The Sun.
London, England, 1864-08-04 00:00:00

Welter Cup.

Deerfoof at. lb. f st. lb.
1 1 19
2 , Plover ...•
....
Bally Edmond ...... 11 ;Port:and .......... 9 Monk .... 11 9 I Prince Lee 800
.. • • 9 7 7
Nanrico
Accident
9 4
9 0
Disappointment .... 10 0 lG,erieseconlanbde
Margerylo 0i m
9 0
Ace of blearts
Weights for the Nursery Plate.

st lb
Ft lb
Aristocrat
Nukuhr,va 8 7 Rose of Denmark.... 7 0
Attache
Vest colt
St. Vincent
Auditor
Lord Weldegrave.... 7 10, "Ptarmigan .. 6 10
Gipsy Boy .......... 7 101Littlig Pickles
Doeford ............ 7 7 I Quil
Previsor ............ 7 7 j Doublet .. 6 10
&Viet .......... 77 ! Imogene filly
Vigilant .. 741 Scylir
Spain
S'imple Maid 7 411:Zing-, of Greece 6 7
SiL;:phus
Flying Horse .. 7 2 j C,qestertleld ..... ... 6 7
Tilt 7 2 B:,itisli Queen ...... 6 7
Sym Cathy 7 01 Hype . 6 4
Cedrie 7 0

EXETER ELECTION--(This Day.)

FINAL CLOSE OF 'P:riE POLL.
Courienny .. .. • • •• .. 1,071
Coleridge .. •• • • • • • . 1,048

LIPORTING INTELLIGTINCE.—This Day,

BRIGHTON RACES—Tnis DAY.
(BY ELECTRIC T'MEGRAPII,)
FIFTH BIENNIAL STAKES.

- -
Du the.m ...
Oliiis
CLARET. STAKES.

Nebula .. 1
Trumps ..
Dzeeption . . 3
Eight ran.
£lO9 PLATE.

Nukuhnva
Ar.ti-Macassar ..
__. ............... . 2

Nine ran.

BRIGHTON CLUB STAKES.

Captain Crow
Nebula
Trumps
SIXTH BIENNIAL STAKES.

Le Mandarin . 1
Eltham ..
Surrey _

Five ran.
CLUB PLATE.

Fanny
blareyae a
_.

Five ran.
£6O PLATE.

Overstone 1
The Tyke

TEE CONFEDERATE STATES,

(From the Special CorrespondeAt of the limes.)
Ric EMOND, June 27

If a man were landed here 1:rom a balloon after
si.t months' absence—if he were taken along Grace
or Franklin Straits in this city on a summer even.
ins., and told that two enormous armies are lying a
few miles off and disputing its possession, he would
deem his informant a lunatic. In every porch he
would see a group of gaily-attired ladies (I do not
believe that 20 rigorous years of blockade would
pale the lustre of ladies' toilet in an American town) ;
he would hear many a light laugh, many a song
issuing from open casements ; he might pass an hour
in conversation without being reminded that war is
furiously raging, otherwise than by the suggestive
boom of the faintly heard cannon ; and, finally,
when the conversation turned into its well.worn
groove, he would find that Richmond trusts and
believes in St. Lee as much as Mecca in Mahomet,
or Spain in St. James of Compostella.
That the confidence reposed in Gen. Lee's ability
is reasonable no one disputes. Do the circumstances
in which his army is placed, its morale, and num-
bers inspire equal faith ? In order to answer these
questions I must premise that two railroads feed
Richmond from the south—one the line from Wil.
mington to Weldon, Petersburg, and Richmond--
VC other the railroad which comes up from Greens•
borough through the centre of North Carolina,
enters Virginia at Danville, and, running through
the heart of the State, reaches Richmond from
the south.west. It may be at once conceded
that there is little likelihood that the first—the
Petersburg and -Weldon Railroad—can be kept open.
Grant's army lies so closely in its proximity, and
his cavalry can strike it in so many points along
the 60 miles which intervene between Weldon and
Petersburg, as to negative its utility. It would be
a waste of power for General Lee to try and keep
it in operation. Upon the other railroad, or rather
sipon the 90 miles of it between Richmond and the
5 tauntoa river, Gen. Lee's defensive ingenuity will
be exhausted. This railroad is, in its nearest point,
dis,-ant about 25 miles from Grant's extreme left,
and trends away from him into the interior of Viz..

ginia, so that an interval of 90 miles divides him
from the bridge over the Staunton river. Can this
railroad be kept substantially in operation ? It has
already been destroyed at intervals for 35 miles
northwards from the Staunton river by a mingled
body of Federal cavalry and infantry, but inasmuch
kls no important bridge has been destroyed, the da-
mage can be repaired in 14 days. I will at once ea-
pt ess my conviction that Grant is not strong enough
eit.'aer in cavalry or infantry to do more than dash
at this railroad and inflict from time to time light
damage upon it. Richmond can never be starved oat
until these two railroads from the South as well as
the James River Canal and the railroads from the
North can be utterly annihilated, and can be kept
annihilated. As an illustration how quickly damage,
if lightly inflicted, is repaired,' may mention that the
Virginia Central Railroad, which was destroyed for
many miles by Steridan upon Jane 11, has for some
days past been open and running to Charlottesville,
whence it continues indirectly to Lynchburg. This
line would, in addition to the James River Canal,
abundantly victual Richmond, although every other
line were cut. In short, to talk of Richmond being
besieged because Grant's army environs Petersburg,
22 miles away, is about as reasonable to pretend that
London was on short rations when Napoleon's army
menaced England from Boulogne in 1804. It is a
tremendous undertaking to starve out a town, even
when i is closely invested by land and water. We
all -snow the historical sieges which Londonderry,
San.gosso, Genoa, and 100 other cities have stood ;
there is as much analogy between the present con-
dition of Richmond and these memorable passages
of history as 'oetween the lazy Scheid and the rapids
of Niagara.

Secondly, it is abundantly evident that Grant,
though outnumbering Leo largely, dares not spread
over too long a line, for fear of having his centre
pierced, and Austerlitz reenacted on the southern
bank of the James. The Federal General has already
tried to stretch his left as far as his men could be
persuaded to go, but the past week has shown that
between the armies there is almost as much differ-
ence of morale as between Leonidas's Spartans and
Xerxes's Persians. Upon the 23d the Confederate
Gen. Mahone doubled round Granee left and cap-
tured 1,600 men, who scarcely fought at all. Two
days later a body of Federals entrenched them.
selves upon the Petersburg and Weldon Railroad,
were attacked by the same Confederate General,
and fled at once, leaving 500 of their number priso-
ners. The inpouriog of Federal prisoners into Rich-
mond these last four days has been incessant. lam
at a loss to convey to you the contemptuous tone in
which the tried and war-worn soldiers of Gen. Lee
talk of the huddled rabble of black, white, and cop-
per coloured victims (there are Indians serving
uader the Stars and Stripes) who Are at times goaded
up to the Southern lines. Who can wonder that men
coming on an acre deep are mercilessly massacred ?
We read with astonishment in the Northern joure
nals that the fighting around Petersburg has been
tern ific. The universal account given to me in the
Southern army has been " since the battle of Cold
Harbour on June 3 we have had little but skirmish-
ing." It is safe to conclude that Grant will never dare
to spread his army over the 25 miles between its pre.
sent position and the Danville Railroad, and unless
he can encamp upon the two railroads, and lie there
permanently, he is as far from the completion of his
teak as a traveller who has surmounted the Mon-
tanvert is from the top of Mont Blanc.
I am satisfied that General Grant will make no
more onslaughts upon Confederate breastworks. He
knows very well that neither Petersburg nor Rich-
mond will be taken by fighting. It is a question
of subsistence, and if Grant lies in his present lines
through the summer, Richmond's poorer classes
may see hard times before September, and for the
twentieth time the Confederate army may be for a
few weeks on half rations. But, if it is imagined
nat the earnestness of these Southerners, proved
in the furnace of three years of suffering and afflic-
tion, and stimulated by such acrid hatred as eye has
not seen nor ear heard before, is unequal to the
occasion, England must be as ignorant about this
struggle as she is held here to be indifferent. In
the meantime, Grant's difficulty in holding his posi-
tion on Bermuda Hundred and close to City Point
will be enormous, putting aside all question of fight-
ing. He is constantly being reinforced by raw,
green troops, who are absolutely worthless as fight-
ing material, and who are destined to fringe the
River James with their graves from Cityai.Point
half-way to Fortress Munroe. The marshes of the
Js.mes in August and September are as deadly as
the swamps of Walcheren or Terracing. There is
so:no nonsense talked in Northern papers about
Grant': occupying a fine, healthy, rolling country.
It is notorious that Bermuda Hundred is one of the
most pestilential spots on the river, and the night
fo which arises from City Point, and spreads over
half the Northern army, tells its tale to all who
are not ysilfully blind. General Leo has exacted
heavy toll between the 3d of May and the 3d of June
—the James river will assist him in August and
September as much as that memorable night of frost
in 1812, in which 20,000 French horses perished,
aided the Russians.

It is impossible to resist speculating upon the
question whether, after a review of the campaign
of the last two months, it is reasonable to pros
nounce Grant a great General—to put him on the
same platform as Lee. I will at once avow my own
convAction, which is shared by every one worth
ii,tenlng to in Secessia, that not one of Grant's pre-
decessors in Virginia has shown one tithe of the
tenacity, energy, celerity, and resolution which the
recent campaign has set down to Grant's credit.
1;14611ex, Hooker, Pope, or Burnside would have
gone bac:: after the battle of the Wilderness, and
woud
never hale got such an effort as was made at
Soottsylvania Court-house out of a beaten army,
rant due credit for vigour in
Bat, after giving CI
ham:llin,, his men, and keeping them compactly
together (which is the greatest difficulty a Federal
General encounters), I am unable to see that his
conception of the camp4iga was able, thouge it
must be confessed that the s trcinge incompetency
of Butler made haif or Grant's
e fiasco be fore
it is that it in the first
it was corneae-aced. Gsrtain
on the York he bad landed 200,000 men

i cst

River or James River, and had not sacrificed the
bone and sinew of his army in fighting his way to
the White-boase, which he might have reached by
water without losing a man, his position now would
be very diffirent. Weeks and weeks will probably
pass without amending his prospec before Peters-
burg. in the meantime diversions, which will dis-
tract him terribly will be pretty sure to change the
aspect of civil and military affairs in the North
before September has passed. Grant is one of those
sledge-hammers of war of the same stamp as Suwar-
row, whose spirits rise with danger, and whose
ccurage borders upon brutality. Lee is his equal
in celerity and endurance, his superior in foresight,
prudence, and sagacity,

July 5.
In contemplating the desolating struggle which
has drawn upon the American Republic the eyes of
civilised mankind, no one can fail to marvel at the
weakness, querulousness, and frothiness which have
marked the deliberations of the representative as-
semblies of either belligerent. In the North, while
all the fiercest passions of mankind, disengaged by
the supreme peril of the nation, have been at sea
without rudder or compass, we have simultaneously
sem Congress roaring like a sucking dove, vapour-
ing about the Monroe doctrine, jobbing and recrimi-
nating, and occasionally imitating the example of
the Lower Empire,which, hemmed in by barbarians,
vented itself in abstract discussions while the bat-
tering ram thundered at the city gates. Similarly,
it is impossible to point to any debate in the
Southern Congress which has risen to the height of
the great argument before it ; and it is my belief
that in three years of discussion at Montgomery and
Richmond only one speech delivered in Congress
will hereafter arrest the attention of the historian.
I mean the remarkable effort of Mr Wigfall in
favour of the temporary suspension of the bill of
habeas corpus. If, however, the normal temper of the
two representative bodies at Washington has been
less steadfast, less dignified, and unshrinking than
has been the case at Richmond, it seems to me that
Washington has contributed more speeches that
will live. It requires no stretch of fancy to picture
that the speech which earned for Mr Vallandigham
the honour of expatriation, and likewise that the
speeches of Mr Long of Ohio, and Mr Voortrees of

Indiana, are likely to be quoted at many a fireside
_ _

when the rabid diatribes of of Messrs. Sumner and
Lovejoy have been long forgotten. But, anyhow,
when we recall the remarkable ability displayed in
the Revolutionary War by such civilians as Alexan•

der Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Madison, Galla-
tin, and Jefferson, it is difficult to believe that the 20
millions in the Northern States should in their hour
of agony have produced not only no great soldier,
but also no eminent administrator in any depart-
ment of civil life. It may fairly be questioned
whether any other Northern civilian has shown such

tact and ability as have been displayed by Mr.
Adams at his delicate post in London.
If, on the other hand, there is in the Southern
Congress no Patrick Henry, it cannot be denied that
the joint resolution which it put forth before expir-
ing, and which may be read in another column, is
worthy of the occasion. It is understood that this
manifesto is from the hand of Mr. Rives, formerly
United States' Minister in Paris, and at present a
member of the House of Representatives at Rich-
mond, in which his long experience of public life,
and his worth and uprightness of character, procure
for him high consideration and respect. It has often
been alleged that the Confederate States have done

little or nothing to submit their cause temperately
to the intelligent judgment of the civilised world.
It will be seen at once that in the accompanying
manifesto some such attempt has been made by Mr.
Rives, Not forgetful of Tallyrand's warning against
an excess of zeal, Mr. Rives states without exagge-
ration the wellknown principles which the Southern
States have always maintained as to the separate
independence and sovereignty of States. It it im-
possible to look around you here in Richmond, or to
go 20 miles away to Petersburg, or converse with
the general cfficers, the subalterus, or the rank and
file of the Confederate army without acknowledg-
ing the truth of the following words :
" For ourselves we have no fear of the result. The wildest
picture ever drawn by a disordered imagination comes short
of the extravagance which could dream of the conquest of
6,000,000 people, resolved with one mind to die freemen
rather than live slaves, and forewarned by the savage and
exterminating spirit in which this war has been waged upon
them, and by the mad avowals of its patrons and sup-
porters of the worse than Egyptian bondage that awaits
them in the event of their subjugation."

'There are many passages of warlike history which
reveal such excesses of systematic and callous bru-
tality towards non-combatants as have drawn down
upon them the common execration of mankind.
The merciless ferocity of Tilly in the Palatinate, the
Dragonnades of Louis XIV., the conduct of war by
Cromwell in Ireland, of the Duke of Cumberland
after the battle of Culloden, are among the instances
which occur to everybody. The military student
will, perhaps, recall a more modern instance in the
retreat of the baffled Massena from before the lines
of Torres Vedras, and will remember the ruthless.
ness towards peasants, villages, and convents which
wrung from Wellington the remark that, "It has
seldom been equalled and never surpassed." I do
net believe,lhowever—and I say it advisedly—that
any of these infamous passages, in regard to which
lapse of time serves but to increase the asperity of
our indignation, surpasses in atrocity the system of
Federal warfare in the Southern States, and notably
in Virginia. In burning words of eloquent censure
Mr. Motley has held up to our loathing the hor-
rible cruelty of Also. and the bigoted tyranny of
his master. Yet Mr. Motley is the complacent and
contented servant of a Republic which, in the name
of liberty, encourages enormities as repugnant to the
civilised warfare of the 19th century as were Philip
ll.'s outrages, in the name of religion, to the moral
sense of the 16th. Ido not mean that throats are
cut indiscriminately as they were by Alva, although
many a dark tale of cupidity and assassination has
issued from the forests and byways of Virginia.
I could, were it not as distasteful to me to write as
it is to your readers to learn such gloomy horrors,
accumulate evidence substantiating the occurrence
of many such murders of civilians in cold blood be-
yond refutation. Nor, again, do I assert that women
are stripped and forced to run races in the presence
of a licentious soldiery, as in the days of the brutal
Duke of Cumberland. But I do mean to assert—and
I challenge contradiction of this statement—that
outrages such as my pen must seek a periphrasis to
describe, and of which white women are the object,
have repeatedly occurr©d ; that in a special degree
the country called the northern neck of Virginia (ly.
ing between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers)
has witnessed them again and again; that the Afri-
can savage, stimulated by those white agents who
give:effect to Mr. Sumner's and Mrs. Beecher Stowe's
theories, is the perpetrator of them, that I am in a
position to mention not less than ten horrors, which
during the last three months, have occurred in the
county of Westmoreland alone, and which arc un-
surpassed in atrocity by the most loathsome records
of modern or ancient warfare. After this statement
it is a relief to turn to the mere details of plunder
and cupidity. Your readers can scarcely be igno-
rant that through every portion of Virginia Fede-
ral raiders have circulated, have killed every four-
footed or feathered animal, except the horses which
have been carried off, have stripped lonely women
surrounded by children of every vestige of food,
have pillaged ladies' clothing and every portable
article of value, have burnt ly.rns and houses at will
wherever their lust of plunder has been bafflad.
Will it be pretended that this is civilised war-
fare ? Can it be alleged that the Federals are
merely exacting retribution for airliner deeds of the
Southerners in Pennsylvania? I apprehend no such
defence will be attempted. The truth is, that for
the first time in modern warfare we are contem-
plating an army which is at onco republican and
andiscinliced. We see officers who in many cases
are more debased than their men, and who impose
upon those man none of the restraints which strict
discipline and organisation extracted from the Re.
publican levies by whose agency Napoleon domi-
neered over Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, and
Madrid. The consequences may be imagined. Ido
net deny that among the Federal officers are OM.
ionaily high-minded and honourable men, such as
General Meade or General Kelly, and I believe I
may add General Grant, who would nom the im-
putation of plundt ring civilians in,war as they Would