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But the fairer analogy lies between Ireland and the Southern
States. The monster meetings and O'Connell's triumphs are not so
long gone by but that many of us can remember the first demand for
secession made by Ireland, and the line which was then taken by
American sympathies. It is not too much to say that America then
believed that Ireland would secure secession, and that the great
trust of the Irish repealers was in the moral aid which she did and
would receive from America. "But our government proclaimed no
sympathy with Ireland," said my friend. No. The American
government is not called on to make such proclamations, nor had
Ireland ever taken upon herself the nature and labors of a
belligerent.

That this anger on the part of the North is unreasonable, I cannot
doubt. That it is unfortunate, grievous, and very bitter, I am
quite sure. But I do not think that it is in any degree
surprising. I am inclined to think that, did I belong to Boston as
I do belong to London, I should share in the feeling, and rave as
loudly as all men there have raved against the coldness of England.
When men have on hand such a job of work as the North has now
undertaken, they are always guided by their feelings rather than
their reason. What two men ever had a quarrel in which each did
not think that all the world, if just, would espouse his own side
of the dispute? The North feels that it has been more than loyal
to the South, and that the South has taken advantage of that over-
loyalty to betray the North. "We have worked for them, and fought
for them, and paid for them," says the North. "By our labor we
have raised their indolence to a par with our energy. While we
have worked like men, we have allowed them to talk and bluster. We
have warmed them in our bosom, and now they turn against us and
sting us. The world sees that this is so. England, above all,
must see it, and, seeing it, should speak out her true opinion."
The North is hot with such thoughts as these; and one cannot wonder
that she should be angry with her friend when her friend, with an
expression of certain easy good wishes, bids her fight out her own
battles. The North has been unreasonable with England; but I
believe that every reader of this page would have been as
unreasonable had that reader been born in Massachusetts.

Mr. and Mrs. Jones are the dearly-beloved friends of my family. My
wife and I have lived with Mrs. Jones on terms of intimacy which
have been quite endearing. Jones has had the run of my house with
perfect freedom; and in Mrs. Jones's drawing-room I have always had
my own arm-chair, and have been regaled with large breakfast-cups
of tea, quite as though I were at home. But of a sudden Jones and
his wife have fallen out, and there is for awhile in Jones Hall a
cat-and-dog life that may end--in one hardly dare to surmise what
calamity. Mrs. Jones begs that I will interfere with her husband,
and Jones entreats the good offices of my wife in moderating the
hot temper of his own. But we know better than that. If we
interfere, the chances are that my dear friends will make it up and
turn upon us. I grieve beyond measure in a general way at the
temporary break up of the Jones-Hall happiness. I express general
wishes that it may be temporary. But as for saying which is right
or which is wrong--as to expressing special sympathy on either side
in such a quarrel--it is out of the question. "My dear Jones, you
must excuse me. Any news in the city to-day? Sugars have fallen;
how are teas?" Of course Jones thinks that I'm a brute; but what
can I do?

I have been somewhat surprised to find the trouble that has been
taken by American orators, statesmen, and logicians to prove that
this secession on the part of the South has been revolutionary--
that is to say, that it has been undertaken and carried on not in
compliance with the Constitution of the United States, but in
defiance of it. This has been done over and over again by some of
the greatest men of the North, and has been done most successfully.
But what then? Of course the movement has been revolutionary and
anti-constitutional. Nobody, no single Southerner, can really
believe that the Constitution of the United States as framed in
1787, or altered since, intended to give to the separate States the
power of seceding as they pleased. It is surely useless going
through long arguments to prove this, seeing that it is absolutely
proved by the absence of any clause giving such license to the
separate States. Such license would have been destructive to the
very idea of a great nationality. Where would New England have
been, as a part of the United States, if New York, which stretches
from the Atlantic to the borders of Canada, had been endowed with
the power of cutting off the six Northern States from the rest of
the Union? No one will for a moment doubt that the movement was
revolutionary, and yet infinite pains are taken to prove a fact
that is patent to every one.

It is revolutionary; but what then? Have the Northern States of
the American Union taken upon themselves, in 1861, to proclaim
their opinion that revolution is a sin? Are they going back to the
divine right of any sovereignty? Are they going to tell the world
that a nation or a people is bound to remain in any political
status because that status is the recognized form of government
under which such a people have lived? Is this to be the doctrine
of United States citizens--of all people? And is this the doctrine
preached now, of all times, when the King of Naples and the Italian
dukes have just been dismissed from their thrones with such
enchanting nonchalance because their people have not chosen to keep
them? Of course the movement is revolutionary; and why not? It is
agreed now among all men and all nations that any people may change
its form of government to any other, if it wills to do so--and if
it can do so.

There are two other points on which these Northern statesmen and
logicians also insist, and these two other points are at any rate
better worth an argument than that which touches the question of
revolution. It being settled that secession on the part of the
Southerners is revolution, it is argued, firstly, that no occasion
for revolution had been given by the North to the South; and,
secondly, that the South has been dishonest in its revolutionary
tactics. Men certainly should not raise a revolution for nothing;
and it may certainly be declared that whatever men do they should
do honestly.

But in that matter of the cause and ground for revolution, it is so
very easy for either party to put in a plea that shall be
satisfactory to itself! Mr. and Mrs. Jones each had a separate
story. Mr. Jones was sure that the right lay with him; but Mrs.
Jones was no less sure. No doubt the North had done much for the
South; had earned money for it; had fed it; and had, moreover, in a
great measure fostered all its bad habits. It had not only been
generous to the South, but over-indulgent. But also it had
continually irritated the South by meddling with that which the
Southerners believed to be a question absolutely private to
themselves. The matter was illustrated to me by a New Hampshire
man who was conversant with black bears. At the hotels in the New
Hampshire mountains it is customary to find black bears chained to
poles. These bears are caught among the hills, and are thus
imprisoned for the amusement of the hotel guests. "Them
Southerners," said my friend, "are jist as one as that 'ere bear.
We feeds him and gives him a house, and his belly is ollers full.
But then, jist becase he's a black bear, we're ollers a poking him
with sticks, and a' course the beast is a kinder riled. He wants
to be back to the mountains. He wouldn't have his belly filled,
but he'd have his own way. It's jist so with them Southerners."

It is of no use proving to any man or to any nation that they have
got all they should want, if they have not got all that they do
want. If a servant desires to go, it is of no avail to show him
that he has all he can desire in his present place. The
Northerners say that they have given no offense to the Southerners,
and that therefore the South is wrong to raise a revolution. The
very fact that the North is the North, is an offence to the South.
As long as Mr. and Mrs. Jones were one in heart and one in feeling,
having the same hopes and the same joys, it was well that they
should remain together. But when it is proved that they cannot so
live without tearing out each other's eyes, Sir Cresswell
Cresswell, the revolutionary institution of domestic life,
interferes and separates them. This is the age of such
separations. I do not wonder that the North should use its logic
to show that it has received cause of offense but given none; but I
do think that such logic is thrown away. The matter is not one for
argument. The South has thought that it can do better without the
North than with it; and if it has the power to separate itself, it
must be conceded that it has the right.

And then as to that question of honesty. Whatever men do they
certainly should do honestly. Speaking broadly, one may say that
the rule applies to nations as strongly as to individuals, and
should be observed in politics as accurately as in other matters.
We must, however, confess that men who are scrupulous in their
private dealings do too constantly drop those scruples when they
handle public affairs, and especially when they handle them at
stirring moments of great national changes. The name of Napoleon
III. stands fair now before Europe, and yet he filched the French
empire with a falsehood. The union of England and Ireland is a
successful fact, but nevertheless it can hardly be said that it was
honestly achieved. I heartily believe that the whole of Texas is
improved in every sense by having been taken from Mexico and added
to the Southern States, but I much doubt whether that annexation
was accomplished with absolute honesty. We all reverence the name
of Cavour, but Cavour did not consent to abandon Nice to France
with clean hands. When men have political ends to gain they regard
their opponents as adversaries, and then that old rule of war is
brought to bear, deceit or valor--either may be used against a foe.
Would it were not so! The rascally rule--rascally in reference to
all political contests--is becoming less universal than it was.
But it still exists with sufficient force to be urged as an excuse;
and while it does exist it seems almost needless to show that a
certain amount of fraud has been used by a certain party in a
revolution. If the South be ultimately successful, the fraud of
which it may have been guilty will be condoned by the world.

The Southern or Democratic party of the United States had, as all
men know, been in power for many years. Either Southern Presidents
had been elected, or Northern Presidents with Southern politics.
The South for many years had had the disposition of military
matters, and the power of distributing military appliances of all
descriptions. It is now alleged by the North that a conspiracy had
long been hatching in the South with the view of giving to the
Southern States the power of secession whenever they might think
fit to secede; and it is further alleged that President after
President, for years back, has unduly sent the military treasure of
the nation away from the North down to the South, in order that the
South might be prepared when the day should come. That a President
with Southern instincts should unduly favor the South, that he
should strengthen the South, and feel that arms and ammunition were
stored there with better effect than they could be stored in the
North, is very probable. We all understand what is the bias of a
man's mind, and how strong that bias may become when the man is not
especially scrupulous. But I do not believe that any President
previous to Buchanan sent military materials to the South with the
self-acknowledged purpose of using them against the Union. That
Buchanan did so, or knowingly allowed this to be done, I do
believe, and I think that Buchanan was a traitor to the country
whose servant he was and whose pay he received.

And now, having said so much in the way of introduction, I will
begin my journey.



CHAPTER II.

NEWPORT--RHODE ISLAND.


We--the we consisting of my wife and myself--left Liverpool for
Boston on the 24th August, 1861, in the Arabia, one of Cunard's
North American mail packets. We had determined that my wife should
return alone at the beginning of winter, when I intended to go to a
part of the country in which, under the existing circumstances of
the war, a lady might not feel herself altogether comfortable. I
proposed staying in America over the winter, and returning in the
spring; and this programme I have carried out with sufficient
exactness.

The Arabia touched at Halifax; and as the touch extended from 11 A.M.
to 6 P.M. we had an opportunity of seeing a good deal of that
colony; not quite sufficient to justify me at this critical age in
writing a chapter of travels in Nova Scotia, but enough perhaps to
warrant a paragraph. It chanced that a cousin of mine was then in
command of the troops there, so that we saw the fort with all the
honors. A dinner on shore was, I think, a greater treat to us even
than this. We also inspected sundry specimens of the gold which is
now being found for the first time in Nova Scotia, as to the glory
and probable profits of which the Nova Scotians seemed to be fully
alive. But still, I think the dinner on shore took rank with us as
the most memorable and meritorious of all that we did and saw at
Halifax. At seven o'clock on the morning but one after that we
were landed at Boston.

At Boston I found friends ready to receive us with open arms,
though they were friends we had never known before. I own that I
felt myself burdened with much nervous anxiety at my first
introduction to men and women in Boston. I knew what the feeling
there was with reference to England, and I knew also how impossible
it is for an Englishman to hold his tongue and submit to dispraise
of England. As for going among a people whose whole minds were
filled with affairs of the war, and saying nothing about the war, I
knew that no resolution to such an effect could be carried out. If
one could not trust one's self to speak, one should have stayed at
home in England. I will here state that I always did speak out
openly what I thought and felt, and that though I encountered very
strong--sometimes almost fierce--opposition, I never was subjected
to anything that was personally disagreeable to me.

In September we did not stay above a week in Boston, having been
fairly driven out of it by the musquitoes. I had been told that I
should find nobody in Boston whom I cared to see, as everybody was
habitually out of town during the heat of the latter summer and
early autumn; but this was not so. The war and attendant turmoils
of war had made the season of vacation shorter than usual, and most
of those for whom I asked were back at their posts. I know no
place at which an Englishman may drop down suddenly among a
pleasanter circle of acquaintance, or find himself with a more
clever set of men, than he can do at Boston. I confess that in
this respect I think that but few towns are at present more
fortunately circumstanced than the capital of the Bay State, as
Massachusetts is called, and that very few towns make a better use
of their advantages. Boston has a right to be proud of what it has
done for the world of letters. It is proud; but I have not found
that its pride was carried too far.

Boston is not in itself a fine city, but it is a very pleasant
city. They say that the harbor is very grand and very beautiful.
It certainly is not so fine as that of Portland, in a nautical
point of view, and as certainly it is not as beautiful. It is the
entrance from the sea into Boston of which people say so much; but
I did not think it quite worthy of all I had heard. In such
matters, however, much depends on the peculiar light in which
scenery is seen. An evening light is generally the best for all
landscapes; and I did not see the entrance to Boston harbor by an
evening light. It was not the beauty of the harbor of which I
thought the most, but of the tea which had been sunk there, and of
all that came of that successful speculation. Few towns now
standing have a right to be more proud of their antecedents than
Boston.

But as I have said, it is not specially interesting to the eye;
what new town, or even what simply adult town, can be so? There is
an Atheneum, and a State Hall, and a fashionable street,--Beacon
Street, very like Piccadilly as it runs along the Green Park,--and
there is the Green Park opposite to this Piccadilly, called Boston
Common. Beacon Street and Boston Common are very pleasant.
Excellent houses there are, and large churches, and enormous
hotels; but of such things as these a man can write nothing that is
worth the reading. The traveler who desires to tell his experience
of North America must write of people rather than of things.

As I have said, I found myself instantly involved in discussions on
American politics and the bearing of England upon those politics.
"What do you think, you in England--what do you believe will be the
upshot of this war?" That was the question always asked in those
or other words. "Secession, certainly," I always said, but not
speaking quite with that abruptness. "And you believe, then, that
the South will beat the North?" I explained that I personally had
never so thought, and that I did not believe that to be the general
idea. Men's opinions in England, however, were too divided to
enable me to say that there was any prevailing conviction on the
matter. My own impression was, and is, that the North will, in a
military point of view, have the best of the contest--will beat the
South; but that the Northerners will not prevent secession, let
their success be what it may. Should the North prevail after a two
years' conflict, the North will not admit the South to an equal
participation of good things with themselves, even though each
separate rebellious State should return suppliant, like a prodigal
son, kneeling on the floor of Congress, each with a separate rope
of humiliation round its neck. Such was my idea as expressed then,
and I do not know that I have since had much cause to change it.

"We will never give it up," one gentleman said to me--and, indeed,
many have said the same--"till the whole territory is again united
from the Bay to the Gulf. It is impossible that we should allow of
two nationalities within those limits." "And do you think it
possible," I asked, "that you should receive back into your bosom
this people which you now hate with so deep a hatred, and receive
them again into your arms as brothers on equal terms? Is it in
accordance with experience that a conquered people should be so
treated, and that, too, a people whose every habit of life is at
variance with the habits of their presumed conquerors? When you
have flogged them into a return of fraternal affection, are they to
keep their slaves or are they to abolish them?" "No," said my
friend, "it may not be practicable to put those rebellious States
at once on an equality with ourselves. For a time they will
probably be treated as the Territories are now treated." (The
Territories are vast outlying districts belonging to the Union, but
not as yet endowed with State governments or a participation in the
United States Congress.) "For a time they must, perhaps, lose
their full privileges; but the Union will be anxious to readmit
them at the earliest possible period." "And as to the slaves?" I
asked again. "Let them emigrate to Liberia--back to their own
country." I could not say that I thought much of the solution of
the difficulty. It would, I suggested, overtask even the energy of
America to send out an emigration of four million souls, to provide
for their wants in a new and uncultivated country, and to provide,
after that, for the terrible gap made in the labor market of the
Southern States. "The Israelites went back from bondage," said my
friend. But a way was opened for them by a miracle across the sea,
and food was sent to them from heaven, and they had among them a
Moses for a leader, and a Joshua to fight their battles. I could
not but express my fear that the days of such immigrations were
over. This plan of sending back the negroes to Africa did not
reach me only from one or from two mouths, and it was suggested by
men whose opinions respecting their country have weight at home and
are entitled to weight abroad. I mention this merely to show how
insurmountable would be the difficulty of preventing secession, let
which side win that may.

"We will never abandon the right to the mouth of the Mississippi."
That, in all such arguments, is a strong point with men of the
Northern States--perhaps the point to which they all return with
the greatest firmness. It is that on which Mr. Everett insists in
the last paragraph of the oration which he made in New York on the
4th of July, 1861. "The Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers," he
says, "with their hundred tributaries, give to the great central
basin of our continent its character and destiny. The outlet of
this system lies between the States of Tennessee and Missouri, of
Mississippi and Arkansas, and through the State of Louisiana. The
ancient province so called, the proudest monument of the mighty
monarch whose name it bears, passed from the jurisdiction of France
to that of Spain in 1763. Spain coveted it--not that she might
fill it with prosperous colonies and rising States, but that it
might stretch as a broad waste barrier, infested with warlike
tribes, between the Anglo-American power and the silver mines of
Mexico. With the independence of the United States the fear of a
still more dangerous neighbor grew upon Spain; and, in the insane
expectation of checking the progress of the Union westward, she
threatened, and at times attempted, to close the mouth of the
Mississippi on the rapidly-increasing trade of the West. The bare
suggestion of such a policy roused the population upon the banks of
the Ohio, then inconsiderable, as one man. Their confidence in
Washington scarcely restrained them from rushing to the seizure of
New Orleans, when the treaty of San Lorenzo El Real, in 1795,
stipulated for them a precarious right of navigating the noble
river to the sea, with a right of deposit at New Orleans. This
subject was for years the turning-point of the politics of the
West; and it was perfectly well understood that, sooner or later,
she would be content with nothing less than the sovereign control
of the mighty stream from its head-spring to its outlet in the
Gulf. AND THAT IS AS TRUE NOW AS IT WAS THEN."

This is well put. It describes with force the desires, ambition,
and necessities of a great nation, and it tells with historical
truth the story of the success of that nation. It was a great
thing done when the purchase of the whole of Louisiana was
completed by the United States--that cession by France, however,
having been made at the instance of Napoleon, and not in
consequence of any demand made by the States. The district then
called Louisiana included the present State of that name and the
States of Missouri and Arkansas--included also the right to
possess, if not the absolute possession of all that enormous
expanse of country running from thence back to the Pacific: a huge
amount of territory, of which the most fertile portion is watered
by the Mississippi and its vast tributaries. That river and those
tributaries are navigable through the whole center of the American
continent up to Wisconsin and Minnesota. To the United States the
navigation of the Mississippi was, we may say, indispensable; and
to the States, when no longer united, the navigation will be
equally indispensable. But the days are gone when any country such
as Spain was can interfere to stop the highways of the world with
the all but avowed intention of arresting the progress of
civilization. It may be that the North and the South can never
again be friends as the component parts of one nation. Such, I
take it, is the belief of all politicians in Europe, and of many of
those who live across the water. But as separate nations they may
yet live together in amity, and share between them the great water-
ways which God has given them for their enrichment. The Rhine is
free to Prussia and to Holland. The Danube is not closed against
Austria. It will be said that the Danube has in fact been closed
against Austria, in spite of treaties to the contrary. But the
faults of bad and weak governments are made known as cautions to
the world, and not as facts to copy. The free use of the waters of
a common river between two nations is an affair for treaty; and it
has not yet come to that that treaties must necessarily be null and
void through the falseness of politicians.

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