In consequence of the treachery of the Chinese, their camp was attacked by the allied forces and the enemy was completely defeated. The authorities were now willing to negotiate once more; but Lord Elgin refused unless the prisoners were surrendered in three days, threatening that otherwise his army would advance to the assault on Pekin. Prince Kung, who now became the chief negotiator, persisting in the system of evasion, the allied armies marched forward, and on the 6th of October the French entered the Summer Palace of the Emperor, which they looted of its inestimable treasures. Two days afterwards Mr. Parkes and his companions were released and permitted to join the camp.
The siege guns were placed in position before the walls of the mysterious metropolis of the vast Chinese empire, and notice had been given to its defenders that unless it were surrendered before noon of the following day the attack would commence. The Emperor had departed, on the pretext that he was obliged to go on a hunting expedition, deputing his authority to Prince Kung and his Ministers. The latter thought it the wisest course to surrender unconditionally, in order to save the city from destruction. The gates were thrown open and the flags of Britain and France were soon seen floating from the walls. It was the first time for thousands of years that the sanctity of the Imperial capital was thus violated. In the terms proposed Lord Elgin stipulated that, if the garrison surrendered, the city would be spared. He was then in ignorance of the fate of some of the British prisoners; but when he became acquainted with the horrifying details he resolved to inflict signal punishment for such barbarous outrages against humanity: he therefore proposed that the Summer Palace of the Emperor, the place in which some of the worst tortures had been inflicted upon the prisoners, should be burnt to the ground. Baron Gros declined to take part in this measure, but Lord Elgin determined to act in the matter on his own responsibility. He wrote to Prince Kung, reminding him that of the total number of twenty-six British subjects seized in defiance of honour and of the law of nations, thirteen only had been restored alive, all of whom carried on their persons evidence, more or less distinctly marked, of the indignities they had suffered; while thirteen had been barbarously murdered. He declared that until this foul deed should be expiated, peace between Great Britain and the existing dynasty of China was impossible. He announced that the Summer Palace must be forthwith levelled with the ground. He required that the sum of 300,000 taels should be at once paid down, to be appropriated, at the discretion of her Majesty's Government, to those who had suffered and to the families of the murdered men; and, lastly, that the whole of the indemnity stipulated in the Treaty of Tientsin should be paid before the armies of Britain and France removed from the city, should the Governments of those countries see fit to adopt that course.
Notwithstanding the indiscriminate loot by which the Summer Palace had been stripped of all that was portable among its precious treasures, there yet remained much that was beautiful and gorgeous in that wonderful abode of Oriental pomp and luxury. It consisted of a series of elegant and picturesque buildings spread over an extensive park. Lord Elgin was determined that not a trace of this grandeur should remain and that the spot on which the blood of British subjects had been so treacherously and cruelly shed, should for ever remain a monument of British power and of retributive justice. Accordingly, the buildings were set on fire by a detachment of our troops and totally destroyed. The Chinese authorities were now brought to a sense of their real position. They no longer dared to talk of Lord Elgin's want of decorum, but humbly signed the convention on the 24th of October. In that treaty the Emperor expressed his deep regret at the breach of friendly relations that had occurred by the conduct of the garrison of Taku in obstructing her Majesty's representative when on his way to Pekin; he conceded the right to her of having an ambassador resident in that city if she thought proper; he agreed to pay a sum of 8,000,000 taels, in certain fixed instalments, as indemnity for the cost of the war. It was also provided that British subjects were to be allowed to reside and trade at Tientsin, and that Chinese subjects should be at liberty to emigrate to British colonies, and to ship themselves and their families on board British vessels; and the Queen was to have the option of retaining a force at Tientsin and at other specified places, until the indemnity should be paid. The ratifications were duly exchanged and the allied armies retired from Pekin to Tientsin on the 5th of November, 1860.
The Session of 1861 was opened on the 5th of February, by the Queen in person, who informed her Parliament, among other matters, that she was glad to take the opportunity of expressing her warm appreciation of the loyalty and attachment to her person manifested by the Canadians on the occasion of the residence of the Prince of Wales among them. The Prince arrived in America on the 24th of July, 1860 and remained there till the 20th of October. During his tour he was everywhere received with the greatest enthusiasm, the people of the United States vieing with the Queen's subjects in Canada in the honours paid to him in popular demonstrations, addresses, and ovations. If he were to be their own Sovereign, and if they were royalists of the highest type, they could not have manifested greater ardour than they did wherever his Royal Highness went. Not the least interesting incident connected with this tour was his visit to the tomb of Washington. Yet royal festivities were accompanied by royal bereavement. The Duchess of Kent died on the 16th of March, 1861, aged seventy-five years. She had throughout her life enjoyed the respect of the public, and won the gratitude of the empire, by the excellent manner in which she had educated and trained the Princess Victoria for her high destiny as Queen of England. Addresses of condolence on this melancholy event were therefore unanimously adopted by both Houses—that of the Upper House being moved by Earl Granville and seconded by the Earl of Derby; and that of the Lower House by Lord Palmerston and seconded by Mr. Disraeli, who thus happily concluded his speech:—"For the great grief which has fallen on the Queen there is only one source of human consolation—the recollection of unbroken devotedness to the being whom we have loved and whom we have lost. This tranquil and sustaining memory is the inheritance of our Sovereign. It is generally supposed that the anguish of affection is scarcely compatible with the pomp of power; but that is not so in the present instance. She who reigns over us has elected, amid all the splendour of empire, to establish her life on the principle of domestic love. It is this—it is the remembrance and consciousness of this—which now sincerely saddens the public spirit and permits a nation to bear its heartfelt sympathy to the foot of a bereaved throne and whisper solace even to a royal heart."
But these domestic affairs were overshadowed by events in the United States. Since the beginning of the year, affairs in North America had assumed a more and more unhappy and alarming character, and the British Government had felt itself compelled to issue, on the 14th of May, its celebrated proclamation of neutrality. It is now time, therefore, to revert to the circumstances in which the great American Union was for a time broken up and a war of colossal magnitude waged during nearly four years between the Northern and Southern States. For many years a feeling of estrangement had been gradually growing up, grounded partly on differences of economic policy, partly on original want of sympathy between the inhabitants of each region, but most of all on the continual collisions to which the question of slavery gave rise. The national tariff had long been so adjusted as to protect the interests of New England manufacturers by excluding, with more or less rigidity, the manufactured products of Great Britain and other European countries; and the Morrill tariff, passed in March, 1861, carried this principle of exclusion to a still greater height. That this commercial policy was injurious to the interests of the South cannot be doubted, since, as they had no manufactures, they reaped no benefit from protection; while the tariff impeded that free interchange of their own teeming supplies of raw material with the products of the industry of other nations, which was necessary to the full development of their material civilisation. Again, the original contrast between Virginia and New England—the one settled by men of aristocratic connections, ruled by territorial instincts and disposed to Toryism in Church and State; the other by persons of the middle rank, predisposed to trade and industry and clinging fast to the "dissidence of Dissent" as their great religious principle—this contrast was ever present to embitter any misunderstanding that might arise. But lastly, and chiefly, the relations between North and South were disturbed by quarrels arising out of slavery. At the time when the colonies achieved their independence, all the thirteen provinces held slaves and legalised slavery. But in course of time natural causes—the labour of a slave not being comparable to that of a free labourer in a temperate climate—produced the diminution and, finally, the extinction of slavery in the Northern States. Northern slaveholders sold their slaves to Southern planters and trusted to the continuous and ever-increasing emigration from Europe, supplemented by a considerable number of free blacks, to supply the wants of the labour market. The time came when the citizens of States that but a short time before had harboured slavery themselves denounced slavery as a sin. The Abolitionists, among whom Garrison was the most prominent person, became a strong party at the North, especially in the New England States; associations were formed for obstructing the operation of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and facilitating the escape of slaves to Canada; and during the ten years that this law was in force, collisions of more or less magnitude between the Federal and State judicatures were continually taking place. The death of John Brown at Harper's Ferry, while attempting to liberate slaves, was only one of many incidents. But, on the other hand, the proceedings of the slaveholders and their partisans were, and had been for years, of a character so outrageous, that conscientious men might well begin to ask themselves whether, in yielding obedience to the Federal legislation, which, in order to preserve the Union, sanctioned such things, they were not breaking a law of higher and more sacred obligation. There was also a danger, as exemplified in the formation of the new State of Kansas, that slavery would extend in the territories of the Republic, for Kansas did not become a Free State until the two sides had shed one another's blood.
The time came for the election of a President to succeed Mr. Buchanan. The great Republican party at the North represented the feelings that were lacerated and the convictions that were outraged by the recent course of events, of which we have given an outline; and in November, 1860, this party carried its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, against the two Democratic candidates, Douglas and Breckinridge. The meaning of this nomination was plain. It announced, "We will have no more compromises." But as, under the constitution of the United States, every State sends two members to the Senate, the members of which were at this time pretty evenly balanced, half from Free, and half from Slave States, the effect of the triumph of the Republican party, and of the foreseen application of the above policy in dealing with the territories, could only be that in a few years the balance of parties in the Senate would be destroyed, as more and more new, and, necessarily Free, States were admitted into the Union. Then, argued the slaveholders, the Abolitionists will become more intolerable than ever; if they give to our domestic institutions for a time an insulting toleration, it will only be while they gather their forces for an open assault; the Fugitive Slave Law will be repealed as soon as they obtain the requisite majority in Congress, and our negro property will be everywhere depreciated in value, while on the borders of Free States it will be utterly valueless. Impelled by such motives as these, the people of South Carolina, which of all the States in the Union had for years been known to be the most restive under the Federal obligation, met in convention at Columbia, and on the 20th of December, 1860, voted the State out of the Union.
The South Carolina politicians had rightly calculated that the example thus set would soon be followed by other Slave States. Between this date and May, 1861, the following States adopted ordinances of secession, voting themselves out of the Union: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The last four States seceded unwillingly from the Union, and only because, hostilities having broken out, it was practically impossible for them to remain neutral, and community of interest attracted them to the Slave States that had already seceded. The first shot fired in anger in this civil war was aimed from a battery on Morris Island, on the 9th of January, 1861, at a vessel bringing reinforcements to Fort Sumter. South Carolina sent commissioners to Washington to negotiate with the President for the peaceful surrender to her of Federal forts and property within the limits of the State. Mr. Buchanan, on the eve of retirement, declined to recognise them in any other capacity but that of private citizens of South Carolina; however, a sort of informal understanding was arrived at, that so long as each side remained passive force should not be resorted to. On the 18th of February the leading men in the seven States that had then seceded having by this time arranged the terms of a new Federation, to be called "The Confederate States of America," Mr. Jefferson Davis and Mr. Stephens were inaugurated at Montgomery, Alabama, as President and Vice-President of the new confederacy. A Constitution was adopted nearly resembling that of the United States, the main difference being that the President was to be elected for six years instead of four, and could not be re-elected during his term of office.
CAPTURE OF JOHN BROWN AT HARPER'S FERRY. (See p. [320].)
Mr. Lincoln, in his sincere anxiety to avoid bloodshed, did not attempt to reinforce the garrison of Fort Sumter; but he declared that he must reprovision it and would use any force that might be required for the purpose. This was rendered necessary by the conduct of the South Carolinans, who had stopped the supply of provisions to the fort from the shore. A fleet was accordingly prepared and despatched to Charleston. About the same time Major Anderson, the Federal commandant, removing his men from all the other posts and batteries that he had hitherto held in the harbour, concentrated his force in the island fort of Sumter. These measures were declared by the South Carolinans a breach of the understanding that had hitherto subsisted and their general was ordered to summon the fort. General Beauregard accordingly summoned Major Anderson to surrender; upon his refusal, fire was opened from batteries, the positions of which had been carefully selected so as to surround the fort with a girdle of fire; the Federals made what resistance they could; but after the barracks had been burnt, and they were in imminent peril of the explosion of the magazine, they capitulated on honourable terms. In this the first conflict of the war, singular to relate, not a man was killed or mortally wounded on either side. Fort Sumter fell on the 13th of April, 1861.