The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 50, December, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 50, December, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
There is a little inconsistency in the English oracles in this respect;
for, while they cannot conceal a kind of sympathy with the Southern
Rebels in what is supposed to be their war upon democratic institutions,
they tell us that they would heartily espouse our cause, if we would but
proclaim a crusade against Slavery. Suppose the Squires of England had
got up a rebellion because societies had been formed for the abolition
of the Corn-Laws; which would the "Times" have gone for putting down
first, the rebellion or the laws? England professes not to be able to
understand the principles of this wicked, this unholy war, as she calls
it. Yet she was not so slow to understand the necessity of putting down
the Irish Insurrection of 1848, or the Indian Rebellion ten years later.
She thinks it impossible for the Government of the United States to
subdue and hold provinces so vast as the Cotton States of America; yet
she neither foreboded nor as yet has found any impracticability in
renewing and retaining her hold on the vaster provinces of British
India,--provinces inhabited, all of them, by races alien in blood,
religion, and manners, and many by a population greatly exceeding that
of our Southern States, brave, warlike, and, to some extent, trained in
European tactics. To have abandoned India would have been to surrender
the greatness of England. English writers and speakers, in discussing
our affairs, overlook wholly the fact that a rebellion may be crushed by
anything except force of arms. Among a people of the same lineage and
the same language, but yesterday contented under the same Constitution,
and in an age when a victory in the stock-market is of more consequence
than successes in the field, political and economical necessities may be
safely reckoned on as slow, but effective, allies of the old order of
things. The people of this country are too much used to sudden and
seemingly unaccountable political revolutions not to be able to forfeit
their consistency without any loss of self-respect; and the rapidity
with which the Southern Rebellion was forced up to its present
formidable proportions, mainly by party management, is not unlikely to
find its parallel in suddenness of collapse. But whether this prove to
be the fact or not, nay, even if the reëstablishment of the Union had
been hopeless from the first, a government which should have abandoned
its capital, which should have flinched from the first and plainest duty
of self-preservation, which should have admitted by a cowardly surrender
that force was law, that treason was constitutional, and fraud
honorable, would have deserved and received the contempt of all
civilized nations, of England among the first.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account