CHAPTER I. Departure from Cork
Departure from Cork.—The Atlantic in March—Fellow-passengers—American politics and parties—The Irish in New York—Approach to New York.
On the evening of 3rd March, 1861, I was transferred from the little steam-tender, which plies between Cork and the anchorage of the Cunard steamers at the entrance of the harbour, to the deck of the good steamship Arabia, Captain Stone; and at nightfall we were breasting the long rolling waves of the Atlantic.
The voyage across the Atlantic has been done by so many able hands, that it would be superfluous to describe mine, though it is certain no one passage ever resembled another, and no crew or set of passengers in one ship were ever identical with those in any other. For thirteen days the Atlantic followed its usual course in the month of March, and was true to the traditions which affix to it in that month the character of violence and moody changes, from bad to worse and back again. The wind was sometimes dead against us, and then the infelix Arabia with iron energy set to work, storming great Malakhofs of water, which rose above her like the side of some sward-coated hill crested with snow-drifts; and having gained the summit, and settled for an instant among the hissing sea-horses, ran plunging headlong down to the encounter of another wave, and thus went battling on with heart of fire and breath of flame—igneus est ollis vigor—hour after hour.
The traveller for pleasure had better avoid the Atlantic in the month of March. The wind was sometimes with us, and then the sensations of the passengers and the conduct of the ship were pretty much as they had been during the adverse breezes before, varied by the performance of a very violent “yawing” from side to side, and certain squashings of the paddle-boxes into the yeasty waters, which now ran a race with us and each other, as if bent on chasing us down, and rolling their boarding parties with foaming crests down on our decks. The boss, which we represented in the stormy shield around us, still moved on; day by day our microcosm shifted its position in the ever-advancing circle of which it was the centre, with all around and within it ever undergoing a sea change.
The Americans on board were, of course, the most interesting passengers to one like myself, who was going out to visit the great Republic under very peculiar circumstances. There was, first, Major Garnett, a Virginian, who was going back to his State to follow her fortunes. He was an officer of the regular army of the United States, who had served with distinction in Mexico; an accomplished, well-read man; reserved, and rather gloomy; full of the doctrine of States’ Rights, and animated with a considerable feeling of contempt for the New Englanders, and with the strongest prejudices in favour of the institution of slavery. He laughed to scorn the doctrine that all men are born equal in the sense of all men having equal rights. Some were born to be slaves—some to be labourers in the lower strata above the slaves—others to follow useful mechanical arts—the rest were born to rule and to own their fellow-men. There was next a young Carolinian, who had left his post as attaché at St. Petersburgh to return to his State: thus, in all probability, avoiding the inevitable supercession which awaited him at the hands of the new Government at Washington. He represented, in an intensified form, all the Virginian’s opinions, and held that Mr. Calhoun’s interpretation of the Constitution was incontrovertibly right. There were difficulties in the way of State sovereignty, he confessed; but they were only in detail—the principle was unassailable.
To Mr. Mitchell, South Carolina represented a power quite sufficient to meet all the Northern States in arms. “The North will attempt to blockade our coast,” said he; “and in that case, the South must march to the attack by land, and will probably act in Virginia.” “But if the North attempts to do more than institute a blockade?—for instance, if their fleet attack your seaport towns, and land men to occupy them?” “Oh, in that case, we are quite certain of beating them.” Mr. Julian Mitchell was indignant at the idea of submitting to the rule of a “rail-splitter,” and of such men as Seward and Cameron. “No gentleman could tolerate such a Government.”
An American family from Nashville, consisting of a lady and her son and daughter, were warm advocates of a “gentlemanly” government, and derided the Yankees with great bitterness. But they were by no means as ready to encounter the evils of war, or to break up the Union, as the South Carolinian or the Virginian; and in that respect they represented, I was told, the negative feelings of the Border States, which are disposed to a temporising, moderate course of action, most distasteful to the passionate seceders.
There were also two Louisiana sugar-planters on board—one owning 500 slaves, the other rich in some thousands of acres; they seemed to care very little for the political aspects of the question of Secession, and regarded it merely in reference to its bearing on the sugar crop, and the security of slave property. Secession was regarded by them as a very extreme and violent measure, to which the State had resorted with reluctance; but it was obvious, at the same time, that, in event of a general secession of the Slave States from the North, Louisiana could neither have maintained her connection with the North, nor have stood in isolation from her sister States.
All these, and some others who were fellow-passengers, might be termed Americans—pur sang. Garnett belonged to a very old family in Virginia. Mitchell came from a stock of several generations’ residence in South Carolina. The Tennessee family were, in speech and thought, types of what Europeans consider true Americans to be. Now take the other side. First there was an exceedingly intelligent, well-informed young merchant of New York—nephew of an English county Member, known for his wealth, liberality, and munificence. Educated at a university in the Northern States, he had lived a good deal in England, and was returning to his father from a course of book-keeping in the house of his uncle’s firm in Liverpool. His father and uncle were born near Coleraine, and he had just been to see the humble dwelling, close to the Giant’s Causeway, which sheltered their youth, and where their race was cradled. In the war of 1812, the brothers were about sailing in a privateer fitted out to prey against the British, when accident fixed one of them in Liverpool, where he founded the house which has grown so greatly with the development of trade between New York and Lancashire, whilst the other settled in the States. Without being violent in tone, the young Northerner was very resolute in temper, and determined to do all which lay in his power to prevent the “glorious Union” being broken up.
The “Union” has thus founded on two continents a family of princely wealth, whose originals had probably fought with bitterness in their early youth against the union of Great Britain and Ireland. But did Mr. Brown, or the other Americans who shared his views, unreservedly approve of American institutions, and consider them faultless? By no means. The New Yorkers especially were eloquent on the evils of the suffrage, and of the licence of the Press in their own city; and displayed much irritation on the subject of naturalisation. The Irish were useful, in their way, making roads and working hard, for there were few Americans who condescended to manual labour, or who could not make far more money in higher kinds of work; but it was absurd to give the Irish votes which they used to destroy the influence of native-born citizens, and to sustain a corporation and local bodies of unsurpassable turpitude, corruption, and inefficiency.
Another young merchant, a college friend of the former, was just returning from a tour in Europe with his amiable sister. His father was the son of an Irish immigrant, but he did not at all differ from the other gentlemen of his city in the estimate in which he held the Irish element; and though he had no strong bias one way or other, he was quite resolved to support the abstraction called the Union, and its representative fact—the Federal Government. Thus the agriculturist and the trader—the grower of raw produce and the merchant who dealt in it—were at opposite sides of the question—wide apart as the Northern and Southern Poles. They sat apart, ate apart, talked apart—two distinct nations, with intense antipathies on the part of the South, which was active and aggressive in all its demonstrations.
The Southerners have got a strange charge de plus against the Irish. It appears that the regular army of the United States is mainly composed of Irish and Germans; very few Americans indeed being low enough, or martially disposed enough, to “take the shilling.” In case of a conflict, which these gentlemen think inevitable, “low Irish mercenaries would,” they say, “be pitted against the gentlemen of the South, and the best blood in the States would be spilled by fellows whose lives are worth nothing whatever.” Poor Paddy is regarded as a mere working machine, fit, at best, to serve against Choctaws and Seminoles. His facility of reproduction has to compensate for the waste which is caused by the development in his unhappy head of the organs of combativeness and destructiveness. Certainly, if the war is to be carried on by the United States’ regulars, the Southern States will soon dispose of them, for they do not number 20,000 men, and their officers are not much in love with the new Government. But can it come to War? Mr. Mitchell assures me I shall see some “pretty tall fighting.”
The most vehement Northerners in the steamer are Germans, who are going to the States for the first time, or returning there. They have become satisfied, no doubt, by long process of reasoning, that there is some anomaly in the condition of a country which calls itself the land of liberty, and is at the same time the potent palladium of serfdom and human chattelry. When they are not sea-sick, which is seldom, the Teutons rise up in all the might of their misery and dirt, and, making spasmodic efforts to smoke, blurt out between the puffs, or in moody intervals, sundry remarks on American politics. “These are the swine,” quoth Garnett, “who are swept out of German gutters as too foul for them, and who come over to the States and presume to control the fate and the wishes of our people. In their own country they proved they were incapable of either earning a living, or exercising the duties of citizenship; and they seek in our country a licence denied them in their own, and the means of living which they could not acquire anywhere else.”
And for myself I may truly say this, that no man ever set foot on the soil of the United States with a stronger and sincerer desire to ascertain and to tell the truth, as it appeared to him. I had no theories to uphold, no prejudices to subserve, no interests to advance, no instructions to fulfil; I was a free agent, bound to communicate to the powerful organ of public opinion I represented, my own daily impressions of the men, scenes, and actions around me, without fear, favour, or affection of or for anything but that which seemed to me to be the truth. As to the questions which were distracting the States, my mind was a tabula rasa, or, rather, tabula non scripta. I felt indisposed to view with favour a rebellion against one of the established and recognised governments of the world, which, though not friendly to Great Britain, nor opposed to slavery, was without, so far as I could see, any legitimate cause of revolt, or any injury or grievance, perpetrated or imminent, assailed by States still less friendly to us, which the slave States, pure and simple, certainly were and probably are. At the same time, I knew that these were grounds which I could justly take, whilst they would not be tenable by an American, who is by the theory on which he revolted from us and created his own system of government, bound to recognise the principle that the discontent of the popular majority with its rulers, is ample ground and justification for revolution.
It was on the morning of the fourteenth day that the shores of New York loomed through the drift of a cold wintry sea, leaden-grey and comfortless, and in a little time more the coast, covered with snow, rose in sight. Towards the afternoon the sun came out and brightened the waters and the sails of the pretty trim schooners and coasters which were dancing around us. How different the graceful, tautly-rigged, clean, white-sailed vessels from the round-sterned, lumpish billyboys and nondescripts of the eastern coast of our isle! Presently there came bowling down towards us a lively little schooner-yacht, very like the once famed “America,” brightly painted in green, sails dazzling white, lofty ponderous masts, no tops. As she came nearer, we saw she was crowded with men in chimney-pot black hats, and coats, and the like—perhaps a party of citizens on pleasure, cold as the day was. Nothing of the kind. The craft was our pilot-boat, and the hats and coats belonged to the hardy mariners who act as guides to the port of New York. Their boat was lowered, and was soon under our mainchains; and a chimney-pot hat having duly come over the side, delivered a mass of newspapers to the captain, which were distributed among the eager passengers, when each at once became the centre of a spell-bound circle.