Sir William Howard Russell

“ The North is to South Carolina a corrupt and evil thing, to which for long years she has been bound by burning chains, while monopolists and manufacturers fed on her tender limbs. She has been bound in a Maxentian union to the object she loathes. New England is to her the incarnation of moral and political wickedness and social corruption. It is the source of everything which South Carolina hates, and of the torrents of free thought and taxed manufactures, of Abolitionism and of fillibustering, which have flooded the land. ”

“ The shore is as flat as a pancake—a belt of white sand, covered with drift logs and timber, and with a pine forest; not a house or human habitation of any sort to be seen for forty miles, from Fort Morgan to the entrance of the harbor of Pensacola; cheerless, miserable, full of swamps, the haunts of alligators, cranes, snakes, and pelicans; with lagoons, such as the Perdida, swelling into inland seas; deep buried in pine woods, and known only to wild creatures and to the old fillibusters,—swarming with mosquitoes. ”

“ The river at Savannah is as broad as the Thames at Gravesend, and resembles that stream very much in the color of its waters and the level natures of its shores. Rice-fields bound it on either side, as far down as the influence of the fresh water extends, and the eye wanders over a flat expanse of mud and water and green oziers and rushes, till its search is arrested on the horizon by the unfailing line of forest. In the fields here and there are the whitewashed, square, wooden huts in which the slaves dwell, looking very like the beginnings of the camp in the Crimea. ”

“ Once, as a large fish came gamboling along the surface close at hand, a great gleam of white shot up in the waves beneath, and a boiling whirl marked with a crimson pool, which gradually melted off in the tide, showed where a monster shark had taken down a part of his breakfast. “That’s a ground-sheark,” quoth the skipper. “There’s quite a many of them about here.” Porpoises passed by in a great hurry for Pensacola, and now and then a turtle showed his dear little head above the enviable fluid which he honored with his presence. ”

“ Whoever raises it hereafter, if it be not decided now, must expect to meet the deadly animosity which is displayed toward the North. The success of the South—if it can succeed—must lead to complications and results in other parts of the world for which neither it nor Europe is now prepared. Of one thing there can be no doubt—a Slave State cannot long exist without a slave-trade. The poor whites who will have won the fight will demand their share of the spoils. The land is abundant, and all that is wanted to give them fortunes is a supply of slaves. ”

“ In a space of the floor unoccupied by machinery some fifteen women and as many men were assembled, and four couples were dancing a kind of Irish jig to the music of the negro musicians—a double shuffle and thumping ecstasy, with loose elbows, pendulous paws, and angulated knees, heads thrown back, and backs arched inwards—a glazed eye, intense solemnity of mien, worthy of the minuet in Don Giovanni. At this time of year there is no work done in the sugar-house, but when the crushing and boiling are going on the labor is intense, and all the hands work in gangs night and day ”

“ A number of men were, however, busily engaged in throwing up the sand, and arms gleamed amid some tents pitched around the solitary wooden shed in the centre. A schooner lay at the wharf, laden with two guns and sand-bags, and as we passed through the narrow channel several men in military uniform, who were on board, took their places in a boat which pushed off for them, and were conveyed to their tiny station, of which one shell would make a dust-heap. The Mobilians are fortifying themselves as best they can, and seem, not unadvisedly, jealous of gunboats and small war steamers. ”

“ Assuredly the New England demon who has been persecuting the South until its intolerable cruelty and insolence forced her, in a spasm of agony, to rend her chains asunder. The New Englander must have something to persecute, and as he has hunted down all his Indians, burnt all his witches, and persecuted all his opponents to the death, he invented Abolitionism as the sole resource left to him for the gratification of his favorite passion. ”

“ At the present minute there is nothing to induce a stranger to believe that an effectual resistance could be offered to a vigorous aggressive movement from the South, supposing the means to make it existed either in the adhesion or permission of the Border States. The North, however, is strong in its population, in its wealth, and in its calm. In the hands of the Border States are all the arbitraments of revolution or union, of war or peace. By an unmeaning euphemism the revolution of the South has been called Secession ”

“ There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees. That hatred has been swelling for years, till it is the very life-blood of the State. It has set South Carolina to work steadily to organize her resources for the struggle which she intended to provoke, if it did not come in the course of time. ”

“ There is an air of quaint simplicity and old-fashioned quiet about Georgetown, refreshingly antagonistic to the bustle and tumult of most American cities, and one can, without much stretch of imagination, fancy the old loyal burghers in cocked hats, small-swords, and long, square-cut sober suits, stalking solemnly down its streets, rejoicing in the progress of the city which recalled the name of the King and the old country, or hastening down to the river’s side to hear the tidings brought from home by the Bristol bark that has just anchored in the stream. ”

“ A government may be so elastic as, like an overstretched india-rubber band, to have no compressive force whatever; and that very quality is claimed for the Federal Government as excellence by some eminent men whom I have met, and who maintained the thesis, that the United States Government has no right whatever to assert its authority by force over the people of any State whatever; that, based on the consent of all, it ceases to exist whenever there is dissent,—a doctrine which no one need analyze who understands what are the real uses and ends of Government. ”

“ As the Commodore entered the Redan the guns of the fort broke out into a long salute, and the band at the gate struck up almost as noisy a welcome. Inside, the parade presented a scene of life and animation very unlike the silence of the city we had left. Men were busy clearing out the casemates, rolling away stores and casks of ammunition and provisions, others were at work at the gin and shears, others building sand-bag traverses to guard the magazine doors, as though expecting an immediate attack. ”

“ How would his faith be disturbed when he learnt from some merchant prince that universal suffrage, in its practical working in that city, had handed over the municipal government to the most ignorant, if not the most unprincipled men; that it flooded and submerged the landmarks of respectability and station by a tide of barbarous immigrant foreigners; that the press had substituted licentiousness for liberty; and that the evils done in New York by these agencies afflicted the whole State! ”

“ From every place I touched at along the Mississippi, a large proportion of the population has gone forth to fight, or is preparing to do so. The whispers which rise through the storm are few and feeble. Some there are who sigh for the peace and happiness they have seen in England. But they cannot seek those things; they must look after their property. Each man maddens his neighbor by desperate resolves, and threats, and vows. Their faith is in Jefferson Davis’s strength, and in the necessities and weakness of France and England. ”

“ Leaving with regret the veranda which commanded so enchanting a foreground of flowers, rare shrubbery, and bearded live oaks, with each graceful sylvan outline distinctly penciled upon the waters of the river, we enter the house, and are reminded by its low-browed, old-fashioned rooms, of the country houses yet to be found in parts of Ireland or the Scottish border, with additions made by the luxury and love of foreign travel of more than one generation of educated Southern planters. ”

“ Even the good cheer and the comfort of the General Quitman could not reconcile me to the eternal beating of steam drums, blowing whistles, bumpings at landings, and the general oppression of levees, clearings, and plantations, which marked the course of the river, and I was not sorry next morning when Vicksburg came in sight on the left bank of the giant stream—a city on a hill, not very large, besteepled, becupolaed, large-hoteled. Here lives a man who has been the pioneer of hotels in the West, and who has now established himself in a big caravanserai, which he rules in a curious fashion. ”

“ These statesmen believe that, like most revolutions, the secession is the work of the minority, and that a strong party of reaction exists, which will come to the front by and by, “expel the traitors,” and return triumphantly with their repentant States into the bosom of the Union. The gentlemen who hold these views have either a more accurate knowledge than the public, are better read in the signs of the times, or have more faith in the efficacy of inaction on the love of Americans for the Union, than is possessed by most of the outer world. ”

“ The streets are crowded with them; the steamers and the railway carriages, the public departments, the steps of the senators’ dwellings, the lobbies of houses, the President’s mansion, are crowded with them. From all parts of the vast Union, not even excepting the South, they have come fast as steam or wind and waves could bear them to concentrate in one focus on the devoted head of the President all the myriad influences which, by letter, testimonial, personal application, unceasing canvass, and sleepless solicitation, they can collect together. ”

“ The third party is formed of those who are inclined to take the South at their word; to cut the cord at once, believing that the loss would be a gain, and that the Southern Confederation would inflict on itself a most signal retribution for what they consider as the crime of breaking up the Union. Practically, so far as I have gone, I have failed to meet many people who really exhibited any passionate attachment to the Union for its own sake, or who pretended to be animated by any strong feelings of regard or admiration for the Government of the United States in itself. ”

“ But most impartial people, at least in New York, are of opinion that the South has shaken the dust off her feet, and will never enter the portals of the Union again. She is confident in her own destiny. She feels strong enough to stand alone. She believes her mission is one of extension and conquest—her leaders are men of singular political ability and undaunted resolution. She has but to stretch forth her hand, as she believes, and the Gulf becomes an American lake closed by Cuba. ”

“ The industry, the capital of the North increased with enormous rapidity, under the influence of cheap labor and manufacturing ingenuity and enterprise, in the villages which swelled into towns, and the towns which became cities, under the unenvious eye of the South. She, on the contrary, toiled on slowly, clearing forests and draining swamps to find new cotton-grounds and rice-fields, for the employment of her only industry and for the development of her only capital—“involuntary labor.” ”

“ The gray swamp yields to an open savannah, beyond which, upon the left, a straggling line of sparse trees skirts the left bank of the Mississippi, and soon after the broad expanse of Lake Pontchartrain appears within gunshot of our right, only separated from the road by one hundred yards or more of rush-covered prairie, which seems but a feeble barrier against the caprices of so extensive a sheet of water subject to the influences of wind and tide. ”