The Sun.
London, England, 1864-10-20 00:00:00

THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

(From the limes' Special Correspondent•)
NEW YORK, OCT. 7.

After an absence of three weeks in British
America, to study the premonitory symptoms that
announce the birth of a new nation, I resume my
pen in this city, the commercial capital of what
might, in contradistinction, be called American
America, if it were not for the pleonasm involved in
the expression, to describe the more violent pa.
roxysms which seem to precede the final disruption
and political death of a greater Confederation than
the world ever saw. In Canada all is peace and
order. In the outlying maritime provinces, almost
as remote from Montreal and Quebec in point of
time, as these are from Europe, there has been en-
gendered a growing desire, not alone to cement and
assure their relations with the mother country, as
the great centre of authority and the strongest
security of their liberty, but to enter into political
partnership with the Canadas, and with any other
States and colonies that may hereafter be founded
bet ween the Western shores of the Great Lakes and
the slopes of the Rocky Mountains ; thence to stretch
to the Pacific Ocean, and to include at no distant
date the magnificent territories of British Columbia
and Vancouver. In these colonies the still current of
political life is only disturbed by the healthy and
breezy ripple of progress and fair weather. Gold
is at par. The paper dollar based upon adequate
security is exchangeable for the full value which
it represents. Confidence between merchant and
merchant and between the people and the banks is
unimpaired. Provisions are cheap and abundant.
Every honest, hardworking man can gain a com-
fortable subsistence by labour not too long pro-
tracted. The authority of the law is paramount.
The inestimable privilege of the Habeas Corpus
has neither been suspended nor threatened.
Every man can sit in the sunshine, " with none
to make him afraid." There is not a grievance
to be alleged, or even whispered, against the
Imperial Government, the purely nominal
bat beneficent suzerainty of which keeps the politi-
cal machinery of the colonies in working order, ex.
cept a querilous but affectionate complaint that
England does not reciprocate the kindly feeling
with which her American possessions regard her.
Bat in Federal America—about to be broken up
into two, if not into three or four political organisa-
tions, everything is the reverse. The fiery ordeal
of war has tried the stability of the institutions on
which popular liberty seemed to repose, and found
them ineullicient for the day of peril. The longer
the war lasts the more envenomed it grows. North
and South are no longer free Republics fighting
against each other for a principle of honour—but
hostile despotisms, ignoring the rights of the people
—the one striving to exist, the other to dominate.
Liberty end war are found to be as incompatible
on the one side as on the other, The law of might
is the only law recognised. Men's passions ere in•
flamed to the fever point, and madness takes the
place of reason. Thieves and swindlers in high
places grow fat upon the plunder of the army and
the people. Commerce in the Federal North is de-
moralised, and, having made up its mind for high
prices, shudders at the prospects of peace and recon-
ciliation, remote and shadowy as they are, and
curses the victories, real or supposed, which the
Government and the Generals in the field announce
because they bring down the premium on gold, re-
duce prices, and, if continued much longer, will
ruin thousands of speculators, large and small, and
produce financial collapse, perhaps national bank-
ruptcy, even although they might not in the long
run be found stable or productive enough to
produce the pacification of the country. Party
feeling is venomous, and, as the day of election
for the President draws near, brings into
play the worst characteristics of human nature,
and, should the contest prove close, threatens to
introduce a new element of revolutionary convulsion
into the seething caldron of popular passion. The
existing Administration is at its wit's end to catch
the wavering favour of the multitude—lies by itself,
or its agents, on every event of peace or war that
it can twist or exaggerate into a reason, or a sem-
blance of reason, for the perpetuation of its power.
The working classes are sullen and discontented,
scowl at the idea of a forced conscription, always
threatened, but never attempted in any populous
community, and clamour for an amount of wages in
depreciated paper which will represent the purchase
ing power of the wages in hard money which they
received before their hands, or those of their sons,
were imbrued in the blood of their Southern
brothers, and up to this time clamour, and are likely
to clamour, in vain. States as large as European
kingdoms are governed under martial law by attor-
neys and mule drivers, who seem to think that the
more horrible the atrocities they commit on their
political opponents the greater service they will
render to the Government that employs them. And
over and above all these sources of evil broods the
dark, iniquitous conviction that if the North cannot
conquer the South, or the South the North, and that
the Union cannot be restored by a civil war, a foreign
war against France or England, unprovoked
although it may be by either of those powers, may
afford the last desperate chance of preserving what
these proud Americans call" the life of the nation ;"
a nation, however that has never yet existed, and
which if the civilised world were wise, and awake
to its own interest and security, it would never
suffer to exist, if the formal recognition of the
South as an independent Power were sufficient to
prevent or even to retard the consummation. If
the Union be indeed moribund—which the North-
ern Americans passionately and continuously deny
—it dies hard. The strong man disbelieves in his
own dissolution. All things are mortal but
himself. Rome and Greece may be dead, England
may have approached her last hour, but the Union
is in its vigorous and rampant youth, and neither
insidious disease nor sudden calamity shall strike it
down. He feels that no external hand has aimed a
blow at his vitals, and cannot believe that in his
rude and lusty frame there exists a poison that he
can neither eradicate nor neutralise, and the same
physical laws which apply to other living beings
apply also to him. He curses his doctors, repudiates
their reiredies, and even in the last agony thinks a
vigorous maturity and a green old age are before
him.

For the last three or four weeks such thoughts as
these have had possession of the mind of the Yankee
nation. All has bees joy and expectation, and pro-
phecy of crowning victory to be achieved at Rich.-
mond by the great Gen. Grant, but within the last
three days there have been ominous whispers in
places of public resort and in the offices of menhants,
brokers, and bankers, that the people have again
and for the hundredth time been deceived by the

mendacious bulletins of the War Department, and
by the over-hopeful braggadocio of the Hibernian
Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley and by the po-
litic reticence of the cooler and more calculating
Grant before Petersburg. To-day it is positively
known that Sheridan's advance in the Shenandoah
has been checked by the General is command of
the Confederate forces, supposed to be Longstreet,
who has taken the place of Eirly, and that Grant's
now plan of operations against Richmond, from
which so much was expected, has turned out as
great and almost as costly a failtiro as every pre-
vious attempt he has made against the Confederate
capital. The two corps of his army which, under
Generals Meade and Warren, he despatched to the
James River gained the permanently untenable pee.
sition of Chapiin'sMill at the loss of upwards of:4,000
men, while Gen. Lae—fully aware that if Grant
had intended to march upon Richmond by that
route he would have marched with his whole army
—only detached sufficient force to foil the movement,
and retained the bulk of his legions at Petersburg.
He suspected or knew that Grant's calculation was
that he would be alarmed for the safety of Rich
mond against attack from the James, and would leave
Petersburg inadequately protected against an assault
by the main body of Grant's army. The conses
quence was that Grant's designs were frustrated.
He gained nothing, not even a barren victory at
Chapin's Mill, and was unable to risk an advance
upon Petersburg. The whole project has thus COTT
to a standstill, having had no results but -the less
of thousands of lives, the befooling of the public,
and the temporary depression of the confidence of
Gen. INPClellan's friends that he will supersede Mr.
Lincoln, Nor is the situation in the Shenandoah
much more comforting to the war party, either in
or out of the ranks of the Republicans or the
councils of the Administration. As if to prove
to his countrymen that even if he should con•
quer the valley he could not retain possession,
Gen. Grant has issued an order characteristically
cruel and ruthless to Generals Custer and Merritt,
to prozeed up the valley at the head of their respec-
tive divisions—to do all possible damage to the
railroads and the crops, to carry off the farming
stock and the negroes, to take all available measures
for preventing the cultivation of the soil, and, in
view of the probability that the war would last
for another year, to convert it into a " barren
waste," where not even a blade of grass should
be permitted to grow. An admiring critic, writ-
ing to a New York journal from the army of
the Potomac, informs the world that the order
has been or will be so effectually executed that if
a crow flies over the valley it will either have to
starve or carry its own rations. He adds that
in the course of one day (Thursday, the 29th of
September) Generals Custer and Merritt destroyed
as much wheat as would have sufficed to feed the
whole Confederate army for a twelvemonth. The
Shenandoah Valley, not only one of the most lovely
but the most fertile in the world, appears to be
doomed, like Italy, to pay a heavy penalty for her
beauty and productiveness. Her inhabitants to the
latest generation will have cease to perpetuate in
vindictive rhyme or tradition the remembrance of
the misdeeds of the worse than Attila who wrought
such horror in her fair fields in the desecrated
names of liberty and union.

And while these recent events in Virginia go far
to prove that the Confederate cause is by no means
so hopeless as Mr, Lincoln's friends and supporters
for electioneering purposes endeavour to represent
it, there are symptoms both in Georgia and Mis-
souri, that the tide of Federal success has begun to
turn. General Sherman, the besieger, bids fair to
become the besieged. Hood's foiled, but undefeated
army, now commanded by General Beaureglni,
threatens to enclose him in A-lanta ; and his con-
mur.ications with his base of supplies, 140 miles in
the rear, are so constantly interruptel by Generals
Forrest and Wheeler, at the head of laige bodies of
cavalry, acquainted with all the byways and passes
of the hills and va.llay_s, as to ruka it obviouJ to the
meanest military cipacity that Sherman's
ship may speedily be subjected to severer tests than
it has yet encountered, and that he may not only
require great skill, hut great good fortune, to fulfil
the promise of final victory, which the North still
anticipates at his hands. In Missouri a signal
diversion in favour of the South has been effected by
Gen, Sterling Price, at the head of a well appsinted
army of 25,000 men, the numbers of which he is daily
augmenting by forced conscription as he passes
along. This conscription, it appears, is considered
the reverse of a hardship by the Missourians who
join his standard, as in the event of defeat and the
scattering of the army by a superior Federal force,
the conscripts may plead that they were compelled
to take service and so save their property, if not
their necks, from the vengeance of the conquerors.
The avowed object of General Price is to seize the
the State capital, install Mr. Reynolds, elected in
the Confederate interest, as the legal governor, and
hold Missouri—or such part of it as his legions can
command—as a constituent portion of the Southern
Confederacy. The Missourians are intensely disaf-
fected to the rule of Mr. Lincoln, and all the mea-
sures of repression which have been adopted against
them have but served to harden their hearts against
the Union and the bloodthirsty officials deputed from
Washington to make them love and adhere to it.
An incident gathered from the lips of Missourians
who have fled from their homes within the last two
months, and found temporary:refuge in Canada, may
help to show why the people of that State abhor
the Federal rule, as administered among them by
3eneral M'Neil and other officers, and how it is that
General Sterling Price, at the first gleam of success
to his arms, may expect to be largely reinforced by
the people. The case occurred some time ago at a
place called Palmyra, where General M'Neil had
his headquarters. A Unionist for whom the General
had some special regard was reported to have been
shot by guerillas. M'Neil forthwith ordered ten
suspected inhabitants of the town, reported right.
fully or wrongfully to be in league with the gneril.
las, to be publicly shot in retaliation. One of them
was an elderly man, with a devotedly attached wife
and a large family of children, the youngest
but three years old. A youthful unmarried
man, named Sydnor, a resident of Palmyra,
was struck with sudden sympathy for the sad
fate of this husband and father, and in a fit of
generous impulse, which, had it been recorded in the
page of ancient history, would have rendered hie
name immortal, offered his life to General M'Neil,
as a substitute for that of his older fellowacountry-
man. M'Neil, without a spark of manly or Christian
feeling in his heart, had the ineffable brutality to
accept the offer. The old man was released, pro-
testing against the bargain, and the young man
was atrociously murdered in his stead. Though
this noble act of selfssacrifice was committed in a
prosaic , age, there is no fear that the memory of
Sydnor will not go down with honour to an ad-
miring futurity, and that when Americans of the
20th or 21st centuries, purified of the stain of this
savage war, shall have occasion to cite to their chil-
dren the names of those whose statues should find
a place in the national Valhalla, that of so brave
and unselfish a yoeth will find a foremost place, and
that the name of Al'Neil will be repeated with the
execration which it deserves. Another case, almost
as horrible, occurred within the last month in lisn-
tucky, under the rule of the ruffian Paine, whose
atrocities have become at last too bad for the Fede-
ral Government to tolerate, and who has fled into a
neighbouring State to avoid trial before a drum-
head court-martial. It seems that a Federal soldier
was shot by a rifle ball in front of the fences of a
small farm, owned by a farmer suspected of vague
and undefinable crime of Southern sympathy. When
the fact was notified to Paine, he despatched a coins
pany of soldiers to the place. They found the farmer
digging in his garden, assisted in his labour by his
son, a lad of 16. They were both seized, accused of
the murder of the soldier, and without being per.
mitted to say a word in their defence, or allowedeven

The financial situation shares the uneasiness of
the political and military. The failures of the cotton
speculators of Europe have reacted upon New York
and Chicago, the great corn emporium of the West,
has witnessed within three days a perfect panic,
and the toppling down of banks and millionaires
whom nobody could have suspected of even the
hazard of insolvency. Gold has fallen 41 per cent.
within 17 dale, on the faith of victories that have
been either exaggerated or invented, and has con-
tinued to rise and fill with and without adequate
cause, to the bewilderment of the public. In the
moncy-market everything betokens a financial
crash, which not even a great victory of the Federal
arms can prevent. In fact, the whole financial and.
commercial system is so rotten and abnormal that
victory is as certain to ruin one powerful set of
speculators, as defeat is to ruin another. No one
can tell which of the two would occasion the greater
panic, if its leading operators began to fall, or how
loud would be the reverberations of a smash that
might involve on one side or the other nine-tenths
of the mushroom magnates whom the war and a
war expenditure has produced, to dazzle the public
and each other with a wealth—which is wealth in
name only, and wb2ch will vanish into nothingness
at the first frost of a hard bat wholesome reality.