The Sun.
London, England, 1864-05-27 00:00:00

THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA,

(From the Times Correspondent.)
NEW YORK, May 13.
Shouts of " victory" resound in the streets from
the voices of the newsboys. The word " victory,"
in large type, stands at the head of the flaring
columns of the second, third, fourth, fifth, and tenth
editions Papers ; and in still larger
letters, ofthat ht newspapers
os may read, at the corners
of streets, where the bulletins of battle are ex-
hibited to the crowd; but victory nevertheless is
not aohieved, and seems as distant as ever. Hitherto
the march of Grant—though, if it be ultimately
successful, it will be considered heroic—is the ad-
vance of a piece of mechanism. He sees no obstacles,
and goes blindly and ruthlessly on. He trusts to
nothing but superior numbers and hard fighting.
The lives of his men are of no value. He throws
them away by thousands, to gain half a mile of
jungle. He has pushed on for five leagues, and paid
about 9,000 lives for each. At every step he fights
at a great disadvantage, on ground of the enemy's
choosing. But he fights on. His men are picked
off by unerring sharpshooters from behind every
tree, but his order is still to push forward. His
Generals fall as if they were of no more account than
private soldiers. Up to Tuesday evening—the
seventh day of the conflict—he had lost 13 of them
in killed, wounded, and prisoners and at least 45,000
men. This loss is admitted by friends and admirers,
while those who are neither inctine to add 15,000 to
that enormous estimate. But still he holds his way
undaunted, seeing nothing, caring nothing, bat.
Richmond, which if he ever reach upon the terms of
these seven days he will reach without so much as
a body guard—a solitary prisoner. The havoc com-
mitted in his ranks is sickening to reflect upon.
One New York regie.ent, the pride of the ci:y,
which not long since marched down Brosdway
amid fl .untitne banners, waving kerchiefs,
loud huzzas, and the music of drum and fire,
suffered sa terribly that out of its full comple-
ment but four officers and fifteen men were lett
after half a day's fighting. Weale brigades have
lost their officers end two-thirds of their rank ann
file, and, having none to lead them, have been in-
corporated with other brigades, only less cruelly
decimated than themselves in having a brigadier
left to reorganise their shattered remnants. Aed
all this time the desperate struggle has only been
waged on the outskirts of the Confederate works,
and in such positions as General Lee would prefer
to see an enemy in whom he wished to annihilate.
The line of the North and South Anna has yet to
be reached ; and if Grant markt, through it and
pay no dearer for the privilege than he has paid
for the honour of eaarchieg from the Rapidan to
Spottsylvanih, Court-house, his original army,
whether it numbered 150,000 or 250,000, will have
dwindled to one-half, and will have more dreadful
to.t
of e e
work before it than has Tet been attempted, But
of
determine
h n
aius z,
: ormb
li o
ne
is alt one to General Grant, With the thblimity
genie:, e
madnessnehaet,d h st
(dteetcel narer°e tune
to e
3 the r
public,
roustb
i e
who
Stanton,l
1w
" I hat he will go to Richmond by that line, if it
takes him all the summer to do it," Impulsive, and
easily led, as the people tette arid apt to be astonished
at nothing, they are eetanished at this audacity.
They do not know how to account for it on any
other supposition than that Grant is the greatest
as well as rtV:e3t daring General whom the world ever
saw., and are content to wait a little longer for the
results before they change their opinion. But the
voice of wailing and lamentation is heard in too
many thousands of households in this and all the
cities of the North to permit unqualified approba-
tion of a system of war so costly es this, or to silence
the buzz of adverse criticism. If Grant's army,
instead of a throbbing, thinking mass of human
beings, were but an agglomeration of steel and iron
—a monster steam engine cunningly put together
for purposes of deetructioo , its driver could not more
deliberately urge it forward in its pitiless career.
People begin to ask themselves what will happen,
if, after all, the machine shall be dashed to pieces,
by the obstructions that it will have to butt against
if it continue to advance. They ask in vain. No
one can answer, or no one will, except by a shrug
of the shoulders and a look of resignation.
The greatest success that has yet attended the
operations of Grant was accomplished by General
Hancock on the night of Wednesday. Both armies
were resting from the fatigues of Tuesday—the
most dreadful day of carnage ever known on the
American Continent—when Hancock, taking ad-
vantage of the darkness and the rain, suddenly
changed his position from the right to the left of
Grant's line, turned the rear of the Confederate
army, and fell upon the division of General A. P.
Hill, capturing 30 guns and 4,000 prisoners. This
was a serious blow to General Lee, and when intelli-
gence of the fact was conveyed to Washington and
to this city simultaneously with the statement that
Gen. Philip Sheridan, at the head of a large body of
Federal cavalry, had also flanked Lee, and severed
his railroad connexion with Richmond, a rumour,
which for awhile found many believers, spread
rapidly abroad to the effect that Lee had capitu-
lated- with his whole army. Wall street received
the news as true, and the price of gold began to
fall rapidly. An official announcement from the
War-office was afterwards promulgated denying the
capitulation, and this, coupled with trustworthy
intelligence, confirmed by a score of witnesses, that
the battle commenced by inceek'e division, Lee
tended to the whole army yesterday morning, sent
gold up again as quickly as it had falter).
Amid all the terrible excitement of the war news
it is easy to perceive that there is an under-current
of deep feeling. The people are not so vainglorious
as formerly. They are not so certain of victory as
they have been on previous occasions, and the bril-
liant strategy of Lee and the unconquerable heroism
of the Southern army extort admiration on every
side. The fact is that the North, even in this day of
extremity, is proud of the noble qualities exhibited
by the Southern army and people, and feels, possibly
not for the first time, a rniBgiVing that the war was
a mistake, and that if it Were possible for North
and South to shake hands, and be to each other 88
once they were, it would be a glorious privilege
and a blessing to both of them. Never before did
the Peace party speak out ag boldly, and find so
many to agree with them. Even Mr. Wendell
as instant a war trumpeter as the land
eve- produced, inclines hie heart to better impulses.
No living American orator is so eloquent as this
gentleman. He is as direct as
Mr. Bright, as calm
as Mr. Cobden, as persuasive as Mr. Gladstone, as
elegant as Lord Carlisle, and when occasion de-
mands can be as fiery as Lord Derby. His language
is the purest Eeglish, without the slightest taint of
the Yannee idiom or accent, or the least approach to
American slang. He never "speaks to Buncosabe"
or indulges in the rhodomontade which his country.
men call "spread eagleism." His satire cuts like
'he polished r, z •r, and draws. b ood with the
scarcely perceptible touch that snows the thorough
master of the instrument. ho eeidomneridesceads

govern his conscience. He has gone back to his first
loves ; he has remembered, it will not do to say he

has discovered, that the liberty of the white man is
worth something, not only to the white man him-

self, but to the cause of civilisation. He has re-
nounced his errors, and has become as nearly

a statesman as Festus was a Christian. In a

speech delivered on Tuesday last at the Church a

the Puritans, on occasion of the 31st anniversary of
the American Anti-Slavery Society, he avowed opi-
nions which place him in the same rank with Mr.
Vallandigham, Mr, Fernando Wood, Mr. Benjamin

Wood, Mr. Long, and Mr. Harris, and every other
man in the country who believes that the war can
neither restore the Union nor preserve liberty, and
in full sympathy with the impartial public opinion
of England and France, and of all Europe, which
saw from the first what he only sees in this day of
awful conflict. He mournfully confessed that the
youngest American would not live to see a resto-
ration of the republic of his forefathers ; that if
peace came, of which he saw no prospect, whatever
Grant might do, 800,000 men would be thrown upon
the community unfitted for the ordinary occupations
of life, and therefore a standing menace and danger
to the public liberty; that for halt a century no one
but a soldier would have a chance of the Presidency;
that the right arm of every men in the country, and
of every male child that was hereafter to be born
into it, was and would be mortgaged to pay the in-
terest on the debt. He admitted that no such des-
potism as must exist in America, ifohe war shoo' i
continue, existed on this side the Wall of China;
that it he were a negro and a slave he would pray
that the war might last for 20 years—for the war
would benefit the black race, and would ultimately
raise it to the social and political level of the white;
but that as an American white citizen he deprecated
even a month's nontinuance of war, because he saw
i❑ it the .ends of debt, military ambition, and dee
potism, agj.nst the progress of which God demanded
a virtue and intelligence in the masses which did not
exist in America, and which raver existed anywhere
else if history were true. " You can never," he said,
in the peroration of a speech abounding in similar
confessions," restore the Union by force. This war has
built up a unanimous Confederate sentiment. . •
If the rebellion reel in Virginia, it will by ❑o means
be broken if it qui's the OA Dominion. . . .
The sections have learnt to respect each other. .
. . We know the South no,,it, its 'willingness
to die for its ideas: its readiness for every saeridce,
and its indomitaboa pride." But Mr, Phillips did
not admit that the North eras reedy to made similar
sacrifices for its ides; on the contrary, he con-
fessed his shame and humiliation at the thought
that 20,000,000 of white people in the North had
gone down on their knees and implored the assist-
arid of sham' met
.teed elavce:e: the woilo
Tiering, half the number of white men in the South.
It might be thought that Mr. Phillips, entertaining
such sentiments ee these, in ready to do now what
Messrs. Lincoln, Seward, Greeley, Everett, and
others were ready to do in 1860,—let the South de-
part without further hindrance, recognise its inde-
pendence, and advise its countrymen to do the same.
But no word to that affect is to be found in his re-
markable speech. He compered North end South
to an eagle end a fish chained to each other. The
eagle could not live in the water, nor the fish in the
air ; and one of the two had to die, in order that the
other might live. But why, it might be asked,
should either die ? Cannot each return to its own
element by the severance of the chai❑ that connects
them? Mr. Phillips meant as much, but seems to
have lacked the courage to say so. But having
gone so far, he will some day or other be
obliged to go further. It is well tkat he should
!eel shame and humiliation. It will be be:ter
that he feel repentance. He, the inciter of men's
passions ; he, the trumpeter of discord; he, the
preacher of a philanthropy of which the means
are blood and misery and a carnage of horror to
which history offers few parallels, though the end,
far off, may once have seemed to his mind to justify
them all, owes it not only to his own conscience,
but to the multitudes of men whom his teachings
have goaded into war, to declare his error, and to
lend his fluent tongue and his clear brain to that
blessed cause of Peace which in this evil hour
needs every voice to pray for it, and, most of ali,
the voices of those to whom God has given the
power to sway the convictions of others. Mr
Phillips may affect to think even now that it were
better that the whole Southern people eheuld be
exterminated than that slavery should not be de-
stroyed or the Union not re-established; but such
merciless logic cannot really govern his conduct, if
sanity be left to him. His speech was for peace, as
far as it went ; and, coming from a man of his
character, it was a sign of the times. Reason has
long been silent in the councils of the North.
It is of good augury that its voice begins to be
heard above the din even of this awful week, and
that the men of thought are learning to take coun-
sel of their consciences instead of their passions,
and daring once again to tell the people unpalatable
ruths.

MAY 14.

Postcript.--Again there is a cry of " victory,"
louder and more persistent than ever. The battle
of Thursday—brouaht on by the brilliant, action of
bleneral klancock—lasted the whole of the day,
and was accompanh. d by as frightful a slaughter
as that of Tuesday. The result appears to be that
General Lee abandoned his strong position at
Spottsylvania, crossed the Po, and retired on Friday
morning towards a still stronger position on the
North Anna, with Grant relentlessly following in
his rear. Some of the papers which ought to know
better, speak of this as "a magnificent and decisive
victory ;" say that " the rebel army has been tho-
roughly vanquished ;" that " as en effective force it
has practically ceased to exist," and that "the love
of the nation to General Grant for this splendid
" achievement will be fervent and unmeasured."
But General Grant and the Secretary of War are
more moderate in their estimate, and Grant merely
says, in recounting the gains of his eighth day of
battle, that the " enemy is obstinate" and " seems
to have found his last ditch." This was before Lee's
withdrawal to the North Anna, and by this time
his opinion of the obstinacy" may bo confirmed,
and that of the " location" of the "last ditch" con-
siderably modified. All these " victories" grow
smaller when the details are published. Even
General Grant's assertion that he captured 30 pieces
of artillery, in addition to two general officers and
between 3,000 and 4,000 men, appears to have been
founded on a misconception. A despatch from the
field dated a day later than his official report to the
Secretary of War, says, "Last night our men again
attempted to bring in the captured guns. Ihe
enemy resisted dreadfully, and a fight. ensued,
which resulted in some of the guns remainin on
g
g rntin ti." Thus it appeuro hat a portion of the
duns have not been captured, wblle it is possible—