<£bi»arb (i(&Mtitfkm. MY DIARY IN AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. MY DIARY IN AMERICA in THE MIDST OF WAK. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON : TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE ST., STRAND. 1865. [The Eight of Translation is reserved.] LONDON BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. TO WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL, LL.D. ("CRIMEA," "INDIA," "AMERICA,") €jpe jBfotamra ARE MOST CORDIALLY INSCRIBED. ADVERTISEMENT. Some portions of the contents of these Volumes ap peared in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, in the form of letters from the United States, in the course of the years 1863-4, and are now reprinted by permission of the proprietors. The remainder of the work is from the Notes and the Diary which I kept during a (to me) very eventful year. G. A. S. 64, Guilford Street, Bussell Square, January, 1865. CONTENTS. CHAP. pAGE I. — JUSTIFICATORY \ II.— NEW YORK 53 III. — A CHRISTMAS IN CANADA 97 IV. — A "DIFFICULTY" AT CHRISTMAS 142 V. — NEW YEAR'S DAY IN NEW YORK 153 VI. — NIAGARA IN WINTER 163 TO. — AFTER THE SUNSHINE 178 VIII. — NIAGARA IN SUMMER 187 IX. — A NIGHT AT NIAGARA 200 X. — THE WORMS 214 XL— SCHENECTADY 22S XII, — A VISIT TO THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC . . . . 251 XIII. — THE GLORIOUS FOURTH OF JULY 342 XTV. — HOW THEY FIGHT ... .... 385 XV. — DEMOCRACY AND THE DUSTBIN 403 MY DIARY IN AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. CHAPTER I. JUSTIFICATORY. To an Intelligent American. You are aware, dear Sir, that the great majority of your countrymen are born public speakers. You are regularly educated to oratory ; you imbibe, almost with your mother's milk, a capacity for expressing yourselves coherently; you appear in public, and speak in public, at an age when young Englishmen, if they presumed to state their opinions in the presence of their elders, would be peremptorily requested to hold their tongues ; and so easy (as a rule) is the flow of your rhetoric, and so well-balanced are your sentences, that I have often thought that in your nonage you lisp in well-formed periods — for the periods come — and point your thoughts with mental semicolons. You are always ready to rise, address an audience large or small, move resolutions or respond to "sentiments." I never yet met with an American who stammered or " tried back " in an after-dinner speech — who dug a hole in the table-cloth with his fork, or twiddled a VOL. I. B 2 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OE WAR. wine-glass, or distorted in any other idiotic manner the Demosthenic principle of action. And I am free to confess that an American barrister can address a jury without thrusting his hands beneath his coat-tails, and an American clergyman proceeds to his " seventeenthly " without wiping his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief or thumping the pulpit cushion. On the other hand, dear Sir, you must, as an intelligent, cultivated, and travelled person, be equally aware that Englishmen are the worst public speakers in the world. The delivery of our statesmen is often marred by modesty, by nervousness, by the conventional reticence of polite society, and by an innate shrinking — however exalted in rank they may be— from addressing a mixed audience in anything approaching an overbearing or dictatorial tone. It is only when men are all free and equal that they can bully one another without reserve. A hundred circumstances intervene to dam the stream of an Englishman's eloquence. In Parlia ment complicated forms and by-laws of etiquette cover the most polished harangues with excrescent references to the "Noble Lord," and the "Honourable Member," and the "Right Honourable Gentleman in the chair," and "this house," and " another place." The system of verbatim re porting was, you may have heard, tried many years ago in a publication called " The Mirror of Parliament ; " but the experiment was a lamentable failure. When honourable members saw their speeches in print, precisely as they had spoken them, they Avere horrified ; and they have since been content to have their orations revised and settled by those JUSTIFICATORY. 3 gentlemen in the gallery who submit to toil on an intellectual treadmill for three hundred pounds a-year. Out of Parlia ment there are quite as many obstacles to our attaining proficiency in fluent speech. You may talk about every subject, human or divine — from Nebuchadnezzar King of the Jews to Pepple Ex-King of Bonny. There are dozens of topics on which we dare not touch, at the risk of being thought irreverent or of being hissed. You, from Chicago to Cape Cod, from Nevada to Nantucket, speak very nearly the same language, and have pretty nearly the same pi-onun- ciation. We speak fifty different dialects — Northumbrian, Lancastrian, Cambrian, Phoenician, Erse, cockney — que soAs- je ? Some of us lisp and some of us drawl, and some of us stutter, and many of us hem and haw, and a great many of us clap on H's where there should be none, and take away H's whence they should be left. We are always speaking, and yet we speak badly. Our philological doctors disagree. We have no Academy (thank Heaven) and no Dictionary ; that is to say we have a hundred, but do not accept any as a final authority. In pronunciation, Oxford is at war with Cam bridge, Dublin with both, and Edinburgh with all. The forum and the bar, the pulpit and the stage, are in virulent antagonism ; one paper calls a bishop's domain a '' diocess," and another a " diocese ; '' and between Alford and Moon — the Queen's English and the Dean's English — it is difficult to choose. You have made up your minds that national shall be pronounced naytional, and advertisement advertyzement ; that defence shall be defense, and theatre theater, and you are happy. r. 2 4 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. Dear Sir, you may be anxious to know what on earth this can have to do with the justificatory remarks prefixed to my " Diary in America in the Midst of War." I will tell you. I have a little story to relate, and this is the introduction to it. When I first set foot on board the " Arabia," bound for Boston, and with the intent of remaining eight months in the United States, I made two solemn resolves :— the first, to tell the truth so far as my lights would permit me ; the next, to hold my tongue. A dumb dog I did not intend to be ; and during the eight months, and their extension to twelve, I took a fair share in very many pleasant and edifying parleys with your countrymen and countrywomen ; but I determined never to speak in public. Of old and aforetime I knew, from meeting you in Europe, what ready speakers you were ; and I was painfully aware of the oratorical deficiencies of that nation of which I was to be, in a foreign and hostile land, the humblest representative. Yes, dear Sir, you are very fond of us, but you are always looking out for the joints in our armour, and you would like to smite us under the fifth rib if you could. You know you would. So I said to myself, " I speak neither better nor worse than the general run of my compatriots ; I know how well the Americans can speak, and therefore I will not speak at all." With respect to the manner in which I kept my first resolve, I leave the decision to candid and impartial men on both sides the Atlantic. If the verdict be that I have Lied, I will never set my foot in America again ; still I hope to walk up Broadway once more before I am grey. From the end, then, of December, 1863, to the middle of JUSTIFICATORY. 5 September, 1864, I never once rose on my hind legs to make a speech. I had scores of opportunities, but I cautiously evaded them. Even when my letters to England had made me most unpopular, a Courteous Committee at Milwaukee — to whom I hereby render my best thanks — wrote to me, asking me to lecture throughout the Great West, and offering me a pocket full of greenbacks. I humbly declined. It was my business to hold my tongue. But, in this same month of September it came about that I was invited to a most hospit able gathering at a beautiful place called Glencove, about thirty miles up the East River. There was to be a fete champetre in the grounds of a chalet, very closely resembling that which poor Albert Smith had painted as a proscenium to his show at the Egyptian Hall ; and in the evening there was to be a grand banquet at the close of which the promoter of a certain railway to the Great West was to present the Engineer-in-Chief thereof, in commemoration of the success ful consummation of the work, with a magnificent service of gold plate. The proceedings were to wind up with a concert and a grand display of fireworks. We ascended the East River, some fifty or sixty strong, in a tug, and had a " mag- nolious" day. You know, dear sir, what Americans and An crlo- Americans can do in the way of hospitality. It is emphatically with them a " big thing." We dined in a manner that would have made Lucullus envious, abased Ban-as, and given Cambaceres " fits." I think that if any guest had hinted a wish to have the biggest pearl at Tiffany's dissolved in vinegar by way of a hors d'ceuvre, our kind host would have despatched an express to New York for it. Not a 6 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. word of politics was talked during nine hours. The Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack floated amicably side by side on the lawn ; the band (Germans, of course,) gave us " Yankee Doodle," " God save the Queen," and the waltz from Faust with strict impartiality ; and although the health of the President of the United States was proposed before that of Her Majesty, we who were Britons agreed that, as the proposer was an Englishman, he had done the right and courteous thing. There was, of course, a great deal of speech-making, and very good speech-making too ; but when I found it was beginning to " burn," as they say at Blind Man's Buff, in my immediate vicinity, I timeously withdrew. I sloped up dark alleys, and lost myself in umbrageous bosquets, and smoked the secret Cabana in remote summer- houses, and thought that out of the speech-peril I had escaped by the skin of my teeth. It was two o'clock in the morning ere a steamer was ready to convey us back to New York. We crowded on board, a happy and hilarious com pany. Not soon shall I forget the ringing cheers with which we greeted our jolly host and the kind, handsome lady, his wife, as the vessel cast off. I found out a very comfortable settee, and lay at length, rubbing my hands at the thought that another day had come, and that I had made no speech, But. Oh, that But ! But there happened to be on board a certain sea-captain, famous in the fasti of the Cunard packet service, in which he holds the rank, by seniority, of Commodore. A stout Commodore, — stricken in years, but bearing his honourable white hairs as lightly as though JUSTIFICATORY. 7 they were snow-flakes. A strict disciplinarian at sea, not executing gambadoes, or cracking jokes, or securing the odd trick on evil nights, but pre-occupied in the task of taking care of your and my life, dear Sir. On shore, however, the Commodore unbends, takes his " tod," smokes his cheroot, sings a good song, tells a good story, and is, generally, the j oiliest of good fellows. No one enjoys an " outing " more than he. Now this Captain had had his eye on me for nine hours. It was not an evil eye, but a sly one. He had marked me down for a speech. He is a capital improvisatore, and, in a patter song of which one verse was devoted to peculiarities of some member of the company, he made so pointed an allusion to me that I had no alternative, when he had finished, but to rise on those so much-dreaded hind-legs, and speechify. Of course, I made an absurd exhibition of my self. I blundered out several strings of incoherent non- sequiturs, and sat down at last covered with shame as with a garment. I have no wish to report a speech which was never meant to be reported ; but I may give you, in a very few words, the gist of that which I said. I alluded to the abnormal and exceptional position which I held in the States, and the notoriety which, however personally obscure I might be, attached to the correspondent of a well-known English newspaper. I pleaded that I had arrived in the States branded and ticketed as an enemy to American insti tutions, and that my- coming was heralded by all kinds of scurrilous newspaper articles setting forth that I was a noto rious libeller, and that my only object in visiting Yankee- land was to abuse the Yankees. I remarked that within a 8 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. very few days of my setting foot in New York I had an inter view with the editor and proprietor of one of the leading newspapers of that city, and that gentleman said to me : " Well, sir, you've come to report us, and I suppose you'll cut us up." I made answer that I was not a reporter, but a man of letters pretty well known for good or evil in my own country, and that I had no more wish or intent with malice prepense to " cut the Yankees up " than to cut up my grand mother. I urged that what literary repute I might have gained in the United States as a writer of books I had deliberately sacrificed to the necessity of recording and commenting upon, day after day, the ever-changing scenes of an embittered con troversy and a bloody strife. I strove to show that no Eng lishman whatsoever, however favourable — and enthusiastically favourable — his opinions might be to the cause of the North, could, at that precise moment of time, hope to succeed in pleasing or satisfying the maj ority of Americans. And, finally, I candidly confessed that I was, by constitution, by predilection, and by habit a grumbler : — that for a long series of years I had, from one end of Europe, been grumbling and fault-find ing, that I had grumbled up and down France and Germany and Italy and Russia, and that for a long time I had earned my living by grumbling at my own countrymen — by picking holes in their manners, their customs, their speech and their actions ; but that this incessant bagpipe drone of complaint was not entirely due to a diseased liver, or discontented mind, and an unlucky lot, but the rather to a strong, though perhaps not very definite impression that there were a great many things in the world and in the ways of men — (my own included) — JUSTIFICATORY. 9 which needed mending; that they might be so helped towards reparation by a man endeavouring to tell Truth and denounce Wrong and uphold Right ; and that, although I did not by any means set myself up as a philanthropist or a redresser of grievances, I had always striven, to the best of my ability, to stand up for the Right, and to plead the cause of the poor and oppressed person, that the strong man might not spoil his goods, nor hale him to prison without a warrant. All this I told my auditory, and this much more. That, although the hospitality I had received in the United States had been lavish and generous and splendid, I should con sider myself a toady and a lickspittle if I paid for so many dinners and so many fetes by so many puffs and so many panegyrics. That I had found many things at which to grumble during my transatlantic travels, and that I had grumbled at them in accordance with what I deemed my duty and my birthright. That where I had blundered I should be glad to rectify ; that where I had unwittingly done injustice I should be glad to make amends ; that for the corns on which I might have trodden I was sorry, but that Nature had pro vided me with hob-nail boots, and that I had not the art of tripping about gingerly, like a Pantaloon in slippers. That I knew that much that I had said had aroused the indigna tion of the American people ; but that had my criticisms been couched in any obsequious or time-serving form i" should have earned their contempt. And that I had too deep and earnest a respect for a great, a noble, but a perverse and mis guided people, not to prefer being abused like a pickpocket to being despised by them. This was my peroration : my 10 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. " Hiev stande ich : Ich kann nicht mehr. Gott hilfe mi)1 ; Amen ;" and here ended my first and last attempt at public speaking in the United States. The Americans among my hearers were probably, in pro portion to the Britons present, eight to one, They received my address very cordially ; but I knew them to be gentlemen, and comfortably tired out with a day's pleasure, and disposed to be on the best of terms with everybody and everything. Their applause, gratifying as it was, could only be accepted as perfunctory. With a far different feeling did I receive the con gratulations of sundry stalwart and swarthy men, the sailors and stokers of the vessel. These honest fellows had formed an outer ring while I was on my hind- legs. It appeared to them that they had a perfect right to listen to what was going on, and I had no wish to gainsay them. I even heard an occasional " That's so," or a " Bully for you," while I was babbling ; but when I was " through " and had " orated " my fill, I shall never forget how one gaunt, grimy, flannel- shirted man after another came up to me, thrust forth a knotted, coal-dust smirched hand — more than one forefinger was decorated with a big signet ring, I can tell you and grasping mine, remarked, " Sir, I have Heard what you have Said, and, as an American, I should like to shake Your Hand." The which they all did most heartily. I thought once —being vain and ambitious, as most of us are— that I had realised the acme' of human felicity, when the Lord Mayor of London was good enough to drink my health at a public dinner ; but on reflection I am convinced that the " proudest moment in my life" was when those stokers on board the JUSTIFICATORY. 11 East River Steamer told me that, as Americans, they would take my hand. This story, which to some may appear trivial, to others superfluous, and to all wearisome, is to most intents and pur poses my Justification for the eight hundred pages which are to follow. It need scarcely be pointed out, dear sir, that such a con fession as I have made in the foregoing pages, — a confession that I grumbled for twelve months, because I am given to grumblmg, and am saturnine and unsocial, can only be received as a plea in abatement. A more definite explanation is needed to justify strictures which I admit to have been severe, but the severity of which I am unable, even now, to modify. I should have been false to my trust had I concealed or glossed over that which I thought demanded censure ; but I should be equally false to it now, did I neglect to state the grounds from which that censure rose. Parenthetically, on the foregoing head I may beg the ques tion. Many persons — -English as well as American — may say when they read this : " What on earth does it matter whether the man praise or censure ? Who cares one doit about what he thinks or writes about the United States ? He is obscure, he is stupid, he is ignorant. His voice has no weight, his verdict is valueless. His book will have but a small circula tion, and will be soon forgotten." There is the question as I have begged it. Now, I answer. So far as the United States are concerned, the Americans do trouble themselves about the utterances of the obscurest, the stupidest and the most ignorant of penny-a-liners, if that penny-a-liner happens to 12 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. be an Englishman, and republishes his impressions in book form. You know, dear Sir, that these volumes will be repro duced in the North, and will have thousands more readers there than they will probably have in England. You know that if the book were entirely favourable to your countrymen and your cause, your newspapers would be filled with extracts from it ; and you know equally well that, as it is, the un favourable passages will be singled out in order to afford an opportunity for abusing the author. The Americans are not indifferent to the opinion of any Englishman. They may vehemently declare they are, but they know better. I daresay that I am a Fool, and dull, and conceited, and a bore ; in fact, I know that I am often all these. I am aware that, as a man of letters, I am not fit to hold a candle to the tourists who have gone before me : — to Basil Hall, to Marryatt, to Fanny Kemble, to the Trollopes, mother and son, to Miss Bremer, to Miss Martineau, to Edward Dicey, to Robert Chambers, to Charles Mackay, to Grattan, to the Howitts, husband and wife, to Sir Charles Lyell, and Lady Emmeline Wortley, to say nothing of such really great writers as Charles Dickens and William Howard Russell. But, miserable hack as I may be, nothing will prevent these hack writings from being as public in the States as Barnum's Museum. Notoriety and celebrity are, I need not hint, two very different things ; but Americans are forced to be as familiar with the name of Old Doctor Jacob Townsend as with that of Ralph Waldo Emerson ; just as in England the names of Alfred Tennyson and Monsieur Francatelli are both household words. One belongs to the library and the other to the kitchen ; but both are known. JUSTIFICATORY. 13 In America you may endeavour to dismiss this book with a sneer, and call its author a " Holywell Street Scribbler," whereas, in England, a more elaborate attempt will be made to depreciate that which I have written on the ground that I am a slovenly and tedious writer, that continual egotism and irritating digressions deface my writings ; that I often blunder in quotation and overload my sentences with long-sounding words — that my orthography is defective and my syntax faulty ; in a word, that I write rubbish, and am a worthless fellow, anyway. I have grown accustomed to this sort of thing, and it does me good. But neither sneers nor snubs, genteel raps on the knuckles nor savage shovelsful of mud will alter the fact that the Journal in which I wrote the letters which form the nucleus of this work has a daily circulation of over one hundred thousand. Thus, givipg three readers to each paper — a fair average, I apprehend — more than a quarter of a million persons read that which I had to say about America every day, on which one of my letters appeared : unless, indeed, they were so disgusted with the first one that ever afterwards they closed their eyes or skipped the page when they came to " America in the Midst of War." These letters may not have made me favourably known. I have lost by their means, indeed, a great many friends, and gained a great many enemies — but they have made me known — known as well as Mr. Horniman with his tea, or Mr. Miles with Ms sixteen shilling trousers. Horniman and Miles and I will all probably be forgotten ten years hence ; but, as it is, we have gotten publicity, and there is an end of the matter. li AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. " C'est icy ung livre de bonne foy, leeteur," old Montaigne says, in a preface to a book which is all about himself. And you may perceive, dear Sir, that if my book have no other merit, it possesses at least that of candour. There is another pre fatory remark by Messire Michel not inappropriate to this undertaking : " Si c'eust dU pour rechercher la faveur du monde je me feusse 'pare' de beautez empruntez : je veulx qu'on m'y voye en ma fagon simple, naturelle et ordinaire, sans estude et artifice, car c'est Moy que je peinds." Should a healthy man be ashamed to avow that his Book is Himself, and that in whatsoever he writes that treats of individual thought or individual opinion, he must be, to a great extent, his own hero ? What do they matter : the spiteful and envious sneers, the paltry accusations of egotism. No man alive can be so vain to others in print as he is vain to him self in the recesses of his own heart ; and the conviction of this is my sole excuse for telling you a hundred times over what I have eaten and what I have drunk ; when my corns hurt me, and when I had the toothache ; what I thought of my -friends, and what my friends thought of me. Had I thought it right to build my book on any other model I should not have left a happy home and an assured livelihood, and a host of kind hearts who had known me from my infancy, to knock about for twelve months and more in a strange land and a cruel climate among strangers who hated me. I should have gone to the Library of the British Museum, and in due time, with the aid of Mr. Panizzi's shelves, produced two bulky octavos as modest as Mignon and as dull as ditch- water. JUSTIFICATORY. 15 This parenthesis, it must be granted, is of the lengthiest. Come we back to the point from which I started : — the need to set forth the things which prompted me to look upon America more through a lens that was couleur d' orange than one which was couleur de rose. Why did I grumble ? At what did I see cause to grumble ? At these things, mainly : — First : It is the common and notorious assertion of Ameri cans that their government is the best in the world; that a pure democracy, such as they have established, secures to every man, without the slightest distinction of race, rank, fortune, or creed, the enjoyment of the fullest personal and political liberty, and that republican institutions have blessed the American people with an amount of aggregate and indi vidual happiness as is unknown to those who are subject to the venal and effete monarchical rule prevailing in Europe. I found, per'contrd, that the government of the Northern States — States utterly free from the influences of civil war — ¦ was practically a despotism, and that despotism arose not from any military exigencies, but from the deliberate convic tion (expressed at the polling booths) of a majority of the Northern States, that the Constitution was a failure, that the doctrine of State Rights, which is the very back-bone of that Constitution, was obsolete and impracticable, and that a " strong government " was the one thing needed, and that to make that government strong it was necessary to place supreme and illimitable power in the hands of one Man. Proof : The President, without formally establishing mar- 1G AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. tial law, did by a new Proclamation entirely annul and abro gate the Constitution by emancipating (on paper) the slaves of all persons who held property in the Seceding States and had taken part against the government. Again. The President's prime minister, William H. Seward, Secretary of State, once boasted that, by merely touching a " little bell " he could have any person arrested in any part of the Union, and detained in custody wheresoever and for so long a period as he chose. That this boast was not an idle one is shown, by the arbitrary arrest of hundreds of persons, not legally accused of any statutable offence, but on the mere decree of Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State, and Mr. Stan ton, the Secretary of War, and their incarceration, for inde finite periods, at Fort Lafayette, in the Bay of New York ; at Fort Warren, in the Harbour of Boston ; at Fort McHenry,- near Baltimore ; and at the Old Capitol Prison, at Washing ton, in the District of Columbia. These persons were denied bail or mainprise ; they were refused communication with their friends, their relations, and even their legal advisers ; they were fed on coarse and repulsive rations — one, a British officer who had unwittingly conveyed some Confederate cor respondence from Baltimore, was confined for many weeks in Fort Lafayette before permission was granted him to receive the not very luxurious gift of a chair, and was during that period compelled to clean out his own cell and perform other loathsome offices ; and often they were turned out of prison as arbitrarily as they had been immured therein : without trial, without enquiry, and without explanation. All this was done, not under the declared pressure of martial law, but in JUSTIFICATORY. ] 7 the Sovereign States of New York and New England ; States living in the peace of the Republic, and in which the Habeas Corpus Act had never been suspended, and the ordinary course of the civil tribunals never interrupted. Again, the President, or the Secretary of War, or both, did, by a simple firman, order General Dix, the military officer commanding at New York, to arrest the proprietors of two newspapers, called the World and the Journal of Commerce, and im prison them in Fort Lafayette, for the offence of having inserted in those papers a proclamation which was subse quently found to be forged. More than this : the publication of the World and the Journal of Commerce was forcibly suppressed ; the clerks and compositors were expelled from the premises, and the offices held by an armed guard. It was notorious that the proprietors of the World and the Journal of Commerce had been in this matter the innocent dupes of an impudent swindler, and so strong was the feeling of indig nation excited by their imprisonment that they were released from custody on the very night of their arrest ; but the se questration of their property, to their great pecuniary damage, continued for some days longer ; and, when they sought for redress before the courts of justice of their State, the judges, in refusing it, explicitly stated that they did not consider it expedient to interfere with the action of the Central Govern ment at Washington : — in other words, with the despotic power of Mr. Lincoln. Let it be noted that the author of the forged proclamation in question, one Joseph Howard, although on discovery arrested for common decency's sake, was treated with much consideration, and dismissed after a very brief 18 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. detention, avowedly because he was a member of the Black Republican party, and had considerable personal influence at the White House. The lenity shown him may very forcibly be contrasted with the extreme and inhuman rigour which was experienced by two citizens of New York, named Dono- hue and Ferry, who were accused, during the Presidential Election, of fabricating soldiers' votes, and who, although they might have been tried and punished for that offence by the regular courts of their State, were arraigned before a military commission sitting at Baltimore, and, being convicted on evidence which even their adversaries admitted to be flimsy and unsatisfactory, were sentenced to imprisonment for life. I do not conceive, dear sir, that it is germane to this argu ment to enumerate — if they could all be enumerated — the various acts of tyranny and oppression committed by the Government of the United States, by their civil and their military servants in the States where martial law had been proclaimed, or where their authority was disturbed or im perilled. A la guerre comme a la guerre ; or, if you like an older aphorism, "Amidst the clash of arms the laws are silent." I will not, therefore, in this place say one word of the atrocities wreaked on defenceless people by the Federal commanders in the States of Maryland, Western Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and Louisiana; of the reign of Terror inaugurated by Payne at Paducah, and by Washburne at Memphis; of the devastation of the Shenandoah Valley by Sheridan, by Custer, and by Merritt; of the murders committed by Federal soldiers JUSTIFICATORY. 19 and the robberies committed by Federal officers ; of the standing crops that have been burnt, the fruit trees that have been grubbed up, the cattle and horses that have been carried off; the whole cities and villages that have been de stroyed ; of women ravished, children maltreated, aged people turned out of doors, churches gutted, negroes stolen, and smiling farms laid waste. The consideration of matters such as these will more appropriately enter into a chapter entitled the " Horrors of War." Nor need I more than cursorily allude to the charges brought against the Federal Government of having systematically interfered with the freedom of elec tion in the North — notably in the States of Maryland, Penn sylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky, — of having hedged round the ballot-boxes with soldiers with fixed bayonets, and caused those who cast their votes against the Government to be in sulted and outraged ; — of having summarily dismissed from office all clerks suspected of ill feeling towards the present order of things, — of having largely and shamefully bribed those who could serve its interests ; — of having tampered with the United States mails, and opened or stolen the correspondence of persons supposed to hold opposition views, and of having exercised a general system of intimidation, corruption, and violence. Charges such as these have been openly made during the past year ; but I cannot speak of my own know ledge of their truth or their falsehood. So far as I can tell, my letters were never opened ; and the only voting I have seen has been in the States of New York and Massachusetts, where everything appeared to be conducted in a most fair and straightforward manner. I will conclude, however, that o 2 £0 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. which I have to say regarding the " despotism " which I im pute to have replaced the formerly free institutions of the United States by the nan-ative of a case which appears to have attracted but little attention in Europe, but which I cannot help regarding as a pivot on which much of this con troversy regarding despotism and liberty must turn, I mean the case of Don Jose" de Arguelles. " Napoleon Bonaparte, first of his line, and called the Great," I wrote on the 18th of May, 1864, " was for a long series of years permitted, by a complaisant and conquered con tinent, to act unrestrictedly according to his own will and pleasure. He did what he liked with his own, and with that which was not his own. He rarely hesitated to abuse the vast power he had seized, and to show himself what is called on this side the water a ' kinder despot.' He ravaged con tinents, overran whole countries, revolutionised States, demo lished dynasties, and gave away crowns as though they had been candies. He tore the Pope from his palace, and made a French general master at the Vatican. He seized upon British subjects, and made inoffensive travellers prisoners of war by thousands. He burnt our merchandise wherever he found it. He violated the territory of Baden, arrested, tried, and executed the Duke d'Enghien. He shut up Toussaint l'Ouverture in a damp dungeon, and allowed that brave and intelligent black man to die of the chills and a broken heart. He caused Hofer, the Tell of the Tyrol, to be slain. He banished Mme. de Stael, and guillotined Georges Cadoudal. In short, he was a terrible Bashaw. On le laissafaire. People murmured ; but they obeyed. They shrugged their shoulders, JUSTIFICATORY. 2] but they bowed their necks to the collar. The glory of his great achievements threw the dark and cruel and meanly per fidious acts he was continually committing into the shade. Yet, as the last straw is said to break the camel's back, and the worm will turn when trodden upon, there was one deed done by Napoleon towards the close of his career — one bar barous, heartless crime, done in the mere spiteful wantonness of arbitrary power — which filled all Europe with horror, with terror, and with amazement. By his order a humble German bookseller, named Palm, was seized and shot. Only the very barest of suspicion of disloyalty towards the great Emperor and King attached to him. The man was murdered in cold blood. Campbell the poet is said to have ironically proposed Bonaparte's health at a supper-table, as a benefactor of the literary species, on the ground that he had shot a bookseller ; but, in sober seriousness, wherever the dismal tidings of this judicial assassination penetrated, they were received with the profoundest indignation and the darkest forebodings. The act of vengeance wreaked on a private citizen was so hideous, yet so mean and petty ; the blood-shedding was so gratuitous ; the murder of the Leipsic bookseller was so obviously the result of capricious, unbridled, reckless tyranny, that men who had hitherto glorified and extolled the conquering hero began to regard him with aversion and dismay. To the ' Austrian marriage and the Spanish ulcer ' Napoleon was wont to ascribe his own downfall ; but he might have added a third cause to those which undoubtedly brought about his ruin. When the plain frock and round hat of the citizen are no longer a protection ; when the peaceful burgess is torn 22 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. from his home by armed and irresponsible myrmidons ; when distinct nationality is no longer a guarantee against the aggression of a foreign despot, the whole of society becomes naturally filled with anger and alarm. Quiet communities feel as though a wild beast were prowling round them. No one can tell whose turn to be devoured may come next, and at last, obeying the sheer instinct of self-preservation, they unite against the common enemy and destroy him. " The American people have, in their wisdom, for the past two or three years suffered the rulers whom they have set over them to do pretty much as they liked in their wisdom. The Constitution being in danger, they have forborne to grumble if the authorities at Washington have occasionally dispensed with the use^ of the Constitution altogether. It became necessary at all hazards to save the ship of the State, and so masts and rigging have been cut away, and the passengers' luggage, and sometimes the passengers themselves, thrown overboard. Mr. Lincoln has poured on, and the people of the Great Republic have endured. To murmur against uncon stitutional acts has become disloyal. To talk too much about the Habeas Corpus is to incur the suspicion of Copperheadism. The Bill of Rights in America has been dishonoured and pro tested, and the Palladium of American liberty is of no more account than a cracked tin kettle. Still the public have been patient They have seen Fort Lafayette and the old Capitol crammed to repletion with political prisoners. They have seen a merciless conscription over and over again enforced. They have heard the doctrine of confiscation and spoliation openly and systematically advocated. They have allowed the JUSTIFICATORY. 23 most bungling and the most profligate of financiers to pawn the national credit, to fritter away the national wealth, to forestall the public resources, and, by the unheard-of inflation of an equivocal paper currency, to endanger the stability of the most energetic commercial community in the world, and to menace private citizens with pauperism and ruin. All these oppressive measures they have borne with cheerfulness and submission. The exigencies of the commonwealth have been pleaded to justify the abrogation of sound doctrines of finance and the suspension of a wise code of laws. But there is one thing the American people will not stand. They are as justly jealous as we ourselves are of the right of asylum, and they have been, until recently, as justly proud of the inviolability of their soil as a refuge for the oppressed of every nation. When the mistaken zeal of Commodore Wilkes, in the affair of the ' Trent,' imperilled the existence of pacific relations between the United States and Great Britain, the good sense of the American people led them to concur in the action of their government in giving up the prisoners taken from the deck of a British ship — led them to see that a great principle was at stake, and that by refusing the ren dition of Mason and Slidell a most perilous and ominous pre cedent would be set. An intemperate sailor had outraged the law of nations, and had been for a moment applauded by the unthinking and backed up by the malevolent ; but in the end better counsels prevailed, and the Americans were con tent to do as they would be done by. "A case has just, occurred which more nearly touches on the right of asylum, aiid which more clearly brings the 24 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. sanctity of the soil of a free country into question, than even the affair of the 'Trent.' All New York is in a fever of indignation at the kidnapping, spiriting away, and ultimate deportation to Havana of Colonel Arguelles. The story, so far as it is known, is one of the strangest and one of the most scandalous that can possibly be conceived. There came recently to the Empire City a Spanish gentleman, named Don Jose" Augustin Arguelles. He was accompanied by his wife, and the pair took up their quarters at a well-known hotel in the most crowded part of the town. Senor Arguelles was a colonel in the Spanish army, and had been Lieutenant- Governor of Colon, a district in the southern part of Cuba. He came well furnished with letters of introduction to New York. He had had, it appears, a quarrel with General Dulce, the Captain-General of Cuba, and considered himself to have been grievously wronged by that exalted functionary. Accord ing to Colonel Arguelles's own showing — and it must be understood that I by no means authoritatively indorse his statement, considering only that his story is good until another one is told — he was a victim to his opposition to the slave-trade. A cargo of negroes, ten hundred and seventy in number — by far the largest importation to the island that had been known for many years — had been ' run ' on to the coast. They were captured by the troops of the Government, and the question of their disposal came within the jurisdic tion of the Lieutenant-Governor of Colon. Colonel Arguelles. represents that he was waited upon by M. Zulueta — the most notorious slave-trader in Cuba, and perhaps in the world, and whose name, as identical with that of a gentleman who JUSTIFICATORY. 25 was tried for slave-trading at the Old Bailey some twenty years since, but acquitted, may be familiar to you — and offered an enormous sum of money in hard dollars if he would consent to what is delicately termed a ' transaction,' and allow the captured Africans to be sold into Cuban bond age. The Captain-General had already, it was hinted, been ' squared.' Colonel Arguelles indignantly refused to come to terms. He saw in this perhaps not only an opportunity for performing an act of public virtue and private morality, but of bringing General Dulce to grief. He had been a member of the Spanish Cortes ; he had some interest, and in very high quarters, at the Court of Spain, and it may be that he cherished the hope of supplanting his chief and rival in the honourable and lucrative office of governor of the siempre fidelis'ma, islet. At all events, the arrangement with M. Zu lueta fell through ; whereupon — still according to Colonel Arguelles's showing — the baffled slavemonger moved General Dulce to subject him to a series of unmerited persecutions. His character blackened and his prospects endangered, Colonel Arguelles resigned both his post and his commission, in order to bring his superior officer to justice, and sailed for New York, en route for Europe, determined to lay his com plaint before the Cortes, and, if necessary, before her Majesty Isabella Segunda herself. He was not permitted long to revel in the delights of New York society. He was in the city just a sufficient time to ventilate a few of his wrongs in an American and a French newspaper published here, when his career was suddenly brought to a close. Early one morning a hackney-coach, containing two or three deputy- 26 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. marshals of the United States, drove to the door of Maillard's Hotel. They entered the house, pushed by waiters and chambermaids, burst into the room occupied by the colonel and his wife, dragged him from his bed, and hurried him away no one knew whither. All that day his friends sought for him in vain. The different station-houses were visited, but the police on duty knew nothing about him. He wasn't in the Tombs ; he was presumably not at Blackwell's Island ; he had certainly done nothing to merit incarceration in Fort Lafayette. At last he was discovered at an obscure jail in Ludlow Street ; but no sooner was his presence there ascer tained than he again mysteriously disappeared, and all trace of him was lost. His wife was distracted ; his friends were furious. The United States' marshal, Mr. Murray, was ap plied to for information, but declined giving any. At last it began shrewdly to be suspected that the colonel had been put on board the steamer 'Eagle,' just then starting for Havana. The aid of some detectives belonging to the metro- politan police was secured by the colonel's friends ; the 'Eagle' was pursued down the bay, and boarded before she reached the Narrows. She was thoroughly overhauled, but no Colonel Arguelles was to be found. The scent was once more lost, His friends, however, were determined to unravel the mys tery. An influential New York gentleman, whose character was above suspicion, and whose loyalty unimpeached, started for Washington in company with Madame Arguelles and the correspondent of a European newspaper, and sought an inter view with Mr. Secretary Seward. The Secretary of State received the deputation in a manner in which pomposity was JUSTIFICATORY. 27 mingled with sentimentality, and embarrassment with both. First, he refused to recognise the right of the deputation to inquire at all as to Colonel Arguelles's whereabouts ; then he made a shuffling exculpatory explanation of the colonel being accused of complicity in the slave trade ; and finally he strove to ride out of the difficulty on the high horse of didactic morality, by observing that ' no person who had sold human beings. into bondage could expect an asylum in the United States.' Mr. Seward might just as well have remarked to his hearers, ' Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,' or recited to them a passage from the Koran. The snubbed deputation Avere, however, not disheartened. They unearthed the Spanish minister. That diplomatist yielded to discreetly applied pressure ; and from him they learnt that Colonel Jose" Augustin Arguelles was an-ested in New York by virtue of a requisition made to the Government of the United States by the Captain-General of Cuba ; that his arrest was made under the direct authority of Mr. Secretary Seward, and that he had been put on board the ' Eagle' after she had passed the Narrows, in custody of Spanish police-officers, and two of the American deputy-marshals who had arrested him ; and that he was now on his way to Cuba, there to be delivered up to the tender mercies of Captain-General Dulce. " It remains to be seen whether the great and free American people will tolerate for one moment longer this most monstrous outrage on their personal liberties and their personal honour. It remains to be seen whether the representatives of the people in Congress will do their duty to their constituents, and force or shame the Government into explanation and reparation. 28 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. It remains to be seen whether the countrymen of that brave and honest sea-captain who, when the Hungarian refugee, Martin Kossta — a man who was barely a postulant for the proud privileges of American citizenship — was kidnapped in the streets of Smyrna, laid his ship alongside the Austrian brig 'Hussar,' on board which Kossta had been conveyed, beat to quarters, ran out his guns, double-shotted them, and swore that unless the man were given up in half-an-hour he would blow the German from the water ' like the peel of an onion.' It remains to be seen whether the nation who share with Britons the glory of offering to all who are in peril from the tyranny of unjust rulers a sanctuary and a safeguard, will tamely submit to have their good name and their repute for hospitality and generosity dragged through the mire by Ministers who appear to be emulous of the commingled attributes of Torquemada, of Fouche, and of Jonathan Wild, and to unite the perfidy of a familiar of the Inquisition with the cunning activity of a Bow-Street runner. In England a Minister of State who had been guilty of such a mean and shabby thief-taker's trick as this would not be in office twenty-four hours after the exposure of his conduct in Parliament. It was as much as all the immense influence brought to bear by the great Sir Robert Peel on his party and the country could do to save Sir James Graham from ruin in the Post Office letter-opening business. We are a people who have great faith in precedents ; and a precedent having been fortunately discovered of a couple of letters opened by Secretary's warrant in the reign of Queen Anne, Sir James Graham escaped condign punishment, but re- JUSTIFICATORY. 29 mained indelibly covered with well-deserved popular odium. But there is no precedent, either in England or in America, for kidnapping people in their beds, and, without even the sem blance of a form of justice, hurrying them on board steamers and delivering them up to their enemies. Louis Napoleon, in ] 851, certainly seized MM. Cavaignac, Lamoriciere, Thiers, &c, at a somewhat untimely hour ; but he had avowedly overturned all existing government ; and, even under those exceptional circumstances, the proscribed representatives were arrested by commissaries of police duly provided with warrants. They were conveyed to well-ascertained places of confinement; they were not kept au secret; and they had not been in prison four-and-twenty hours before the President, in a public proclamation, strove to justify his conduct. The authorities at Washington have, it is true, and most tardily, ventured upon a semi-apology for the kidnapping of Colonel Arguelles, as may be learnt from the following semi-official statement telegraphed to New York : ' It is understood that an arrangement has been entered into between our Govern ment and that of Spain for the purpose of rendering up slave-traders who escape from Cuba to the United States, and from the United States to Cuba. In this connection the arrest of Colonel Josd Augustin Arguelles is significant.' ' In this connection,' it might be understood that something of the nature of a treaty of extradition has been concluded between the United States and Spain, whose sudden and virtuous indignation against the slave-traders, at whose doings she has connived for so many years, cannot be too highly commended ; but, granting that it is a most excellent thing 30 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. mutually to give up thieves, and murderers, and forgers, and man-stealers, it would seem expedient, it would seem at least decent, to make the arrest publicly — to justify it by some evidence more credible than the ex-parte statement of a man vehemently suspected of being himself over head and ears in a most infamous traffic ; to bring the person accused before a magistrate, and to refrain from relegating him to bondage, and perhaps to assassination, until he has had an opportunity to be heard in his own defence. It is very much to be feared that the unfortunate Colonel Arguelles will never be seen alive again. The Government may be brought to a due sense of the shameful disregard of public and private right of which it has been guilty ; Marshal Murray and some of his subordinates are to be prosecuted, it is said, before the grand jury, for their share in the kidnapping ; it is not impossible even that a gunboat might be sent to Havana to demand the body of the captive ; but it is a matter of doleful dubiety as to what state that body would be in when surrendered. The climate of Cuba is very hot. The vomito negro is a disease of frightfully rapid operation. Dead men tell no tales ; and Jos^ Augustm Arguelles must know a great many things of a nature to compromise some of the most respectable people in Havana. "Whether this unlucky Spanish colonel live or die, the fact nevertheless remains, that the laws of the United' States have been most disgracefully set at defiance, and the fair fame of its people most wantonly befouled, by the action of the Federal Government. It matters little whether Arguelles or Dulce, or both, have been mixed up in the JUSTIFICATORY. 31 slave-trade. Little good would arise from an analytical discussion on the relative morality of Spanish officials. Nor is it for one moment to be denied that the kidnappers of black men ought to be punished both in this world and the next. But how about the kidnappers of white men ? How about the deputy-marshals who pulled Colonel Arguelles out of his bed ; who are said to have been heavily bribed for the swift and secret performance of their knavish task ; and who have taken a trip to Havana with their victim, to be feted, no doubt, on their arrival by the Spanish alguazils, their accomplices ? How about Marshal Mun-ay, the dis creet corregidor who set the myrmidons in motion % And, finally, how about the Honourable William Henry Seward, Secretary of State in the Cabinet of Abraham Lincoln, who has sold his country's birthright for a mess of olla-podrida, and conceded to a Spanish viceroy that which poor broken- down Abdul Medjid refused disdainfully to concede to Francis Joseph of Austria and Nicholas of Russia. ' No,' quoth the Mahometan sultan, when he was summoned to surrender the1 refugee Louis Kossuth ; ' I will keep the Giaour from hurting you for a year and a day, but I will never give him up to you.' And all Christendom cried ' Bravo ! ' to the turbaned Turk." We learnt subsequently that on the arrival of this most unfortunate gentleman at Havana he was taken before General Dulce, and bitterly reproached with having " caused a scandal in a foreign land." That he was then thrown into a noisome dungeon, into which descent could only be made through a trap in the roof by a ladder in the Morro Castle ; 32 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. that, after many weeks' confinement, he was tried before a court-martial, not on the slave-dealing issue, but for military insubordination, and sentennced to degradation and a long term of imprisonment — whether in chains or not, I know not. And this is the last, probably, that the world will ever hear of Don Josd de Arguelles, With this monstrous case, dear sir, I close my argument as to whether the United States, in the year 1864, possesses anything approaching " the best government in the world." Second. I was told, I was assured (I mean as one of the British public) that the American Civil War was undertaken by the North, much less for the purpose of repressing an unnatural and parricidal rebellion on the part of the South, * than for the purpose of liberating four millions of blacks from a cruel and humiliating bondage. I was told that the rebellion was fomented by a few thousand arrogant and oligarchical slaveholders ; that the hearts of the people of the South were not in the war, but that it was a crusade in favour of human freedom, and that the North were only bent on the emancipation of an enslaved and oppressed race. Here is the Confession of Faith of the North, written by Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, one of the most admired poetesses of New England, professedly as a "Battle Song of the Republic." I have heard it sung to the familiar anti-slavery air of " John Brown," by a Massachusetts regiment twelve hundred strong, and the effect under those circumstances was almost incon ceivably fine. You must excuse the seemingly blasphemous " vigour " of some of the expressions. Those expressions are accounted utterances of genuine and heartfelt piety in New JUSTIFICATORY. 33 England, where there yet dwell descendants of Captain Hew- Agag-in-pieces-before-the-Lord, and Lieutenant Bind-their- Kings-in-chains-and-their-Nobles-with-links-of-iron, and where children are still christened with long-winded scriptural appellations, reca,lling " If Christ-had-not-been-born-thou- would'st-have-been-damned-Barebones." I need only remind you of the first and last stanzas of Mrs. Howe's stirring lyric : — Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord ; He is trampling out the vintage where his grapes of wrath are stored ; He hath loosed the fateful lightnings of his terrible swift sword, For God is marching on. * ****** In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea ; There's a glory in his visage that transfigures you and me ; As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, For God is marching on. There is to this song a refrain, beginning "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah ! " which, from the disagreeable effect it might have on European ears, I refrain from quoting. I was told by politicians, by newspaper editors, clergymen, by private gentlemen, by ladies, that the one great object of the war was to set the Black Man free ; that, although the martial ardour of the North had first been fired by the attack on Fort Sumter, and the legions of the Republic called to arms simply to compel the South to return to their allegiance, and although there had been at first no inten tion whatever to interfere with their "domestic institu tions," that is to say, with slavery (an intention explicitly disavowed by Mr. Lincoln himself in his inaugural address in March, 1861), there had gradually arisen in the minds of 34 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. even moderate men a firm conviction that slavery was at the bottom of this trouble, that it was the root of the evil, and that, ere ever the Union would be restored on its former basis, slavery must be demolished root and branch, and utterly stamped out. I was told that the cruelties of the Southern slaveholders had reached a point which humanity and policy could no longer tolerate. I was shown dozens of books, pamphlets, leading articles, in which cruelties and enormities, in comparison with which the horrors of " Uncle Tom's Cabin " were but as milk and water, were charged on the slave system. I was bidden to believe that the polished and kindly ladies and gentlemen with whom it had been my lot, for years, to associate in Europe were, at home, gloomy and reckless tyrants, who passed their lives in overworking and torturing their slaves. I was bidden to regard a plantation as a kind of Inferno, where at every step you met women tied up for punishment, and heard the sibillant rush of thongs through the air ; where the whipping-post the cow-skin, the paddle, the gyves, the yoke, and the branding-iron were permanent institutions, where the miserable bondsmen and bondswomen went half-naked, were half-starved, and were worked from twelve to eighteen hours a-day, and where, if they succeeded in escaping from their intolerable thraldom into some Dismal Swamp, they were hunted down by savage bloodhounds, and brought back with their flesh half torn off their limbs, then to be tied up to a beam by their thumbs, a post thrust between their legs, and their toes barely touch ing the ground, and flogged till the blood ran down their heels. I was told that after this scourging their bloody JUSTIFICATORY. 35 backs were washed down with brine. I was told that they were kept for days in the stocks or the bilboes, their faces exposed to a burning sun and to the assaults of innumerable flies. I was told that pregnant women were not exempt from the lash ; that they were forced to toil in the rice swamps within a few days of their confinement, and that a favourite amusement with a facetious overseer was to compel a son to flog his own mother, and a husband his own wife. I was informed that in every plantation there was a Harem and that every planter was a Sultan, that he flung his handker chief to any black houri he chose, and woe be to her who declined his condescending patronage. I was told that the Amuraths of the South never experienced the slightest scruples in selling their cast-off mistresses or their base-born children ; and that on the auction-blocks of Charleston and New Orleans beautiful young girls, as white as you or I may be, dear sir, were, as a common occurrence, exposed for sale, and that they were as commonly bought for the vilest of purposes by the proprietors of dens of profligacy. I was told that in every town in the South there was a public calaboose or whipping-house, whither masters and mistresses who had no regular apparatus for torture on their own premises — who were too lazy to become themselves the executioners, or too sensitive to have execution done under their own eyes — were accustomed to send their slaves to be punished, and that women and young girls were, as a matter of course, dragged to these places, stripped, and lashed by the hands of men. I was bidden to believe that the long-descended and high- minded gentlemen of Virginia were habitually engaged in b 2 36 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF AVAR. the loathsome and degrading calling of rearing slaves for the markets of the extreme South ; that the breeding of black human cattle was as favourite a pursuit with a landed pro prietor in the Old Dominion, as breeding heifers or sheep might be with an English country gentleman, and that when this live stock was sufliciently plump and strong to labour in the rice-grounds or cotton-fields of Carolina or Tennessee, negro traders came to purchase the " likeliest young niggers," and took them away, shackled and manacled, to be sold into hopeless bondage down South. I was shown photographs of negroes whose backs had been lashed into one bleeding mass of mashed up muscle, or whose limbs were covered with the blisters raised by the paddle — who had been branded with their owner-'s initials on the forehead and on the cheek, whose ears had been clipped, whose nostrils slit, and whose tongues cut out. And, finally, I was told that these four millions of black people were sunk in the most abject and entire ignorance of every branch of knowledge, secular or divine — that it was a crime to teach them to read or write— and that missionaries who had attempted to preach the Word of God to them had been banished, cowhided, tarred and cottoned, ridden on rails, hanged, and shot. And I was asked whether, as an Englishman and a Christian, — whether as the countryman of Clarkson, of Wilberforce, of Granville Sharpe, of Brougham, of Macaulay, and of Buxton — I could, for very shame, deny that these were horrors and these were scandals which cried aloud for abrogation, or that a nation who had undertaken to abrogate them was engaged in a righteous and a holy war, JUSTIFICATORY. 37 I heard all these things. I heard and read too what the other side had to say and write. I could not penetrate into the Southern States ; but I went to Cuba, and saw, during two visits to that island (I went to Mexico in the interval) negro slavery in full operation on the plantations on the factories. I do not pretend to know much about anything, but I claim to have studied the question of slavery for very many years with intense and concentrated industry— to have read nearly all that has been written on the subject — from Blue Books to Anti-Slavery Reporters — during the last fifty years ; and, in early youth, to have had much viva voce instruction as to the practical working of slaveholders, for I came on the mother's side from a long line of West Indian Planters who owned slaves and did not torture them. When my mother, dear sir, was brought to England sixty years ago to be educated, there came over with her three black slave-women, and these women used to sit on the stairs all day in London, shivering, and crying to be sent back to Demerara. And slavery, sixty years since, in British Guiana, was no joke. These are the result of my studies. That I believe slavery to be an evil, and to a certain extent a curse : but that it is not a worse evil nor a worse curse than Prostitution, than Drunkenness, than Pauperism, than the tyranny of capital over labour, or than the greed for wealth. I believe that it is not half so great an evil and not half so great a curse as that Devil's own Game — War, and as that Devil's own creed which strives to preach the doctrine that there is a " God of Battles," and that Almighty God can, under any circum stances, look with aught save sorrow and abhorrence on the 38 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. spectacle of His creatures cutting one another's throats. And I believe that although cruelty to anything that lives, parlant or mute, is wicked and detestable, the cruelties said to be inflicted by the Southerners on their bond servants are in the main gross and malevolent exaggerations, and that, in any case, it is better that a refractory negro should have a sound thrashing than that A. B., who never saw C. D. before in his life, and cannot possibly have the slightest grudge against him, should fall upon him, shoot him with bullets, rip up his bowels, stab him in the heart, or batter his brains out, and call that Glorious War. I believe that for thousands of years unavailing efforts have been made to civilise the black natives of Africa, and that those efforts — missionary enterprise and the Republic of Liberia notwithstanding — will continue to be unavailing. I believe that the negro in his own country is not to be civilised. I know that when the missionaries do get hold of him and teach him his Catechism and baptise him, his Chris tianity very soon deteriorates into a kind of Obeah worship grafted on Exeter Hallism, and that he howls out his " Glory Hallelujahrums " and his " Bress de Lord's" without the slightest idea of the real meaning of his invocations : — and that in fact the deity he invokes is only Mumbo Jumbo in a white choker. / believe that he is and has been ten thousand times better off as a bond-servant in the Southern States of America than as a free negro in the North, and ten million times better off as a negro, at all, in America, than as a denizen of Dahomey or Ashantee, and that if he is some- ' times flogged and sometimes sold, down South, his blood is JUSTIFICATORY. 89 not shed to fill a pond for a "great custom," and his skull is not scooped out to form a calabash for his sovereign to drink rum from. I believe that he is naturally inferior to the white man in mental organisation ; that his defects and his vices are not to be eradicated by education ; that he will always (in the aggregate : of course there are individual exceptions) be lazy, indolent, and slovenly, good-natured and kind-hearted, but subject to inexplicable fits of caprice, sulkiness, obstinacy, and perversity : — willing and obedient only when he fears the eye or the hand of his master ; incon ceivably vain, trivial, and puerile, always as lecherous as a monkey and often as savage as a Gorilla, and finally totally unconscious of or indifferent to the moral laws — let alone such legal enactments as teach tha,t lying and stealing are wrong. I believe that this is the negro. I believe that he will make a capital sailor in a ship where there is a good boatswain, an excellent footman or coachman in a household where the master and mistress keep a tight hand over their servants, a valuable soldier under white officers and stern drill-sergeants (in time, and if he is strictly disciplined and smartly dressed, after the pattern of our West India regi ments), a useful body servant, an active hotel waiter, and an incomparable barber. But I believe that he must always have a " boss " or a master or guide of some sort over him, with power to punish him when he misbehaves himself; and I believe that in default of this master, guide, or " boss," he will go to the Devil, as he has gone in Hayti, as he will go in Liberia, as he would go in Jamaica were not the magistrates and the police too strong for him, and as he has been going 40 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. in his own country, Africa, for I don't know how many thousand years. They told me when I came to America that the great heart of the country was set upon the destruction of slavery. Perish the Union, perish the country, perish every white man in it ; but that eminently helpless dark-coloured person must be freed from the questionable oppression he has so long endured, and so contentedly suffered. He must have entire liberty — to do what % To dig trenches for the white engineer officer ; or with his mangled body to make fascines and gabions for the white man's forts ; or to wander about to pilfer, and starve, and rot, as he is doing just now with great regularity and despatch in a hundred places where he has been set free. The abolition of slavery, the Radicals maintain, is not to be left, as all humane and sensible men desire it should be, to another generation, happily free from the passions and the prejudices which disfigure the existing one. Able and patriotic but temperate men are not to be encou- reged to devise a scheme whereby a great national evil may be gradually and equitably, but effectually, abolished, " No, no," the Radical cry runs ; " slavery must go, hie et nunc. No compromise ! no compensation ! It must go. It is punctured in the spinal marrow. It is reeling and staggering like an ox that has been stricken with a pole-axe. Never mind those who may be crushed by the toppling down of its huge bulk. It is doomed, and it must die." So the negro is to receive forthwith his gift of the white elephant — freedom. I wonder " what will he do with it." Sir Bulwer Lytton would be puzzled to answer the question. I met JUSTIFICATORY. 41 in Washington a lady, as loyal of course as she was accomplished, who told me that she once owned a female slave. The poor woman was about to become a mother. My informant — as it is the kindly custom of Southern ladies to do — busied herself in preparing for . the advent of her bond-servant's infant. In good time she gave the slave money to purchase baby linen. "Well, Peggy," she asked one day, "what did you buy?" The slave told her. She had bought a silk umbrella ! Such was her notion of a layette. Were this a solitary instance, or one that I had heard at second hand, I should be ashamed to quote it ; but hundreds of witnesses could, if needful, be put into the box to prove how utterly childish and irresponsible the vast majority of these poor people are. From the old slaves who crawl about the houses of their owners, fed for nothing and not worked, saying and doing what they please, and sleeping with their feet so thrust into the embers on the hearth that they scorch their toe-nails off, to the little black brats snug gling like so many guinea-pigs about the floors of Southern houses ; from these to the women who buy silk umbrellas instead of childbed linen, and who come roaring to their mistress for remedies if they have a sore finger or a soft corn — who will only take medicine when they are sick from her hand — and who, as mothers, are so shamefully neglectful of and so wantonly cruel to their children, that the white ladies are often, compelled to take the little ones away from their unnatural parents to preserve their lives — it is the same lamentable case of an inferior and impracticable race. And in the North — the free North — the land of liberty, of intelli- 42 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. gence, of newspapers, and Methodist chapels, and common schools ; do they fare better there ? I declare that, of all the miserable and woe-begone objects I have ever beheld out of a Russian gaol or an Italian lazar-house, the free negroes I have seen in New York are the wretchedest and most for lorn. Take away those who are coachmen or servants in private families, and who are clad in some kind of decent livery by the employers ; take away a proportion of mulat- toes and "bright" coloured people (among which class the women are often, given to tawdry finery in apparel, but seldom to personal cleanliness) ; take away a few, a very few old negroes, who have made money by storekeeping, and wear broadcloth and tall hats ; and the residue are a listless, decrepit, drowsy, cowering race, always going to the wall, always sliding and slinking away, always ragged, always dirty — lying and pilfering and tipsifying themselves in a feckless, shambling kind of way — horribly overgrown children — cretins whose goitres are on their brains instead of in their throats. In the back slums of New York you meet them prowling about with baskets full of scraps and offal. When the police rout out some dilapidated tenement at the Five Points, they are sure to find negroes lurking and snoozling among the rubbish. Let a streak of sunshine be cast across the pave ment, and you are sure to find a negro sitting on a doorstep, basking in the radiant wannth. The negroes at Washington are sturdier, comelier, more intelligent fellows. But they have been bred up not to freedom but to slavery. At Baltimore the railway porters are athletic, active, and willing negroes. Only the day before yesterday they were slaves JUSTIFICATORY. 43 Turn them loose in the blessed land of freedom, and see how long it will be before they hopelessly deteriorate. There is, I believe, a proviso in the laws of the State of New York, by which negroes who have acquired a certain amount of pro perty — some fifty or sixty pounds sterling — are entitled to vote. Last year one of the candidates for the mayoralty of the Empire City was accused of having gone down to a meeting of these moneyed negroes, and promised them all manner of fine things — permission to ride in the street rail way cars among the rest — if they would vote for him. The accusation was I hear unfounded, and a mere electioneering ruse ; but, had it been otherwise, the candidate would have taken but little by his motion. There are certainly not three hundred coloured people who can justify such a claim to the franchise, in this city of a million of inhabitants. But is the existence of the educated negro, of the " learned nigger," to be denied ? By no means. There are President Roberts of Liberia, and Mr. Frederick Douglas, just as there were Phillis Wheatley and Toussaint L'Ouverture. There was the Hottentot Venus, and there was Mr. Lumley's " Black Swan." But how many more ? and how lamentably few are the intellectual plums in this huge black pudding. That the negro, however, can sometimes say a shrewd thing is unques tionable. I have been told of an " intelligent contraband," who, escaping from Dixie into tbe land of Abraham, was pressed by a white patriot to enter into the military service of the North, but manifested an unaccountable reluctance to shoulder a musket. "Why don't you enlist, Ginger ?•" asked the white patriot. "Wal, mas'r," replied the contraband, 14 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. " Did yever see two dogs fightin' for a bone ? " " Certainly, Ginger." " Wal, did yever see de bone fight?" "Not I." " Wal, mas'r, you'se both a fightin', and Ginger's de bone, an' he's not gwine to fight in this hyar difficulmty." The con clusion arrived at by the intelligent contraband was, I think logical. I hope the story is not apocryphal, or the invention of some white minstrel of the Christy or Bryant race, who blacks his face and sings songs the like of which were never heard in Dixie. You will often, also, get a drolly shrewd reply, or a cutting bit of repartee from a negro. In " giving evasive answers " they are unapproachable. A friend of mine had a negro butler who had embezzled from four to five hundred dollars. When arraigned before a family council for his misdeeds, he " concluded to own up there had been a little misapprehension," i. e., that he had stolen the five hundred dollars. There is a very good story told of a negro witness who was called to speak to the character of a brother darkey, and who gSEve him a very bad one. " Do you mean to say he's a thief, sir ? " thundered the cross-examining counsel. " I'se not gwine ter say he's a tief, sa," replied the witness; " buff wattersay's dis. If I vers a chicken, an' I saw dat nigga' loafin' round, I'd roost high, dat's all." Equally evasive is the reply of the negro who is asked by his master whether he is for Lincoln or for Jeff Davis. " I'se for de Lord, mas'r," he answers. "He'll work out his salvatiums. Bress de Lord." The coloured people have, it is well known, a considerable aptitude for mimicry. But it is mimicry of that order which, as children, we were told used to lead to the catching of JUSTIFICATORY. 45 baboons. The hunter laid his trap — a tub of water — and at a distance from that a tub full of birdlime. He caught the eye of the baboon, stooped, and laid his face in the water. The imitative brute watched him ; walked to the next tub, and thrust his muzzle into the birdlime. So the baboon was caught. Negroes will imitate to the life the follies and the absurdities of the whites. They will put on the petit- maitre airs of their employers. I saw at Washington a waiter who, in moustache, whisker, turn-down collar, and even to a lisp and a limp, was the image of Lord Dundreary clipped in a vatful of ink. There are many black clergymen, schoolmasters, and lecturers, who can talk by the hour together, and use the longest words, and all the outward forms and symbols of argumentative discourse ; but the mimicry and poll-parrotism break out at last. A friend, himself an ardent Republican, gave me recently a forcible illustration of the painful shallowness of the negro intellect, even when trained to an apparently high degree of culture. He was riding in a railway carriage, and close by him were two full negroes, one a minister of some one of the innume rable denominations that here obtain ; the other a " class- leader " in a Sunday school. Both were well-dressed, neat, fluent, and scrupulously courteous and urbane. It was a Sunday morning, and the clerical negro was reading an illus trated newspaper, say Harper's Weekly. The class leader took occasion to express, very respectfully, his surprise that his companion, " a minister ob de Gosple," should be perusing so mundane a publication on the Sabbath. The clergyman, in a tonent of verbosity, justified himself, mainly on the principle 46 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. that to the pure all things were pure. " Oh, sa ! I admit de question," the other replied; "but I tink you gyrate too much." "Pray dispossess yourself of dat conception, sa," quoth the clergyman, " it is not de gyration, but de develoff- ment, &c, &c," and so on through mere verbiage. " There, now your argument is a little diminutive," the class leader interposed. This unlucky remark broke down with one blow the pack of rhetorical cards which the sable ecclesiastic had been building up. Somehow the word " diminutive " was not to be found in his copious vocabulary. " Dimi/nufive you- self you dam black niggar," he screamed out ; " what, you call me diminufive, you ugly cuss ? I cave you dam black head in'.' And to it they went, tooth and nail, till the hard skulls " collided " and the wool flew by handfuls. You will please to observe that when coloured people quanel they exchange the word "nigger" as a term of reproach very freely. I give this conversation precisely as it was related to me by the gentleman who overheard it. I have heard a story of a judge who addressed a poor wretch convicted of petty larceny in this fashion. " Prisoner, Providence has endowed you with health and strength, instead of which you go about the country stealing ducks." I had been fed with all these fine tales about "righteous war," "holy crusade," "regeneration of an oppressed race," and the rest of it, instead of which, I found the black man at the North a despised, derided, degraded, persecuted, mal treated outcast. I found that in the month of July, 1863, the mob of New York had been burning negro orphan asylums and hanging negroes to lamp-posts for the simple offence JUSTIFICATORY. 47 of being negroes. Instead of which, I found that a negro at the North was not permitted to compete with a white man in any lucrative or honourable walk of life, and that he was not even allowed to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. That so far from keeping the meanest corner-grocery or ribbon-and-tape shop, he could not be a bar-keeper or serve in a drapery-store ; that there were no negro carpenters, tailors, shoemakers, or bricklayer's labourer even ; that he was not allowed to drive an engine, or stoke a furnace, or act as conductor to a horse-car. That if he entered one of those cars, or an omnibus, he was liable to be turned out neck and crop on the mere complaint of a delicately sensitive white person. That he was not admissible to the white man's church, to the white man's theatre, to the white man's concert-room or lecture-hall. Instead of which, I found him lurking in policy-shops — the pettiest of gambling-dens — or keeping the doors of faro-banks. I found that he, all nigger as he was, was not suffered to become a nigger minstrel, or at least to commingle with the high and mighty whites who blacked their faces for the delectation of the audiences at Wood's or Christie's. Instead of which, I heard the negro cursed and vilified on every side as the cause of the war and the only obstacle jto peace. Instead of which, I have heard it said five hundred times by educated and intelligent American gentlemen that if the South would only come back to the Union they might keep their slaves in smcula scecu- lorum; that the genuine abolition party was still an insignificant minority of fanatical enthusiasts ; and that if Republicans as well as Democrats were polled on the two 4S AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. questions, " Union with Slavery," or "Disunion without Slavery," the vast majority would be for the Union and the "Domestic Institution." And these, dear sir, are the two prime reasons why for twelve months I incessantly grumbled. You told me, you told us, you told all England and all Europe, that yours was the freest country in the world. I found it governed by a worse than Russian despotism. My own immunity from mal treatment is no proof of the liberty you enjoy. Personally you may have despised me. Nationally you did not dare touch one hair of my head. The meanest of British subjects could not be treated like Don Jose" de Arguelles. I was as safe at the Brevoort House as in Guilford Street, Russell Square. Besides, I know your good nature, and the innocu- ousness of your rage, and while I have been damned in the columns of your newspapers in the morning I have socially dined with your foremost editors in the evening. You told me, you told us, you told England and Europe that yours was a righteous war and a holy crusade to emanci pate the Black Man. I have found the Black Man as I have described him, decidedly not better, and as decidedly much worse for your efforts in his behalf. The more cruel among your slavedrivers — for that you have had a Degree among you, now and then, I no more question than that we have had a Governor Wall or a Mother Brownrigge — sometimes whipped the Black Man to death. You have been emanci pating him into the grave by the thousand and the tens of thousands. You will emancipate him out of the land at last altogether, and there are a good many of your countrymen, JUSTIFICATORY. 49 dear sir, who will opine that such an affranchisement of ex tinction and extermination would be about the best thing which could happen for the United States of America. You may object — and I have heard this objection pettishly adduced, time and again — that the decay of your liberties and your inconsistency in the treatment of the Black man are no business of ours. Why should we meddle in your concerns ? Que diable irions-nous faire dans voire galere ? I am re minded "in this matter" (and to help out your argument, dear sir,) of the story of Deacon Peabody and his pigs — a story which I daresay I do not quote correctly. It ran somewhat thus : Somebody halloaed over a fence to Peabody, crying : " Say, Deacon, the pigs are rooting up your potato patch." To which Deacon Peabody answered, " 'Taint any consarn o' your'n ; they're my pigs and my potato patch." Have we, then, any right to call your attention to the fact that certain unholy swine are grubbing up a garden in which once grew the choicest fruits and the fairest flowers ? I answer that we have. Your great and standing complaint against us — a complaint which is a hundred times bitterer, and is more sorely felt than any alleged grievances about Alabamas, Floridas, Tallahassees, Alexandras, Slidells and Masons, St. Alban's raiders, Lake Erie pirates, and what not — is that, since the commencement of this struggle, the governing classes of England have denied you their sympathy. By the governing classes I mean not only the Lords and most of the M.P.'s and the moneyocracy, but those who govern by reason of their capacity or their social influence. You have the fanatics, the visionaries, the donkeys and the doctrinaires of 50 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. Great Britain on your side ; you have John Bright and a part of Manchester, and the conceited and cracked-brained scio lists of the Tom Brown school ; you have Professor Goldwin Smith and Mr. George Thompson ; but the majority of culti vated Englishmen, albeit they may abhor slavery, and depre cate recognition of the South, do not sympathise with the North. You would have given your ears for such sympathy. You would give your ears for it now. One-half of your abuse of England is due to the fact that you consider England the only country worth abusing. America is a stage, and Americans are always acting to a British audience. Why have we hissed 1 Why haven't we ap plauded ? Why do we withhold our sympathy ? For three reasons, dear sir. First, because we conceived that the South, if it found its connection with the North intolerable, had quite as great a right to secede from it as you had to secede from us in 1776, because we wanted you to take our tea, and pay for some two-penny half-penny stamps. I have seen the. stamps and the tea in the Museum of the Historical Society at Boston. Second, because we conceive that you have not been sin cere in your declaration that the war was undertaken and carried on for the liberation of the oppressed and enslaved African ; and because we believe that the real object of the war is to obtain domination over the South, and that you would throw the negro OA'-erboard to-morrow if you could restore the Union by sacrificing him. Third, and last, because the history of the war as set JUSTIFICATORY. 51 forth by your own writers and speakers has proved it to have been conducted under circumstances of rapine, spoliation, and atrocity, than which the wars of Attila or Genseric can show nothing more flagitious, and in a spirit worthier of Pagans and Cannibals than of Christian gentlemen. As for the other things I have grumbled at they are as the shadow of the shadow of smoke. What does it matter now, if Mrs. Trollope saw a gentleman at the playhouse put his feet up on the ledge of the dress circle, or was shocked at the spectacle of a young lady in Virginia lacing her stays in the presence of a black footman ? Mrs. Trollope is dead. We must all die. " You know you must," I quote Jeremy Taylor. Will it matter ten or fifteen years hence if one surly English traveller the more or the less found fault with your hotels or your spittoons, your cuisine or your cock-tails, your quack advertisements or your railway cars, the square- toed boots of your men, or the false back-hair of your young ladies ? Has all that the travellers have said for thirty years prevented New York from numbering in the year 1864 a population of one million of souls? Will ten thousand grumblers prevent your becoming in another half century a nation seventy millions strong ? There, let the grumblers be ; and the fools who declare you to be " sunk in a hopeless abyss of ruin." You are pretty deep in the mire just now ; but you will come out of it some day stronger and better in every way. Did not Dean Swift once invent a factitious proverb : " The more dirt, the less hurt " ? May that be your case. This is the end of my justification. The rest of the book E 2 52 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. must speak for itself. The only merit I claim concerning it is that the things I had to say against the Americans were uttered whilst I was living amongst them — were said to their face and in their teeth, and that I waited until I came home to say that which was favourable of a people of whose many great and noble and generous qualities there cannot be a sin- cerer admirer than I am — among whom I spent many happy months, and where I have left many of the dearest friends I ever had in my life. CHAPTER II. NEW YORK. Doctor Maginn once began an article on poor Haydon, the painter, in Fraser with these agreeable words, " Come along, donkey, and be cudgelled ;" and he proceeded to cudgel him accordingly. That was the style in the good old days of " slashing writers." Now it is very easy to apostrophise the City of New York with a " Come along, Gotham, and be described," but it is by no means so light a task to describe it. Consider its size. Have you read Camden? Are you familiar with Stow ? Have you taken down one of the volumes of the great Crowle Pennant in the Print Room of the British Museum ? Have you Charles Knight's "London" on your own library shelves ? Are the names of J. T. Smith, and John Timbs and Peter Cunningham, familiar in your mouth as household words ? Do you know how many hun dreds of articles about London antiquities and London life and London characters there are in that dead-and-gone periodical " Household Words " itself ? And Paris ! Are there not Mercier and Edmond Texier, and scores of feuilletonistes, satirists, and antiquarians writing, week after week, scores of sketches of Paris, grave or solemn, in scores 54 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. of papers big and little % Pelion has been piled upon Ossa in the way of description of the two great capitals of Euro pean civilisation ; yet it is felt on all sides that not half the truth has been told — that in both London and Paris there are innumerable inner recesses and penetralia which are still, to most intents and purposes, a terra incognita, and that there are as many thousand denizens of the French and English metropolis, knowing not their right hand from their left, as there were in Nineveh of old. And why ? Because they are so enormous, and their population is so prodigious. A lifetime will not suffice for description when we have to deal with millions. We may take one cluster of streets, a few groups of character, half-a- dozen phases of life ; but we do, at the most, but fringe the huge continent of brick and stone, and, when we are broken and exhausted, are mournfully conscious of the vast outlying districts we have failed to explore. We have been but as topographical Newtons — as children picking up pebbles and shells on the sea-shore while the great ocean of life lay un discovered around us. " Oh ! my Book, my Book ! " mur mured the dying Buckle at Damascus. Poor fellow, he knew that with all his well-filled, common-place ledgers, with all the noble volumes he had actually put forth, he had but written, as yet, the Preface to the History of Civili sation. Do not believe that the mania for excess in architecture was destroyed by the confusion of tongues. In most of us who think that we can think there is implanted, inherent and innate, an ambition to set about the building of Babel. NEW YORK. 55 We all want to do the " big thing on Snyder " — to write the Big Book. Some of us are privileged to reach the second or third story, some even rise to the attics. To one or two in a generation is it given to wave a flag from the chimney-pots, and see the end crown the work : then they may walk to and fro in their gardens at Lausanne, like Gibbon, chuckling softly and rubbing their hands : then perchance they may regard their accomplished labour as Dom Calmet did his Dic tionary of the Bible, and sigh, " I shall never live to correct the errors which are in that work ;" these are the fortunate ones — the elect ; but how many are destined to faint and falter and die, or ever the foundations are dug or the scaffold ing reared ? The British public, to say nothing of my publisher, would be extremely dissatisfied were I to confine this work to a description of the aspect and a commentary on the manners of New York. Yet, give me a thousand pages and I could fill them all — aye, and with smaller type than that which Messrs. Tinsley have allotted me — with variations on this soli tary theme. New York, from the Bay ; New York from the top of old Trinity church ; New York from the Central Park ; New York from Brooklyn Heights ; the merchants, the bankers, the hack-drivers, the rowdies, the stock-jobbers, the hotel-keepers, the bar-tenders, the corner grocery keepers, the quacks, the photographers, the dandies, the corn-cutters, the editors, the blacklegs, the shoulder-hitters, the " hard cases," the militia colonels, the bounty-jumpers, the crimps, the dry goods drummers, the water-side sharks, the ." war widows," the niggers, the miscegenators, the free-lovers, the 53 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. spiritualists, the railway-conductors, the policemen, the trot- ting-match jockies, the pilots, the gold speculators, the belles, the boarding-house keepers, the log-rollers, wire-pullers, pipe- layers, engineers, financeerers, war-parsons, office-seekers, poets, artists, Ethiopian minstrels, critics, connoisseurs, Irish hod-carriers, German tailors, bootmakers, fiddlers, trumpeters, and lager beer-sellers, the refugees, thieves, loafers, knaves and fools of New York the tremendous. I want a page for each and every one of these types of character, and five hundred more for the five hundred additional types which will surely suggest themselves so soon as ever I get a pen in my hand. I want space to describe the oyster eating at Fulton market, and the ice-cream devouring at Taylor's. I should properly go through the great hotels seriatim, and give a separate chapter to the Astor House, the Fifth Avenue, the St. Nicholas, the Everett, the Metropolitan, the New York, the Prescott, the Astor Place, the Brevoort, the Hoffman, the Clarendon, the Albemarle, the Lafarge, and even the Jones House ; for all of these hostelries are peculiar and character istic. Then I should take the theatres of New York — the which, I may remark, are the prettiest and most comfortable in the whole world — and wander from the Academy to Wallack's, from Niblo's to the Winter Garden, or from " Four- forty-four " to the Bowery. After that should come an appreciative essay on the three gastronomic temples owned by the immortal Lorenzo Delmonico — let it be recorded to the honour of that urbane restaurateur, that so far as his Fifth Avenue establishment was concerned, and although he NEW YORK. 57 knew the subscriber to be an enemy to the United States, he gave that subscriber frank and cordial credit, and could only, by vehement entreaty, be persuaded to send in his bill at the expiration of every month. Following the triple Delmonico should come at least twenty pages devoted to the Maison Dore'e, the second great restaurant of New York (some con noisseurs declare it to be the first), and a shorter article on the Casa Reilly. Then we might have something discreet to say about the divers " tigers " that are to be fought all night, and sometimes all day — by which I mean the gaming houses — and the enlivening games of faro, euchre, poker, and old sledge. Then we might take the cars to one of the hundred ferries, and watch the huge East River steamboats bound for the Sound and the Fall River, or cross to Brooklyn, or Hoboken, or Jersey City, or Staten Island, or wander for hours by the waterside, and the crowded wharves, and mingle with the salmagundi of all nations just vomited forth at the Emigrant Depot at Castle Garden. Or, being Sunday, we might attend Grace Church the fashionable, and gaze upon Mr. Brown, the stout and superb sexton thereof, or enter the pews of more staid and orthodox Trinity, or go and hear Doctor Chapin on Universalism, or Dr. Cheever upon blood shed, or the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher on the Gospel according to Joe Miller. I need at least two chapters for the Central Park, one for the beautiful landscape gardening displayed there, the ornamental bridges, the magnificent carriage drives, the garden of acclimatization, the charming blending of sylvan and rocky scenery ; and another chapter for the wealth and fashion and splendour of the afternoon 58 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. Corso, the elegance of the dandies, and the beauty and grace of the fair equestrians. Then, I think I would write from forty to fifty pages about the pretty toilettes and prettier faces one meets with on Broadway, on a fine afternoon — say between Union Square and Canal Street. After that a genteel description of Fifth Avenue, right from Washington Square to the Reservoir, should follow. After that, if you pleased, we would take a stroll among the old clothesmen in Chatham Street, that transatlantic Holywell Street — skim through the Fourth Ward — see where once all the poverty and vice of the infamous Five Points festered and seethed, but where now are schools, mission-houses, . and lodging- houses for little newsboys ; or plunge head over heels in the humours of the Bowery — its Lager Bier Gartens and halls for the performance of the much-loved nigger-minstrels. A considerable section should be devoted to the underground life of New York — to the myriad cellars, now splendid and now squalid, which yawn beneath the feet of the wayfarer, and which are now bullion-offices and exchange brokers, now bars and grog shops, now oyster and now ice-cream saloons, now German " barbier stilben," now stationers' shops, now restaurants where " meals at all hours " are advertised. Stop. I am reminded in this connection, as Mr. Abraham Lie coin says, of a little story. There was . an ordinary down town once, where, for the sum of fifty cents, you were entitled to sit down at a table groaning with substantial viands, and eat as long and as much as ever you chose. A gaunt man from Maine, a Solon Shingle kind of individual, entered this ordinary one day, and proceeded to cram his fifty cent's NEW YORK. 59 worth. He went in for the beef and he went in for the mutton, and he went in for the turkey and cranberry sass. He was death on squash. He devoured stewed tomatoes until you might have thought he was Eve's brother-in-law. He was a whale at sweet potatoes. He punished the squash, the celery, and the cold slaugh, awfully. He roamed like a bee from flower to flower — from beefsteak to huckleberry pie, from Vanilla ice-cream to pork and beans, from succotash to meringues, from Phipps's ham to Indian pudding. He ate like Gargantua, like Bernard Kavanagh the Fasting Man (when there was nobody looking), like Ben Brust in " Gideon Giles the Roper," like Dr. Johnson at Streatham, when the veal pie and plums were to his liking, and there was plenty of capillaire to pour into his chocolate, and good store of anchovy sauce wherewith to souse his plum pudding. He ate until the guests regarded him with affright, and the waiters gathered round him and scanned him with minatory looks. He finished up with a fishball or two and a couple of cobs of hot corn with plenty of fresh butter, drank a mighty draught of cold water, ordered a tooth-pick, and tendered fifty cents in payment for his inordinate feed. The " boss," or master of the establishment, folded his arms, and with knitted brow and quivering lips replied, "Don't see it, stranger ; I guess it's a quarter more." " Why," expostulated the gaunt man from Maine, pointing to a printed notice on the wall, " I guess that paper says ' dinner, fifty cents.' " " Yes," rejoined the " boss," " but when a man eats as if there was no hereafter, we charge him seventy-five cents." The connection in the eating-house-keeper's mind between 60 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. moderation in eating and a belief in a future state, struck me, at the time the story was told me, as being exceedingly droll. Having left the cellars I might — if you would only concede me the thousand pages I covet — mount four or five flights of stairs with you, and see what the artists of New York — a worthy, jovial, hard-working, catholic crew they are — were doing in their studios. Then we might pop in — hoping we did not intrude — on the editors. Subsequently we might pay the Bohemians a visit, take a glass of genuine English pale ale at the " House of Lords " in Houston Street, a queer comfortable hostelry very un-American in its aspect, bearing the same relation to literary-theatrical life in New York as the old "Crown " in Vinegar Yard did to the London Bohemia in the days when the Punch Club was in its glory, and the Douglases, the Howards, the Harries, the Marks, the Alberts, the Ebenezers, the Percivals, the W. M. T.'s (sometimes) of old heard the chimes at midnight. Which chimes are now very dumb indeed, and the few survivors of those triple bob majors have forgotten that they ever heard them. Perchance at the "House of Lords" we might meet a famous actor or two, a critic or so, a poet who has not yet made his fortune by dabbling in Erie or Harlem, a painter — stay, the painters mostly affect the muslin-curtain-hung bowers of the " Waver- ley " — and any number of newspaper men. It may not be their ordinary haunt, for I saw very little of Bohemia while I was in America. It was my business, you see, to travel in a strange country, and I had no right to go home before my time. Aha ! I hear my old friends Hircius and Spungius NEW YORK. 61 screech — " The vagabond confesses that he is a Bohemian." Yes, I was born in the Arme-gasse, just off the Cour des Miracles, in the city of Prague. I was brought up among the Zingari, attained some proficiency in the Rommany lan guage, and have some slight knowledge of the affairs of Egypt. I had a sister called Esmeralda, who was very fond of a goat, was much beloved by a deformed wretch by the name of Quasimodo, and was unfortunately hanged on the Parvis of Notre Dame de Paris. My putative mamma, Azucena, got into trouble (through some tender passages of mine with a certain Leonora — non di scordar di me; Lenny — ) and was barbecued on a gridiron by the cruel Conte de Luna, Chairman of Quarter Sessions, and member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. I know all the harbours on the sea-coast of Bohemia. I can tell fortunes if you will cross my hand with silver, and whisper a horse if you will lend me one, and I think I could do a little tinkering if you would confide to me your kettle. I wonder what a Bohemian really is. Sam Johnson, I suppose, was one — the glorious old Doctor, who kept school and slept on bulks and in the ashes of glass houses, who kicked his heels in Chester field's ante-chamber and cowered in a horseman's coat behind a screen in Mr. Cave's dining-room, eating humble-pie and correcting the proofs of the Parliament of Lilliput ; who was a dozen times locked up in a sponging-house, and had to write "Rasselas" to pay for his mother's funeral, and was given to carrying home exhausted wantons on his back, and to entertaining in his house blind women and starved-out apothecaries, and lived to write the " Lives of the Poets " and 62 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. the "English Dictionary." I suppose this man, whose bio graphy Peers and M.P.'s and Professors are now glad to annotate and gloze over, was a Bohemian. But, I suppose, the drunken, conceited, crack-brained, worthless scamp, Jemmy Boswell, and the gross, fat-headed brewer, Thrale, who gorged himself at last into a fit of apoplexy and died from overeating, were not Bohemians. Oh dear no ! Jemmy was the heir to a baronetcy, and Thrale was a parliament-man — a gentleman of high social position, and the proprietor of a brew-house in Southwark, which his widow sold to a Quaker for a hundred-thousand pounds, vending, not only so many boilers and vats, but " the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice." And I think that were Spenser and Shakspere alive, and were they to go into partnership as poets, they would be held, in the opinion of the Court News man and the select circles, vastly inferior to Barclay and Perkins. Bohemians ! Why, David the King was a Bo hemian. Why, Napoleon the Great was one. Work hard and scorn the world, and the dullards and the dolts will fling Bohemian in your teeth. To the subscriber, Bohemianism at the mezzo cammin of life resolves itself into having worked twelve hours a day for many years, into having paid his butcher and his baker and avoided that Insolvent Court through which so many non-Bohemians have genteelly passed, with never having been indebted to a patron for a penny, to a minister for a place in the Custom House, or to a critic for a kind word. The " House of Lords " is a tavern, and therefore beyond the pale of gentility ; but I shall ever preserve a kindly re- NEW YORK. 63 membrance of the place, for there I first met Artemus Ward, the drollest of living American humorists. Could I say anything more — if you granted me those thousand pages — about New York ? Good lack ! my tongue and pen should run faster than ever well-trained mare flew over the Fashion Course. Wall Street and William Street ! — what might not be written about the Gold Room and the Stock Exchange, the speculators in " corners," and the jobbers who were " short " of Harlem ? Maiden Lane, what oppor tunities for word painting do not thy stores, teeming with multifarious merchandise, afford ! John Street, is there nothing to be said concerning thy steel ! Pine Street, could not pages be indited concerning thy counting houses ! Nassau Street, stands there not, at the corner of one of thy blocks, the office of the New York Herald ; and out of the Herald and its editor and proprietor might not many chapters be made ! Why, a whole volume or two has been written on James Gordon Bennett. Do not Fourth Avenue and Sixth Avenue invite description ! Shall nothing be said about Grand Street ! Am I to pass by the grand Pompeian clothing establishments of Broadway and Canal Streets ; the dazzling goldsmith's wares of Tiffany and Ball and Black ; the sump tuous, marble-fronted, dry goods store of E. T. Stewart ; the numberless modistes and fieuristes of the fashionable quarters in silent contempt ! A chapter for Washington Market ; a chapter for the Tombs ; a chapter for Brady the photo grapher ; a chapter for the Dusseldorf Gallery, another for the Cooper Institute, another for the common schools, another for the free-lovers, another for the express and railway ticket- 64 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. offices, another for the " Oriental Saloons with pretty waiter girls," another for the boarding-houses ; ten chapters, at least, for Shoddy — Cotton Shoddy, Gold Shoddy, Scrip Shoddy, Contract Shoddy, Political Shoddy, and Petroleum Shoddy, and still my task would be but half accomplished. I should have then left out the somnambulists, the mesmerists, and the fortune-tellers, the characteristics of Mackerelville and the curiosities of Commanipaw, the sports of High Bridge, the delights of the Bloomingdale Road, and the beauties of the Greenwood Cemetery over the water ; to say nothing of the Astor and Mercantile Libraries, Barnum's Museum, the City Hall, and the art collection of the Aspinwalls, the Wrights, the Lennoxes, the Barlows, the Grahams of New York and its vicinity. But I haven't got the thousand pages. I am near the end of my tether already ; and it has come to this : that of a city of a million souls I can give you no more detailed account than can be comprised in a narrative of a walk down Broadway. Now Broadway is literally the back-bone of New York, and indeed the shape of the city proper is not unlike that of the fish called the sole. Assume Broadway to be the spine, the bridge over the Harlem river the head, the Battery and Castle Garden the tail ; the ferries to Brooklyn and Jersey City the fins, the avenues running parallel to the spine the roes — hut there are eight — and the streets that branch off at right angles, from Eighth as high up, I think, as Seventy- third Street, will stand for that fringe of small bones in the sole which, nicely browned, you are always tempted to eat, NEW YORK. 65 and which half-choke you. My Manhattan fish must be a sole cb la Normande, for the shores of New Jersey and Long Island will represent the edges of the dish, the East and the North, the Harlem river, and the Bay, will stand for the sauce, and the numerous exquisitely beautiful islands which dot the surface of these waters may do duty for the morsels of mushroom and cockscomb which make the garniture of a sole a la Normande so delicious. The simile I have striven to establish may be but questionably appropriate, since a sole is the one fish quite unknown in the New York market. Aha ! my luxurious brothers, you have no soles. You may order one at Delmonico's, or the Maison Dore'e; but they will bring you a sorry substitute in the shape of a filet, a gratin, a Normande, or a friture of flounder. Well, then, I will take this vertebrated column, and endea vour to trace its course through the great corpus of Man hattan : — only I must begin with the lumbar vertebrae, then touch the dorsal, and terminate with the cervical. I came to New York, on the twenty-ninth of November, 1863, by the wrong door. I should properly have chosen, in England, one of the New York in lieu of the Boston steamers of the Cunard line. As it was, instead of crossing the Atlantic " right away " in the superb " Scotia " or the luxu rious " Persia," and entering the beautiful bay of New York by the Narrows, I chose, or had chosen for me, the comfort able but rather slow-going " Arabia," a Boston boat. Eleven days would have sufficed to bring us direct to New York ; but in the voyage to Boston we consumed fourteen and a-half — were half-smothered in the usual fogs about the 66 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. banks of Newfoundland, and delayed the usual twelve hours at Halifax, too short a time to see anything of the place, and too long a time to be moored by the side of a coal wharf. Then, when we reached Boston, we had to pass through the ordeal of a Custom House (of which I shall have to speak more in detail anon), whose officers have, to say the very least, a great deal to learn in the way of civility. We had to wait several hours for a train from Boston to Stonington, where we left the cars to enter one of those floating palaces, the river steam-boats, and we did not arrive at Pier Some- thing-or-another, East River, New York, before seven o'clock in the morning. Here some travelling companions, Ame ricans, total strangers to me when I went aboard the " Arabia," but eminently polite, cordial, and obliging — as all Americans who have travelled in Europe are — left me. I felt very much like an oyster at the bottom of a barge. The 'tween decks of the river steamer looked so very big. Another three-quarters of an hour were consumed in extri cating my luggage from the monstrous pile of trunks and carpet-sacks which crowded the gangway; and, in spite of the admirable system of checking (the which I cannot too often praise, nor too highly recommend for adoption in England), I found that the task of getting what belongs to one very tedious and very trying to the temper. You see that I did not yet " know the ropes," i.e., understand the ways of the country ; nor, indeed, had I yet learnt the ways of any country where nobody will render you any assistance, and where even you are often unable to purchase for a pecuniary consideration the services of your fellow-man. Everything is attainable on 'NEW YORK. 67 the North American continent, if you only choose to strive for it, save human bone and muscle. The complaint of Tom Hood's Needlewoman would be out of place here. Bread is very cheap, and flesh and blood are very dear. And rightly so, perhaps ; although, by a strange inconsistency, in this very land where a man's labour is so expensive, they hold his life very cheaply, and kill him with much more alacrity than we starve him. I got my traps at last, and selecting from a yelling crowd of hack drivers on the wharf (they were fortunately not permitted to come on board) one particular person whose face I thought looked honest, I entered his two-horse vehicle, saw my affairs chained and grated on behind, and desired to be driven to the hotel to which I had been recommended, and to the proprietor of which I had a card of introduction : — the Brevoort House, in Fifth Avenue. In this I showed, once more, my ignorance of the "ropes." I ought, in the first place, to have secured my hack driver, given him my brass luggage checks, got into his carriage, and waited tran quilly there until he had removed my trunks from chaos. Next, I should have made a bargain with him ere I engaged him. The result of my neglecting to do so was, that the rascal, when I arrived at my journey's end, had the face to charge me five dollars, or one pound sterling (say fifteen shillings in actual bullion, gold being then at between forty and fifty premium), for a five miles' drive. I use the term rascal advisedly. I am sure that all unprejudiced Americans will agree with me, that, on the whole surface of the habitable globe, there does not exist a more villanous and unconscion- F 2 68 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. able crew of extortioners than the hack drivers of New York. I mean those at large, and those who casually ply for hire. If you go to a decent livery stable, they will let you a capital carriage and pair, with a civil and intelligent driver, charge you but moderately, and give you " tick " besides. I had a friend who always took six months' credit for his coach-hire. If you engage one while you are staying at an hotel, they will put your carnage hire in the bill, and not charge you more than a moderate commission for doing so. But these are among the "ropes" of which you do not learn the use until you are just ready to leave the country. A year in the States, abating two and a half months I spent in the West Indies and Mexico, cost me just a thousand pounds, which, with gold ultimately at a hundred and fifty premium, represented about two thousand five hundred per annum ; and the major part of this time I was alone ; yet I have very little doubt, that, were I to return to the States, and to stay there a similar period, even with gold at a more inflated rate, I should not spend more than five hundred pounds. Young Traveller, I beseech you to bear these things in mind, if you would save money in the States. Lay in a copious stock of boots, gloves, overclothing and underclothing, before you start ; don't smoke cigars, or, if you must, bring them with you ; drink lager beer (if you can) instead of claret or champagne ; live at a boarding-house (also if you can) in stead of an hotel ; patronise the horse-cars, to the exclusion of hackney-coaches ; never ask anybody to dinner ; never play euchre at Saratoga, poker at Baltimore, roulette at Washington, or faro anywhere ; avoid junketings to Catskill NEW YORK. 69 or to Long Branch ; lead a virtuous life ; and when down town, dine at Bangs ; and you will be, if not happy, at least economical in New York. The hack driver discovering that, in my inexperience, I was quite willing to allow him to take an inch, was not slow in availing himself of the opportunity to seize an ell. I was entitled to the entire interior of his vehicle — had I consented to receive any travelling companions the law would only allow him to charge me fifty cents for my ride — but he doubtless thought that he might as well make a good thing out of me, and accordingly favoured me in the course of our journey with no less than three fellow-insides. I daresay that the rogue openly plied for fares as he drove me along. I did not demur, having been such a very few hours in America. I thought it might be, as the Spaniards allege, when subjecting you to any particularly outrageous measure of extortion, " un costumbre del pats." My first companion was a very tall officer in the army, with a red flannel shirt peeping from above the collar of his uniform, and who looked as though he were in the habit of going to bed but very rarely — and then of retiring to rest in his clothes. There was a good deal of whiskey in his hair, and of compound alcohol in his breath. He was perfectly affable, but very drunk, and his conversation was mainly made up of incoherent inquiries to the subscriber as to what was the general opinion of the "boys" as to the personal character of " Cheesewright," coupled with the slightly irrelevant information that he had lately given Cheesewright h — — . As I had not the honour of Captain Cheesewright's acquaintance — I may as well call him Captain 70 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. for courtesy's sake — I was naturally unable to enlighten the officer in the red shirt on a topic in which he appeared to take so much interest. The remainder of the time I passed in this gentleman's company he occupied first in withdrawing from the toe of his left boot a roll of dollar bills, which he had seemingly stowed away there for safety when the whiskey began to get into his hair, and next in endeavouring to adjust round his neck a paper collar. He left me at the Astor House, where I presume he was satisfactorily " fixed up " by the dexterous barbers of that establishment, and with the aid of hair brushes, combs, pommade hongroise, bay-rum, and a cocktail or two, was enabled to make quite a genteel ap pearance at the Astor House table d'hSte ; but he took care to repeat to me, as he left the carriage, that the h he had given Cheesewright was of the very liveliest and com- pletest description. During the twelve months I passed in America, I suppose that I met and conversed with at least five hundred officers in the army of the United States. With many, and of all ranks, from generals to second-lieutenants, I had the honour to be on terms of considerable intimacy. From several members of the staff of General Dix I received a great deal of kindness and courtesy ; and to General Dix himself I had the honour to be presented. The gallant officer in command of the Department of the East did not threaten to send me to Fort Lafayette, as he is said to have threatened poor Mr. Manhattan,* but, on the contrary, was exceedingly polite, and * This person's name was Joseph Scoville, familiarly called " Joe." He had been private secretary to Mr. John C. Calhoun, and was at the time of NEW YORK. 71 only regretted that the friend who introduced me to him had come too late to enable the General to lend him his yacht for an excursion up the East River. From a number of officers of every grade and every arm of the service, I received in Virginia nothing but cordiality, hospitality, and attention. The very fact, indeed, of being an Englishman was at the head-quarters of the Army of the Potomac a passport to every kind of urbanity and civility. Is it, then, gross ingratitude for the favours I confess to have received to set down that the first officer I met in New York was " tight," and looked as though he had not been to bed for a week ? I hope not. I should be ashamed to say ab uno disce omnes. The plain truth of the matter is that the American officer is, like every thing else in the Northern States, a " little mixed." Side by side with the scholar and the gentleman, the young man of family and fortune, the graduate of Harvard, the millionaire, perchance, you will find some worthless "cuss," some incor rigible " hard-case," who in the armies of England and France would be forthwith cashiered ; but who in the legions of the his death " Reader " to the Common Council of New York, the members of which august body passed resolutions of regret and condolence with his widow on the occasion of his demise. I never met "Manhattan," and although I could not, of course, but hear a great deal about him, I see no reason, in his case, to depart from the maxim " de mortuis." He has been described to me by many cultivated Americans as a man of rare but mis directed abilities. He wrote a novel, entitled in the United States Vigor, and in England Marion, in which there is a kind of apotheosis of Mr. James Gordon Bennett, and in which, floating in the midst of a cloaca of obscenity, there are some verycTirrdus revelations of the life of New York thirty years since. The New York press were very much enraged at "Manhattan's" letters to the Morning Herald and Standard having been in any way deemed expositions of the thought or feeling of Americans on political topics. He was, I believe, by birth a South Carolinian, and in politics a Secessionist. 72 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. North is permitted to retain his commission and his shoulder straps, either because he has some miserable political in fluence, or because officers of a higher moral status than he are hard to get, and his superiors do not care about going further and faring worse. Since the time of which I write, a great many of the hardest "cases" in the Union Army have been weeded out, and scarcely a month has elapsed without some especially disreputable " cusses " being turned out of their regiments by sentence of court-martial; but enough remain to render that " mixed " element of which I speak a very visible and repulsive presence. This was my first travelling companion. I am photograph ing simply from the life, without ornament and without sur plusage. My next was a clean-shaven gentleman, with a very high shirt collar, blue spectacles, an elaborately plaited frill, a broad-brimmed hat, and a long bottle-green surtout with brass buttons. He might have been a wealthy mer chant or banker, or a gentleman of independent means. I bade him good morning, but he did not apparently hear my remark, and I did not care to " argufy " with him. Perhaps he took me for a " confidence man." He had with him a market-basket, containing, as I live, a red cabbage, a quan tity of oyster-plant, several eggs, and about a pound and a half of raw beefsteak. Why not ? Why should not elderly gentlemen go to market at eight o'clock in the morning if they so choose ? At all events, the sight was novel and strange to me, and I put it down as another costumbre del pats. I have since been given to understand that the cus tom of gentlemen going to market, although still obtaining NEW YORK. 73 in some of the cities, particularly in Philadelphia, is not nearly so prevalent as it was a quarter of a century since, and that in New York at least it is, with frugality, simplicity, early hours, and other old-fashioned practices, fast dying out. The old gentleman with his marketing alighted a consi derable way " up town," and my third and last fellow- passenger was a lady, who rode a considerable distance with the subscriber. She was young ; not pretty, but passably good-looking ; and very neatly and becomingly dressed. In particular I remember that she had a velvet bonnet, an ermine tippet, and a warm merino dress. Few as the hours of my stay in the States had been, I had already become aware, from my first railway journey, and from my first voyage in a steamboat, that the stories so frequently told of the cross-questioning and generally inquisitive characteristics of the people, were mere exaggerations, and that they are, on the contrary, extremely taciturn, and averse from colloquy with strangers * * The first question I put to a stranger on board the steamer from Honington subjected me to a reply which I considered to be so much delibe rate rudeness. A knot of individuals were smoking at a table in the fore part of the vessel, and the atmosphere, from tobacco and kerosene lamps, being rather hot and choky, I asked one of them if there were any means of reaching the upper deck. I did not know that on this upper deck no passenger was allowed. The person whom (civiUy enough) I addressed, " guessed I might get there by climbing up the guys." That night I asked no more questions. I have sometimes fancied that the churlishness and bearishness I so frequently encountered were due to the fact of an Englishman carrying his country about with him in his countenance and on his tongue, but this I am led to believe now is not the case. The Americans are quite as surly to their own compatriots as to foreigners — unless they are intro duced to them. For example, it is all but impossible to obtain a civil answer from the employe's on a railway ; yet, on the occasion of my second journey from Boston to New York, having with me a young gentleman 74 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. But the young lady in the ermine tippet and velvet dress was, to my surprise, extremely communicative. She asked me where I came from, and when I told her that I was an Englishman just arrived, informed me that she had been twice to Canada, and that she had " royal blood in her veins." from Harvard University, he was good enough to introduce me to the mail agent of the train, with whom, of course, I shook hands. This functionary inducted us into his private van, found a seat for us on the mail bags, allowed us to smoke, accepted a nip from a private brandy-flask, entertained us with political and social discourse, and was in all respects a model of obliging politeness. I was somewhat tickled also, many months later, when at a depot at New York, and having a lady with me, I had asked at least a dozen times, and quite unavailingly, which was the shore-line train to Boston, being ultimately hailed by a gaunt gentleman in a yellow "duster," who was smoking, and reading the Evening Post, with his body on one chair and his feet on the top of the back of another, and who accosted me (we had wandered very far up the platform) in these remarkable words, " My Christian friend, you're (join' a darned sight out of your way." I dare say this gentleman was in the employ of the railway company ; still we took his intimation as an extreme act of condescension. On the other hand, every American friend has scores of stories to tell you of the loquacity of eccentrics they have met in railway cars. Here are two or three culled at random. An esteemed Bostonian told me that once, happening to take out his watch (which was a repeater) in a car, a bony finger (the nail in half mourning) was pointed over his shoulder until it touched the dial, and a nasal voice asked, " What do yer g'in for skh ? " — meaning how much he had paid for his watch. So, too, an Englishman in our legation at Washington told me that, going to Grover's Theatre one night, and happening to have a very handsome fur coat on (it was mid winter), the box-keeper proceeded to stroke him down, as though he had been a cat, exclaiming, " By /" (details unfit for publication), " that's fine ! " Then there is the story, familiar perhaps to English ears, of the man with the wooden leg, who, being asked by a fellow-traveller how he had lost that limb, promised to teU him, only on condition that he should ask him no more questions, and the pledge having been given, proceeded to say that it was bit off. Finally, there is the anecdote of the gentleman who, anticipating the flood of questions with which he was about to be overwhelmed, forestalled his interrogators by making a clean breast of it in this wise : " My name's Colonel Zeph. B. Tompkins. I was born to hum, and raised down ter Martha's Vineyard. I'm forty-seven year old, and I kyant help it. I'm go'in ter New York, and, if I like it, by I'll buy it!" NEW YORK. 75 I have not the least idea of what she meant by this ; but I know she told me so. Finally she said that she would be very pleased if I would call upon her. I could not do less than tender her my card. She remarked that she had no cards of her own about her, but that she resided at number something or another East Such-and-Such a Street. She was perfectly calm, self-possessed, and well-behaved, and she left me in a maze of utter bewilderment. Was this, I asked myself, another costumbre del pats ? The first American friend to whom I related this anecdote laughed, shook his head, and opined that the lady in ermine was a " hooker " — that is to say, an improper person. I don't believe she was. I believe this country to be so eccentric and so abnormal, that this and a hundred similar adventures might happen to a stranger during the first week of his stay ; only, and per contra", it is quite feasible that he might remain five-and- twenty years in America without experiencing so queer a ren contre. Whoever and whatever the lady was I never found out. I forgot the number in the street she gave me, but I ascer tained that the street itself was a perfectly respectable one. I tell the story as it occurred, with a full foreknowledge that many unthinking persons will laugh at me for having told it ; but of this I am certain, that, all man of the world as I vainly imagined myself to be, I was as completely perplexed and non plussed by the lady in ermine as Peter Simple was by the obliging damsel he met at the Common Hard at Portsmouth. It is a luxury in the midst of a life full of very hard and cruel realisms to find that for once, if only for five minutes, you have been as innocent as a sucking-dove. 76 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. You know how difficult it is at your first rapid passage through a great city to gain even the feeblest idea of the aspect of the place. Some travellers have a rapider grasp of purview than others, and the education given by Robert Houdin's father to the aspiring conjuror would not be a bad preparation for a rapid tourist. M. Guizot's impressions of a rapid drive through the English metropolis on a wet day, in the memoirs of his mission to the Court of St. James's, is about the best sample extant of a clear, comprehensive, and accurate survey of a heterogeneous mass of externals, and London is perhaps the most difficult city in the world thus to describe d la main. St. Paul's is a stand-point from which to judge only a very small portion of the city, and when M. Guizot first came to London the new Houses of Parlia ment were not built. Milan is easier : the exquisite cathedral incompasses you and overshadows you everywhere. St. Petersburg is easier : almost everything worth seeing in the city of the Czar is visible from the Admiralty Square. Constantinople is easier still : you have but to stick to the view from the Golden Horn. Brussels is easiest perhaps of all : you are at once impressed with the Hotel de Ville, the Maison du Roy, the house of the Brasseurs, and the street at whose corner stands the Mannekin — "men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever " — and these are Brussels. There is not much to be made out of New York, from the first coup d'ceil at eight-thirty on a rainy morning. There are no public buildings of importance. There are few open spaces. One street succeeds another street, and one street is painfully like another street. Broadway, immeasurably long NEW YORK. 77 as it seems to be, is not wide : at early morning its popula tion is not picturesque ; and from the window of a hackney- coach you can scarcely realise the altitude of its edifices. Thus, and from the fact of the basements of the hotels being mostly occupied by shops, I was not aware that I had passed the St. Nicholas, the Metropolitan, the Lafarge, and the Prescott. The Fifth Avenue, which, from its enormous size, packing-case look, and comparatively isolated situation, can hardly be mistaken anywhere, we did not pass. I don't think the driver, although he had a fare so very ignorant of " the ropes," took me more than a mile and-a-half out of my way in order to set down the young lady in ermine. When I was left alone I thrust my head out of the window, and, at the risk of getting splashed up to the eyes with mud, tried to see as much as ever I could ; but the result was not satis factory. No grand temples, no imposing public offices, met my view. I was not in the region of the great banking- houses. I was being borne through a huge wilderness of houses, houses, houses — all alike, all tall, all many- windowed, all flat and uncorniced, and unporticoed : — all of the packing- case style of architecture, in fact. Still, wet and cheerless as the morning was, there abode not about the square flat houses that desparate hue of dinginess engrained on London by centuries of long leases and burning of coal-fires. A London house seems to have been built, in the first instance, to last for ever, and the fire-insurance plate of the Sun or the Phoenix let into the brickwork has the venerable appearance of a Roman medal. Then, addicted as we are supposed to be to Quakerlike plainness in the exterior of our habitations, 78 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. there is probably no people on earth so fond as are the English of sticking all over their houses trashy ornaments in compo : — friezes without architraves, columns without cor nices, caryatides that do not support anything, vases that hold nothing, masks and bas-reliefs that do not mean anything. Regent Street is a kind of stucco-pie, full of this archi tectural mince-meat. The general effect is nil; but the details are wonderful in their petty copiousness,, This cer tainly has the advantage of giving to each house a distinctive appearance of individuality; redeems to some extent the grimness caused by the coal-smoke, and makes London, albeit all but colourless, the least monotonous city in the world. Which is a paradox, but is nevertheless true. In Paris and the great continental cities the eye grows weary, almost to despair, by the continuous succession of blank stone walls, with here and there a grim parte cochhre, the desert being only relieved at the expiration of half-an-hour's fatigue by some magnificent public edifice ; but in London, grubby and dingy as every building is — from St. Paul's to a pickle-shop— scarcely any two buildings are exactly like each other. There is a difference in the pattern of a window-blind, in the height of a door-step, in the colour and graining of the door, in the model of the knocker or the area-railing, in the fashion of the name plate, in the shape of the bell-handle. Englishmen's houses are identical, and yet not alike ; just as English John and Thomas are twins, and yet differ in a hundred different characteristics. I am speaking of middle- aged London. In the new metropolis which is starting up around us there would seem to be a tendency towards the NEW YORK. 79 uniform and stereotyped style of architecture ; and for that reason I can scarcely imagine anything more dismal to a lover of diversity in out-door life than the interminable series of terraces, gardens, and groves — as grand as Gog and Magog, but as like one another as two peas or two Southdowns — which occupy the site of once cheerful and smiling market- gardens at Bayswater and Old Brompton — I beg pardon: Tybumia and South Kensington : — I beg pardon again : — Westbournia and Albertopolis. The New York houses I have animadverted upon as some what monotonous are, let me hasten to admit, in the lower part of the city, say from the Battery as far as the City Hall Park. Above this point, and for many miles upwards, a new Broadway extends, in whose edifices the wildest exuber ance of architectural whim is visible. But in old New York — if any part of a city in which no tenement to which Europeans would seriously accord the stamp of antiquity can be termed old — the packing-case order naturally prevails. The Dutch houses of New Amsterdam were mostly of timber, and were in process of time burnt down. The first English colo nists were New Englanders : innovating, impatient, not over burdened with taste, and indeed contemning as useless, if not denouncing as ungodly that which we admire as sesthetical. Sir Christopher Wren is said to have planned the city of Charleston, and the influence of the great architect may have had as much to do with giving an aristocratic cachet to the State of South Carolina as had the fact of its Constitution being drawn up by John Locke.* But no Sir Christopher had * This Constitution must have been, by all accounts, a wonderful docu- 80 AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR. anything to do with the building of New York. The place grew up anyhow, and you know of what kind is the colonial " anyhow." Four walls are run up, and covered with a roof and pierced with so many doors and windows, and fit for occupation either as a store or a dwelling-house. The very name of " store " has a colonial sound, and conveys a rough- and-ready, impromptu, higgledy-piggledy mode of stowing away merchandise. When plate-glass windows are put into a store, and chandeliers, gilding, carpets, and easy-chairs are plenteous inside, and gentlemanly assistants — adepts in the arts of " dressing " a window, and " shaving " the ladies — are engaged, the store should, according to European notions, become a shop ; but the Americans have chosen to retain the appellative of early colonial days * There are receptacles for ment. I never had time to disinter it from the shelves where it lies dor mant, although I have little doubt that it is to be found, either in the Astor Library or among the treasures, "rare and peculiar," of the Bibliotheca Barloviana — the last of which is perhaps the richest collection of books on American subjects in the whole world. There was a triple order of aristocracy in John Locke's scheme : Palatines, Caciques, and Landgraves — Heliogabalus and Jack the Painter ! — and vestiges of this wonderful oligarchy were extant, I am told, within the memory of men still living. A South Caro linian gentleman I knew was acquainted with » family of " Palatine Smiths." It is almost needless to say that the great English philosopher's plan would not work. * A charming volume might be written on those same colonial days, and, for aught I know, some New Yorker may have already done for the Empire city that which the New Englanders have done so charmingly for Boston and other Down East cities. But I never met with such a book. Knicker bocker's History is confined to an account of the Dutch dominion in New Amsterdam, and breaks off at the cession of the island of Manhattan to Charles the Second's Duke of York. I should like to know something about the old Bowling Green, where are now the offices of the Cunard Steam Packet Company, but in the centre of which once stood a statue of George the Third. There is a legend that the statue, unpedestaled, headless, and otherwise mutilated, was within the present generation to be seen in a NEW YORK. 81 goods to be sold by retail in Broadway, the most magnificent perhaps that can be found on the surface of the habitable globe ; but they will continue to be " stores " to the end of time, unless our cousins consent to a compromise and call them magasins. They can't call them