Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 368, June 1846

In the present instance the two backwoodsmen had no evil intention against the Indian; all they wanted was to give him a glass of Monongahela, and to amuse themselves a little at his expense. So at least it appeared from the words of the one who had been knocked down, and who, without taking his tumble at all in ill part, now roared out, that "he must drink a half-pint of whisky with him, or he would put him in his pocket."

"Come, young Redskin," cried the other; "come along. You shall help us to fight the cussed Britishers, and drink, ay, drink like a fish."

By this time the little group was surrounded by deserters from the parade-ground, examining the Indian with a rude and unceremonious, but not an ill-natured, curiosity. Without permission or apology they inspected his wardrobe, tried the edge of his scalping-knife, examined his mocassins, and one of them even made an attempt to remove the cap from his head. By these various investigations the stranger seemed more surprised than gratified. His exterior was, it must be confessed, somewhat singular. A foxskin cap covered his head and extended down over his ears, concealing his light brown hair, an attempt at disguise which the long fair down upon his upper lip rendered tolerably unsuccessful. His deerskin doublet denoted the Indian, but his trousers were those of a white man. One of his mocassins – the other he had left in some swamp – was of Indian workmanship; one of his cheeks was still daubed with the red and black war-paint, which had been nearly rubbed off the other; his hands, although burnt brown by the sun, were those of a white man. If any doubt could have remained, his features would have settled it; the bold blue eye could no more have belonged to an Indian than could the full rosy cheek and the well-formed mouth. The crowd stared at him with the same sort of stupefaction which they might have shown had they entered a thicket expecting to find a fat deer, and encountered in its stead a growling bear.

"I should think you've looked at me enough," said the stranger at last, in good English, and in a sort of half-humorous, half-petulant tone; at the same time delivering a blow, with the flat of his knife, upon the horny hand of a backwoodsman, who had again attempted to lift his cap with a view to examine his hair.

It was, as the reader will already have conjectured, our young Englishman, who, having been guided by the Indian runner into the path to the Coshattoes, had at last succeeded in making his way over and through the innumerable swamps, rivers, and forests with which that district is so superabundantly blessed. The comparative coolness of the season, and the shallowness of the swamps and rivers, of the former of which many were entirely dried up and converted into meadows, had favoured his journey, or else he would scarcely have succeeded in reaching the banks of the Atchafalaya. For the preceding three weeks he had lived upon wild-geese and ducks, which he had killed and roasted as the Indians had taught him. He had now just emerged from the wilderness, and, however great his wish undoubtedly was to find himself once more in civilized society, the grim aspect of the Goliath-like backwoodsmen, their keen eyes and sunburnt visages, and long horn-handled knives, were so uninviting, that he was almost tempted to wish himself back again. Nevertheless, he seemed rather amused than disconcerted by the frank, forward familiarity of the people he had come amongst.

"And d – n it!" exclaimed one of the men after a long pause, during which Hodges had been the observed of all eyes, "who, in the devil's name, are you? You are no Redskin?"

"No, that I'm not," replied the young man, laughing; "I am an Englishman."

He spoke the last words in the short decided tone, and with all the importance of a baron or count, who, having condescended to arrive in disguise amongst his dependents, on a sudden thinks proper to lay aside his incognito. There was in his look and manner, as he glanced over the crowd, a degree of self-satisfaction, and a curiosity to see the impression made by the announcement, mingled with the feeling of superiority which John Bull willingly entertains, and which he at that time was wont to display towards Brother Jonathan, but which has since entirely disappeared, and given place to a sort of envious uneasiness – a certain proof, in spite of the scorn in which it disguises itself, of his consciousness of the superiority of the detested Brother Jonathan, aforesaid.

"An Englishman!" repeated twenty voices.

"A Britisher!" vociferated fifty more, and amongst these a young man in a grass-green coat, who had just come up with an air of peculiar haste and importance.

"A Britisher!" repeated the gentleman in green; "that's not your only recommendation, is it?"

The person addressed glanced slightly at the speaker, who was measuring him with a pair of lobster-eyes of no very friendly expression, and then carelessly replied —

"For the present, it is my only one."

"And d – n it, what has brought you to Opelousas?" demanded the green man.

"My legs!" replied Hodges. But the joke was not well taken.

"Young man," said an elderly American, "you are in Louisiana state, and see before you citizens of the United States of America. That man there" – he pointed to green-coat – "is the constable. Jokin' is out of place here."

"I come from on board my ship, if you must know."

"From on board his ship!" repeated every body, and every brow visibly knit, and a low murmur ran through the crowd.

The news of the landing of British troops had just reached the town, and the same courier had brought the unwelcome intelligence of the capture of the American gunboats on the Mississippi. Trifling as this disaster was, compared with the brilliant victories achieved on Lakes Champlain and Erie, and on the ocean, at every meeting, by American ships over British, it had, nevertheless, produced a general feeling of exasperation.

The constable stepped aside with several other men, and talked with them in a low voice. When they returned, and again surrounded the Englishman, their conference had produced a marked change in their manner. Their rough familiarity and friendly inquisitiveness had given place to a repulsive coldness; the humorous cheerfulness of their countenances was exchanged for a proud, cold earnestness, and they measured Hodges with keen distrustful glances.

"Stranger," said the constable, in a tone of command, "you are a suspicious person, and must follow me."

"And who may you be, who take upon yourself to show me the way?" demanded the midshipman.

"You have already heard who I am. These men are citizens of the United States, presently at war with your country, as you probably know."

The green-clad functionary spoke these words with a certain emphasis, and even dignity, which caused the young man to look with rather less disdain at his shining beaver-hat, and verdant inexpressibles.

"I am ready to follow," said he; "but I trust I am in safety amongst you."

"That you will soon see," replied the constable, dryly.

And so saying, he, his prisoner, and the crowd, set off in the direction of the town.

If, as appears from the preceding extract, our author is ready enough to expose the peculiarities and failings of the English, whose foibles, in various parts of this book, he sets forth with at least as much severity as justice, he, on the other hand, and although his sympathies are evidently American, gives some curious specimens of their deficiency in military organization and discipline, and of the loose manner in which public affairs were carried on in the then newly formed state of Louisiana. The young midshipman is taken before our old acquaintance, Squire Copeland, who, with the restlessness characteristic of his countrymen, has emigrated some three years before from Georgia to the infant town of Opelousas, and holds the double office of justice of the peace and major of militia. Hodges is examined on suspicion of being an emissary from the British, sent to stir up the Indian tribes against the Americans. He scrupulously observes his promise, made to Tokeah and Canondah, not to reveal their place of abode; and, hampered by this pledge, is unable to give a clear account of himself. Suspicion is confirmed by his disguise, and by certain exclamations which he imprudently allows to escape him on hearing Major Copeland and his wife make mention of Tokeah, and of Rosa, their foster-child, of whom they now for seven years have heard nothing. The result of his examination, of which the good-natured and unsuspicious squire, having his hands full of business, and being less skilled in the use of the pen than the rifle, requests the prisoner himself to draw up the report, is, that Major Copeland, the constable, and Hodges, set off for a town upon the Mississippi, then the headquarters of the Louisianian militia. What occurs upon their arrival there, we will relate in a third and final notice of the book before us.

THE FALL OF ROME

Its Causes at Work in the British Empire

The Rise and Fall of the Roman empire is by far the most remarkable and memorable event which has occurred in the whole history of mankind. It is hard to say whether the Rise or the Fall is most worthy of profound study and anxious examination. The former has hitherto most strongly attracted the attention of men, from the extraordinary spectacle it exhibited of human fortitude triumphing over every obstacle, and human perseverance at length attaining universal dominion. It was the spectacle most likely to rivet the attention of strenuous and growing nations – of men in that stage of existence when national ambition is strong and the patriotic passions ardent, and the selfish interests have not yet become so powerful as to have generally extinguished the generous affections. But it may be doubted whether the events that occurred in the later stages of the Roman empire, are not fraught with more valuable and important information than those of its earlier annals. Less interesting to the soldier, less animating to the citizen, less heart-stirring to the student, they are more instructive to the philosopher, more pregnant with warning to the statesman. They contain the only instance yet exhibited among men of a nation sinking from no external shock, but from the mere influence of internal decay; and point alone, of all passages in the annals of the species, to the provision made by nature, in the passions and selfishness of men, against the possibility of universal dominion.

To any one who attentively considers this all-important subject, two things must be apparent, of the very highest consequence in arriving at correct ideas on it. The first is, that the Roman empire did not sink under the external violence of the barbarians, but under the weakness and decline which had arisen in its own bosom. The second, that the causes hitherto assigned by historians and philosophers for this internal decay, are either vague generalities, having no definite meaning, and incapable of any practical application, or can be easily shown, even to the most superficial reader, not to have been the real causes of the phenomenon.

There can be no doubt that some of the irruptions of the barbarians – particularly those of the Goths into Romelia, which led to the fatal battles of Thessalonica and Adrianople; and of Alaric into Italy, which terminated in the capture of the Eternal City – were very formidable inroads, and might, in the best days of the empire, have taxed its strength and resolution to repel. But a little consideration must be sufficient to show, that, formidable as these invasions were, they could without much difficulty have been withstood, if the empire had possessed the strength which it did in the days of the republic, or in the first two centuries of the Cæsars. The Cimbri and Teutones, whom Marius combated and destroyed on the Rhone and in the north of Italy, were at least as formidable a body of barbarians as those which four centuries afterwards overturned the western empire. The forces whom Cæsar conquered in Gaul, Trajan on the Danube, were to the full as powerful as those which carried the standards of the Goths and Vandals to Athens and Carthage. Ætius, in the decline of the empire, and with the mingled Roman and barbarian force of Gaul alone, defeated Attila in the plenitude of his power, at the head of three hundred thousand men, on the field of Chalons.

Belisarius, with fifteen thousand men, recovered Africa from the Vandals; thirty thousand legionary soldiers did the same by Italy under Narses, and overthrew the whole power of the Goths. So high did the Roman soldiers still stand even in the estimation of their enemies, that Totila, the warlike monarch of the Goths, strove to bribe them into his service by offers of high pay. None had yet been approved equal to these legionary soldiers in battle; and the manner in which, with infinitely inferior forces, they repelled the barbarians on all sides, decisively demonstrates this superiority. The vigour and ability of Heraclius so restored the empire, when wellnigh sinking under the might of its enemies, that for a century it was regarded with awe by the barbarous nations all round its immense frontier. The five provinces beyond the Euphrates were conquered by the Romans from the Parthians during the decline of the empire. Nothing is so remarkable, in the last three centuries of Roman history, as the small number of the forces which combated around the Eagles, and the astonishing victories which, when led by ability, they gained over prodigious bodies of their enemies. The legions had dwindled into battalions, the battalions into cohorts. The four hundred and fifty thousand men who under Augustus guarded the frontiers of the empire, had sunk to one hundred and fifty thousand in the time of Justinian.[3 - Finlay's Greece under the Romans, p. 250.] But this hundred and fifty thousand upheld the Eastern empire for a thousand years. So feeble were the assaults of the barbarians, that for above two centuries of that time the single city of Constantinople, with the aid of the Greek fire, defended itself with scarce any territory from which to draw support. It was not the strength of its enemies, therefore, but the weakness of itself, which, after an existence in the West and East of two thousand years, at length extinguished the Roman empire.

What, then, were the causes of decay which proved fatal at length to this immense and enduring dominion? Philosophers in all ages have pondered on the causes; but those hitherto assigned do not seem adequate to explain the phenomenon. Not that the causes of weakness are baseless or imaginary; on the contrary, many of them were most real and substantial sources of evil. But what renders them inadequate to explain the fall of Rome is, that they had all existed, and were in full operation, at the time when the commonwealth and empire were at their highest point of elevation, and centuries before either exhibited any symptoms of lasting decay. For example, the ancient historians, from Sallust downwards, are loud in their denunciation of the corruption of public morals, and the selfish vices of the patrician classes of society, as being the chief source of the decay which was going forward, while the growth of the republic had been mainly owing to the extraordinary virtue and energy of a small number of individuals.[4 - "Mihi multum legenti multum audienti quæ populus Romanus domi militiæque præclara facinora fecissent, forte lubuit attendere quæ res maxime tanta negotia sustinuit. At mihi multa agitanti constabat, paucorum civium egregiam virtutem cuncta patravisse: eoque factum ut divitias paupertas, multitudinem paucitas, superaret." – Sallust, Bell. Cat., 32.] But the very circumstance of these complaints having been made by Sallust in the time of Augustus, and the fact of the empire of the West having existed for four hundred, that of the East for fourteen hundred years afterwards, affords decisive evidence that this cause cannot be considered as having been mainly instrumental in producing their fall. How is the unexampled grandeur and prosperity of the empire under Nero, Adrian, Trajan, and the two Antonines, whose united reigns extended over eighty years, to be explained, if the seeds of ruin two centuries before had been sown in the vices and corruption of the rich patricians? In truth, so far was general luxury or corruption from being the cause of the ruin of the empire, the cause of its fall was just the reverse. It was the excessive poverty of its central provinces, and their inability to pay the taxes, which was the immediate cause of the catastrophe. The nobles and patricians often were luxurious, but they were not a thousandth part of the nation. The people was miserably poor, and got more indigent daily, in the later stages of its decay.

Modern writers, to whom the philosophy of history for the first time in the annals of mankind has become known, and who were aware of the important influence of general causes on social prosperity, independent of the agency of individual men, have assigned a different set of causes more nearly approaching the truth. Montesquieu says, the decay of the Roman empire was the natural consequence of its extension. This sounds well, and looks like an aphorism: but if the matter be considered with attention, it will be found that it is vox et præterea nihil. Those who, with so much complacency, rest in the belief that the fall of the Roman empire was the natural result of its extension, forget that its greatest prosperity was coexistent with that very extension. It is impossible to hold that the decay of the empire was the consequence of its magnitude, when the glorious era of the Antonines, during which it numbered a hundred and twenty millions of inhabitants under its rule, and embraced nearly the whole known habitable globe within its dominion, immediately succeeded its greatest extension by the victories, unhappily to us so little known, of Trajan.

More recent writers, seeing that Montesquieu's aphorism was a vague proposition which meant nothing, have gone a step further, and approached much nearer to the real explanation of the phenomenon. Guizot, Sismondi, and Michelet have concurred in assigning as the real cause of the decay of the Roman empire, the prevalence of slavery among its working population, and the great and increasing weight of taxes to support the imperial government. There can be no doubt that these were most powerful causes of weakness; and that they stand prominently forth from the facts recorded by contemporary annalists, as the immediate and visible causes of the decline of the empire. The history of these melancholy periods is full of eternal complaints, that men could not be got to fill the legions, nor taxes to replenish the treasury; that the army had to be recruited from the semi-barbarous tribes on the frontier; and that vast tracts of fertile land in the heart of the empire relapsed into a state of nature, or were devoted only to pasturage, from the impossibility of finding cultivators who either would till the land, or could afford to pay the taxes with which it was charged. Doubtless the large proportion – at least a half, perhaps nearly two-thirds – of the people who were slaves, must have weakened the elements of strength in the empire; and the enormous weight of the direct taxes, so grievously felt and loudly complained of,[5 - They were as high as L.9 sterling in the time of Constantine, a sum probably equal to L.20 of our money. But the freemen were the higher classes alone, and it is probable a similar class, both in France and England, pay at least as much at this time. – See Gibbon, iii. 88.] must have paralysed, to a very great degree, both the industry of the people and the resources of government. But a very little consideration must be sufficient to show, that these were not the real sources of the decline of the empire; or rather, that if they had not been aided in their operation by other causes, which truly undermined its strength, it might have been great and flourishing to this hour.

Slavery, it must be recollected, was universal in antiquity, and is so over two-thirds of the human race at this hour. Much as we may feel its evils and deprecate its severities, we ourselves, till within these three centuries, were entirely fed by serfs; and a few years only have elapsed since the whole of our colonial produce was raised by slave labour. America and Russia – the two most rising states in existence – are, the former in part, the latter wholly, maintained by slaves. It was an army, in a great measure composed of men originally serfs, which repelled Napoleon's invasion, survived the horrors of the Moscow retreat, and carried the Russian standards to Paris, Erivan, and Adrianople. Alexander the Great conquered Asia with an army of freemen wholly fed by slaves. The Athenians, in the palmy days of their prosperity, had only 21,000 freemen, and 400,000 slaves. Rome itself, in its great and glorious periods, when it vanquished Hannibal, conquered Gaul, subdued the East – in the days of Scipio, Cæsar, and Trajan – was to the full as dependent on slave labour as it was in those of its decrepitude under Honorius or Justinian. Cato was a great dealer in slaves; the Sabine farm was tilled by the arms of slaves; Cincinnatus and Regulus worked their little freeholds entirely by means of slaves. Rome was brought to the verge of destruction, nearer ruin than it had been by the arms of the Carthaginians, by the insurrection of the slaves shortly after the third Punic contest, so well known under the appellation of the Servile war. It is perfectly ridiculous, therefore, to assign as a cause of the destruction of Rome, a circumstance in the social condition of its people which coexisted with their greatest prosperity, which has prevailed in all the most renowned nations of the earth in a certain stage of their progress, and is to be found, in our own times, in states the most powerful, and the most likely to attain vast and long-continued dominion.

Equally futile is it to point to the weight of the taxes as the main cause of the long decline and final overthrow of Rome. Taxes no doubt are an evil; and if they become excessive, and are levied in a direct form, they may come in the end to ruin industry, and weaken all the public resources to such an extent as to render a nation incapable of defending itself. But a very little consideration must be sufficient to show that it was not, in the case of Rome, the increase of the taxes taken as a whole, but the decline in the resources of those who paid them, which rendered them so oppressive. If, indeed, the national establishment of the Roman empire had gone on increasing as it advanced in years, until at length their charges became excessive and crushing to industry, the theory would have been borne out by the fact, and afforded perhaps satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. But the fact was just the reverse. The military establishment of the Roman empire was so much contracted as it advanced in years that whereas it amounted to 450,000 men in the days of Augustus, in those of Justinian it had sunk, as already noticed to 150,000.[6 - Gibbon, c. i. and c. xxxii. Agathias states the military establishment in its best days at 675,000, which is much more likely its real amount. Agathias, v. p. 157, Paris edition.] So far were the forces of Rome from being excessive in the later stages of the empire or disproportioned to an empire still, after all its losses, holding so large and fair a portion of the earth under its dominion, that on the other hand they were miserably small; and the disasters it underwent were mainly owing to the government of the Cæsars never being able to equip an adequate army to repel the attacks of the barbarians. The force with which Belisarius reconquered Africa and recovered Italy, never mustered seventeen thousand men; and the greater part of his successes were achieved by six thousand legionary followers. It was not the weight of the national establishments, therefore, but the diminished resources of those who were to pay them, which really occasioned the destruction of the empire.

There are two other facts of vital importance in considering the real causes of the gradual decay and ultimate ruin of the dominion of the legions.

The first of these is, that the extent of the decay was, in the latter stages of Rome, very unequal in the different provinces of the empire; and that while the central provinces, and those in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, were in the most wretched state of decrepitude, the remote districts were in the highest state of affluence and prosperity. This important fact is abundantly proved by unquestionable authority, and it sheds a flood of light on the real causes of the ruin which ultimately overtook them all.

The state of agriculture in the Italian plains under the Cæsars, is thus set forth by Gibbon: —

"Since the age of Tiberius, the decay of agriculture had been felt in Italy; and it was a just subject of complaint that the life of the Roman people depended on the accidents of the winds and the waves. In the division and decline of the empire, the tributary harvests of Egypt and Africa were withdrawn; the numbers of the inhabitants continually diminished with the means of subsistence; and the country was exhausted by the irretrievable losses of war, pestilence, and famine. Pope Gelasius was a subject of Odoacer, and he affirms, with strong exaggeration, that in Emila, Tuscany, and the adjacent provinces, the human species was almost extirpated."[7 - Gibbon, vol. vi. c. xxxvi. p. 235.]

Of the progress and extent of this decay, Gibbon gives the following account in another part of his great work: —

"The agriculture of the Roman provinces was insensibly ruined; and in the progress of despotism, which tends to disappoint its own purpose, the emperors were obliged to derive some merit from the forgiveness of debts, or the remission of tributes, which their subjects were utterly incapable of paying. According to the new division of Italy, the fertile and happy province of Campania, the scene of the early victories and of the delicious retirements of the citizens of Rome, extended between the sea and the Apennines, from the Tiber to the Silarius. Within sixty years after the death of Constantine, and on the evidence of an actual survey, an exemption was granted in favour of 330,000 English acres of desert and uncultivated land, which amounted to one-eighth of the whole surface of the province. As the footsteps of the barbarians had not yet been seen in Italy, the cause of this amazing desolation, which is recorded in the laws, (Cod. Theod. lxi. t. 38, l. 2,) can be ascribed only to the administration of the Roman emperors."[8 - Ibid. vol. iii. c. xviii. p. 87. Edition in twelve volumes.]

Michelet observes, in his late profound and able History of France: —

"The Christian emperors could not remedy the growing depopulation of the country, any more than their heathen predecessors. All their efforts only showed the impotence of government to arrest that dreadful evil. Sometimes, alarmed at the depopulation, they tried to mitigate the lot of the farmer, to shield him against the landlord; upon this the proprietor exclaimed he could no longer pay the taxes. At other times they abandoned the farmer, surrendered him to the landlord, and strove to chain him to the soil; but the unhappy cultivators perished or fled, and the land became deserted. Even in the time of Augustus, efforts were made to arrest the depopulation at the expense of morals, by encouraging concubinage. Pertinax granted an immunity from taxes to those who could occupy the desert lands of Italy, to the cultivators of the distant province and the allied kings. Aurelian did the same. Probus was obliged to transport from Germany men and oxen to cultivate Gaul.[9 - "Arantur Gallicana rura barbaris bobus, et juga Germanica captiva præbent colla nostris cultoribus." —Probi Epist. ad Senatum, in Vopesio.] Maximian and Constantius transported the Franks and Germans from Picardy and Hainault into Italy; but the depopulation in the towns and the country alike continued. The people surrendered themselves in the fields to despair, as a beast of burden lies down beneath his load and refuses to rise. In vain the emperor strove, by offers of immunities and exemptions, to recall the cultivator to his deserted fields. Nothing, could do so. The desert extended daily. At the commencement of the fifth century there was, in the Happy Campania, the most fertile province of the empire, 520,000 jugera (320,000 acres) in a state of nature."[10 - Michelet, Histoire de France, vol. i. p. 104-108.]

So general, indeed, was the depopulation of the empire in the time of Justinian, that it suggested to many of the emperors the project of repeopling those favoured districts by a fresh influx of inhabitants. "Justinian II. had a great taste for these emigrations. He transported half the population of Cyprus to a new city near Cyzicus, called Justinianopolis after its founder. But it was all in vain. The desolation and ruin of the provinces continued, and up to the very gates of Constantinople, which was maintained entirely by grain imported at a low price from Egypt, and cattle from the Tauric Chersonesus."[11 - Finlay's Greece under the Romans.]

As a natural consequence of this entire or principal dependence of Rome on foreign or provincial raising of grain, there was, on any interruption of these foreign supplies, the greatest scarcity and even famine in the metropolis. All the vigilance of the emperors, which was constantly directed to this object, could not prevent this from taking place. Tacitus says, that in the scarcity under Claudius, there only remained a supply of fifteen days for the city.[12 - Tacitus, Annal., xii. 43.] Famine in Rome was frequent under Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero. Claudian laments, that after Egypt had been assigned to Constantinople, Rome had come to derive its subsistence solely from Lybia, and depended on the double chances of the seasons and the winds.

– "Nunquam secura futuri,