Horace Greeley.