The Continental Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, June, 1862

'Au diable with politics,' interrupted Achille; 'what a very pretty girl that is alongside you, Caper. Look at her; how nicely that costume fits her, the red boddice especially. Where, except in Italy, do you ever see such fine black eyes, and such a splendid head of coal-black hair? This way of having Italian nurses dressed in the Albano costume is very fine. That little boy with her is English, certainly.'

'Och! master Jamey, come in out of that grane grass; d'yiz want ter dirty the clane pinafore I've put on yiz this blissed afthernoon?' spoke the nurse.

'In the name of all that's awful, what kind of Italian is she speaking?' asked Légume of Caper.

'Irish-English,' he answered; 'she is not the first woman out of Old Ireland masquerading as an Albanian nurse. She probably belongs to some English family who have pretensions.'

'Ah bah!' said Légume, 'it's monstrous, perfectly atrocious, ugh! Let us make a little tour of a walk. The tombola is finished. An Irish dressed up as an Italian—execrable!'

EN AVANT!

O God! let us not live these days in vain,
This variegated life of doubt and hope;
And though, as day leads night, so joy leads pain,
Let it be symbol of a broader scope.

God! make us serve the monitor within;
Cast off the trammels that bow manhood down,
Of form or custom, appetite or sin,
The care for folly's smile or envy's frown.

Oh! that true nobleness that rises up,
And teaches man his kindredship to Thee;
Which wakes the slaveling from the poison cup
Of passion, bidding him be grandly free:

May it be ours, in these the evil days,
That fall upon our nation like a pall;
May we have power each one himself to raise,
And place God's signet on the brow of all!

Not race nor color is the badge of slaves;
'Tis manhood, after all, that makes men free;
Weakness is slavery; 'tis but mind that saves
God's glorious image as he willed it be.

Out of the shadows thick, will coming day
Send Peace and Plenty smiling o'er our land;
And the events that fill us with dismay,
Are but the implements in God's right hand.

Where patriot blood is poured as cheap as rain,
A newer freedom, phoenix-like, will spring;
Our Father never asks for us in vain:
From noble seed comes noble harvesting.

Then let, to-day, true nobleness be ours;
That we be worthy of the day of bliss,
When truth's, and love's, and freedom's allied powers
Shall bind all nations with fraternal kiss.

Would we might see, as did the saint of old,
The heavens opening, and the starry throng
Listening to have our tale of peace be told,
That they may hymn man's resurrection song!

DESPERATION AND COLONIZATION

As the war rolls on, and as the prospects of Federal victory increase, the greater becomes the anxiety to know what must be done to secure our conquests. How shall we reestablish the Union in its early strength? How shall we definitely crush the possibility of renewed rebellion? The tremendous taxation which hangs over us gives fearful meaning to these questions. And they must be answered promptly and practically.

The impossibility of Southern independence was from the first a foregone conclusion to all who impartially studied the geography of this country and the social progress of its inhabitants. The West, with its growing millions vigorously working out the problem of free labor, and of Republicanism, will inevitably control the Mississippi river and master the destinies of all soil above the so-called isothermal line, and probably of much below it. The cotton States, making comparatively almost no increase in population, receiving no foreign immigration, and desiring none, have precipitated, by war, their destined inferiority to the North. It has been from the beginning, only a question of time, when they should become the weaker, and goaded by this consciousness, they have set their all upon a throw, by appeal to wager of battle, and are losing. It is not a question of abolitionism, for it would have been brought on without abolition. It is not a question of Southern wrongs, for the South never had a right disturbed; and in addition to controlling our Government for years, and directly injuring our manufactures, it long swallowed a disproportionably great share of government appointments, offices, and emoluments. It is simply the last illustration in history of a smaller and rebellious portion of a community forced by the onward march of civilization into subordination to the greater. The men of the South were first to preach Manifest Destiny and the subjugation of Cuba and Mexico—forgetting that as regarded civilization, they themselves, on an average, only filled an intermediate station between the Spanish Creole and the truly white man of the North. Before manifest destiny can overtake the Mexican, it must first overtake the Southerner.

Despite all its external show of elan, courtesy, and chivalry, 'the South,' as it exists, is and ever must be, in the very great aggregate, inferior to the North in the elements of progress, and in nearly all that constitutes true superiority. They boast incessantly of their superior education and culture; but what literature or art has this education produced amid their thousands of ladies and gentlemen of taste and of leisure? The Northern editor of any literary magazine who has had any experience in by-gone days with the manuscripts of the chivalry, will shrug his shoulders with a smile as he recalls the reams of reechoes of Northern writers, and not unfrequently of mere 'sensation' third-rate writers at that, which he was wont to receive from Dixie. And amid all his vaunts and taunts, the consciousness of this intellectual inferiority never left the Southerner. It stimulated his hatred—it rankled in his heart. He might boast or lie—and his chief statistician, De Bow, was so notoriously convicted of falsifying facts and figures that the assertion, as applied to him, is merely historical—but it was of no avail. The Northern school and the Northern college continued to be the great fountain of North-American intellect, and the Southerner found himself year by year falling behind-hand intellectually and socially as well as numerically. As a last resort, despairing of victory in the real, he plunged after the wild chivalric dream of independence; of Mexican and Cuban conquest; of an endless realm and a reopened slave-trade—or at least of holding the cotton mart of the world. It is all in vain. We of the same continent recognize no right in a very few millions to seize on the land which belongs as much to our descendants and to the labor of all Europe and of the world as it does to them. They have no right to exclude white labor by slaves. A Doughface press may cry, Compromise; and try to restore the status quo ante bellum, but all in vain. The best that can be hoped for, is some ingenious temporary arrangement to break the fall of their old slaveholding friends. It is not as we will, or as we or you would like, that what the Southerners themselves term a conflict of races, can be settled. People who burn their own cities and fire their own crops are going to the dire and bitter end; and the Might which under God's providence is generally found in the long run of history to be the Right—will triumph at last.

As has been intimated in the foregoing passages, the antipathy of the South to the North is deeply seated, springing from such rancor as can only be bred between a claim to social superiority mingled with a bitter consciousness of inferiority in nearly all which the spirit of the age declares constitutes true greatness. It is almost needless to say, that with such motives goading them on, with an ignorant, unthinking mass for soldiers, and with unprincipled politicians who have to a want of principle added the newly acquired lust for blood, any prospect of conciliation becomes extremely remote. We may hope for it—we may and should proceed cautiously, so that no possible opportunity of restoring peace may be lost; but it is of the utmost importance that we be blind to no facts; and every fact developed as the war advances seems to indicate that we have to deal with a most intractable, crafty, and ferocious enemy, whom to trust is to be deceived.

There can be no doubt that the ultimatum of the South is secession or death. We of the North can not contemplate such a picture with calmness, and therefore evade it as amiably as we can. We say, it stands to reason that very few men will burn their own homes and crops, yet every mail tells us of tremendous suicidal sacrifices of this description. The ruin and misery which the South is preparing for itself in every way is incalculable and incredible, and yet there is no diminution of desperation. The prosperity which made a mock of honest poverty is now, as by the retributive judgment of God, sinking itself into penury, and the planter who spoke of the Northern serf as a creature just one remove above the brute, is himself learning by bitter experience to be a mud-sill. Verily the cause of the poor and lowly is being avenged. Yet with all this there is no hint or hope of compromise; repeated defeats are, so far, of little avail. The Northern Doughfaces tell us over and over again, that if we will 'only leave the slave question untouched,' all will yet be right. 'Only spare them the negro, and they, seeing that we do not intend to interfere with their rights, will eventually settle down into the Union.' But what is there to guarantee this assertion? What proof have we that the South can be in this manner conciliated? None—positively none.

There is nothing which the Southern press, and, so far as we can learn, the Southern people, have so consistently and thoroughly disavowed since the war began, as the assertion that a restoration of the Union may be effected on the basis of undisturbed slavery. They have ridiculed the Democrats of the North with as great contempt and as bitter sarcasm as were ever awarded of old to Abolitionists, for continually urging this worn-out folly; for now that the mask is finally thrown off, they make no secret of their scorn for their old tools and dupes. Slavery is no longer the primary object; they are quite willing to give up slavery if the growing prosperity of the South should require it; their emissaries abroad in every salon have been vowing that manumission of their slaves would soon follow recognition; and it was their rage at failure after such wretched abasement and unprincipled inconsistency which, very naturally, provoked the present ire of the South against England and France. They, the proud, chivalrous Southrons, who had daringly rushed to battle as slave lords, after eating abundant dirt as prospective Abolitionists, after promising any thing and every thing for a recognition, received the cold shoulder. No wonder that ill-will to England is openly avowed by the Richmond press as one of the reasons for burning the cotton as the Northern armies advance.

The only basis of peace with the North, as the South declares, is Disunion; and they do most certainly mean it. No giving up the slave question, no enforcing of fugitive slave laws; no, not the hanging of Messrs. Garrison and Phillips, or any other punishment of all Emancipationists—as clamored for by thousands of trembling cowards—would be of any avail. It is disunion or nothing—and disunion they can not have. There shall be no disunion, no settlement of any thing on any basis but the Union. Richmond papers, after the battle of Pittsburgh Landing, proposed peace and separation. They do not know us. The North was never so determined to push on as now; never so eager for battle or for sacrifices. If the South is in earnest, so are we; if they have deaths to avenge, so have we; if they cry for war to the knife, so surely as God lives they can have it in full measure. For thirty years the blazing straw of Southern insult has been heaped on the Northern steel; and now that the latter is red-hot, it shall scorch and sear ere it cools, and they who heated it shall feel it.

We may as well make up our minds to it first as last, that we must at every effort and at any cost, conquer this rebellion. There is no alternative. This done, the great question which remains to settle, is, how shall we manage the conquered provinces? There are fearful obstacles in the way; great difficulties, such as no one has as yet calmly realized; difficulties at home and abroad. We have a fierce and discontented population to keep under; increased expenses in every department of government; but it is needless to sum them up. The first and most apparent difficulty is that involved in the form of government to be adopted. As the rebellious States have, by the mere act of secession, forfeited all State rights, and thereby reduced themselves to territories, this question would seem to settle itself without difficulty, were it not that a vast body of the ever-mischief-making, ever-meddling, and never-contented politicians (who continue to believe that the millennium would at once arrive were Emancipation only extinguished) cry out against this measure as an infringement of those Southern rights which are so dear to them. They argue and hope in vain. Never more will the South come back to be served and toadied to by them as of old; never more will they receive contemptuous patronage and dishonorable honors. It is all passed. Those who look deepest into this battle, and into the future, see a resistance, grim and terrible, to the death; and one which will call for the strictest and sternest watch and ward. It will only be by putting fresh life and fresh blood into Secessia, that union can be practically realized. Out of the old Southern stock but little can be made. A great portion must be kept under by the strong hand; a part may be induced to consult its own interests, and reform. But the great future of the South, and the great hope of a revived and improved Union will be found in colonizing certain portions of the conquered territory with free white labor.

A more important topic, and one so deeply concerning the most vital prosperity of the United States, was never before submitted to the consideration of her citizens. If entertained by Government and the people on a great, enterprising, and vigorous scale, as such schemes were planned and executed by the giant minds of antiquity, it may be made productive of such vast benefits, that in a few years at most, the millions of Americans may look back to this war as one of the greatest blessings that ever befell humanity, and Jefferson Davis and his coadjutors be regarded as the blind implements by which God advanced human progress, as it had never before advanced at one stride. But to effect this, it should be planned and executed as a great, harmonious, and centrally powerful scheme, not be tinkered over and frittered away by all the petty doughfaces in every village. In great emergencies, great acts are required.

It is evident that the only certain road to Union-izing the South is, to plant in it colonies of Northern men. Thousands, hundreds of thousands now in the army, would gladly remain in the land of tobacco or of cotton, if Government would only provide them with the land whereon to live. Were they thus settled, and were every slave in the South emancipated by the chances of war, there would be no danger to apprehend as to the future of the latter. Give a Yankee a fat farm in Dixie, and we may rely upon it that although a Southern nabob may not know how to get work out of a 'free nigger', the Northerner will contrive to persuade Cuffy to become industrious. We have somewhere heard of a Vermonter, who taught ground-hogs or 'wood-chucks' to plant corn for him; the story has its application. Were Cuffy ten times as lazy as he is, the free farmer would contrive to get him to work. And in view of this, I am not sorry that the Legislatures of the border wheat States are passing laws to prevent slaves from entering their territories. The mission of the black is to labor as a free man in the South, under the farmer, until capable of being a farmer on his own account.

The manner and method of colonizing free labor in the South deserves very serious consideration, and is, it may be presumed, receiving it at the hands of Government, in anticipation of further developments in this direction. We trust, however, that the Administration will lead, as rapidly as possible, in this matter, and that the President will soon make it the subject of a Message as significant and as noble as that wherein this country first stood committed by its chief officer to Emancipation, the noblest document which ever passed from president or potentate to the people; a paper which, in the eyes of future ages, will cast Magna Charta itself into the shade, and rank with the glorious manumission of the Emperor of Russia.

The primary question would be, whether it were more expedient to scatter free labor all over the South, or simply form large colonies at such points as might serve to effectually break up and surround the confederacy. Without venturing to decide on the final merit of either plan, we would suggest that the latter would be, for a beginning, probably most feasible. Should Virginia, certain points on the Atlantic coast, embracing the larger cities and vicinity of forts, and Texas, be largely or strongly occupied by free men, we should at once throw a chain around the vanquished foe, whose links would grow stronger every year. With slavery abolished—and it is at present abolishing itself with such rapidity that it is almost time lost to discuss the subject—immigration from Europe would stream in at an unprecedented rate, and in a few years, all the old Southern system become entirely a tradition of the past, like that of the feudal chivalry which the present chivalry so fondly ape.

The enormous internal resources of Eastern Virginia, her proximity to free soil, the arrogance and insubordination of her inhabitants, render her peculiarly fitted for colonization. Not less attractive is Texas—a State which, be it remembered, is capable of raising six times as much cotton as is now raised in the whole South, and which, if only settled and railroaded-ed, would, in a few years, become the wealthiest agricultural State in America. But let our army once settle in the South, there will be little danger of its not retaining its possessions. He who can win can wear.

The country has thus far treated very gingerly the question of confiscation, which is, however, destined to thrust itself very prominently forward among the great issues of the day, and which is closely allied to colonization. That the South, after forcing upon us such a war as this, with its enormous losses and expenses, should be subjected to no penalty, is preposterous. Confiscation there must be—not urged inhumanly on a wholesale scale, but in such a manner as to properly punish those who were forward in aiding rebellion. When this war broke out, the South was unanimous in crying for plunder, in speaking of wasting our commerce and our cities on a grand scale. But it is needless to point out that punishment of the most guilty alone would of itself half cover the expenses of the war.

It may be observed that already, since the decree of emancipation in the District of Columbia, a fresh spirit of enterprise has manifested itself there. Within a few days after the signature of the President to that act, Northern men began to prepare for renewed industry and action in the old slave field. The tide of free labor which will rush into Virginia, after the chances of war or other action shall have emancipated that State, will be incalculable. Its worn-out plantations will become thriving farms, its mines and inexhaustible water-powers will call into play the incessant demand and supply of vigorous industry and active capital. We may hasten the movement or we may not, by direct legislation. For the present, it seems advisable to await the rapidly developing chances of war and their results; but the great rush of free labor will come, and that rapidly, and Virginia, disenthralled, become, in all probability, once more the first among the States.

We have spoken of the desperation of the rebels, and of the idleness of expecting from them any peaceable compromise. Those who, in the South, will take the oath of allegiance, and who have probably acted only under compulsion, should be spared. But there is a vast number who are as yet under the dominion of a madness, for which nothing but the most vigorous measures can be of any avail. It is evident that at present, every where except in Halleck's department, government is too indulgent. Traitors flaunt and boast openly in the border States, and publicly scheme with their doughface allies, to defeat the Union cause in every possible way, too often with signal success. The more mercy they receive, the more insolent do they become, and yet every effort has been made, and is making, 'to conciliate.' Let Government be vigorous, and rely only on its strong hand, so far as the management of avowed traitors is concerned; such men hold to no faith, and keep no oaths. With such, a threat of confiscation will be found of more avail than all the lenity in the world.

We may quote, in this connection, from a letter to the Salem Register, from Captain Driver, who hoisted 'Old Glory' at Nashville, when our troops took possession of that city. After speaking of the immense amount of property being destroyed through the State, he asks:

'Is there one man North, who now expects to make peace, based on compromise with such men as lead here? Is there one who expects a lasting peace in this land, until the armed heel of freedom's soldiers marks every inch of slave soil? If there is, he knows little of the South or Southern men and women. One defeat of the Federal forces, and madness would be rampant here. In the hour of victory, they would destroy every Union family in the South. We live on a volcanic mass, which at any moment may upheave and blow us to glory without the benefit of the clergy, the most of whom are in the army of Dixie.

'Our enemy is as bitter as death, as implacable as the savage of the forest; he will do any thing to gain his end. Twice has the 'Black Flag' been flaunted in our faces, and cheered by a portion of our citizens. Our women are more bitter than the men, and our children are taught to hate the North, in church, in school, and at the fireside. Our city still presents a sullen, silent front; it will take as long time to root treason out of Nashville us it did the household sins of Egypt out of Israel.

'Had I my way, I would confiscate the property of all traitors, work the slaves three or four years under overseers, on the land of their masters, sell the crops thus raised, and pay the war debt; this would save the people from taxation. The fifth year's crop give to the slaves, and send them to Texas or elsewhere; give them a governance, buy up the slaves of the loyal men, and let them be sent to their brethren. The land confiscated, I would divide among the soldiers of the North and the widows and orphans of those deluded poor men of the South who fell victims to false notions of 'Southern Rights;' compel the Northern man to settle on his grant, or to send a settler of true, industrious habits, and give him nopower to alienate his title for ten or more years. This will insure an industrious, worthy, patriotic people for the South. One man will make one bale of cotton, others ten; your spindles and looms will be kept running by free men, and slavery will cease forever, as it should do. Slavery is a curse, a crime, a mildew, and must end, or war will blast our fair heritage for all time to come.'