The Sun.
London, England, 1865-02-06 00:00:00

TF.E CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

(From the Times' Correspondent.)
NEW YORE, Jan. 24.

Delirious joy, over-confidence, and the wildest
expectation of victory continue to rule the hour.
`Wilmington is to be evacuated. The redoubtable
'Sherman—no longer mad, as he was asserted to be,
but in the pride of superior sanity able to declare
that his countrymen are " crazy about niggers," is
march conquering and to conquer to Augusta,
-which he is to capture as easily as Savannah. Thence
he is to dash upon Charleston, which being ill-forti-
fied in the rear is to be abandoned at his approach.
This done, he is to continue his triumphant progress
to Richmond, where he will unite his veterans with
those of Grant, and dare the " rebel" General to
risk his last battle for the existence of the Confede-
racy. If such battle be fought, it is the common
opinion that Lee will be routed, that ex-President
Davis will escape into Mexico, and that the Union
will be immediately restored amid a blaze of illumi-
nations and a thunder of grins in all the cities of the
continent from the Lakes to the Rio Grande. Not
that everybody believes in this final conflict. On
the contrary, a large class of *respectable people are
of opinion that at the decisive moment General Lee,
like the celebrated racoon in the Yankee story which
held parley with the Western huntsman, and saga-
ciously refused to give so unerring a shot the
trouble of wasting his ammunition, will handsomely
descend from his tree and yield to the fate which it
is impossible to avert. Absurd as all this may seem
in Europe, opinions even wilder than these are cir-
culated from mouth to mouth and feed the credu-
lous imagination of the multitude. The Americans
are in a spasm of elation more violent than any they
have yet experienced in the course of the war, and
dream dreams that put reality out of countenance.
They are so quick, excitable, and impulsive, and
the very limited and partial education which they
receive and the false moral which they draw from
the facts of their brief history so fill their minds
with conceit and presumption that they really believe
themselves to be the noblest and most virtuous
people in existence, the peculiar favourites of
Heaven, and the destined. regenerators of the world.
How many painful and humiliating lessons they
must receive before they learn that the thirst of
universal dominion in which they indulge after
every inconsequential victory of their armies or
fleets may be as much a disease of Republics as it
used to be of Kings, and that their rank in the
hierarchy of nations may be many grades lower
than their pride has placed it, is for the future to
disclose, but no existing tongue or pen to prognos-
ticate. Meanwhile the hot fit is upon them with
more than ordinary severity, and visions of peace
with the South, to be followed in due time by war
with some great European Power, dance before
their waking eyes, and make them appear to cooler
judgments than their own as " crazy" as General
Sherman believes, though for a totally different
reason.

Mr. Blair's two visits to Richmond, the despond-
ency of one portion of the Southern press, the viru-
lent opposition of another to the policy of Mr. Davis,
and the proof of Southern desperation supposed to
be afforded by the appointment of General Lee to a
kind of military dictatorship ; the reinstatement in
command of General Joseph E. Johnstone, whose
supersedure by the Southern President in favour of
General Hood led to the whole series of recent Con-
federate reverses ; andlthe belief of the majority of
the Northern people that the South is well nigh
exhausted of men and hope—all these things com-
bined have led to the prevalent over-confidence of
the last week that peace is close at hand, and caused
in Wall-street a fall in gold and stocks great and
rapid enough to be best described by the single
word ,4 panic."

Whether Mr. Lincoln, with his better means of
judgment, shares in the exaggerated hopes of his
people, may be matter of doubt ; but if his eon-
victions are to be ascertained by his acts, it would
appear that he considers himself and his position to
be strong enough to justify him in inaugurating a
less partial, sectional, and, if the word can be used
in his case, factious policy than he has hitherto pur-
sued. Pending his re-election, and while the event
was still doubtful, he relied, as it was natural he
should, upin the support and the advice of the party
by whose votes alone he could secure the renewal of
his Presidency. Now that he has four years of office-
before him, and neither hope not chance a third
term, he seems to develope a more catholic and uni-
versal spirit, and to admit that the opposition to the
conduct of the war, and especially to the civil ad-
ministration of his Government, was not so entirely
unfounded and unjustifiable as his violent friends
have always represented it to be, and that there was
no small amount of truth as well as of patriotism in '
the attitude assumed towards him by the Democartic
party. Within the last six weeks it has been observ-
able that he and some of the more prominent mem-
bers both of his party and his Administration have
been gradually adopting, or re-adopting, the prin-
ciples and policy of the Democrats and Conserva-
tives. Prior to Mr. Lincoln's re-election the most
opprobrious epithet that could be directed against
au enemy of the Government was " Copperhead."
If any one disapproved the acts of General Butler, or
denied that he was either a great soldier, a wise
statesman, a courteous gentleman, or a perfectly
honest administrator of other people's property, he
was written down in Republican newspapers and
talked down in Loyal Leagues as a " Copperhead."
Mr. Lincoln has, after some trial of his patience,
adopted the Democratic opinion.of the great General
Butler, cut short his military career, disgraced him
as completely as Henry VIII. disgraced Wolsey,
and must, so far, be considered worthy of taking a
high place in the Copperhead party. In like
manner it was factiousness, disloyalty, treason, and
Copperheadism to complain of the military oppres-
sion exercised by such generals as Payne and Bur-
bridge. Very recently Mr. Lincoln and his Secre-
taries have come to the conclusion that the com-
plainants had right on their side, and that Payne
and Burbridge were damaging and not aiding the
cause they were appointed to serve. They have con-
sequently deprived the one officer of his command,
and ordered a military tribunal to inquire into the
conduct of the other. Before his re-election Mr.
Seward's boast to Lord Lyons that, by the ringing
of a bell on either side of his chair, he could consign
any man in the United States to Fort Lafayette or
Fort Warren, was maintained by all the Republicans
to be no more than a strong expression of an anoma-
lous but wholesome state of things, necessary for
the salvation of the Republic in a troublous and ex-
ceptionable time. All who asserted the contrary
were held to be enemies of their country—seces-
sionists, rebels, and Copperheads. Mr. Lincoln and
Mr. Seward have resolved to ring the little bell no
more, to discourage arbitrary arrests of every kind,
to trust to the ordinary action of the laws in all
eases, and to govern upon strictly Conservative
principles. Emboldened by such high encourage-
ment the House of Representatives has instituted an
inquiry to ascertain what persons are held in custody
for political or military offences in the old capital
prison at Washington,
with a view to their immediate
trial before the proper tribunals if there be any ap-
parently well founded
charge
against them, and to
their immediate
dismissal if there be not. A simi-
lar inquiry with reference
to the prisoners
in Fort
Lafayette and otherßastiles of the same descrip-
tion is also recommended in influential quarters,
and not opposed by the Republicans.. This is also
Copperheadism, if the Republican leaders were pre-
viously correct in their - •
application of the term.
So also, when Mr. Chase was ti • ooding the country
with inconvertible paper money, and Mr. Thaddeus
Stevens was aiding that now excellent Judge, but
then fanatical financier, in a vain endeavour
toe keep
clown the premium on gold to 20 per cent. by
penal enactment, all who disapproved Mr. Chase
and considered Mr. Thaddeus Stevens to be, in a
financial point of view, an utter ignoramus or a
presumptuous simpleton, were accused of that
worst kind of disloyalty which could only be
described as Copperheadism. But this despised
and maligned faith the Cabinet and both Houses of
Congress have duly studied, and guided by experi-
ence have come to the conclusion that in financial as
well as in military and social affairs the Copperheads
were right. The work of conversion has gone on so
Lincoln is the arch Copperhead of
bravely that Mr. L

the day, and Copperheadism is no longer a heresy
or a crime in the estimation of the Government.
But the greatest triumph of the Cotppee
rurhmecod urson
party
has not yet been achieved, though the
the subject of peace, if true as regards Mr. Lincoln's
and Mr. Seward's ideas upon the proper mode for
the restoration of the Union, go far to show that
even this crowning victory may yet be reserved for it.
The main, the fundamental principles of " Copper-
headism" was that slavery, whether good or bad,
right or wrong, politic or impolitic, was according
to the law and Constitution, a thing with which the
Federal Government had no right to interfere, and
that if it were to be abolished the slaves could only
be legally and safely emancipated by the people and
the Legislature of the several States in whsch slavery
existed. To this faith, also, Mr. Seward has, it ap-
pears, been converted ; and to this faith, in like
manner, Mr. Lincoln is rapidly tending, in spite of
the obstructions which he cast in his own path by his
proclamations and edicts of emancipation and his
Niagara letter (dictated by Mr. Stanton). But not
even that great consummation would complete the
circle and secure the final victory of Copperheadism.
Copperheadism has a foreign as well as a domestic
policy, and however much the European world may
approve its ideas upon the habeas corpus, upon per-
sonal liberty, upon State rights, upon the American
Constitution, and upon the true character, moral and
political, of General B. F. Butler, it can hardly ap-
prove its principle that North America belongs to the
North Americans, that North America extends from
Panama to the Arctic Regions, that there are no
other North Americans than the people of the
United States ; and that, consequently, Spain must
receive notice to quit Cuba, England to give up
the West Indies, Canada, and the whole of the
British possessions north of the St. Lawrence and
west of Cape Race; and that the Emperor Maximilian
must pack up his portmanteau and leave Mexico to
be overrun and annexed by the all-conquering and
irresistible Yankee nation—first alike in courage,
power, honour, glory, wealth, and extent of terri-
tory—the grandest empire on which the sun ever
shone, and destined, at no very remote day, to make
an end of the effete monarchies of the Old World,
and inaugurate the reign of universal liberty, uni-
sal corruption, and universal shoddy !
It must be said, however, that Mr. Stanton has
not approached quite so closely as Mr. Lincoln and
Mr. Seward to the faith or the practices of the Cop-
perheads, with whom it is a cardinal dogma that there
should be no interference with the freedom of the
press and that if the proprietors and conductors of any
journal commit an offence against public decency or
safety, or attack the character of individuals, the
law and the tribunals, and not the strong hand of
military power, should take cognizance of their mis-
deeds. Mr. Stanton thinks differently. In the
New York Daily News, of which the Hon. Benja-
min Wood, member of Congress for one of the dis-
tricts of the city, is editor and proprietor, and
which under his management has been conspicuous
for the bold, unflinching, and able advocacy of
peace with the South, even if peace can be secured
by no other method than the recognition of the
independence of the Confederacy, there every day
appears a long string of advertisements called
" personals." These " personals," in the absence of
postal communication between North and South,
serve as a means of intercommunication between
families. Parents and children, husbands and
wives, the dearest and closest relatives and
friends whom the hard fortune of the war has
found or retained on different sides of the line
called " Mason and Dixon's," which is supposed to
divide the North from the South, have been thus
enabled in a perfectly open, honest, candid, and one
would think natural and laudable manner, to tell
each other whether they were in sickness or in
health, in prosperity or in adversity, what young-
lings of the flock might have been removed by death,
or what elders and patriarchs of the family had yielded
to the inevitable doom of all who live. Mr. Stanton
fancies he sees treason in these affectionate letters,
which are duly copied into the Southern papers, and
has given imperative orders to Gen. Dix to prohibit
their publication for the future, under the penalty of
the suppression of the Daily News if it disregard the
order, and the trial of the editor and proprietor by
court-martial. Mr. Wood was yesterday summoned
into the presence of Gen. Dix, who, being a gentle-
man and a scholar, did his spiriting courteously.
Mr. Wood had no alternative but to yield the point.
It is folly to argue with the master of legions, even
though a man be a member of Congress and a more
important citizen than the one before whose excep-
tional power he is asked to succumb. This morning,
therefore, the Daily News appears without its "per-
sonals," and hundreds of families, both in the North
and the South, are deprived of that little but grateful
alleviation of the miseries of war which was derived
from this innocent and sole means of communion
between people who have not of necessity ceased to
love and respect each other because the chasms of
civil strife have produced a physical, but not a moral
separation between them. I enclose frau- columns of
these " personals" from a recent number of the
Daily News, containing many simple and affecting
announcements, in which none but a malignant of
the worst kind would seek to discover treason. If
there be persons, either North or South, whose object
is to communicate military or other dange;ous infor-
mation under the disguise of family announcements,
they will not be thwarted by the suppression of this
department of the courageous peace advocate. It is not
difficult to communicate in cypher, and, as the Daily
News observes, it would be quite as easy to convey
treasonable information in an advertisement for a
lost horse or dog in the Herald or the Tribune, as in
a family notification of a birth or a marriage, an
attack of sickness or a death. The suppression is
more like an act of spite than of statesmanship. It
inflicts as much hardship upon Northern as upon
Southern families, but as it deprives a fearless oppo-
nent of a lucrative source of revenue it is to be
supposed that in that its main end is accomplished
and that Mr. Stanton is satisfied.