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

THE CIV IL WAE, IN AMERICA,

(From the Times Correspondent.)
NEW YORK, Jan. 5
The old year went out and the new year came in
amid such 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 " impossiblet But the twenty.

fourth hour of 1864 had not tolled before the most

potent of all scavengers, the frost, began to facili-
tate desertion and harden the road. The thermome.
ter suddenly fell from fcrty•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 left 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
.Liffersonville to Chicago; and railway communica-
tion throughout the North and West was either
greatly impeded by snow drifts or stopped alto-
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 other 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 smell-pox on a visit of philanthropy to

the wretched negro barrack, or settlement, in the

neighbourhood of "Washington, having corapletely

recovered from the attack, hid the usual handshz.,k.

ing levee at the White House, and went through

the ordeal with undinchillg bravery. To such of the
crowd as he was personally acquainted with ho gave

a cordial greeting, and to some favoured few fired eff

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 occasion, or to presume to think that his
felicitations on the New Year were as acceptable as
those of his white brother. As such the 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
opening, not alone the opening of another year, but
the first anniversary of the President's Proclamation

cf Emancipation. On these occasions, though the
white friends of the nep,ro race were advertised to
make speeches in support of emancipation, vary few
were present. A sprinkling of white women were
to be seen, together with a few prominent clergyman
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 7alr. 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 parcellei 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 Cnrist." 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. Bat 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 be 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 cerebrate the proclamation in his heart, be-
cause the proclamation was the key to victory
peace—that without it victory
and 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-
byterian clergy ; but they stand in a small mino-
rity. No public man 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
shopkeepers of Paris from socialism and com-
munism. 'rhe churches may deplore this fact,
and attribute it to the innate wickedness of the
heart of 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, coosiderable anxiety begins to be
felt at Washington on the subject of that august
tribunal—the first alike in power and dignity in
the Republic, and having within its competency to
set aside or annul the acts of the Executive. It
of ten Judges, of whom six were
i
consists at present
appointed by the Democratic party in the halcyon
days before Lincoln, and four by the Republicans
since Mr. Lincoln's assumption of office. The Chief
Justice, the Um, a love seldom
Roger B. Taney, of Baltimore, a
man beloved in Maryland with
accorded by Americans, apprciches hip 90th yen*,