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ADVERTISEMENT.
THE Publishers of
Harper's Weekly
congratulate their readers upon the appearance in Number 272 of the first part
of a new serial tale entitled "No NAME," by
WILKIE COLLINS, Esq., author of "The Woman in
White." Its opening gives promise of the same wonderful power and matchless
dramatic skill which entranced the readers of "The Woman in White." It is seldom
that a periodical is enabled to furnish its subscribers with such a series of
attractive tales as have appeared consecutively for the past two years in
Harper's Weekly, from the pens of Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Bulwer. The
commencement of this Tale affords a good opportunity for parties residing in the
country to form clubs, and obtain Harper's Weekly at the reduced price of
subscription.
The circulation of Harper's
Weekly being now over 120,000 copies each week, it is the best advertising
medium in the country.
HARPER'S WEEKLY.
SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 1862.
PROGRESS OF VICTORY.
ISLAND No. 10 is ours! It
couldn't stand
Commodore Foote's mortar-shelling, and seems to
have surrendered after one day's fighting, abandoning to us quantities of
stores, guns, ammunition, etc., which the rebels can not replace. How the
garrison escaped, if they did escape, remains to be ascertained. Thus falls the
second rebel strong-hold on
the Mississippi.
The next is Randolph, which
Commodore Foote will probably have assailed before this paper reaches the public
eye. But meanwhile we have authentic intelligence that Generals Smith and
M'Clernand are at Savannah, Tennessee, in the rear of
Memphis and below Randolph, with the victorious
army from
Fort Donelson, probably 30,000 strong. Thus
Randolph is flanked as Columbus was, and if the garrison fight unsuccessfully
there, their escape is cut off. Will they not deem it wise to anticipate the
inevitable event by another evacuation? And if they do, will not Memphis follow
the example of
Nashville before another week elapses?
At the hour we write;
Commodore Porter, with a powerful flotilla of
mortar and gun boats, is thundering at the gates of
New Orleans. What resistance he will meet no
one can tell. One account states that every adult in New Orleans is under arms,
drilling daily under the traitor Mansfield Lovell, late of New York. Another
says that there are not 8000 troops below Baton Rouge. It is stated that the
rebels have one or two iron-clad rams there, which may, perhaps, if they are
ready, run down two or three of the gun-boats. But of the final result of the
attack there can be no reasonable doubt. New Orleans, like Nashville and
Memphis, will object to be shelled, and early in April, if not late in March,
Foote and Porter will shake hands under the glorious old flag in the Lower
Mississippi.
Of movements nearer home it is
not yet lawful to speak.
General Joe Johnston has fallen back upon a new
defensive line along the Rappahannock and Rapidan, and is waiting to be
attacked.
GENERAL McCLELLAN is in the field with an army
which must be fully double that of Johnston, and is choosing his point of
attack. Where that point will be, a few days will show. The public may rest
assured that it will not be where the rebels expect it.
A leading foreign critic,
describing the position of the hostile armies three months ago, PRONOUNCED THE
LINE FROM
NORFOLK, THROUGH MANASSAS AND
BOWLING GREEN TO
COLUMBUS, PERFECTLY IMPREGNABLE, and predicted that every attack made by GENERAL
McCLELLAN upon that line would fail. He said that it was stronger than the
famous Italian Quadrilateral. If any one had told him that within three months
from that time Manassas, Bowling Green, and Columbus would be abandoned by the
rebels without firing a gun, and that the garrisons would be scattering in
dismay, without arms and without stores, throughout the South, he would probably
have been less surprised than he will be to hear that the General whose genius
has contrived these results is being savagely and brutally abused for his in
competency by the New York Tribune.
McCLELLAN'S ADDRESS TO HIS
ARMY.
THE following is an extract from
an Order of the Day issued by General McClellan from Fairfax Court House on 14th
instant:
SOLDIERS OF THE ARMY OF THE
POTOMAC!
For a long time I have kept you
inactive, but not without a purpose. You were to be disciplined, armed, and
instructed. The formidable artillery you now have had to be created. Other
armies were to move and accomplish Certain results. I have held you back that
you might give the death-blow to the rebellion that has distracted our once
happy country.
The patience you have shown, and
your confidence in your General, are worth a dozen victories. These preliminary
results are now accomplished. I feel that the patient labors of many months have
produced their fruit. The
Army of the Potomac is now a real army, magnificent in
material, admirable in discipline and instruction, and excellently equipped and
armed. Your commanders are all that I could wish. The moment for action has
arrived, and I know that I can trust in you to save our country. As I ride
through your ranks I see in your faces the sure prestige of victory will do
whatever I ask
of you. The period of inaction
has passed. I will bring you now face to face with the rebels, and only pray
that God may defend the right!
These words will thrill the heart
of every soldier on the Potomac. McClellan, like Napoleon, is a believer in the
efficacy of military eloquence: his addresses to his soldiers, from his first
march into Western Virginia, are the true lyrics of the war. If you wish to
ascertain wherein true eloquence consists, compare his addresses with the tawdry
performances of Joe Johnson the rebel, "General" Howell Cobb, and the other
military propagandists of slavery.
Lest any of the soldiers in the
Army of the Potomac should be so weak of heart and mind as to be misled from the
path of duty by the dastardly and atrocious attacks upon General McClellan which
have garnished one or two despicable newspapers published in this city, the
Major-General Commanding adds :
In whatever direction you may
move, however strange my actions may appear to you, ever bear in mind that my
fate is linked with yours, and that all I do is to bring you where I know you
wish to be—on the decisive battlefield. It is my business to place you there.
I shall demand of you great,
heroic exertions, rapid and long marches, desperate combats, privations perhaps.
We will share all these together, and when this sad war is over we will all
return to our homes, and feel that we can ask no higher honor than the proud
consciousness that we belonged to the Army of the Potomac.
These brief, manly sentences
fulfill the highest requirements of military eloquence. A single unanswerable
argument disposes of the cavilers who have assailed McClellan with the weapon of
their own ignorance: the closing appeal will rouse whatever is manly and noble
and truly heroic in the breast of his troops.
None of Napoleon's justly famed
"Orders" reveals a higher order of genius, or promises better results than this
Address of General McClellan's.
If he can fight as well as he
writes, the Army of the Potomac will win imperishable glory.
THE following letter is worth
perusal:
WASHINGTON, March 15, 1862.
....Your New York papers are
rather hard on Russell, of the London Doles, for his mistakes about this country
and the singular ill-fortune which has attended his predictions. Yet I venture
to say that the Doctor has been more sinned against than sinning. He is a
genial, whole-souled Irishman, fond of good company, good liquor, and racy talk;
as a writer, possessed of remarkable descriptive power and a thorough mastery of
British newspaper slang; withal, not much given to do his own thinking, not a
good judge of character, and not endowed with the faculty of analyzing the acts
of men and nations, or finding the real causes of the events he witnesses. He is
by trade a reporter, and a very good one. His misfortune has been that when he
has been out of reach of his employers he has never known what to report, and
has been the victim of any one who chose to impose upon him.
When he first arrived in New York
he fell among foreign bankers, New York club men, and that exclusive circle of
aristocrats whose foreign sympathies are so notorious, and who have no more
understanding of or influence over the American mind than the Mandarins of Pekin.
They told him—what they undoubtedly believed—that the Union was gone, and that
the North would not fight: and he, poor man, wrote the whole to the Times to
appear side by side with the accounts of the Great Uprising.
On his return from the South,
warned by previous experience, he eschewed the commercial metropolis, and
established his head-quarters here. Through the influence of
Lord Lyons and some
of our leading snobs he obtained ready admittance to our "best society," and
from that time to this we have owned him and inspired his letters. Every idea,
and many whole sentences in his recent letters he has picked up in conversation
here.
You must understand that
Washington is almost as Southern a city as
Charleston. Though the number of
slaves actually held here is small, the influence of the leading Southern men
who have resided here, wholly or in part, for the past ten or twenty years, has
been so marked that in no city of the Union is the slavery interest stronger, in
good society, than in the Federal Capital. It is disreputable, in our leading
circles, to object to the institution. In the estimation of our good families a
Southerner is naturally a gentleman, a Northerner naturally a low fellow. There
have been exceptions to the latter rule; as for instance our friend Mr. Bright,
ex-Senator from Indiana, who was always welcome in good houses. But the rule
itself has been so well established that I have known Northern men, after a
short residence here, feel so ashamed of their origin that they not only
pocketed their principles but tried to deny their birth-place. It is hardly
necessary to add that our "best society," thus principled, is decidedly in favor
of the South in the present contest. Our views in this respect harmonize
admirably with those of the leading foreign ministers. The South has no better
friends any where than M. Mercier, who represents France, and M. Stoeckel, who
represents Russia. These gentlemen are noisy in their admiration of the rebels,
and in their contemptuous pity for the deluded North. They were certain, before
the affair at Fort Donelson, that the North could win no victory, and wrote as
much to their courts. So did other foreign ministers. The whole feeling of the
diplomatic corps has been so emphatically hostile to the United States that a
man who was invited to a diplomatic dinner came away convinced that it was all
up with the country, and that Europe was going to recognize the rebels early
next morning.
Here you have the key to poor
Bombastes' nonsense. He has merely repeated what he has heard any time those six
or eight months in diplomatic and fashionable circles in this city.
It was in the power of General
McClellan and the President to set him right; but they had other fish to fry. I
suppose they are very sorry for him.
Seward is, I'm sure!
THE LOUNGER.
AGITATION.
"IT is very easy to say that
slavery caused the rebellion. But why didn't you let slavery alone? Why were you
always agitating? Why were you forever roaring and raving about slavery, which
was none of your business ?"
Such is the secret question of
many honest minds. But if they were as intelligent as they are honest they would
not ask it. For slavery would always have been let alone by the country if it
had let the country alone. If it had been content with its own proposition, that
it was a local and a State institution, the country, confident that the Slave
States would gradually be compelled to provide for its peaceful extinction,
would have pitied and deplored, but it would not have divided politically upon
the question.
But when slavery, claiming, on
one side, for immunity, that it was a State affair, and on the other, for
aggression, that it was established and protected by the National
Constitution—in pursuance of that claim disputed upon the soil of New York the
law of New York forbidding it—sought to occupy the Territories, and exclude and
disgrace free white labor—and picked a quarrel with Mexico, and tried to pick
another with Spain to get more slaves and more slave-territory, with consequent
preferred slave-representation in Congress—repealed the most sacred compacts,
and made the Supreme Court declare, without any case to decide, that slavery was
lawful wherever the Constitution bound, then the country said, We must conquer
slavery, or slavery will conquer us.
The laboring men—who are the
great mass of the people—knowing that by their natural increase they and their
children must look for homes to the fertile fields of the great Western
Territories, saw that slavery disputed the ground; that the great slave-holders
would engross vast estates to be covered with slaves; and that, in fact, slavery
had its hand upon their bread-and-butter. The common sense of the laboring white
men in the country saw that the slave-holders meant to fill their places in the
new States with slaves. Consequently the slavery politicians at the North and
the South vainly bawled themselves hoarse about State Rights, and the
inferiority of the negroes, and their fitness to be slaves, and the wickedness
of abolitionists who wanted to bring slaves to the North to fill the places of
white laborers; for the mass of the people instinctively answered: "If it be a
State affair, let it stay at home in the States: if the negroes are inferior,
and born to be slaves, poor devils! we are sorry for them, but it's none of our
business: it is a State affair: and as for the wicked abolitionists, why, is it
any wickeder to fill our places with black men in the old States than in the
new? You are trying to get hold of our future homes, and to disgrace the labor
by which we live." And in every one of the Free States they spurned, by
tremendous majorities, the transparent trick of slavery.
It was because slavery would not
let the country alone, but was forever agitating it by frantic efforts to expand
beyond its State limits, that the nation could not let it alone. When you leave
a wolf alone that is smelling about your child's cradle—when you have a disease
alone that is poisoning the springs of your life—then you may look to see a free
people letting slavery alone when it is trying to take the bread out of their
mouths, as well as to deprive them of political rights. For you will observe
that the same party which supports the universal despotism of slavery, and its
right to go wherever it chooses, is the same party which tries to show the great
superiority of the condition of the slave to that of the free black at the
North, or the white laborer in England, in order to establish its logical
premise that capital ought to own labor.
Let it be fairly understood,
then, that if slavery had not agitated there would have been no agitation. The
sufferings of black men and the injustice of the system in any State of the
Union would have been tolerated by the people of the other States, so long as
they were not implicated, and so long as their rights were not threatened, as
polygamy is tolerated in Turkey, or cannibalism in the Feejee Islands. But when
the system struck at the rights, at the labor, at the very existence of free
citizens beyond the limits of those States, they did just what they would do if
the Turks should try to marry their sisters as collateral wives, or Feejee
savages to eat their children for dessert. Slavery had stealthily struck at the
country for years. In 1856 the country saw it clearly. In 1860 it put its heel
upon it. In 1870 slavery will be a dried relic.
TO A FRIEND IN BALTIMORE.
THE preceding remarks will be
accepted by a courteous friend who writes to the Lounger, and signs himself "An
Original Union Man of Baltimore," as partly a reply to his letter. The letter is
candid and calm. The writer will understand that it is not possible to publish
communications in this column, but will doubtless concede that the following is
a fair summary of his points:
The letter is suggested by an
article of the Lounger in No. 271, March 8, to the effect that henceforth either
slavery or its agitation must be suppressed; and that, as the latter is
impossible, the former must go to the wall.
The writer says that he holds no
slaves, and
means to own none; yet he is sure
that an effort suddenly to
abolish slavery in the most moderate border States
might lead to civil war, ruining both races in those States.
He would be glad to see some
reasonable plan of gradual
abolition in his own State. He says: "If slavery is
to be removed there is no way for it, consistent with humanity, but to fix a day
providing that all slaves born after that day shall be free on arriving at 21 or
25 years, if males; and 18 to 21, if females. By this gradual mode alone could
there be preserved to the blacks the habit of labor. As one or another became
free he would have around him, yet in servitude, his relatives and friends, and
would be induced by their example to continue to work. If slavery is ever
removed, the removal must begin in the most Northern of the Slave States, and
its mode must be gradual; but no interference from without will ever bring it to
pass. On the contrary, we know that the abolitionists, however well-meaning some
of them may be, are practically the slave's worst enemies. As an objection to
gradual
emancipation, it may be said by the immediate abolitionist that, so soon
as gradual emancipation was determined upon, many slaves would be sold South,
and thus deprived of all advantage from the measure; but this difficulty would,
of course, be provided against by the law of emancipation."
He then protests most earnestly
against agitation outside of the Slave States, as delaying the result.
He complains of the Lounger's
statement that
Fort McHenry is the secret of the quiet of Baltimore as harsh,
unmerited, untrue, and impolitic. "That troops are necessary to keep Maryland in
her present position the writer does deny."
In reply, the Lounger will say
that if this impending and inevitable discussion could be conducted in the
spirit of this letter, we should all be gainers.
The writer and the Lounger are
evidently agreed as to the general question.
As to the method of achieving the
result, the writer will observe that the Lounger has not said that immediate and
unconditional emancipation is desirable.
And as to agitation, the writer
of the letter will find his answer in the preceding article.
The people of the free States,
intelligent and obedient to law beyond precedent, when they saw the tendency and
efforts of slavery, as a political power and industrial system, sought to arrest
them by every peaceful means of free discussion. Obtaining the Government, they
intended, by preventing its perversion, to establish liberty and not slavery as
the national policy. It was a peaceful, lawful process—according to the spirit
and letter of the Constitution, to the instincts of humanity, and to progressive
civilization. The constitutional majority of the country intended nothing
unlawful, nothing violent, nothing unfair, to any person or party. They believed
that the Constitution was a charter of liberty, and not of privilege or slavery;
and that the fair operation of the Government secured every right. With the
system of slavery in the States they had no thought of meddling, although
slavery had been tearing the country to pieces in its efforts to retain
political supremacy. This perfectly lawful, peaceful policy of the great honest
mass of the people, was entirely understood by the slavery leaders at the South
and their sympathizers at the North. The restriction of slavery, its consequent
amelioration and disappearance, was its logical result. With that went the
political supremacy based upon the institution, and therefore the leaders struck
at Sumter, hoping that the Democratic party at the North would be more partisan
than patriotic. When the smoke of Sumter cleared away they saw that the hope had
failed. Henceforward their doom was only a question of time.
Now a nation that has been roused
to political action by the aggression of slavery—that has voted it out of
supreme power—that has been forced by the military rebellion of slavery to load
itself with a stupendous debt, and to strew the dead bodies of its loyal
citizens across a continent, will no longer submit to the dictation and
domination of slavery, nor will it have spent all the lives and the money for
nothing. Henceforth the agitation which slavery has maintained for its extension
and domination must cease, and forever; and the nation will certainly secure
that result, or it will yield to the rebellion.
The Border States will decide as
their wisdom suggests. They will encounter no unfair, no unreasonable, no
unconstitutional opposition. Thousands of men in those States have been
faithful, but they know that, even if they have counted the numerical majority,
the working minority has been able to wrest Tennessee temporarily from the
Union, and to blast other border States with fire and blood, and that those
States have been held in the Union, not by their own citizens, but by United
States volunteers. The people of those States will see that slavery, whether
right or wrong, generates rebellion, and that so long as they are Slave States
so long they will be the battle-field. If, then, they wish to be rid of the
cause of trouble, the nation offers to help them. If they prefer that their
fields shall still be battle-fields, they will so decide. If, with Mr.
Wadsworth, of Kentucky, they elect to favor the rebellion rather than to listen
to any emancipation even upon their own terms, the struggle will be prolonged
and embittered, but its event must be the same.
If now the Lounger's courteous
and candid correspondent in Baltimore will do all that he can to repress the
efforts of slavery to convulse the country by seeking to extend itself, and
within his own State will vigorously agitate for some wise system of
emancipation, he will be doing a patriotic duty. But manifestly, while slavery
continues to threaten the people of the Free States politically, industrially,
and with arms, those people must defend themselves in every possible way; and a
most agitated agitation is inevitable until peace is not only conquered but
secured.
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