Chapter 7

_January 31._--The Copperheads in Congress are shedding crocodile tears over the doom that awaits those Africo-Americans who may unfortunately be taken prisoners by the rebels. Now, in the first place enlisted Africo-Americans are under the protection of the United States Government, and that Government will not be guilty of the infamy of seeing its captured soldiers murdered in cold blood--and in the next place the Africo-American will prove anything rather than an easily-made captive to Southern murderers. The Africo-Americans will sell their lives so dearly as to disgust the rebels with the task of attempting to capture them.

_January 31._--Few people can understand the intensity of the disgust with which I find myself often obliged to mention Thurlow Weed--that darkest incarnation of all that is evil in black mail, lobbyism, and all hideous corruptions. It is not my fault that such a man is allowed to exert a malign influence on the country's fate, and I am obliged to give the dark as well as the bright parts of the great social picture. How deeply I regret my inability to collect and record, in part at least, if not as a whole, all the deeds of heroism and devotion, of generous and brave self-abnegation, which have been done by thousands, even by millions of those who are both falsely and foolishly called the lower classes.

FEBRUARY, 1863.

The Problems before the People -- the Circassian -- Department of State and International Laws -- Foresight -- Patriot Stanton and the Rats -- Honest Conventions -- Sanitary Commission -- Harper's Ferry -- John Brown -- the Yellow Book -- the Republican Party -- Epitaph -- Prize Courts -- Suum cuique -- Academy of Sciences -- Democratic Rank and File, etc. etc. etc.

_February 1._--The task which this great American people has on its hands is one utterly unexampled in the history of the world. While in the midst of a great civil war, and struggling as it were in very death-throes, to emancipate and organize four millions of men, most of whom, up to this very day, have by deliberate legislation been kept in ignorance and savagery. Thoroughly to comprehend the immensity of such a task, we must also reflect that the men to whom that task is intrusted are anything rather than intellectual giants. Yet the true solution of the problem will be given by the principle of self-government and by the self-governing People. And it is therein that consists the genuine American originality which Europe finds it so impossible to understand. And it is just as little understood by most of the diplomatists here, and what is still worse, it is not even studied by them. It is wretched work to be obliged to witness the low, the actually ignoble parts which many men play in the great farce of political life. I could easily mention a full score of would-be-eminent men, who are unsurpassed by the meanest of the vulgar herd in flippancy and an utter want of self-respect.

The diary published in London by Bull Run Russell deserves to be read by every American. Russell deals blows to slavery which will tell in England. However annoying may be to many the disclosures made by this indiscreet confidant of their vanity, Russell's revelations establish firmly the broad historical--not gossipping--fact, that before and after Sumter, the most absolute want of earnestness, of statesmanlike foresight, and the most childish but fathomless vanity inspired all the actions of the American Secretary of State. I am one of the few who, having often met Russell here, never fawned to him, nay who not even took any notice of him; but I am grateful to him for his falsely-called indiscreetness--for his having done the utmost to bring out truth--in his own way. It is the best that I have seen, or heard, or read of him. Flatterers, Secretaries, Senators, and Generals crowded to Russell and to his table, and he exposes them. Among others, General McDowell was Russell's guest, very likely to show his gratitude to the slanderer of the volunteers, whom McDowell did not understand how to lead to victory.

Seward showed to Russell his dispatches to Lord John Russell. Mr. Sumner, at Bull Run Russell's table, asked Russell's aid to keep peace with England. Good! Unspeakably good!

Not only the Emancipation problem must be solved, so to speak, amidst the storm of battle--but other and very mighty problems, social, constitutional, jurisprudential, and financial, must be similarly and promptly dealt with. And these great questions must be debated to the accompaniment of the music of musketry and cannon. In some respects the situation of America at present may be said to resemble that of France in the days of her great Revolution. But affairs here and now are still more complicated than they were in France from 1789 to 1793.

Formerly I took a more active part than I now take in revolutionary and reformatory struggles, and was seldom daunted by their difficult problems, or by their most violent tempests. But now I have a chilling sense of weariness and disgust as I note the strange things that are done under my very eyes.

The burden of taxes laid upon a people who have an inborn hatred of taxation, a debt created in a few months surpassing that which England and France contracted in half a century; and that debt contracted as if by magic, and in the very crisis of a civil war such as any foreign war would be mere baby's play to.

The people at large see the precipice, and hear the roaring of the breakers ahead, but despair not! Sublime phenomena for the future historian to dwell upon! All this is genuine American originality. In its sublime presence, down, down upon your knees in the dust, all you European wiseacres!

The capture of the _Circassian_, an English blockade runner, gave birth to some very delicate international complications. The decision of the Prize Court shows up the absolute destitution of statesmanship in the Department of State, generally coruscated with ignorance of international principles, rules of judicial international decisions, and of belligerent rights and observances. Every day shows what a masterly stroke it was of the Secretary of State to have proclaimed the blockade in April, 1861, and to have been the first to recognize the rebels in the character of independent belligerents. The more blockade runners will be captured by our cruisers, the more the complications will grow. A false first step generates false conditions _ad infinitum_. The question of the _Circassian_ is only the beginning, and not even the worst. The worst will come by and by. But Seward is great before Allah! The truth is, that Mr. Seward and the Department are as innocent of any familiarity with international laws, as can be. The people, the intelligent people would be horror-stricken could they suddenly be made acquainted with all the shameful ignorance which is corrosively fermenting in the State Department.

To every intelligent and well regulated Government in Europe, the Department of Foreign Affairs--which in America is called the State Department--has attached to it a board of advisers for the solution of all international questions.

In England, for instance, all such questions are referred to the Crown Lawyers, i.e. the Attorney and Solicitor General, and, in specially important cases, to the Lord High Chancellor, and one or two of the Judges. And in order to obtain the advice he obviously stands so much in need of, Mr. Seward ought to have consulted two or three American juriconsults of eminence. Mr. Seward ought to have foreseen that the war would necessarily give rise to international, commercial, and maritime complications. Such men as Charles Eames, Upton, etc. would have been excellent advisers on all international and statutory questions. Presumptuous that I am--to venture upon the mere supposition that Seward the Great can possibly need advice! Not he, of course--not he. Mr. Seward is the Alpha and Omega--knows everything, and can do every thing himself. Happily, the people at large is the genuine statesman, and can correct the mistakes--and worse--of its blundering, bungling servants.

American pilots and statesmen! Forget not that foresight is the germ of action. Foresight reveals to the mind the opportuneness of the needed measure by which a solution is to be given, a question decided, and the hoped-for results obtained.

American people! How much foresight have your--dearly-paid--servants shown? You, the people alone, you have been far-seeing and prophetic; but not they.

_February 2._--All the efforts of the worshippers of treason, of darkness, of barbarism, of cruelty, and of infamy--all their manoeuvres and menaces could not prevail. The majority of the Congress has decided that the powerful element of Africo-Americans is to be used on behalf of justice, of freedom, and of human rights. The bill passed both the Houses. It is to be observed that the "big" diplomats swallowed _col gusto_ all the pro-slavery speeches, and snubbed off the patriotic ones. The noblest eulogy of the patriots!

The patriots may throb with joy! The President intends great changes in his policy, and has telegraphed for----Thurlow Weed, that prince of dregs, to get from him light about the condition of the country.

The conservative "Copperheads" of Boston and of other places in New England press as a baby to their bosom, and lift to worship McClellan, the conservative, and all this out of deepest hatred towards all that is noble, humane, and lofty in the genuine American people. Well they may! If by his generalship McClellan butchered hundreds of thousands in the field, he was always very conservative of his precious little self.

Biting snow storm all over Virginia! Our soldiers! our soldiers in the camp! It is heart-rending to think of them. Conservative McClellan so conservatively campaigned until last November as to preserve--the rebel armies, and make a terrible winter campaign an inevitable necessity. O, Copperheads and Boston conservatives! When you bend your knees before McClellan, you dip them in the best and purest blood of the people!

_February 3._--The Secretary of War appointed General Casey to shorten the general tactics for the use of Africo-American regiments to use them as light infantry.

The devotion of American women to the sick and wounded soldiers, makes them be envied by the angels in Heaven (provided there are any). This devotion of these genuine gentlewomen atones for the ignoble flippancy of dancing crinolines.

Down, down goes slavery notwithstanding the _gates of hell_, and their guard, the McClellans, the Sewards, amorously embracing the Copperheads and all that is dark and criminal. Humanity is avenged and Eternal Justice is satisfied.

_February 4._--Sumner is re-elected to the Senate. His re-election vindicates a sound principle, because his opponents were all the Copperheads and slavery-saviours in Massachusetts. Sumner's influence in the Senate is rather limited. Politically he is on all points most honest; but his conduct towards Seward is not calculated to impress one with any very high esteem for his manhood.

It is not force, or decision, or power, that is cruel in revolutionary times--but, weakness. All societies have had their epochs of progress and of retrogression. Sylla was a conservative, and so too was Phocion. The Pharisees were reactionists and conservatives. Europe has millions of them, of various hues, shapes, tendencies and convictions. But the reactionists and conservatives in the past of Europe all have been and are of a purer metal than the conservatives here, and their impure organs, as the National Intelligencer, the World, the Boston Courier, and the rest of that fetish creed.

_February 4._--The French Yellow Book, or State Correspondence, justifies my forebodings of November last. Mr. Mercier's diplomatic sentimentalism, and his associations, germinated the _Decembriseur's_ scheme for mediation and humiliation.

Further is to be found in the Yellow Book the evidence how, from the start of this dark rebellion, Mr. Seward, the master spirit of the Administration, dealt death blows to all energetic, unyielding prosecution of the war for crushing the rebellion, and that he was double-dealing in all his public actions. The published state papers of the French government disclose the fact that nine months ago Mr. Seward sent the French minister to Richmond with a mission to invite the Jeff. Davises, Hunters, Wigfalls, Benjamins and others to come back to their seats in the Senate, and in the name of the cruelly outraged North, Mr. Seward proffered to the traitors a hearty welcome. So says the French diplomat in his official dispatch to the French Secretary of Foreign Affairs. Such underhanded dealings should not be allowed, and most assuredly would be stringently punished, if perpetrated under similar circumstances by the minister of any European government dealing with treason in arms. But here, Mr. Seward's impudence--if not worse--displays its flying colors. The Republican press will swallow all this, and Senator Sumner as Chairman of the Committee will--keep quiet.

That confidential mission entrusted to the French diplomat by Mr. Seward, was more than sufficient to evoke the subsequent attempt at mediation, because it revealed to the piercing eye of European statesmanship, how the Administration, and above all how its master spirit had little confidence in the cause; it revealed the want of earnestness in official quarters. I hate and denounce all attempts, even by the most friendly foreign power, to meddle with the internal affairs of our country. But I have some little knowledge of European statecraft, of European diplomacy, of European rulers, and of European diplomats; and I assert, emphatically, that they are emboldened to offer their meddlesome services because they have very little if any respect for our official leaders; and because the want of energy and of good faith to the principles of the North as displayed by Seward, he nevertheless remaining at the helm, has firmly settled the conviction in European minds, that the rebels cannot be crushed by such traffickers and used up politicians as have in their hands the destinies of the Union.

_February 5._--The new Copperhead Senators--in their appearance resembling bushwhackers; the pillars of Copperheadism in the House, take umbrage at the sight and the name of New England, and abuse the New England spirit with all their coppery might. Well they may. So did Satan hate and abuse light.

Patriot Stanton is earnestly at work concerning the organization of Africo-Americans on a mighty scale; busy against him, likewise, are the intriguers, the traitors, the cavillers, the Sewardites and the McClellanites, all being of the same kidney. Seward sighs for McClellan. But Stanton will override the muddy storm. He has at his side men as pure, energetic and devoted as Watson, a patriot without a flaw.

Stanton surrounds himself and selects young men--as far as he can, he crowds out the remains of Scott, so tenderly protected by Lincoln. Could he only have swept out the rest of the old fogies! Undoubtedly these young men in the War Department would give new life to it.

_February 6._--The people at large are at a loss to find the cause of the recent disasters. The general axiom is, "we are not a military nation." Neither is the South. But here they forget that every great or small effect has its--not only--cause, but several causes. Many such causes have been repeatedly pointed out. Old routine in military organization stands foremost. Few, if any, understand wherein consists the proper organization of an army, and most have notions reaching back sixty years. The medical and surgical bureaus are obsolete. Governor Andrew of Massachusetts, who is always on the right side, and with him many young men, insisted upon organizing the above services as they are organized in the Continental armies of Europe. But even in the Senate prevailed the respect for dusty, rusty, domestic tradition. The few changes forced by the outcry of the people cure not the evil. Skeletons and not men are at work, and if they are not skeletons they are leeches of the government and of the people's blood.

Thus likewise, when the organizations of the staffs was discussed, no one had the first notion of the nature and duties of a staff; and the military authorities were as ignorant as the civilians. Of course a McClellan, then a Halleck, Meigs, Hitchcock, etc., could not disperse the fog. Many Congressmen were thunderstruck by the display of words which, as they were purely technical terms, the Congressmen in question could not understand. Others sought for guidance in the Staff of Wellington, and thus oddly but unmistakably proved themselves completely in the dark as to the difference between the personal staff of the commander of an army, and the Staff of that Army itself. And all this in a country of the most rapid movement and progress, and amongst a people which unhesitatingly adopts and adapts to its own needs and welfare almost every novelty from almost every part of the world. The great fault committed by the People is its too great respect for false authorities and false prophets.

The so-called honest Conservatives have exercised and still continue to exercise a most fatal influence on public affairs, and especially on what is called the domestic policy. These same "honest Conservatives" are more dangerous than the out-spoken Copperheads; more dangerous, perhaps, than all the friends of slavery and foes of the Union combined. These "honest Conservatives" have contrived to surround themselves with a halo of honesty and respectability. But they as cordially hate and dread every vivid light and vigorous progress as the traitors themselves do. Those Conservatives opposed every vigorous measure. They spoke tenderly of the "misguided brethren" in the South, and took their own servile and blundering, though quite possibly sincere fancies, for actual and tangible facts. The honest Conservatives will support whatever is slow, double-dealing, and, therefore, conservative. The honest Conservatives took McClellan to their honest hearts, and not one of them has any clear notion of military affairs, and still less can any of them fathom the awful depth of McClellan's military criminality. I repeat what I said in the first volume of my Diary: McClellan and his tail fell, not on account of their Democratism, or their pro-slavery creed, but because McClellan repeatedly displayed all the worst qualities of a thoroughly unsoldierly commander. No one would have uttered a word of censure if McClellan with his hundred and eighty thousand men had surrounded the thirty to forty thousand rebels in Centreville and Manassas in the winter of 1861-2, and taken some nobler trophies than camp manure and maple guns! The honest Conservatives attack and hate Stanton, yet not one of them has any notion whatever of Stanton's action towards McClellan. Stanton would have been the first to raise McClellan sky-high if McClellan had preferred to fight instead of reposing in his bed in Washington, and then in various muds. Such is your knowledge of this and of all other public affairs, O respectable soul and spiritless body of honest Conservatives! Historians of this country! collect the names of the _honest_ Conservatives, but expose them not to the abomination of coming generations.

_February 7._--The Sanitary Commission, with all its branches and subdivisions, is among the noblest manifestations of what can be done by a free people, and how private enterprise of intelligent, patriotic and unselfish men can confer benefit. Nor must the praise of that great work be limited to men. Warm-hearted gentlewomen also have done their share in it. The Sanitary Commission is one of the best out-croppings of self-government, and does honor to the people, and softens and ameliorates the warlike roughness of the times.

The Sanitary Commission marks a new era in the history of genuine and not bogus and merely verbal philanthropy, and its spontaneity and expansion were only possible in free, and therefore humane and enlightened America.

_February 8._--Mr. Seward is busily at work endeavoring to crush the radicals, and to make the Emancipation Proclamation a mere sheet of waste paper. All that is mean and nasty, all that is reeking and foul with all kinds of corruptions, takes Seward for its standard-bearer. The so-called radical press aids Seward with all its might.

_February 9._--Gen. Casey adopts some of my ideas and suggestions, which I discussed with him. Gen. Casey is honestly at work, and the new tactics will be in print.

Stanton would wish to establish a thorough military camp on a large scale, for organizing Africo-Americans. But the higher powers are against it. Virginia, the most populous slave state, the nursery of slaves, must, scorpion-like, be surrounded with glowing contraband camps. What a splendid position for such a camp is Harper's Ferry under the shadow of immortal John Brown!

A few days ago, Mr. Lincoln was full of joy because the defences of Washington are in excellent condition. Thus the country will learn with joy that the----spade is still at work, that the military curse hurled by Scott and McClellan is still influencing the operation of the war, that Halleck is the worthy continuator of his predecessors, that Mr. Lincoln's fears and uneasiness about the fate of the city of Washington are slowly, slowly assuaged, that the President's fancy is nursed, that the construction of the extensive fortifications around the capital is still continued, that new forts are continually erected, that the fear of an attack on Washington is still paramount, and that to-day--sixty to seventy thousand troops are kept idle in these old and new forts--when Rosecrans has no succor, when Texas is lost, and when the whole rebel region trembles under the tread of savage hordes.

Through one of its clerks, the State Department intends to sue me for libel, contained, as they say, in the first volume of my _Diary_. Well, great masters, if you swallow me, you may not digest me. Let us try.[2]

[Footnote 2: I must here record that Mr. Carlisle, the eminent lawyer in Washington, although in every respect opposed to my political and social views, behaved, in this affair, as a thorough man of honor. I am sorry that on a similar former occasion, not in Washington, my political friends showed themselves not Carlisles.]

_February 10._--... mens agitat molem ... oh, could I only believe that such is the case with Mr. Lincoln, how devoted I could become, and loyal to him, according to the new theory of the lickspittles and politicians!

_February 10._--Resolute Senator Grimes did what was the duty of Sumner to have done long ago. Grimes presented resolutions relative to the mission of Mercier to Richmond, a mission allowed, almost authorized by Mr. Seward. Mercier cannot be blamed, and his veracity is supported by the fact that Lord Lyons was at once informed of the whole transaction, and Lord Lyons is to be believed. Seward will play the innocent, and take his refuge in the god of--lies.

_February 12._--In his answer to the Senate, Mr. Seward gives to Mercier the lie direct. It will be rich if Mercier stands square.

_February 12._--Congress draws to its close. Lincoln accumulates powers, responsibilities, and hereafter perhaps curses, sufficient to break the turtle on which stands the elephant that sustains the Sanscrit world.