The Sun.
London, England, 1863-05-01 00:00:00

THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA,

(From Correspondent of the Itmes.)

The spring campaign, NEW YORK, April 17.
which has opened so un-
favourably for the Federal cause at Charleston, does
not pron-dse much success in any other portion of the
vast circumference over which its operations are ex-
tended. Mr. Lincoln, more suo, sees nothing for it
but :o keep " pegging away" at the enemy, but,
under such feeble management as his, " pegging"
degenerates into " pEcking." Admiral Dupont has
gained no laurels by " pegging" at Charleston.
Admiral Farragut and Gen. Grant have " pegged
away" in vain at the front and back doors of Vicks-
burg. Gan. Banks, instead of " pegging" at Port
aurisen„haa,sunitbia hands as he can, well
-noanage to defend New Orleans. Gen. Rosecrans is
checkmated in Tennessee by Gen. Braxton Bragg,
nd w.ll have to "peg away" not only with rare
vigour, but rarer good fortune, to save Nashville.
General Foster is cooped up in Washington, North
Carolina, surrounded by a vastly superior
force under General H. D. Hill; while
General Hooker, who boasts that the army
of the Potomac is " the finest army on the planet,"
is confronted by the same defiant and triumphant
foe who at Fredericksburg shattered the ranks and
almost broke the spirit of Gen. Burnside, and can-
not advance by that route to Richmond if he would,
and would not if he could. Everywhere the Confe-
derates are in the highest health and confidence;
and again the capital is in such danger as to
threaten the North with a graver humiliation than
the ill-fortune of war has yet inflicted. Even
Baltimore is not considered safe, and new raids of
the Confederates into Maryland and Pennsylvania
are openly predicted, as soon as the spongy roads
shall have hardened sufficiently under the rays of
the spring and early summer sun to permit the
passage of horse and artillery.

The Northern people begin to be puzzled to ac-
count for this uniform failure of all the greatest
schemes of their Government. They know, and
have long deplored, that there are little brains at
Washington. They admit that attorneys do not
always make gocd Generals; that Gen. Halleck and
Mr. Stanton are the two greatest failures of the
North—far greater than Mr. Lincoln himself—and

that a miserable peculation and corruption every•
where prevail ; but they have never doubted, amid
all their discouragements, that they have a large
army, only requiring to be well led to be moderately
successful. But even this foundation of hope for the
future has failed them in their present need. They
were assured three months ago that they had armies
in the field amounting to 1,0'30,000 men. They were
told only last week that their legions were at least
700,000 strong, and they know that pay is due and
rations art, drawn for that number. With the spirit
of a people who can calculate, if they can do any-
thing, they have taken to adding up numbers, and
are asking one another " Where are our legions?" It
is a simple sum in elementary arithmetic, and the
resalts show roguery or robbery somewhere, or, if
not these, the concealment of truths that ought to
be known to every citizens if the Government fairly
did its duty. General Hunter, charged with the

land attack upon Charleston, was unable to co -ope-
rate with Admiral Dupont, because he had less than
14,000—some accounts say less than 12,000—men,
negroes included, under his command, and because
the Government at 'Washington, though urgently
appealed to for reinforcements, was unable to spare
him a single battalion to aid in a victory on which,
above all others, it had set its heart. Gen. Banks
is in an equally deplorable condition. He has not
above 18,000 men to depend upon for the safety of
Louisiana, and appeals in vain for help to General
Halleck and Mr. Stanton. They have no men to
spare, and he must do the best he can with the de-
moralised and insufficient force at his disposal. Gen.
Fostteor
the
inNloartethstCaacrenoliunnat—s, wishoa question of a few
se surrender, accord-
iog
hours—has been sacrificed either by the neglect or
inability of the War Department to send him the
men he needed. General Roseerans requires double
of the 700,000 his actual force to maintain himself successfully in
Tennessee, but cannot persuade the Government to
send him so much as a brigades,
Washington, or
hoara
forno btrhie-
gpaudbelictopspaArree.
tWhehgerreeatthemnaairoeritthye armies of the
re-
tainedße-
for the defence of
vir
useless invasion of Virginia by the line of the Rap-
pahannock p
annoTchke?reoraarreectohmespeu7toedo,oooo good authority to beo a merely imaginary
no more than 60,000 men in and about Washing-
ton, charged with the defence of the capital and
the person of the President, and from 80,000 to
100,000 under Hooker, seeking in vain for an
opportunity to march through the tenacious mud
of the Old Dominion, toward that much coveted
city of Richmond, which neither he nor his army
will ever reach by the road which Burnside failed to
travel, and which M'Clellan was disinclined to at-
tempt. If these figures be correct the Federal army
must either amount to a force far inferior to its roll
upon the books of the War-office, the Treasury, and
the Commissariat, or it must be scattered in small
dribblets over the Border States, or be retained for
garrison duty in the Northern and Western cities to
overawe and keep down the discontented " Copper
heads." Which of the two solutions is correct ? The
most probable is that the Government has no such
army as it pretends to have, and that the rank and
file do not exceed 300,000 or at most 400,000 men ;
that desertions have been more frequent, more sys-
tematic, and more numerous than is publicly known ;
and that sickness prevails to a far greater extent
than the Government has cared to divulge.
But why, it may be timed, does not the Govern-
ment, under circumstances such as these, take im-
n ediate measures to fill up the ranks ? Why, when
the term of the nine months' volunteers is within a
few days of expiry, does it not offer them a renewal
of bounty for a renewal of service P And why,
above all, does it not organise measures for railing
out the first instalment of a quarter of a million of
men under the Conscription Act ? It seems myste-
rious that not only does Mr. Lincoln take no steps
of the kind, but that the journals of Washington
and New York, which speak at the prompting of
the Administration, have announced within the
last few days that there is, in the opinion of the
'atilo present necessity for a con-
all the men really required can
baN con-
scription r
por Department,
'm and that
btt)oainlrdt
by
ent
voluntary enlistment and high
bounties. There is more in these announcements
especially the European public,
peot- Taken in connection with
t than
would plainread lym esti%
the anti British outcry which has been so suddenly
raised and so strenuously encouraged by the Go-
vernment, two inferences may be drawn. One is
that in the existing temper of the public mind a con-
scription cannot be safely resorted to ; that not only
can the Government obtain no additional men for the
further prosecution of hostilities against the South,
but that a conscription is in itself so alien to the
habits, the education, the prejudices, and the free
spirit of the people, and so likely to be resisted by
organised combinations of working men, Irish and
German as well as native, and by the " Copper-
in the North-Western States
ahseatdosb,'e' minorae
hesipeisllgehsl
degree dangerous and impolitic.
The second is. that a the Government must largely

increase its armies or be utterly beaten by the South,
it is essential to get up some great popular excite-
ment that may serve to reanimate the flagging en-
thusiasm of the people. As nothing within the
reach of the Administration is so likely to accom-
plish the end as a threatened war with Great Bri-
tain, that ancient and never-failing " dodge " is un-
scrupulously employed. Not, perhaps, that the Go-
vernment desires such a war, but that it desires to
render war so imminent,—to come, as it were, so
nearly. within an inch, or a hair's breadth of it,—as
the
sc. yet cal
wtrlpoeuu
Britishnwl
dsoa rerdi
eisadefi
odl
peopleyr
arlon wgrtrmd
ybyaoiytshmt
to excite thz warlike ardour and the undying hate
of the Irish Roman C. tholic population, and of all
controversies,
handsrf e
ft
therefore
reea greatgbae pps tee cities,prEha Eng-
land. egpds.
which would not lift a finger against the South, but
forwanh
even for the rupture of diplomatic relations bets% een
the two countries. To this extent animosities may
be carried; but in the opinion of those who have
longest studied the character of the people, and who
best know the men in power, there will be no war
unless Great Britain shall herself declare it,
The case of the Peterhoff was not deemed of im-
portance in this city until the facts were set forth
in the English newspapers. She was represented
here as an ordinary blockade runner, legally cap-
tured in an attempt to force her way into Charleston.
Not a word was said of her being bound to the neu-
tral port of Matemorace Now, that the real facts
havastektitallioalige _is a general impression
that Mr. Seward will not risk a diplomatic or any
other rupture with Great Britain on account of that
vessel, but that she will be given up, together with
the mails, unopened, that were found on board. The
real grievance on which Mr. Lincoln kind Mr.
Seward rely for exciting the necessary amount of
hostile feeling against England is the construction
in British ports of such vessels as the Alabama and
the Florida, and the probability that, unless they
assume a sufficiently threatening attitude, the Con-
federate Loan of three millions sterling will be ex-
pended in the same way, in the same places, and for
the same purpose. The idea of issuing letters of
marque to adventurers of New York and other cities
for the purpose of capturing these daring cruisers
seems to have been abaudoned, not only on account
of the danger of provoking the principal maritime
nations of Europe into war against the United
States, but, perhaps, because they have discovered
that letters of marque are only issued against
foreign enemies, and that in taking this step the
Federal Government would virtually recognise the
independence of the Southern Confederacy, and
could not afterwards make it a grievance against
other nations if they imitated the example.
Mr. Horace Greeley's fall from grace in the matter
of the perpetuity and efficacy of the President's pro-
clamation of emancipation has brought upon him
the distrust and the reproaches, if not the enmity,
of some of his fellow-labourers in the cause. A
meeting to condemn and disavow his interpretation
of the document, and especially his assertion that
if the Union were restored the Southern Slave-hold-
ing States could legally re-enslave the negroes whom
Mr. Lincoln's proclamation set free, was held the
night before last at Mr. Henry Ward Beecher's
church,under the presidency of the Rev. Dr. Cheever.
The speakers were not very successful in their de-
molition of Mr. Greeley's logic and law, both of
which have found an unexpected supporter in the
Hon. It. H. Dana, Attorney-General of the State of
Massachusetts, and, as the Tribune truly says,
"one of the earliest, ablest, and first anti-slavery
men " of that State. That gentleman, doubtless in
order to help the Government out of the ;:ilemma
into which it thrusts itself by the proclamation, and
to gain back for it some portion of the Democratic
and Conservative support which it has lost, declared
in a speech at Providence, Rhode Island, "that if
any man feared or hoped that the proclamation did,
as a matter of law, by its own force, alter the legal
status of one slave in America on the Ist of January
last, he built his fears or hopes on the sand, It was
a military act, and not the decree of a legislator. It
force does not do is not done." This was Mr.
dhoansenboyletghaelstrocne
go na the si
st a
dt uosnoe f; t
wh eh sla ta
teh. lairrhmas t f
Greeley's assertion in terser and more authoritative
language than he employed ; but no reply was
made at the meeting, which was otherwise only re-
markable for the singularly awkward admission of
one of the speakers. A Mr. Gilbert, who is do-
-cribed as a leading member of the Church of the
Puritans, declared that "the captive bird should
be liberated, in order that it might fly off to its
native air," or, in other words, that the slave,
when emancipated, should be sent back to Africa,
which is Mr. Lincoln's favourite scheme for settling

the difficulty. The other admission was still more
significant of the designs of the party in power—
the real enemies of the freedom of the American
people. It was to the effect "that the national
debt incurred by the war would create a con-
solidated Government and sweep away the old
, doctrine of State rights." This gentleman went a
little too fast. The debt threatens to be the instru-
ment of disintegration rather than of consolidation.
Already the subject of repudiation is openly dis-
cussed. It is declared by leading lawyers of the
Democratic party that the debt was illegally con-
traoted,and that the West and North-West are begin-
ning to murmer that, whoever may be found to pay
it, they will not. But the speaker was too much in
love with despotism to look the facts of liberty
fairly in the face. He was too warmly attached to
the idea of a centralised Government, powerful
enough to dominate the world, to tolerate the exist-
ing constitution of the States. He concluded his
speech by declaring, " that he would rejoice to see
the day of consolidation. When that period arrived
the Government would be able to maintain a million
of armed men, and might then say, 'Come on,
France ! Come on, England ! Come on, Copper-
heads!'" Such is American Puritanism and Aboli-
tionism, and such are its ideas of Republican liberty !
A huge debt ! An immense standing army ! De-
fiance to the word! Denial of the right of free dis-
cussion to its own citizens, and deportation of the
negro race ! And yet these people pretend that
in combating the South they are fighting in behalf
of the great cause of human liberty and progress,
and feel aggrieved when the English people with-
hold their sympathy !
The Federal army has lost one officer and ought
to lose another by a recent unhappy occurrence in

,he camp near Suffolk. General Michael Corcoran,

once keeper of a "groggery" in this city, and who
first made for himself a military reputation when a
)ieutenant of militia by an act of disobedience to the
commands of his superior officer, for which he was
tried before a Court-martial, has proved that he is as

unfit to be a general as he was a lieutenant. He
has cruelly murdered a subordinate officer for the
performance of his duty, and, if he be not tried
for the capital offence and dismissed from the army,
whether he bo found guilty of murder, or of the
minor crime of manslaughter, a bad example will
be set to the whole army, and the Federal Go-
vernment will deserve to lose any battle in which
such a man as ho is shall lead either an army or a
division. General Corcoran, who, perhaps, imagines
that he must be a very great man as well as a very
great warrior, inasmuch as New York recently gave
him a public reception as brilliant as it gave to the
Prince of Wales, was walking near the lines of the
army when he was challenged for the password by
Col. Kimball, of the Hawkins Zouaves, the officer
on duty, and who had newly arrived with his com-
pany, and did not know the person of the general.
He answered abruptly, " I am General Corcoran,"
as if that were sufficient. Col. Kimball replied that
anybody might call himself General Corcoran, and
again demanded the countersign. Corcoran at-
tempted, in contravention of all military duty
propriety, to pass on ; and when and
Col. Kimball held
up his hand or drew his sword to prevent him the
general discharged a revolver and shot the unfor-
tunate officer dead upon the spot. How can the