The Sun.
London, England, 1864-02-11 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, THURSDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY 11, 1864.

blockade. If the moral reprobation of mankind and
a pirate's doom which awaits the captured have not
deterred speculators in Boston and New Y k from
engaging in the slave trade, it will be imagzned that
the threat of imprisonment will not hinder English-
men from venturing upon a cornmer ;:.,4 not less lucra-
tive, and sanctioned by the sympaty of three-
fourths of their countrymen.
The heart of Richmond has been deeply stirred
by the recent arrival here of General Morgan, fresh
from the indignation of the Ohio Penitentiary and a
felon's punishment. It will be believed that the
sight of his shorn locks and the narrative of his
escape have provoked indignation and triumph such
as has not been elicited by any previous incident
of the war. It is for obvious reasons hardly pro-
bable that the details of his escape, as given in
the Richmond journals, embrace the whole truth.
The subsequent arrival here of Captain Hines,
the partner of his imprisonment and the principal
agent in their joint escape, has been scarcely less ac-
ceptable to the people of Richmond. General Morgan
is one of the few Americans who have a horror of
speechmaking, and he has contented himself with
acknowledging the compliments of the Virginia
Legislature, and other similar corporate bodies, in
the briefest utterances. Whatever may be General
Morgan's hidden sentiments about the treatment
he has received (and they are said to be very bitter),
he has had the wisdom not to give them public ex-
pression. But the indignation of his staff and his
private friends knows no bounds, and it is said that
his future regiments (which will be numerous) are
already busied in electing to a novel office an occu•
pant who will be worthy of his opportunities. The
friseur et coiffeur a Sa Majeste, who followed the
courtly campaigns of Louis XIV., will be revived
on this Republican soil, and the " Barber to the
11th Tennessee" and other similar cavalry regiments
will exercise his skill on many a Yankee poll which
the fortune of war may bring within General Mor-
gan's grasp. There will be plenty of work in the
West, not only for General Wheeler, who is General
Johnston's principal cavalry officer, but also for the
detached commands of Generals Forrest, S. D. Lee,
and Morgan, and those of Colonels Ferguson and
Dibrell. But both East and West, and especially
where the influence of Generals Lee and Long-

street is felt, there is less and less disposition to
engage in the ostentatious cavalry raids by which
in the earlier part of the war the reputation of Gene-
ral J. E. B. Stuart was established. It is known
that the Federal policy is to encourage these raids ;
that they inflict upon the enemy who sustains them
less danger than upon the troops which perpetrate
them ; that they convert the wild Confederates en-
gaged in them into undisciplined thieving marauders
and cost vastly more in horseflesh (which is precious)
than they gain in the destruction of property. It is to
hoped that we have seen the last of such Quixotic
enterprises as that which carried General Morgan
into Indiana and Ohio, and subjected him to the
atrocities which, for the first time in the history of
nations, the Federal Government has sanctioned to-
wards a prisoner of war. The sight this day in the
streets of Richmond of General Hood's tall and
stately form, seen for the first time on horseback
since he lost his leg at Chicamanga, has occasioned
general gratification. There are few officers dearer
to the people of Secession than General Hood.
Modest as a child, fearless as his intimate friend,
General Longstreet, unselfish and unsullied as a
Bayard, he has already given his right leg and four
inches of the bone of his left arm to the cause which
is so dear to his heart, and again in a few weeks he
will be found foremost among the foremost, offering
up perhaps another limb, perhaps life itself, on that
altar for which no sacrifice is too costly. A singular
commentary upon the old text that " necessity is the
mother of invention" may be observed in the artificial
leg which supplies the place of General Hood's lost
limb. When this war commenced there was through-
out the length and breadth of the South no artificer
cunning in the construction of artificial limbs; but
such was the demand occasioned by the fierce battles
of the bloodiest war of the century that Richmond
is now teeming with every variety of wooden leg
and crutch, and there has arisen in Charlottsville (a
little town in the interior of Virginia) an artist who
has attained no inconsiderable skill in patching np
and supplementing lost arms and legs, and enabling
the maimed again to take the field. Is this a peo-
ple to be subjugated by the sweepings of Germany
and Ireland—a people whose sons are not satisfied
with giving an arm or a leg to their country, but
insist again and again on carrying their mutilated
forms into the deadliest hail of the battle front, and
whose appetite for danger and suffering does but
increase with the urgency of their country's need ?
A great many stories have been current about
"the generosity towards General Lee" of the muni-
cipality of Richmond, which is represented as having
offered to the General a sum of money, amounting,
if report speaks truth, to 50,000 dots. or 60,000 dols.,
with a view to his purchase of a house. It is known
that General Lee's wife and daughters, shorn of the
comforts of their former homes on Arlington
Heights and at the White House on the Pamunkey
River (the latter of which was burnt to the ground
by General M'Clellan's soldiers), are living in an
obscure little house in Richmond, and, upon the
principle of " Date obolum Belisario," it is felt that
Richmond, which owes to General Lee so infinite a
debt, can scarcely retain its own self-respect while
it contemplates such a spectacle. Itiis hardly neces-
sary to state that from the acceptance of any such
gift General Lee's proud simplicity has recoiled.
It is stated that his answer, when the offer was made
to him, was to the effect that if Richmond had so
much money to give away, he begged to call atten-
tion to the destitute wives and widows of many of
his noble soldiers, and to divert into this channel
the bounty misapplied to himself.
General Longstreet, who has shown his wonted
tenacity in holding on to East Tennessee while the
bridges in his rear over the Holston and Watanga
Rivers were being rebuilt, and his communications
with Virginia re-opened, is still clinging to his old
position between the Holston and Clinch Rivers,
and has been engaged in supplying shoes and
clothes to his men, of which after the hardships
of their march from Chattanooga to Knoxville
they stood greatly in need. It is probable that
before long we shall hear of some movement
which will flatter the Yankee garrisons in Knox-
ville and Cumberland Gap. General Buckner, be-
tween whom and General Longstreet very friendly
relations exist, is about to join the latter. What-
ever may be the comparative merits of General
Joseph E. Johnston as contrasted with Gen. Bragg,
there will undoubtedly be hereafter a harmony
among the Generals of the Western army which
was looked for in vein when Gen. Bragg was at its
head. Gen. Johnston, bound to Gen. Longstreet by
the recollections of the battle of Williamsburg
fought when Gen. M'Clellan was advancing upon
Richmond by the peninsula), is understood to enter-
tain warm regard and admiration for Longstreet,
and therefore full concert of action may be looked
for between the two Generals in the momentous
campaign on the eve of which we are standing. It
is not dissembled either at Washington or Rich-
mond that to the Western campaign the principal
interest of the war will attach. It seems to me that
if disaster ever assumed the shape of a blessing in
disguise, the defeat sustained by Gen. Bragg's army
on the 25th November should be ranked in the cate-
gory. If, with Gen. Bragg still in command, the
Western Confederate army had dragged through an
inactive and spiritless winter, with morale deterio-
rating day after day, decimated by desertion, and
radically disaffected, it would he ve taken no pro-
phet to predict that the first collision next spring
between Grant and Bragg could have had no other
result than the defeat, if not the annihilation, of the
latter. How different is at this moment the prospect!
With great energy Generals Johnston and Hardee
are straining every nerve te reorganise, inspirit, and
recruit the wreck handed over to them by General
Bragg. At their back are all the resources of the
roused and excited State of Georgia, prepared now
to dispute every inch of the 138 diffalult miles which
separate Chatanooga from Atlanta, and which, it
may be predicted, will be found at least as hard to
surmount as the 60 miles which are interposed be-
tween Fredericksburg and Richmond. It is pro-
bable that the lesson taught to Gen. Grant by Gen.
Cleburne during the retreat of the (../lonfederate army
from Missionary Ridge (a lesson of which the North-
ern journals eagerly eupprese all the details) will be

repeated dozens and dozens of times before Atlanta
is approaohed.
It is a matter of surprise to all Englishmen in the
Confederate States that the Foreign-office (guided
as I have again and again been tauntingly told, by
Mr. Adams), takes no more heed of British subjects
in Secessia than it does of the codfish in the
Atlantic. My own impression has always been
that British subjects in the South are not
materially worse off without Consuls than they
were before the " decapitation" of Mr. Moore
and his collagues. I have seen dozens of instances
in which a hearty desire to act justly between con-
scripts claiming to be foreigners and the enrolling
officers has been exhibited at Richmond. The efforts
of Mr. Gustavus A. Myers, gratuitously and with
much self-sacrifice extended to British subjects, have
been unremitting; and they have been cordially se-
conded by the Assistant Secretary of War, Judge
Campbell, who brings to the duties of his present
post the same mild legal sagacity and uprightness of
character which distinguished him while seated on
the bench of the Supreme Court at Washington.
Exceptional cases of hardship, such as that of Mr.
Belshaw, have occasionally occurred, but they have
been made the most of in England by the rabid par-
tisans of the North, who are never tired of claiming
for the Federal Government the very largest mea-
sure of indulgence for high-handedness in the" hour
of their agony," but who refuse to the Confederate
Government and nation the smallest charity under
circumstances of vastly superior trial. Bat I confess
it does appear to me strange that the Foreign-office
should not endeavour to retain within the Confede-
rate States one trusted consular agent in a capacity
which he might hold without offence to the Confe-
derate Government. Mr. Cridland, who was Mr.
Moore's locum tenens at Richmond during the first
two years of the war, and who is now residing as
a private person at Mobile, is, if I am not mis-
taken, the last of the quondam British Consuls left
upon the soil of Secessia. It is well known that the
archives of the British Consulates are left to take
their chance in the various towns where the Foreign
office was once represented. If these archives are
of as much consequence as is vulgarly imagined,
and if the Foreign-office still desires to retain one
correspondent within the insurgent States, why not
appoint Mr. Cridland custodian of the archives of
the British Consulates in the South (or what the
French call Chancellier), and give him authority to
proceed at intervals from town to town, and see
that those archives are in safe keeping ? In no
other way can the Foreign-office obtain such trust-
worthy private information from an agent in whom
they will consent to repose confidence. Perhaps
Lord Russell,' guided by Mr. Adams, and Lord
Lyons, hoodwinked by Mr. Seward, think that yet
a few weeks and British Consuls will. resume their
functions at Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and
Mobile under the shelter of the stars and stripes.
There are places and circumstances in which oppor-
tunity of observation is of more moment than saga-
city of induction, and entitles ordinary men who
possess it to instruct philosophers who generalise at
a distance. I will venture, therefore, in conclusion,
to assure Lord Russell that the gigantic task which
President Lincoln has taken in hand is not hitherto
half way towards its accomplishment ; that before
its completion rivers of blood will flow where rivu-
lets have flowed before ; that, if necessary, where
one slave is found fighting for Mrs. Stowe, and
Mr. Sumner, ten slaves will be found fighting for
their masters and for slavery; that the fourth year
of the war finds the two sections under circum-
stances of far greater equality as regards men and
material of war than its predecessors; that the
North is, perhaps unconsciously, bolstering up its
faith and stiffening its backbone by a diet of inge-
nious mendacity ; and that if ever it should suc-
ceed in driving its enemy from the field, it will
find itself face to face with a problem the difficulties
of which it has not begun to gauge, but which are
such as have baffled solution by any other nation
since the creation of man, and which will baffle and
exhaust even the irrepressible Yankee.