Book: Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862

V >> Various >> Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862




'It's always so,' said a fat man next to Caper, 'these _villani_ take
the bread out of our mouths; but _ecco_! there is another one who has
the _terno_; blessed be the Madonna, there is a third! Oh! _diavolo_,
the _villano_ will only have one third of the _terno_; and may he die of
apoplexy!'

A vender of refreshments passing along, the fat man stopped him, and
purchased a _baioccho's_ worth of--what?

Pumpkin-seeds! These are extensively eaten in Rome, as well as the seeds
of pine-cones, acorns, and round yellow chick-peas; these supply the
place occupied by ground-nuts in our more favored land.

There is this excitement about the tombolas in the Piazza Navona, that
occasionally a panic seizes the crowd, and in the rush of people to
escape from the square, some have their pockets picked, and some are
trampled down, never to rise again. Fortunately for Caper, no stampede
took place on Advent Sunday, so that he lived to attend another grand
tombola in the Villa Borghese.

This was held in the spring-time, and the promise of the ascension of a
balloon added to the attractions of the lottery. To enter the Villa, you
had to purchase a tombola-ticket, whereas, in the Piazza Navona, this
was unnecessary. At one end of the amphitheatre of the villa, under the
shade of the ilex-trees, a platform was erected, where the numbers were
called out and the awards given.

Caper, Roejean, and another French artist, not of the French Academy,
named Achille Legume, assisted at this entertainment. Legume was a very
pleasant companion, lively, good-natured, with a decided penchant for
the pretty side of humanity, and continually haunted with the idea that
a princess was to carry him off from his mistress in spectacles, Madame
Art, and convey him to the land of Cocaigne, where they never make, only
buy, paintings--of which articles, in parenthesis, Monsieur Achille had
a number for sale.

'Roejean,' said Legume, 'do you notice that distinguished lady on the
platform; isn't she the Princess Faniente? She certainly looked at _me_
very peculiarly a few minutes since.'

'It is the Princess,' answered Roejean, 'and I also noticed, a few
minutes since, when I was on the other side of the circus, that she
looked at ME with an air.'

'Don't quarrel,' spoke Caper,'she probably regards you both equally, for
--she squints.'

This answer capsized Achille, who having a small red rose-bud in his
button-hole, hoped that at a distance he might pass for a chevalier of
the Legion of Honor, and had conquered something, say something noble.

A wandering cigar-seller, with _zigarri scelti_, next demanded their
attention, and Roejean commenced an inspection of the selected cigars,
which are made by government, and sold at the fixed price of one and a
half _baiocchi_ each; even at this low price, the stock of the
tobacco-factory paid thirteen per cent under Antonelli's direction.

'Antonelli makes a pretty fair cigar,' said, 'but I wish he would wrap
the ends a little tighter. I'm sorry to hear he is going out of the
business.'

'Why, he would stay in,' answered Caper, 'but what with baking all the
bread for Rome, and attending to all the fire-wood sold, and trying to
make Ostia a seaport, and having to fight Monsieur About, and looking
after his lotteries and big pawnbroker's shop, and balancing himself on
the end of a very sharp French bayonet, his time is so occupied, he can
not roll these cigars so well as they ought to be rolled.... But they
have called out number forty-nine; you've got it, Legume, I remember you
wrote it down. Yes, there it is.'

'Forty-nine!'

'I wonder they dare call out '49 in this villa; or have the people
forgotten the revolution already, forgotten that this spot was made
ready for a battleground for liberty. The public censor knows his
business; give the Romans bread, and the circus or tombola, they will be
content--forever?'

'_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 Legume 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 Legume, '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.

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