My Diary: North and South (vol. 2 of 2)

by Sir William Howard Russell

I spent three days here writing my letters and repairing the wear and tear of my Southern expedition; and although it was hot enough, the breeze from the lake carried health and vigour to the frame, enervated by the sun of Louisiana and Mississippi. No need now to wipe the large drops of moisture from the languid brow lest they blind the eyes, nor to sit in a state of semi-clothing, worn out and exhausted, and tracing with moist hand imperfect characters on the paper.

I could not satisfy myself whether there was, as I have been told, a peculiar state of feeling in Chicago, which induced many people to support the Government of Mr. Lincoln because they believed it necessary for their own interests to obtain decided advantages over the South in the field, whilst they were opposed totis viribus to the genius of emancipation and to the views of the black Republicans. But the genius and eloquence of the little giant have left their impress on the facile mould of democratic thought, and he who argued with such acuteness and ability last March in Washington, in his own study, against the possibility, or at least the constitutional legality, of using the national forces, and the militia and volunteers of the Northern States, to subjugate the Southern people, carried away by the great bore which rushed through the placid North when Sumter fell, or perceiving his inability to resist its force, sprung to the crest of the wave, and carried to excess the violence of the Union reaction.

Whilst I was in the South I had seen his name in Northern papers with sensation headings and descriptions of his magnificent crusade for the Union in the west. I had heard his name reviled by those who had once been his warm political allies, and his untimely death did not seem to satisfy their hatred. His old foes in the North admired and applauded the sudden apostasy of their eloquent opponent, and were loud in lamentations over his loss. Imagine, then, how I felt when visiting his grave at Chicago, seeing his bust in many houses, or his portrait in all the shop-windows, I was told that the enormously wealthy community of which he was the idol were permitting his widow to live in a state not far removed from penury.

“Senator Douglas, sir,” observed one of his friends to me, “died of bad whisky. He killed himself with it while he was stumping for the Union all over the country.” “Well,” I said, “I suppose, sir, the abstraction called the Union, for which by your own account he killed himself, will give a pension to his widow.” Virtue is its own reward, and so is patriotism, unless it takes the form of contracts.

As far as all considerations of wife, children, or family are concerned, let a man serve a decent despot, or even a constitutional country with an economising House of Commons, if he wants anything more substantial than lip-service. The history of the great men of America is full of instances of national ingratitude. They give more praise and less pence to their benefactors than any nation on the face of the earth. Washington got little, though the plundering scouts who captured André were well rewarded; and the men who fought during the War of Independence were long left in neglect and poverty, sitting in sackcloth and ashes at the door-steps of the temple of liberty, whilst the crowd rushed inside to worship Plutus.

If a native of the British isles, of the natural ignorance of his own imperfections which should characterise him, desires to be subjected to a series of moral shower-baths, douches, and shampooing with a rough glove, let him come to the United States. In Chicago he will be told that the English people are fed by the beneficence of the United States, and that all the trade and commerce of England are simply directed to the one end of obtaining gold enough to pay the western States for the breadstuffs exported for our population. We know what the South think of our dependence on cotton. The people of the east think they are striking a great blow at their enemy by the Morrill tariff, and I was told by a patriot in North Carolina, “Why, creation! if you let the Yankees shut up our ports, the whole of your darned ships will go to rot. Where will you get your naval stores from? Why, I guess in a year you could not scrape up enough of tarpentine in the whole of your country for Queen Victoria to paint her nursery-door with.”

Nearly one half of the various companies enrolled in this district are Germans, or are the descendants of German parents, and speak only the language of the old country; two-thirds of the remainder are Irish, or of immediate Irish descent; but it is said that a grand reserve of Americans born lies behind this avant garde, who will come into the battle should there ever be need for their services.

Indeed so long as the Northern people furnish the means of paying and equipping armies perfectly competent to do their work, and equal in numbers to any demands made for men, they may rest satisfied with the accomplishment of that duty, and with contributing from their ranks the great majority of the superior and even of the subaltern officers; but with the South it is far different. Their institutions have repelled immigration; the black slave has barred the door to the white free settler. Only on the seaboard and in the large cities are German and Irish to be found, and they to a man have come forward to fight for the South; but the proportion they bear to the native-born Americans who have rushed to arms in defence of their menaced borders, is of course far less than it is as yet to the number of Americans in the Northern States who have volunteered to fight for the Union.