The Press.
London, England, 1858-03-06 00:00:00

THE PRESS, MARCH 6, 1858.

a fragment struck the Brigadier-General on the upper
part of the right thigh near the hip, inflicting a fearful
woun4. Captain Wilson, who was standing alongside the
bed with one knee on it at the time, reading a memoran-
dum to Sir Henry, was knocked down by filling bricks
and slightly wounded in the back by a piece of shell. Sir
H. Lawrence's nephew, Mr. Lawrence, had an equally nar-
row escape, being on another bed close by : he was not
hurt; the fourth individual in the room was a native
servant, who lost one of his feet by a fragment of the
shell. It was at once pronounced that Sir Henry Law-
rence's wound was mortal, and his sufferings were great.

After forty-eight hours' intense suffering this
great and gond man breathed his last, to the
profound grief of the whole garrison. There
was no time, however, for mourning. The
rebels were pouring in " a perfect hurricane
" of round shot, jinjal and musketry," and at
times the lire was " terrific." Their marksmen,
too, were good ; they had loopholed every
house within fifty yards of the defences, and
threw in such a storm of shells and carcases,
and logs of wood shod with iron, that a head
or a hand dare not be exposed for a moment
by day. For ten days this hurricane of fire
lasted, an assault was made and repulsed, and
then the attack subsided into a regular siege
and a determined defence. The confusion
consequent upon so unexpectedly sudden a
siege soon settled down, but the garrison were
lamentably weak and ill provided either
with stores or clothing. The appearance of
the officers was soon scarcely in accordance
with the regulations :
Owing to the necessity for blowing up the Muchee
Rhawun, the officers brought in with them nothing but
the clothes they wore. Many others in this garrison had
lost everything when their bungalows in cantonments were
burnt ; and a few better off had shared their wardrobes
with them. As time went on, however, clothes wore oat,
and there were no means of providing others; and by this
time officers might have been seen wearing the most ex-
traordinary costumes ; few, if any, had any semblance of a
military uniform, and very many were in shirts, trousers,
and slippers only ; one gallant civilian having found an
old billiard•table cloth, had contrived to make himself a
kind of loose coat out of it, while an officer wore a shirt
made out of a floor-cloth. All carried muskets, and were
accoutred like the soldiers.

On the 20th of July the enemy sprung their
first mine against the Redan battery, and then
under a terrific fire of musketry and round
shot made their first serious assault. They
were repulsed with loss, and, disheartened at
the result, contented themselves for some days
with vigorous mining. The incessant hard-
ships of the defence now began to tell upon
the garrison, while the close confinement and
the scanty and unwholesome food seriously
affected the health of the women and children.
On the sth of July the Staff Officer writes, sick-
ness was " spreading rapidly" among the gar-
risen, painful boils broke out upon the
body, fever and dysentery struck down the
men, while smallpox and want of
nourishing food destroyed the children and
sick. The supplies were rapidly diminishing,
and the stench of the dead bullocks and horses,
which they had neither time nor strength to
drag away or to bury, was " frightful," and so
deadly at one particular spot that no man
kept guard there without suffering fever.
Their hopes of relief were dying out. On the
29th of July the sound of heavy firing in the
direction of Cawnporo revived for a day their
spirits, but it drifted away, and no help came.
What would they have done if at that moment
they had been teld that two months more
must elapse before relief would reach them ?
And so the days passed; hoping against hope,
suffering every privation, men and women
lived and. laboured on, sternly resolved.
Each day passed away, writes the Stall
Officer, much like its predecessor, with the
same amount of cannonading and musketry
fire. Each night brought the funeral of sonic
dear friend or cherished companion.
The rebels sprung mines and made
desperate assaults, to be countermined
and repulsed. At one time they breached
the wall, but it was speedily retrenched ;
at another, they effected a lodg-
ment so close to our lines that they thrust in
bamboos with lighted straw at one end, in the
vain hope of firing what they dare not seize.
In less than twenty-four hours they were
driven out, their bamboos burned, and their
guns spiked. Courage and endurance, how-
ever, have their limits. The terrible inequality
of foree which existed was beginning to have
effect about the middle of September. The
provisions were failing, and the garrison, never

231

disheartened, were becoming so thinned with
death and sickness that an end of the drama
was rapidly anproachitig. The sufferings of
all—of the sick and wounded and of the
women—were beyond endurance, while the
rebels, slowly but surely, were closing in
upon the defences. At last, on the 22nd
of September, intelligence reached them that
Outrank and Havelock had crossed the Ganges.
The effect was electrical. The hopes of all
revived, the sick and wounded brightened up,
and the most intense excitement reigned
throughout the garrison. The next day the
sound of guns was heard in the direction of
Cawnpore. "About eleven a.m. nearly all
" sourAl of firing had ceased, but increased agi-
" tation was visible among the people in tho
" town, in which two large fires were seen.
" An hour later, the sound of musketry and
" the smoke of guns was distinctly perceived
" within the limits of the city "

All the garrison was on the alert, and the excitement
amongst many of the officers and soldiers was quite
painful to witness. At 1.30 p.m. many of the people of
the city commenced leaving, with bundles of clothes, Sze.,
on their heads, and took the direction of cantonments
across the different bridges. At 2 p.m. armed men and
sepoys commenced to follow them, accompanied by large
bodies of irregular cavalry. Every gun and mortar that
could be brought to bear on the evidently retreating
enemy was fired as fast as possible for at least an hour
and a half. The enemy's bridge of boats had evidently
been destroyed and broken away, for many were seen
swimming across the river, most of them cavalry, with
their horses' bridles in their hands. Strange to relate,
during all this apparent panic the guns of the enemy in
position all round as kept up a heavy cannonade, and
the matchlockmen or riflemen never ceased firing from
their respective loopholes.
At 4 p.m. report was made that some officers dressed
in shooting-coats and solah caps, a regiment of Ewe.
peens in blue pantaloons and shirts, and a bullock bat-
tery were seen near Mr. Martin's house and the Motee
Muhal. At 5 p.m. volleys of musketry, rapidly growing
louder, were heard in the city. But soon the firing of a
Minis ball over our heads gave notice of the still nesr3r
approach of our friends, of whom as yet little or nothing
had been seen, though the enemy were to be seen firing
heavily on them from many of the roofs of the houses.
Five minutes later, and our troops were seen fighting their
way through one of the principal streets, and, though men
fell at almost every step, yet nothing could withstand the
headlong gallantry of our reinforcements. Once fairly
seen, all our doubts and fears regarding them were ended;
and then the garrison's long pent-up feelings of anxiety
and suspense burst forth in a succession of deafening
cheers. From every pit, trench, and battery—from behind
the sandbags piled on shattered houses—from every post
still held by a few gallant spirits—rose cheer on cheer—
even from the hospital ' Many of the wounded crawled
forth to join in that glad shout of welcome to those who
had so bravely come to our assistance. It was a moment
never to be forgotten.

Soon all the rearguard and heavy guns were inside our
position, and then ensued a scene which baffles description.
And so ended the second act of the siege of
Lucknow. The Staff Officer does not bring
us down further; hut we commend his diary,
if it be necessary to commend the diary of such
days, to the attention of our readers, not for
its vivid descriptions or its brilliant antitheses,
but for its unostentatious relation of facts, re•
corded with a degree of distinctness that
vouches for the authenticity of the writer's
statements.

The Life and Times of Aaron Burr, Vice-
President of the United States.. By J.
Parton. London : Sampson Low and Co.

THE subject of this American biography is
familiar to us by the tradition of his appear-
ances in London society, as well as by the
allusions to him in the writings of Dumont,
Bentham, and some letters of Charles Lamb.
Ho was an extraordinary person, though not
of the kind fitted for hero-worship. Many of
the statements in this large volume, and not a
few of its incidents, deserve to be held in
English opinion as " coarse " and " vulgar;"
but as an American piece of biography, and as
a contribution to the " domestic history of the
Americans " in past times, the book has some
literary value. It testifies strongly to the ex-
aggeration of character and vulgar violence of
manners which are apt to spring up in a mere
democracy. In a mixed Constitution ambi-
tion is regulated by established rules, and the
presumption of gross obtrusiveness is repres-
sed. In the canvassing for power to which a
community like that of the United States is
subjected there is danger of society being
vitiated by what Dryden in one of his dramns
has called

that sewn
Which bubbles npmost when a nation boils.

232

The constant duels, the extravagant clamour,
and the violent collisions which occur in
American politics are to be traced in a great
measure to the pressur6 resulting from per-
petually appealing to the opinion of the multi-
tude. We know that there are disgraces
enough in some of our British electioneering,
but those scandals are confined to the mere
underlings of politics : in America many of
the leading persons and chiefs of parties are
sullied by the furious and vulgar strife in-
separably attendant upon unbalanced demo-
cracies.

Colonel Aaron Burr, the subject of this
volume, was a considerable person in his
time, and his memoirs illustrate only too
faithfully some of the preceding reflections.
In the Army of the Revolution he held the
rank of a lieutenant-colonel, and he was sub-
sequently a senator and Vice-President of the
United States. In American electioneering
Colonel Burr played a stormy and conspi-
cuous part. He aspired to be Governor of
New York, and was a prominent performer in
days characterised by the biographer as " the
era of bad feeling." He killed Alexander
Hamilton in a notorious duel, which left an
indelible stain on his character ; and
he went through a variety of incidents of
most opposite nature. He was a man of
free opinions, and reminds us of one of the
nautical desperadoes in Cooper's novels apply-
ing himself to democratic politics, and ex-
pending on the platform energies more appro-
priate to the quarter-deck. The honours of
biography in England are not accorded to
characters of the Wilkes and Feargus O'Connor
type ; but such is not the case in American
literature. The 1 muds between notoriety
and celebt ity, beta; ('en clamour and opinion,
are there not, u'oarly mirked ; and the remarks
of Mr. John Stuart Mill. in his review of De
Tocqueville's " Democracy," that " America
" wants a leisure class," is strikingly con-
firmed by the sort of books which find large
circulation in the United States.
But we cannot deny that a work of the
kind before us has some historical interest
in showing us the transitions through which
American democracy has passed. As yet the
history of the last fifty years in the States has
not found an adequate literary expositor; and
certainly there are many curious and striking
details in the volume before us which make
us wish to see more of the internal political
life of the Americans.
Aaron Burr was the natural grandson of the
celebrated divine, Jonathan Edwards, the
author of a well-known work on " The Free-
dom of the Will." His father, President Burr,
married Esther, the third daughter of Jona-
than Edwards. The Burrs themselves came,
it is supposed, from Germany, and Aaron Burr
had a great many remarkable qualities. But
the biographer has spun out his life too much,
and we cannot accept Mr. Parton's literary
faculty as adequate to the task of biography.
In one place Mr. Parton writes of the " subtle
"feminine (!) intellect and resolute will of Jona-
" than Edwards " (p 30) ; some of the common-
places of college composition he accepts as
original ; he speaks of " Miss Burnett's novels ;"
and many other touches record his free-and-
easy mode of composition. He writes :
During the summer of 1787, all minds were fixed upon
the proceedings of the convention that was forming the
Constitution under which we now live. The science of
government never had such a thorough discussion as it
then received at the hands of editors, pamphleteers, and
wayside politicians.

" The science of government " receiving "a the-
" rough discussion" from " wayside" politi •
cians is an Americanism. Scattered through
the volume arc many interesting testimonies
to the class of American politicians at various
periods. Aaron Burr himself was equally
conspicuous as a colonel in the Revolution
Army, as a barrister, and a platform politician.
His vogue in politics was in times when the
United States were ruled by the three impor-
tant connections of the Clintous, the Schuylers,
and the Livingstons . Mr. Parton, after cha-
racterising them, says :

These were the three families. The Clinton. had
power, the Livingstone had numbers, the Schuylers had
Hamilton. Neither of the three was strong enough to
overcome the other two united, and any two united could
triumph over the third.

He might have added that so rapidly do f4mi-