Winter Campaign

HARPER'S WEEKLY.

[NOVEMBER 7, 1863.

706

THE GALLOP OF DEATH.

TAN-TA-RA, tan-ta-ra, tan-ta-ra, tan-ta-ra!

"Boots and saddles!—quick, quick! Now mount and away!

Look sharp and ride fast; that's the word. Hip, hurrah!

We must catch them asleep at the dawning of day!"

Now they noisily dash through the rippling stream,

Now silently gallop along the soft sand;

Then off with a bound through the woods, where no gleam

Of star-light shines through, rides the brave, gallant band!

"Now slowly and steadhy. Hist!—not a word!"—

'Tis the sentinel sleepily pacing his beat.

The murderous swish of a sabre is heard,

And he falls with a groan at the first horse's feet.

"Draw sabre! Now charge, boys! No powder to-night!"

Rings the voice of the chief, while the loud bugles blare

'Mid the clashing of swords, striking flashes of light,

And the fierce victor-shouts, and the yells of despair.

'Twas a brave work done by that gallant band;

Let their praises be sounded on every breath

Of wind that blows o'er our glorious land!

And this be the song of the Gallop of Death:

Tan-ta-ra-ta!

Hip, hip—hurrah!

'Tis the bugle's stirring call:

Mount, boys, mount,

And never count

What will be your chance to fall.

On, boys, on, till the morning sun

Gleams on our flag, and the vict'ry's won!

It matters not

If a rebel shot

Put an end to our fleeting breath—

Ride, boys, ride,

And luck betide

Those who ride the Gallop of Death!

On, boys, on, till the morning sun

Gleams on our flag, and the vict'ry's won!

With ringing clash,

And lightning flash,

We'll strike a righteous blow;

And let the shout

Ring loudly out,

As we smite the traitors low.

On, boys, on, till the morning sun

Gleams on our flag, and the vict'ry's won!

And when 'tis done,

And the vict'ry won,

We'll gayly march to camp;

And joyous song,

As we ride along,

Keep time to our horses' tramp.

On, boys, on, and the morning sun

Will smile on us and the brave work done!

HARPER'S WEEKLY.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1863.

THE WINTER CAMPAIGN.

FROM Washington comes once more the weary report that the campaign in Virginia is at an end. In November, say the strategists, Virginia mud is impracticable. The only episode of the fall campaign has been Lee's unsuccessful attempt to outflank Meade or to force him to fight on the banks of the Rappahannock. Having failed in this, the rebel chief has fallen back to his old quarters, within easy reach of Richmond and Staunton, having lost in his brief enterprise about as many men as we did, and minus four or five guns, against which last loss he has no set-off. The Richmond editors do not seem well pleased with the result, on the whole, and we are not surprised at it. Whether, as is assumed at Washington, the campaign in Virginia is really over is not very certain to our mind. Virginia mud is no doubt very deep and very cohesive, but is it much more difficult to navigate than the swamps of the Mississippi, through which Grant and Banks marched their armies to victory? Of the propriety of marching forward at once to give Lee battle where he is, the President and General Meade must be much better judges than we are. But one does not need to be much of a soldier to see that if Lee sends any considerable portion of his army to reinforce Bragg in the Southwest it will be possible for Meade to attack him to advantage in Virginia, mud or no mud, and that he ought on no account to fail to do so.

So far as can be now discerned, however, the true key, in a military sense, to the rebel position is in the Southwest. It is doubtful whether the conquest of all Virginia, including of course Richmond, would really impair the capacity of the rebels to continue the war, so long as they held the more southern States. To lose Richmond would be a very serious loss, not only in a moral aspect, but likewise in view of the stores and work-shops established there. But it would not be fatal. Raleigh would answer every purpose of a Confederate capital, and the rebels have shown that they can build foundries and cast shot and shell any where. Thus far, with the single exception of the capture of Norfolk, it is questionable whether all our operations in Virginia, from the commencement of the war to the present time, have yielded any permanent advantage to the Union cause.

Very different with our operations in the West. There, every blow struck has told. Every Union success has visibly weakened the capacity of the rebels for further resistance. The loss of New Orleans, the loss of Nashville, the loss of Vicksburg, the loss of the Mississippi, the loss of Chattanooga—these are losses to them irreparable, tending each of them directly to render it impossible for them to protract the

war. A few more such successes will render this tendency imperative.

Our military policy in the West is very simple. We hold the river. That we must continue to hold, and are preparing to do so by a system of forts garrisoned mainly with negro troops, and connected together by gun-boats. Every bluff from Cairo to New Orleans is being fortified; gun-boats patrol the river from end to end, almost within sight of each other: so that, when the work is complete, it will be impossible to wrest it out of our hands, though guerrillas will of course continue to annoy unarmed vessels for a long time to come.

Then we hold Chattanooga and the two lines of communication therewith—one to Nashville through Tullahoma and Murfreesboro; the other to Memphis through Stevenson, Huntsville, Florence, and Corinth. These long lines we must keep. We must be prepared to hear almost daily of attacks on them by rebel raiders, of bridges burned, trains captured, tracks torn up. These injuries we must patiently repair, and punish the raiders whenever we can catch them: bearing in mind, as a consolation, that however annoying these raids may be to us they are of no use to the rebels, and do not invalidate the fact that we hold the two central roads through the heart of the Confederacy, and are every day gradually, by our mere occupancy, crushing out its life.

This is, however, only the beginning of what we have to do. Chattanooga must become, by-and-by, the base of a new offensive operation into Georgia—the object of which will be a junction with the land army of Gilmore at or near Savannah or Charleston. Success in this operation presupposes the defeat of Bragg by Grant, and the capture of Charleston by Gilmore—both of them operations of great difficulty, as we have all learned by this time. Both Gilmore and Grant will need more men than they have; more guns, and more supplies. But they are getting more men, guns, and supplies, and pretty soon the campaign will open. How soon it will end, or how many campaigns it will take to achieve the purpose, no one can tell, and few inquire; for every one knows that, no matter how long it takes, the work will be steadily prosecuted till it is completed. When Gilmore and Grant shake hands in Georgia or South Carolina, the second bisection of the Confederacy will be complete, and we shall then he glad to hear from the Richmond Enquirer on the subject of peace.

ONE POINT GAINED.

THE steady abuse which has been poured upon this country by the British press ever since the war began has conferred upon us an inestimable benefit. It has enfranchised us from the condition of quasi-colonial dependence—as to public opinion—in which we had previously existed. Before the war, abuse England and Englishmen as we might, we all secretly feared and respected British opinion. No native newspaper wielded as much power in our educated circles as the London Times. The articles of that journal were invariably republished in our dailies, were eagerly read, and very generally accepted as a guide of conduct by intelligent Americans. From the smallest things to the greatest we were used to being led by England. When the London Times expressed a preference in a Presidential contest, its candidate's prospects rose instantly. Congress trembled before the mandates of the foreign journal; and the public scarcely dared render a definitive verdict on a book, or a play, or a picture, until the great British papers had pronounced on the subject. Neither the War of Revolution nor the War of 1812 succeeded in emancipating us from the control of the Mother Country in matters of opinion, judgment, and taste.

It was reserved for the Slavery Rebellion to complete our independence. It must be confessed that it has done the work pretty thoroughly. Every American who reads any thing at all has now ascertained that the London Times and most of the other British journals are, in the first place, so ignorant of this country that their opinions are valueless; and, secondly, so brutally hostile to our national existence that their counsels should be regarded as the sneers of an enemy. There is hardly a prediction that has been made by the leading London journals which has not been falsified. There is not a suggestion that has found place in them which it would not have been injurious to adopt. They have learned by this time that the Potomac does not empty into the Mississippi, and that Vicksburg is not on the Hudson. But they have not learned not to hate us, and not to wish for our ruin.

The consequence is that we have at length achieved our independence, and are as indifferent to British opinion as we have always been to French or German opinion. No French or German criticism of our policy or our habits ever annoyed us. And now we care as little about British criticism. Our journals no longer publish the abusive articles of the London Times, for nobody cares to read them. It is taken for granted that whatever is said about us in England will be false, mean, unjust, and ill-natured; and nobody cares about seeing the precise

form of abuse adopted. Henceforth we shall pay no more attention to what the English think or say than we do to the views of the Dutch or the Spaniards.

This is a great point gained, and really lays us under obligations to the London press. Nothing was more injurious to the development of independent national thought than the craven, semi-colonial deference to British views which used to prevail in this country. We shall hear no more now of what the London Times says on this or that subject, or what the British Reviews have decided on this or that book, policy, picture, or play. We are going now to do our own thinking. For this great boon let us be duly thankful.

AMERICAN INDUSTRY.

THE steady advance in the price of manufactured goods imported from abroad should secure to our manufacturers an era of unexampled prosperity. All kinds of dry goods and hardware, for instance, imported from England, have advanced, since the war began, from 75 to 150 per cent. With the exception of cotton, there has been no corresponding advance in the cost of the raw material; and labor, though more valuable than it was, has not risen in an equal ratio. The fact is, the tariff was advanced at the commencement of the war from an average of 20 per cent. to an average of 30 per cent., and the duties being payable in gold, the actual duty has averaged 40 or 45 per cent.

If legislation and casual favors can develop manufacturing industry in this country, we ought now to become independent of the world. There is not a manufactured article used in any house in the United States which can not now be made cheaper in this country than it can be imported from abroad. There is not a tool, or an article of wearing apparel, which New England can not produce at a lower price than it will cost to procure a similar article from Europe. If our manufacturers have any energy, they will now drive the foreigner out of our markets once and forever.

But there must be no mistake in the selection of a site for manufactures. New England is not destined to be the home of manufacturing industry, for the simple reason that it does not possess the coal which is the main-spring of manufactures. It is in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois—especially the latter—that the great factories of the United States will finally find their home. Illinois alone is capable of manufacturing every thing that is wanted in this country, from steam-engines to kid gloves; from threshing machines to buhl tables. And now is the time to establish factories there. The great manufacturing establishments of England which have enriched Manchester, and Leeds, and Paisley, and Birmingham, date from the Napoleonic wars. If our capitalists are shrewd and enterprising, our great war will do as much for them, the great manufactures of the United States will now be established at the West, and this country will not only become independent of Europe, but will, by-and-by, be prepared to send goods thither as well as produce.

THE LOUNGER.

OUR FRIENDS IN ENGLAND.

WE have all spoken with constant and just indignation of our enemies in England; have we thought or said enough of our friends? We have always had them even there. Edmund Burke, our British friend in the Revolution, did not justify the colonies. He said only that it was impolitic for Britain to exercise the right she claimed, and therefore he would not ask whether she had it. But our friends in England now are unconditional. They clearly comprehend the origin and scope of the war, and they spare no effort to enlighten the public mind around them. In fact no country torn by war ever had so firm, intelligent, and active a body of friends in another country as the United States now have in England. The senile absurdities of Lord Brougham, the dandy slanders of Sir Bulwer Lytton, the feeble flings of Carlyle, the thundering falsehoods of the Times, the shrill chorus of abuse from the lesser press, and the long-continued, contemptuous "neutrality" of the Government, pausing only when it saw distinctly that the sailing of the Rams was war—all these, with the passionate hatred of the Union, and maudlin sympathy with a rebellion to establish slavery, which abound in the London clubs and English society, are not more remarkable than the faithful friendship of John Stuart Mill, of John Elliott Cairnes, of Goldwin Smith, of John Bright, and of the others whose names are familiar in our ears and our hearts.

With the beginning of the rebellion, and the declaration of equal belligerence by the British Government, these men began their work of active friendship. Mr. Mill's pamphlet upon the American contest was a clear and masterly statement of the situation. None more comprehensive and powerful has been made in this country. First issued in a magazine, it was subsequently published separately. It was followed by letters in the same spirit in answer to invitations to public meetings. An article of his upon the American question in the Westminster Review is unsurpassed for its wisdom, common sense, and manliness applied to our great struggle.

The work of which Mr. Mill's article was a review, "The Slave Power," by Professor Cairnes,

republished here by Carleton and by a Boston house, is the most complete presentation of the subject ever made. The perfect familiarity of the author, not only with the political movements of the last thirty years in this country, but with their most secret spirit and bearing, and his calm and elaborate exposition of the social and industrial death which is, by the laws of political economy and of nature, engendered by slavery, make this book the most valuable single work which the long and fierce debate in this country has produced. Professor Cairnes was at once attacked by all the English emissaries and agents of rebellious slavery. His facts were denied, his arguments controverted, and his conclusions scouted. But the champion was worthy of the cause. He stripped for the fight, and in the columns of the London Daily News he absolutely demolished his antagonists. They were either Englishmen who did not understand the merits of the case and the qualities of their opponent, or they were renegade Americans, who supposed that their mere dicta would prevail in an American question. But Mr. Cairnes cleared the field. His argument, his good-humor, his agility, his ample and detailed knowledge, were irresistible. A lecture upon the war delivered by him last winter in Dublin was printed and circulated as a tract, and his "Slave Power" was issued in a second and enlarged edition. It is a work indispensable to every man who would thoroughly comprehend the slavery question. In all his conclusions the American reader may not agree. But nobody will deny the immense service it has rendered to the American cause.

Goldwin Smith, Professor of History at Oxford, was first generally introduced to the public of this country by his most able speech last spring at the meeting in Liverpool or Manchester to protest against the building of rebel pirates in English yards. The meeting was nearly simultaneous with the debate in Parliament in which Mr. Laird, amidst the loud applause of British lawgivers, flippantly announced that he intended to break the British laws. Mr. Goldwin Smith claimed that if the law were not sufficient, the law should be changed. Lord Palmerston sneered that the Government would not ask a change of the law. Six months afterward Lord Palmerston's colleague declared that they would. In April Goldwin Smith demanded that Great Britain should hold a certain course, because it was the only honorable and dignified one. In October the British Government ungraciously says it intends to take it, because it is the only safe one. Which of us—as Goldwin Smith indignantly asks—which of us has dishonored and belittled England? His pamphlet, just republished here, upon the question whether the Bible justifies American slavery, is the conclusive reply of a competent and trained scholar to the shallow brawling of reverend charlatans. At the moment when the Times and English public sentiment are trying to persuade themselves that slavery is, after all, a Christian institution, Professor Smith scatters the hope of success, and so knocks another prop from English sympathy with slavery in bloody rebellion against the peace and existence of a power friendly to England.

The speeches of Mr. Bright, of Mr. Forster, and of Mr. Cobden, are familiar to our readers. Their steady attitude of sympathy will not be forgotten whatever befalls. And that nothing may be wanting to show the quality of our English friends, they have now begun the publication of a series of short monthly penny tracts. The first, by Francis Power Cobbe, "The Red Flag in John Bull's eyes," the second, by Isa Craig, "The Essence of Slavery, extracted from Mrs. Kemble's Georgian Journal;" the third, "Who are the Canters?" by Professor Cairnes; the fourth, by Edward Dicey, etc. While such friends do such work for our cause we have no right to speak of "England" as hostile. For they speak the thought of the leading minds of England. They forecast its future. And it is for their sake, for their tried and true friendship for us, that every loyal American is bound to do all he can by temperate criticism and forbearance, not indeed sparing the sharpest censure of the venal falsehood of the British press, and the meanness of the British Government, to lessen the chances of war between America and England.

FROM A DIARY.

THE Lounger's friend who keeps a diary has returned from his summer wanderings to his corner at the club, where he hears and sees a great many amusing things. It is with his consent that the Lounger transcribes a few passages:

Coming in the other morning I found X— laughing at the cool way in which the World cuts Vallandigham, "the representative martyr of the Lincoln despotism," as X— called him. Then he turned to the Express of the previous evening, and laughed still more. "What does it say ?" I asked. "I don't know," he answered, "but the mere name of the paper reminded me of a certain M. C. for the city, and of a story I heard at Mrs. Chaffinch's dinner-table yesterday. I sat next to the furious Mrs. —, whose husband, you know, is in the rebel army. She turned to me and said, 'I suppose you hate us like the rest.' 'My dear Madame,' I answered, 'I hate nobody; I am a philosopher.'

"She was quite reassured, and prattled on in the most amusing way. 'Do you know,' said she, 'that I have been afraid to go into society ever since I have been in New York, lest I should hear remarks offensive to Southern ears.'

" 'My dear lady,' said I, 'New York is a very large place. You may choose your society, and you must be extremely fastidious if you are not suited. Mormons and Mohammedans, I doubt not, find congenial companionship here. Why should a rebel despair, my dear Madame?' said I, smiling.

" 'Oh!' she answered, 'I am quite elated. I called the other day at the house of one of your members of Congress, and there was a large company assembled; and I assure you, although public affairs were discussed, and I am the wife of a Confederate officer, I heard nothing that was not most agreeable to my feelings—nothing at all."'

"Whew!" said I: "and what did you say to that?"

"I smiled, en philosophe, and I said, 'Why, my dear Madame, you might have been at the house of any of our city members, and your ears would have been perfectly secure.' (Next Page)