The Express.
London, England, 1862-03-07 00:00:00

AT.ILISOCAN IIiDIL

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LONDON, FRIDAY. MARCH 7.

Tnc authentic essounts of the sanitary events of
February 16th in Western Tennessee confirm the
startling general announcements which preceded'
them, and show the immense importance of
the Federal successes in th►t part of the Union.
The unconditional surrender of 15,004) Confide-

rates, with horse*, guns, and baggage, is a fact
which tells the whole story—that is, wherever it

is not suppressed, as we saw in a remarkable in-
stance yesterday, and a private imagination of
" conditions exacted " by the defeated party put

in its stes4L

It appeals that Genera d'art

after capturing Fort Henry, CM the Tenneseee River,
on the bth, appeared before Fort Donebion„ standing
_ _ .

on the Cumberland River, a dozen miles east of
the first-named fort, on the 13th of February. The
Confederates appear to have chosen a very strong
position on two great hills, with their fort on the
lower ground near the river. Their forces are
stated to have numbered from 20,000 to 25,000
men. Those of the Federalists are variously
stated at from 30,000 to 40,000 ; the disparity
of numbers being in a great measure compensated
to the Confederates by the advantages of their

position.
The Federal flotilla took • brief but I
gallant part in the attack, bat suffered so severely I
from the accurate fire of the enemy's heavy guns
that after an hour's close fighting it withdrew die-
abled, with the loss of fifty•four men. The Gen.
federate troops fought with credit, and being well
entrenched indicted on the Union troops a loss
which their Generals admit to be very heavy.
They appear to have expected reinforcements from
Bowling Green, still further to the East, but after
three days' fighting, during which positions and
batteries were repeatedly lost and retaken on
each side, the fortune of war showed itself so de-
cidedly for the Federalists, that General FLOYD,
who is " wanted" at Washington to explain some
little matters, quietly abandoned his command in
the night, and left his fellows to obtain the best
conditions they could. These proved to be no
conditions at all, for when General /locum
proposed an armistice and the appointment di
Commissioners to draw up terms of capitulation,
he received from General GRANT the answer—
" No terms except unconditional and immediate
" surrender can be accepted. I propose to move
" immediately on your works." To which Ge-
neral Breit/vex was constrained to reply that not-
withstanding the brilliant success of the Confede-
rate arms, he was compelled to accept those
" ungenerous and unchivalrous" terms.
The events of the campaign which has just
opened have so far justified the predictions we
have ventured on from the beginning. The
Northern forces are at last organised, as well as
they can be organized without regularly trained
officers, and they have begun to move, and
wherever the Southern line is touched it gives
way. Those who have been assuring us for twelve
weary months that the Southern army were • sort
of mixture of the tiger and the bulldog, who might
be exterminated but would never submit, while
the Union soldiers were little better than curs
and mongrels, must have some difficulty in recon-
ciling their theory with recent events. When
7.otuvorria made his onslaught on General
Taints', his forces defended themselves with
great feebleness, as is proved by the return
of only 130 killed out of a Federal divi-
sion of 10,000 strong, and then retired in great
disorder upon one of the strongest positions in the
West. Their camp was entrenched on • high
"bluff" over the Cumberland River. The earth-
works were as good as six months of preparation
could make them ; they were fully armed with
artillery of the heaviest kind, were fully pro-
visioned, and the garrison sou well butted. There
was no reason why they should not have been
held for a week or ten days against treble the
force General Thomas had at command. If they
were animated by the spirit for which their friends
here ask us to give them credit, they might have
remained there until this hour. But they did not
remain one night They left before daybreak,
and took nothing with them but the clothes they
had on. Their papers, arms, provisions, and
stores of all kinds were abandoned ; and so
far from preferring death to retreat, they
did not even kill or drive off their bag-
gage mules, but allowed 1,200 of them to stand
ready for capture by the enemy. The earlier affairs
in Western Virginia were marked by the same
horror of desperate measures. Seven hundred
men laid down their arms at one time to General
WCirt.i.a., after two actions, in which the
loss on both sides wastrifling in the extreme. At
Hatteras, seven hundred men more surrendered
two forts and themselves, after a two hours' cannon-
ade, in which their total leas was sixteen ! More
recently, Fort Henry, in Tennessee, a heavily
armed earthwork, supported by 5,000 men out-
side, was given up to five gunboat., ►fter • bom-
bardment of one hour and twenty minutes, the
force outside having decamped previously. At
Roanoke Island, works armed with forty
rifled guns of enormous calibre, with the ap-
proaches by water obstructed by piles, and de-
fended by a tle,•t of ten guns each, and a garri-
son of 5,000 men, with swamps and brushwood
around all the redoubts, are bombarded for one
day by a small fleet of light vessels,
and stormed the next morning at daybreak
by 10,000 men, with • loss of 40 killed and 150
or 200 wounded, and the gunboats are all de-
stroyed or captured. The fate of Fort Donelson
is another instance of the extent to which South-
erners share the very pardonable and very human
desire "to lieu to fight another day." Since
MACK laid down his arms with 40,000 men at

Min, there have been few instances of such whole-
sale capitulation as this last one in Tennessee, and
we have not the slightest doubt that the coming
three months will add others to the list.

We do not dwell on these facts as proofs that
the Southerners are more wanting in courage or
tenacity than men of other countries, but as proofs
that they are neither braver nor more persevering
than other people ; that though they may do sa
much as some have done to achieve their inde-
pendence, they will do, and are doing no more,
and are not doing nearly so much as a great many
have done. They have just furnished in another
direction another striking indication of the valuo
of those desperate resolves which some of
our contemporaries have been so assiduous
in presenting to the English public as
a good basis for commercial calculations.
We have been enured until we were tired of hear-
ing it repeated, that not a pound of cotton would
be either sent down to the porta, or be allowed to
be exported, until the blockade was mimed along the
whole line. This heroic resolution was announced
to the world, with the usual accompaniment of
oaths and asseverations and invocations. England
and France having made up their minds unmis-
takeably to let things take their course, we are
now informed that any vessel which can run the
blockade can have as much of it for export as she
chooses

to Garry. In short, it is not difficult to
foresee, even at ibis stage of the contest, that the
South will furnish through the whole course of it

abundant illustration of the accuracy of those ac-
counts of the character of the people which all the
shrewdest observers agree in furnishing. They
have all that confidence in their own immense

superiority to all other nations, in the superior
excellence of theirpeculiar social organization to that
of all other countries, that profound contempt for the
quiet manners, and the thoughtfulness and caution
bred by high civilization, which are characteristic
of semi-be:berms societies. The notions of the
Northern States, and of Europe, possessed by the
mass of the population, are strikingly similar to
those of the Turks about Western Europe. They
have engaged in the present struggle with that im-
pulsiveness by which their temperament is so
strongly marked, and with the ignorance et the
comparative value of their own resources which is
the natural result of slavery, of the want of edu-
cation, the want of commerce, and the scattering
of the population over too wide an area. What
they are now exhibiting is that want of vigour in
resistance which men in inferior stages of culture
generally display when they first find that they have
over-rated their strength.
The recent successor of the Federal army are
_ _

reminding some of our contemporaries of some facts
which they had forgotten. We do not think that,
looking back on the past nine months, they will on
the whole be anxious to maintain:the correctness of
their estimate of the military character of the North.
The Secession leaders had been preparing for their
insurrection for eight years, under the adminis-
tration both of Fizzes and BUCTUNLII ; and
when they began it, they were not only in posses-
sion of the greater part of the public arms and
stores, but they took the North and the Govern-
ment by surprise. The reverses sustained by the
Federal forces at the outset were the natural and

unavoidable consequence of the haste with which
they were raised, and the comparative complete-
ness of organization and equipment in which they
found their adversaries. The fact that none
of these reverses was sustained in a conflict on
open ground was • fact which the Secessionist
organs in this country studiously overlooked.
Neither at Bull's Run, Big Bethel, and Ball's Bluff,
one even at Springfield, engagements which have
been put forward as proofs of the superior prowess
of the Southerners, did the latter show them-
selves with emcees in the open field. No one,
however, who was at all familiar either with North-
ern or Southern character, or with the require-
ments of modern military organizations, was in
the least deceived as to the probabilities of the
'draggle by anything that occurred in the first aim
months. Nobody but Mr. BIULZSPOZD Hors and
Blacktrood's Magazine, and, perhaps, Sir Anew-
eau) ALISON, saw in Bull's Run one of " the
" decisive battles of the world," or came to the
conclusion that the United States were moribund,
because they could not raise and equip an army of
800,000 men in lees than half • year. Those, too,
who have studied Northern and Southern pecu-
liarities of temperament and habits did not
fall into the egregious blunder of supposing,
as many of our political philosophers did,
that the Northern farmer or mechanic
would make • worse soldier than the Southern
planter or "poor white," simply because he was
less familiar with the use of the pistol or bowie
knife, drank lees whisky, and rode less on horse-
back. This theory would make a Turk, or a Moor,
or a Sikh, batter military material than a York-
shire ploughman or • French vine-dresser; and
yet what general would hesitate about which of
them he would enlist in an army organised as
modem armies are f The moral qualities are
those which in our day contribute most to make a
good soldier. Habits of order, intelligent appre-
ciation of the value of a cause, profound reliance
on the value of organization, and readiness in sub-
mitting to it and in carrying it oa, are things
which can only be acquired in • high state of
civilization, and they are the very things the
poriesaion of which distinguishes the Yankee
or North Western farmer or mechanic from the
"young man of the better classes" from Alabama
or

INTENNATIONAL ExaletTtox, 1862.—The Com-
mittee upon Art Designs for Manufactures met
yesterday at South Kensington, the Marquis of
Salisbury, X.G., in the chair. The committee de-
termined to take immediate steps to secure the
proper representation of the works of decewssd de-
signers. They would be glad if proprietors of de-
sign* by Gibbs, Keat, Taman, Smile, Gandy, Jai-
fery, Wyatt, Flaxman, Stothard, Holland, &id-
geus, Pitt (sculptor), Tatham, E. Wyatt, Pugin,
Barry, &c., would offer the loan of them for exhi-
bitiou during the time the International Exhibition
is °Pen-
MIBRION or MN RIGHT HON. W. E. GIJ.D-
STONI TO TIM lONIAN INLANDS.—This morning $ blue
book of 83 Tam, consisting of papers relative to the
mission of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone to the lonian
Wands in the year 1858, was presented to parliament. The
despatches are from the Right Hon. Sir J. Young, Sir E.
B. Lytton, the then Colonial secret.ry, Sir H. Storks, and
Mr. Gladstone himself. The right boa. gentleman, it will
Ibe remembered, was brat High Commiwioner Eatraordi.

vary, and 'abstinently Lord High Commisaiouer.
PaTstei'm DAY IN LOYDON.—The Duke of
rambri.lge will pride at the annul festival in support of
the Besevoiset Society of fit. Patrick. which will take
plaoe at Inseamone 'tavern on fit. Patrick's day. Many
lout* eeeleben of both houses of Parliament, including
Viscount Palmerston and Earl Ituriell,, will support his
Royal Highness on this occuion.

-
Dc*T or Silt G. H. DASHWOOD M.P.—A
vacancy has oceirred la the represestatiaZ of
Wycotobe, the death ef air George Healy Dfelii=
which todt es Tesedey, at lie seat, West Wycombe-
The 801111•10,1 we • son dthe
or:l'4h baronet, aadeucesealed to the title on the death of
his father in 1849. He entered parliament in 1812 as one
of the members for Buckinghamshire, awl continued to re-
present that coostitueacy Willa% when lie was unseated ;
be again contested the mat is 1837, and was again defeated,
but an the same year waa elected for Wycombe, and has con-
tiuued to repr -meet that borough uninterruptedly ever
Mace. Is pohtias the deceased wag a liberal.

Zbt Court.

WINDOOR CANAL. lUD= S.

The Queen, accompanied by the Crown Princess
of Prussia (Prisons Royal), Prisons Alice, Prime Alfred,
and Primer Helena, left Osborne at ball-put two dolor&
and arrived at Windsor Castle at twenty minute' past
seven.
The ladies and gentlemen in attendance were ViaCOUntela
Jocelyn, Countess fichalanstsla, Lady Augusta Bruce, Lieu-
tenant-General the Hon. 0. Grey, Count Furstensteini
Colonel the Hon. A. N. Hood, Major Cowell, and Dr.
Jenner.

Her Majesty travelled in the utmost privacy.
Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice arrived at Windsor
Cutle, from Osborne, at twenty minutes Wore two o'clock,
attended by Lady Caroline Barrington, the Hoe. Beatrice
Brig (who joined at Gosport), Colonel the Hoo. A. Har-
ding*, and the Master of the Household. Countess Blucher
sad Baron Erma &odour travelled with the Priociesneu
. .

The Eight Hon. Mr George Grey arrived at Osborne yew
tetchy, sad hod an mafiosos of her Majesty. The Eight
Hon. fiemetary returned to London to-day.
Prince Arthur remains at Osborne, attended by Major
Elphinstimm
Viscount Torrington and Lientenant-Colonel F. Cavendish
have arrived at the Castle, as Lord and 01.00111 in Waiting.
The Hoe. Emily Chthaut has also arrived, as Maid of
Honour in Waiting.

A deputation on the sab}ent al limited liability relating
to joint stock banks had as interview with the Right Hon.
T. Milner Gibson and the Right Hon.W. Hutt yesterday,
at the Odic* el the Hood of Trade.

A &panties hod se interview with the President sod
View.Prerldest d the Board of Tide yesterday, on the star
led of compulsory pilaw.
Despatches were received yesterday at the Colonial-offiee
from the Lord High Cocumbsioser al the lonian Wu&
Despatches were nut to the Owen= of (weds.