The Sun.
London, England, 1863-07-09 00:00:00

THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

(From the limes' Correspondent.)
NEW YORK, June 26.
The objects of General Lee, in his advance into
Maryland and Pennsylvania, are admitted by nearly
every one, except a few philosophical optimists and
Government contractors, to be nothing less than the
capture of Washington. Mr. Lincoln and his Cabinet,
as well as Gen. Hooker, share this opinion. Were
Lee in command of the Federal and Hooker of the
Confederate army, Washington would be considered
safe. But with these generals where they are, there
is scarcely any person, who devotes the least atten-
tion to the subject, who is not of opinion that Was-
hington is in imminent peril. The strange part of the
business, so far as the public feeling of this great
city is concerned, is that there is a very wide spread
and earnest wish that. Lee may be successful. There
has been a great revulsion of sentiment among all
classes. The belief that the present administration
has neither brains nor honesty, and is incompetent
to conduct the war; that it cannot conquer the South;
that the South will indubitably achieve indepen-
dence ; and that it is better for all parties that it
should do so without further bloodshed—hat spread
rapidly down from the upper into the lower strata
of the people; or perhaps it should be said that it
has spread from the lower strata of the working
classes upwards, until it has permeated the whole
mass of society, except the contractors, the preachers,
and the newspaper editors, It is openly expressed
in the ferry boats and the omnibuses. It is discussed
in hotel lobbies and reading-rooms. It is the per-
vading gossip of the few exclusive clubs of an " un-
clubbable" community. It is a common subject of
remark when friends or acquaintances meet in the
streets. It is the staple topic of conversation in
private society, and appears to be so deeply rooted
and so universally diffused as to have hushed the
blatant trumpeters of war, and wedded the conflict-
ing passions, interests, and convictions of a great
People into the homogenity of one weary, disgusted,
and all but indignant prayer for ``Peace." Mr.
Lincoln's proclamation of emancipation was the first
administrative act that drove the Northern people to
admit the hopeless immensity of the struggle in
which they were involved. When that direct pro-
vocative to servile war was followed by such acts
of suicidal folly as the arrest of Mr. Vailandigham
by Gen. Burnside, and his banishment by Mr. Lin-
coln; and the blundering oppression and illegality
manifested in a thousand ways by such petty des-
pots in shoulder-straps as Gens. Schenck,
Hascoll,
and Milroy ; all of them simultaneous with a rise
of 50 per cent. in the provisions and the dread of a
compulsory conscription, the opinion of the majority
of the hardworking, struggling, striving, and sensi-
ble people seems to have gone right over to the
cause of the South. The change is palpable and
glaring. He who runs may read. There is no mis-
taking it. Even the New York newspapers, which,
with few exceptions, live in a little world of their
own, while they misrepresent the great world which
they do not see, begin to have a glimmering notion
that the sentiment of the masses has undergone a
change, and to wake up, though slowly, to an ap-
preciation of the new set of circumstances that has
taken possession of men's minds. This week the
change is much more obvious than it was ten days
ago when the first rumours of Lee's advance into
Pennsylvania were made public. At that time the
alarm of Governor Curtin excited a genuine, though
not a very large amount of sympathy; and troops
of militiamen were despatched by the Governor of
New York and New Jersey to his aid with an
alacrity which might have put to shame the
authorities of Washington, and which certainly
proved the superiority of the State organization
over those of the Federal Government. This week
all is changed. If Pennsylvania requires strong arms
to repel the invaders of her soil, she must find them
among her own citizens, or consent to bear the
penalty of her pusillanimity or apathy. New York
will send her no more men. The Governor of New
Jersey, instead of affording any additional aid, has
recalled the regiments he first despatched, having
no authority (according to the constitution, binding
within the State, and limiting its external action)
to extirpate his citizens for the relief of any neigh-
bouring commonwealth for a single day longer than
such citizens choose to be absent from their homes.
Meanwhile Pennsylvania takes thingsin a peculiarly
Candidian manner. Her citizens laugh at the fears
of Governor Curtin ; and instead of welcoming the
militiamen of New York and New Jersey as friends
and brothers—rob them in the most shameless man-
ner in the prices of every article they require, treat-
ing them, in fact, as if they were alien enemies to
be fleeced and mulcted to the utmost verge of cupi-
dity on the one side and of endurance on the other.
In every part of the country the war mania seems
to have subsided. The chill has succeded the fever.
New England, which spoke so lustily, with a voice
like Chanticleer in a summer morning, of 900,000
volunteers which she would send from her teeming
homesteads and proselytising churches to support
the policy of emancipation, has not sent a man to the
relief of Pennsylvania. New York is chivalrous but
prudent, and does for her own dignity what she re-
fuses to do for President Lincoln, while the North-
West organises her young men in secret societies to
resist compulsory aid to a war which the common-
sense of the majority has long sinceceased to approve.
Such is the situation. Gen. Lee is thundering at the
gates of the Capitol—or may not only thunder at,
but batter them down ; and the people, so far from
being very much alarmed, or very indignantly pa-
triotic, rather approves than condemns the Confe-
derate chief, and wishes that he were President
instead of Mr. Lincoln, to settle a difficulty which
it is out of Mr. Lincoln's reach even to appreciate.
In fact, the Federal Government seems to be
tumbling and crumbling like perdition.
In this crisis of the fate of the Republie it is in-
structive to note how prescient its early statesmen
were in predicting what has happened, and how
right up to the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861 were
all the advanced intellects of the time in advocating
a peaceable separation. The disruption of the Union
is no new idea. Washington himself foresaw it,
and in the touching legacy of his last words to the
American people he solemnly warned them of the
dangers that were visible to his prophetic eye,
though unseen by his careless contemporaries. Jef-
ferson, too, clearly saw what was coming, and in
endeavouring to maximise the rights of the Sove-
reign States of the Union, and to minimise the
power and action of the Federal Government, did
his best to preserve the empire which Washington
had founded, but which Washington's principles
were impotent to conserve. In the year 1839 John
Quincey Adams prefigured the true policy of the
North in the circumstances which have since arisen,
He measured the gulf which climate, slavery, and
antagonistic commercial interests would place be-
tween North and South, and deprecated the sword
as the arbiter of the difference. " The link of
Union between these States," he said, "is not in
the right, but in the heart. • . • If the day
should come—may Heaven avert it !—when the
affections of the people in these States shall be
alienated from each other—when the fraternal
feelings shall give way to cold indifference, or
collisions of interest shall fester into hatred,
the bonds of political association will not
long hold together parties no longer attracted by
the magnetism of conciliated interests and friendly
sympathies; and far better will it be for the people
of the disunited "States to part in friendship from
each other than to be held together by restraint.
Then will be "the time for reverting to the prece-
dents which occurred at the formation of the adop-
tion of the Constitution, to form again a more per-
fect Union by dissolving that which could no longer
bind, and to leave the separate parts to be united by
the law of political gravitation to the centre"
This was the true philosophy. This was the lan-
guage of Mr. Sc ward in 1848 ; this was the language
of Mr. Lincoln, when he ascended the chair : this
was the language of every man who had an idea in
his head when Mr. Lincoln was unhappily elected;
this was the language of Mr. Edward Everett, who
now preaches war "to the bitter end ;" and this,
too, was the language of the honestest politician in
America, Mr. Horace Greeley. To this faith, after
the sad disallusions of the last eighteen months,
Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Seward, Mr. Everett, Mr. Greeley,
and a host of smaller men, are rapidly returning,
like prodigal sons who have seen the errors of their
'Bala and come home repenting. Peace is in all