The Sun.
London, England, 1864-01-19 00:00:00

TEE Cl VIL WAR IN AMERICA,

(Frain the Times Corresponclm.l,.)
NEW YoEK, Jan. 5.
The old year went out and the new year came in
amid sueh warm though rainy weather, that the
streets of this ill-paved city were ankle deep in slush
and mire ; and the roads of Virginia were in so soft,
spongy, and greasy a state that desertion from the
army of the Potomac was declared on high military
authority to be " impossible.' Bat the twenty-
fourth hour of 1864 had not tolled before the most
potent of all scavengers, the frost, began to facili-
tate desertion end harden the road. The thermome•
ter suddenly fell from forty.two degrees above zero
to nine degrees below; and a storm of wind of an
intensity of cold that could scarcely have been sur-
passed in Siberia, or at the grave of Sir John
Franklin, began to blow from the north-east. The
water froze in the jugs and basins of sleeping apart-
medts. The bottled beer in the cellars was con-
verted into ice, and the milk in the pail or the ewer
at the farm house or the store became as solid as
glass. The tracks loft by cartwheels in the mud
were hardened into ridges as difficult to penetrate as
if they had been of iron ; and desertion from the
Army of the Potomac was feasible to any faint-
hearted warrior who had courage enough left to
betake himself homewards. Several unhappy per-
sons were frozen to death in the streets of Philadel-
phia ; four Confederate prisoners perished of cold
and exposure in a railroad car on the way from
Jeffersonville to Chicago ; and railway communica.

tion throughout the North and West was either
snow drifts or stopped alto-
greatly impeded by
gether. It is asserted that no such extremity of
cold has been experienced south of Boothia Felix
for the last half century ; and the journals from
every part of the country continue to report from
day to day, the casualties and loss of life that have
occurred in consequence. On Saturday and Sunday
the frost continued, but the bitter wind ceased to
blow. Consequently all the world made merry out
of doors. Men and women donned their furs and
woollen comforters, and everybody who could skate
hurried to the Central-park or ether places where
there were ponds or sheets of water, to indulge in
the favourite diversion of the Americans. Even on
Sunday the gaieties did not slacken. The Central.
park was as jubilant with holiday-makers as Rome
or Naples during the Carnival, Wealth, beauty,
youth, and fashion, as well as poverty, ugliness, old
age, and vulgarity, thronged to the scene of festi-
vity, and were as joyous as if skating were the
supreme end and felicity of human existence, and
as if no such thing as war were desolating the
fairest portions of the Continent, and storing up,
perhaps, for the present generation—most certainly
for its successors—a harvest of agonies and evils
such as the world has seldom witnessed.
New Year's-day is a sore trial to the patience of
public functionaries in America, and most of all to
the President. Mr. Lincoln, who is reported to have
caught the small-pox on a visit of philanthropy to
the wretched negro barrack, or settlement, in the
neighbourhood of Washington, having completely
recovered from the attack, held the usual handshak-
lag levee et the White House, and went through
the ordeal with unflinching bravery. To such of the
crowd as he was personally acquainted with he gave
a cordial greeting, and to some favoured few fired off
his Western wit or humour with all his ancient hila-
rity. It was remarked as a novelty that there were no
less than four negroes in the crowd, and that the
President received them with special good humour.
It is the first time in the existence of the Republic
that a black man has dared to mingle in the throng
on such an occesion, or to presume te think that his
felicitations on the New Year were as acceptable as
those of his white brother. As such tOe incident
deserves to be recorded. Generally throughout the
North, and especially in the New England States
and in New York, the negroes celebrated on Friday
evening, not alone the opening of another year, but
the first anniversary of the President's Proclamation
of Emancipation. On these occasions, though the
white friends of the negro race were advertised to
make speeches in support of emancipation, very few
were present. A sprinkling of white women were
to be seen, together with a few prominent clergymen
of all denominations, except the Episcopalian and
the Roman Catholic ; but, with these exceptions, the
negroes and mulattoes had it all to themselves. The
only really prominent white man who lent his name,
his presence, and his voice to the celebration was the
Rev. D, Bellows, a noted Unitarian clergyman of
this city. This gentleman, like Mr. Wendell Phillips,
Mr. Ward Beecher, and the other zealots, lay and
clerical, of Abolitionism, mingles no little malignity
for the white race with his philanthropy for the
blacks. Mr. Wendell Phillips is of opinion, in his
animosity against the slaveholders, that true justice
will not be done to the negroes until the Southern
Confederacy shall have been parcelled out among
them in small farms, and the "mean whites" com-
pelled to labour for them. Dr. Bellows rides the
Abolition hobby almost as unmercifully ; and de-
clared at the Emancipation Jubilee of New Year's-
night that the anniversary which the coloured men
had met to celebrate "deserved to stand alongside of
the birth of Jesus Christ." He thought that if white
men had been subjected to the same indignities as
the black the white race would have deteriorated, and
that our present Christian civilisation would have
been impossible. Setting at nought the experience
of all ages and the palpable evidence of anatomy, he
affirmed the difference between the whites and the
blacks to be nothing but a difference in external cir-
cumstances, and prophesied that in five or at most ten
years the black race would be "suddenly elevated—
make a great leap forward in civilisation—and be
socially and politically regenerated." The white
people present made no response, and the negroes
themselves seemed to think the news too good to
be true. But the reverend negrophilist, nothing
daunted, repeated last night, at a second meeting
of coloured people, all his sanguine vaticinations
of the future of their race, advised them not to be
called or to call themselves" coloured," but boldly
to insist upon being designated " blacks," for were
there not " red men," "yellow men," and " white
men," and were not all these " coloured ?" He
himself, -he said, was coloured, but his colour was
not black. He regretted to see so few white men
present of the class that might be regarded as repre-
sentatives of public opinion ; but God Almighty
was the author of the Proclamation of Emancipa-
tion, and not President Lincoln, and God s help
rather than man's, would render its policy
triumphant over all obstacles. Mr. Charles Sumner,
whose name
was placarded all over the city as in-
tending to ba present and make an oration, failed to
appear, but sent a letter apologising for his ab-
sence, in which he said that wherever he was he
would celebrate the proclamation in his heart, be-
cause the proclamation was the
key to victory
and peace—that without it victory would have
been doubtful and peace impossible, whereas both
were now certain. Mr. Sumner, like Mr. Wendell
Phillips, is in earnest on this question, and so, no
doubt, is the great body of the Unitarian and Pres-
byteries clergy ; but they stand in a small mino-
rity. No public men who aspires to political
honours or office cares to identify himself with their
proceedings, and the whole business community
and the entire mass of the labouring Population
keep as studiously aloof from abolitionism as the
ehopkeepers of Paris from socialism and com-
munism. Tho churches may deplore this fact,
and attribute it to the innate wickedness of the
heart cf fallen humanity ; but it is a fact, never-
theless, and none know it so well as the negroes
themselves, or hope less from the emancipation of
their Southern brethren than they do.
As the great question of the constitutionality of
the proclamation, by which Mr. Lincoln endea-
voured to set aside the State laws of one-half of the
late Federal Union, must shortly be tried before:the
Supreme Court, considerable anxiety begins to be
felt at Washington on the stfejset of that august
tribunal—the first alike in power end dignity in
the Republic, and having within its competency to
set aside or annul the acts of the Executive. It
corsists at present of ten Judges, of whom six were
appointed by the Democratic party in the halcyon
days before Lincoln, and four by the Republicat.
since Mr. Lincoln's assumption of office. The Chief
Justice, the Hon. 'Roger B. Taney, of Baltimore, a
man beloved in Maryland with a love seldom
acecr led by Americans, approaches his 90th year,