The Sun.
London, England, 1864-06-21 00:00:00

The Presidential Contest in America.

BALTIMORE, June G.
An Englishman in New York, unless he be a lord
or a Dissenting minister, with Republican "procli-
vities," and strong opinions on the subject of negro
slavery, finds few friends. He is an alien, an enemy,
a person ignorant of everything but the unimpor-
tant concerns of his own little island ; and one who
is supposed on the stage, in the newspapers, and in
such cultivated society as the place affords to inva-
riably misplace his aspirates, and to call himself a
" Hinglishinan." It is very different in Baltimore.
To be an Englishman is to be furnished with a
perpetual passport to the good will and favour of
everybody of any note in the place—except the
military governor and his subordinates—who hold
the city by the strong hand, and repress in every
Possible way the opinions and feelings of the inha-
bitants. The Baltimoreans are proud of their Eng-
lish descent,
their English manners, their English
hospitality, and their English sympathies. If ever
they have an ill word to say against England, it is
because they are angry with the British Govern-
ment for not having recognised the independence of
the South, and so expedited their own deliverance
from the Northern
Union. They take care, however,
to distinguish between the people and the Govern.
methey cast npon Lord Rus
sell n
and Lord
Palmerston,
and look forward to the
day,
long
h ug handit her Southern children—more
truly hers than the
tis
the blamewhich
m a y
e coming, when the
mixed
Northbreedo --13 Europe h
rope that have
mother countryt o
peopled and overrun the
all be united,
not atone
in sympathy, but in commercial and poli-
tical t...auce. In short, Baltimore loves the Eng-
wiishhenasfrerheuterhadaes with Now EYorkngl bates England
shall
them, and hopes,
follow
the re-
cognition of the South, to become one of the first
commercial cities of the American continent,and to
rival New York in influence and hospitality. Bal-
timore is as inimical to all that is Yankee as Rich.
mond or Charleston, and were it not for the presence
of a large military force, which is in possession of
Fort Al'llenry, and could reduce the city to ashes
in an hour, if it threatened to revolt against the
depotism which it abhors, it would hoist the Con-
federate flag, and invite the Southern army to enter
and hold it. Maryland, of which it is the pride
and the emporium, has at this moment no less than
20,000 of her sons in the Southern army, fighting,
without the inducement of bounty money or any
mercenary consideration whatever, for the cause of
Southern Independence ; about double the number
that she has raised for the Northern armies, not-
withstanding all the bounties offered by the Federal
Government and the municipalities, and the sums
contributed by the rich to avoid the risk of a con.
seription. The 20,C00 are for the most part natives
of Maryland; 'he 8,000 or 10,000 in the Federal
army are mainly Irish or Germans, with whom the
bounty is everything and the cause nothing;
together with negroes and the freed slaves of "dis-
loyal" owners. The ladies of Baltimore, renowned
as being the handsomest in America, a tradition of
olden time, which the parsing glance of the stranger

as he walks along the streets is sufficient to confirm,
are even more "rebellious" than their fathers,
brothers, husbands, or lovers, as ladies are wont to
be in all parts of the world where the passions are
excited by political strife. They have a habit in
their pleasant climate of sitting after nightfall upon
their "stoops," or marble doer step, in preference
to their drawing rooms, in the fall, or it may
the scanty, elegance of their evening costume, to
gossip, or sing, or knit, by the light of the moon.
And while, as now, a battle is supposed to be
raging in their not very remote vicinity—a battle
or series of battles which may decide the fate of
North and South, and point the way that Maryland
must ultimately go—and when, with a favourable
wind, it may even be possible, in the silence of
the night, to hear from afar the faint echoes
of the artillery of the coutending hosts, they
gather in this primitive fashion, with more than
the usual excitement of expectation, to keep up
the rebellious spirit by the interehange of sentiment
and the outpouring of their hopes and fears. Now
and then may be heard, in defiance of the lazy, but
perhaps the not altogether unsympathizing, police-
man who saunters along his beat through the
fashionable quarters of the town, the melancholy
chant of "Maryland, my Maryland," sung to the
air of a German Burschenlied ; the livelier strain of
the "Bonnie Blue Flag," or to English ears the
nobler melody of "God save the South." Like
the ladies of Scotland, commemorated in the ancient
ballad, who sat with their " gold combs in their
hair" and their fans in their hands, waiting for the
return of Sir Patrick Spens, they sit upon their
doorsteps waiting for General Lee, or any other
Southern hero who will be good enough to take
their city in his victorious march to Washington,
and liberate them, once and for ever, from the dull,
leaden, obdurate, relentless tyranny which General
Butler inaugurated, General Schenck continued,
and General Wallace perpetuates, These three
attorneys, having nothing of the so:dier about
them but the uniform and the shoulder-straps, have
severally and collectively managed to concentrate
upon their heads an amount of feminine hate from
Baltimore and all Maryland which, in default of
historical record, will be sufficient to send down
their names to a late posterity with as much odium
as that which attaches to " old Bogy" in all the
nurseries of Europe.
It is in a city with a character like this that the
friends of Mr. Lincoln determined to hold the Con.
vention to nominate him for a second term of
office, and to this city I have come from New York
to be present at the first process of the quadrennial
manufacture, the ultimate result of which is a Pre-
sident of the United States. It is not to be sup-
posed that in this respect Mr. Lincoln's friends
run any risk of the expression of hostile opinions,
or still less of an adverse decision on the part en
the people among whom they thrust the preten-
sions of their candidate. A convention is like a
Parliament. No one has a right to speak, ex
cept a member duly elected. If the public be
admitted to the deliberations, it is a matter of ex-
pediency and favour—not of right; and any objector
or disturber may be summarily expelled. In Balti-
more, however, there is scarcely the risk of so much
as a dissentient hiss or an ironical cheer. The native
residents will not attend, even out of curiosity, and
there is a sufficiently large population of placemen,
contractors, officials, and persons who directly or
indirectly are making money out of the war, as well
as of Federal soldiers quartered in the neighbouring
forts, to make it certain that the Convention will
not lack an appreeiative audience. Mr Lincoln's
friends intended to forestall opposition in the Pre-
sidential contest by being first in the field, but they
had no sooner announced their time and place than
the supporters of Gen. Fremont took what the Lin-
colnites call a " mean advantage," and sammoned a
Convention at Cleveland, in Ohio. Here they built
their platform, called themselves by the new name
of the' Radical Democracy," and unanimous nomi-
nated their candidate a full week before Mr Lincoln'b
friends.could be brought together. The main planks
of the platform do not, it is true, dovetail very
squarely ; for a vigorous prosecution of the war and
a vigorous preservation of the liberties of the people
nre more incompatible than Americans understand,
or care to acknnwledge ; they may serve, however,
to elect a candidate upon, and, if so, they will answer
their purpose. But tLs.: Cleveland Convention, dis-
agreeable as it has prover; to Mr Lincoln, is not the
only affliction of the kind he will have to endure.
The supporters of a an opposition candidate--but
whether it be Gen. Fremont, or Mr Chase, or a
greater or less than either whose name is
vet to be
divulged—resolved to forestall him even in
more, and several days ago engaged the large has.
of the Maryland Institute for this evening (the
Gth), paying the price demanded in advance. Su
quietly was the matter managed that when on
Friday last Mr. Lincoln's " wire pullers" made ap-
plication for the hall, expecting no difficulty, they
found to their chagrin that it was pre-engaged, and
that the Lincoln Convention ran the risk of being
houseless and homeless. In this emergency they
made application for the Front-street Theatre,
which is capable of accommodating from 3,000 to
4,000 persons, and succeeded in obtaining it. At the
time at which I write no one seems able to pene-
trate the mystery of to-night's Convention, and as
this letter must be posted before the proceedings
commence, the mystery must, as far as I am con-
cerned, remain unsolved until my next. The COD-
a (pence of this unusual state of affairs is that Bal-
timore swarms, not alone with delegates to the two
Conventions, but with " wire pullers," "kg
" axe grinders," and other trading and professional
politicians, who have a purpose to serve by the suc-
cess of one or other of the candidates. Hotel or
boarding house accommodation is difficult to be ob-
tained, except by those who took the precautiom to
bespeak beds a week ago, and the price of board
and lodging has been raised about 500 per cent, by
the hotel keepers, by whom a Convention is consi-
dered their harvest and opportunity ; during the
existence of which such a thing as a conscience is
not thought of, however suggestively it may prick,
and when such a word as extortion is banished alike
from memory and the dictionary.
Baltimore, however, is much too near the seat of
war to be wholly engrossed with the contest for the
Presidency, and feeds itself upon rumours, true and
false, from the armies of Grant and Lee. Every
hour produces a new story, which the next hour
neither confirms nor disproves—stories tinged, if
not wholly invented by the wishes of the story-
tellers, and which much oftener speak of disasters
than of victories to the Federal cause. From
General Grant's despatches to Mr. Stanton—of
which the War Secretary only publishes such por-
tions as are favourable to the Federal army, or
serve to keep up the spirits of the Northern people—
it is evident that no general action had taken place
up to Saturday, the 4th, and equally evident that
such action was imminent from hour to hour. And
at a time like this, when every man is of value, i

seems strange and unpatriotic—at least to an Eng-
lishman's eyes—that whole regiments of hardy
veterans should leave the front to return to their

homes, and wash their hands of the war and of all
that belongs to it. Yesterday (Sunday) afternoon,
while the bells were ringing for afternoon service,
the sound of the drum and fife, followed by the air
of the " Star Spangled Banner," played by a full
military band,
was heard in the street. Opening the
Window and looking out upon Monument-square, I
find the place full of soldiers. Thinking it was a
reinforcement for General Grant, I descended into
the square and mixed with the crowd of spectators.
I soon learnt that these hardy, eun-browned, and
dirty-looking veterans were the Pennsylvania re-
serves, who were not rushing to the battlefield to
crush the rebellion,bat rushing from it, because their
time had expired. Their numbers were said to be
upwards of 4,000, though it afterwards appeared
that they were less than 2,000 ; that they formed
the sole remnants of 12 regiments, originally of the
full complement of 1,200 men each, or 14,400 in all;
that they had enlisted for tbree years in the first
flush of the excitement that followed the Confede-
rate attack on Fort Sauter; that they had fought
in all the battles of M•Dowell, M'Clellan, Pope,
Burnside, and Hooker; tnat they had crossed the
Rapidan with General Grant, fought under his orders
at the Wilderness and Spottsylvania Court-house,
marched with him in his long and dangerous circuit

from Spottyslyanin to the Chickehominyond that