The Sun.
London, England, 1865-01-30 00:00:00

THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.


(From the Times' Correspondent.)

NEW YORK, Jan. 13.

There is nothing to be heard on any side but
rumours of peace. Wall-street has to some extent
caught the infection of credulity, and gold has gone
down 9 per cent. since Saturday last. But that peace
will come out of the embassies, formal or informal,
which Mr. Lincoln has sent, or is willing to send, to
Richmond, or to receive from the South at Wash-
ington, no man whose opinion is worth a straw can
in his heart believe. That the Federal Government
is more than usually anxious, either to gain some
overwhelming victory in the field, or to coax back
the reluctant South on any terms, whether in refe-
rence to slavery, to the assumption of the Southern
debt, to the position of the Southern leaders and
in short that would not in-
generals, to everything
volve a disruption of the Union, is manifest to the
most careless observer. The impelling power which
thus drives Mr. Lincoln's Government into the paths
of conciliation if conquest be unattainable, without,
however, driving it to the extremity of making a
formal offer of peace to Mr. Davis, is the fear that
after the 4th of March next the European Govern-
ments--led by Great Britain, France, Russia, and
Spain--will severally or conjointly recognise Mr.
Lincoln as de facto President of the States alone by
the votes of which he was elected for his second
term, and thus by implication, if not overtly, recog-
nise Mr. Jefferson as the de facto President of the
Confederacy. There may possibly be 'no founda-
tion whatever for the rumours to this effect, which
reach this country from Europe by every steamer ;
but there undoubtedly exists in high quarters here
and in Washington a dread, and in some instances
a hope, that these rumours are true, and that the
recognition of the Confederacy will not be delayed
much if any longer than the ninety days," which
are the favourite term with Mr. Seward and the
Federal press for the accomplishment of all
greatly desired events, whether civil or military.
Meanwhile, however, the war goes vigorously on.
Gen. Sherman, having secured Savannah, has orga-
nised measures for a rear attack upon Charleston,
with the assistance of Admiral Farragut's fleet in
front. The second expedition to Wilmington has
already set sail, and as the weather has been much
milder and calmer than on the first occasion the re-
port that it has arrived off Cape Fear without loss
or accident is probably correct. In other quarters
there are no signs of movement, though a report,
founded upon private telegrams, that Gen. Lee is so
well provided at Richmond and Petersburg as to be
able to spare 40,000 men from the defences of those
cities for services in a new and unsuspected quarter
leads well informed people to believe that the lull
will be speedily broken, and that the Federals will
not be left in entire possession of the aggressive.
Gen. Butler's deposition has been received with
sullen silence by the Republican and Abolition party,
and with shouts of applause by the Democrats and
by moderate conservative men of all classes. The
Tribune alone among the Republican journals has
had the courage to speak the sentiments of the party,
and has indignantly denounced the action of the Go-
vernment, as not only personally unjust to General
Butler but publicly injurious to the cause of the
Union. If Butler were really dismissed for his re-
fusal to sacrifice the lives of brave men in a hope-
less assault upon a strong if not impregnable fort,
as he seems to allege in his sharp and eloquent fare-
well to the Army of the James, there can be no doubt
that he has been ill-used. It would appear, indeed,
that Gen. Butler's failure at Fort Fisher was the pre-
text, and not the cause of his removal, that the diver-
gences if not hostilities of sentiment and opinion be-
tween him and Gen. Grant, as well as Mr. Stanton,
were of long standing and widening growth, and that
the Lieutenant-General finally assumed such a posi-
tion towards the Government in the matter as to force
Mr. Lincoln to decide which of:the two should remain
in the Federal service. In other words, Gen. Grant
threatened to resign if Gen. Butler were not removed.
If this be the true explanation, Gen. Butler will not be
suffered to remain permanently under a cloud.
Work will be found for him to do, more pleasant in
its character and safer to life and limb in its per-
formance than the conduct of an army amid shot
and shell and the other horrors of the battlefield.
The case of Mr. Chase is one in point. It was ne-
cessary to oust him from the Administration, but
inexpedient to convert him into an irreconcilable
enemy. In due time, as he was discreet as well as
ambitious, he was rewarded with the Chief Justice-
ship of the Supreme Court. Most probably, if Gen.
Butler be equally reticent, equally persevering, and
equally determined not to be politically extinguished,
he will receive a befitting reward at the hands of a
President who understands as thoroughly as any
mart living which opponents it is safe to despise and
which it is safer to flatter and conciliate.

The great question of slavery continues to assert
its supremacy and stands before the American
people in a variety of ways. The South, which alone
has any power in the matter, is debating, under the
hard pressure of necessity, the expediency of calling
out an army, or a series of armies, of ablebodied
slaves in successive levies, from 50,000 to five times
50,000 men, to be rewarded with their own freedom
and that of their wives and families at the conclu-
sion of the war. The North, which has no power
but much will to abolish slavery, is debating in the
halls of Congress an amendment to the Constitu-
tion, for ever prohibiting slavery in any State or
territory of the Union. The amendment, if not
carried by the requisite majority of two-thirds of
the present Congress, will, it is calculated, be car-
ried all but unanimously in the new Congress which
will assume power on the 4th of March next. Whe-
ther the amendment, if embodied in the Constitu-
tion, will have any practical effect in giving freedom
to a single slave who would not have been freed if
no such legislative enactment had been made, de-
pends not upon Congress but upon the opposing
armies of North and South. If the North con-
quer, the sword of the North and not the resolu-
tions of Congress will free the negroes. If the
South conquer, the votes of the Federal Congress
are idle wind, and the Northern people will act more
wisely—if they love the negroes half as much as they
detest slavery—in repealing the laws that convert
them into social pariahs, and in some States such as
the President's own State of Illinois, prohibit the
entrance and sojourn of any man of black skin and
woolly hair within their sacred boundaries. Three
of the Border States, which know something of the
question, and which, moreover, have the power of
dealing with it in their own limits, have either
abolished the institution by the legal votes of their
Legislatures and the affirmation of the people, or
have taken measures to that end. Maryland, which
produces nothing that cannot be cultivated by the
labour of free white men, and which consequently
was under no paramount necessity of employing
slaves, long since found the institution to be unpro-
fitable, and has already freed itself of the trouble,
the responsibility, the disgrace, and the danger of
maintaining it. Missouri and Kentucky have already
taken the usual preliminary steps, by convention of
the people and the action of the Legislature, to imi-
tate the example of Maryland • and as they also pro-
duce nothing that free
white 'labour cannot cultivate,
and as they have found
slavery too costly and un-
profitable to be worth
against the makingopposition of any effort to preserve,
of the Northern people and
the disapprobation of
th
little doubt that in a few ewee k civilised
world, there is
or months slavery
will have ceased to be a burdens upon these rich and
important commonwealths. It is
know that
.abolishing
however, for
IT
European philanthropists to kil
slavery the philanthropic element in
strong
not been
l
ryland, as
well as in Kentucky and Missouri, has
greatly, if at all, called into action. The
in the prime of life, will be able to take care Ofsha.ve,
self in some way or other, though driven, as in u -
New
York and throughout the North, to earn a poor sub-
sistence by the lowest,:roughest, and most scantily
remunerated kinds of labour ; but the young, the
helpless, the impotent, the disabled, and the super-
annuated negroes, who were formerly maintained by
their owners, will, it is to be feared, fare but badly
at the hands of public charity, which has not yet
established or even thought of establishing any legal
provision for their maintenance. It would thus ap-
pear that the best chance for the poor negro is with
the South. Mr. Lincoln can do nothing for the race
but convert into soldiers such of the most stalwart

as are willing to take service in his armies. He can- I
not reach, either by his proclamations or his guns,
the great bulk of the black population w io still toil
for their Southern masters and mistress ‘s, and take
no advantage of the peril or weakness cf the Con-
deracy to rise in insurrection, or even in mutiny
and insubordination, against their employers. The
South can much more effectually befriend them, and
seems as if it would not hesitate much longer in
placing freedom within the power of such ablebodied
slaves as shall earn it by devotion to the cause of
national independence, and of so regulating and
modifying the slavery that will afterwards remain
as to gradually prepare the way for complete eman-
cipation
by some process that shall not convert •
the useful slave into a pauper, and that will provide
for the subsistence of the aged and the impotent by
some species of legislative enactment or form of
poor law. There are not wanting persons high in
social and political position to affirm that, if this
were done, the Northern Abolitionists of the extreme
school would recommend peace with the South and
a recognition of its independence, on the plea that
the war was a war against slavery, and that slavery
having ceased to exist the Southern people were as
much entitled to an independent Government of
their own choice as the Thirteen Colonies were-when
they rebelled against Great Britain. These philoso-
phers may be at present in the minority, but it can-
not be denied that their voice is powerful, their in-
fluence great, and that it is within the limits of
probability that sooner or „later their sentiments,
like the little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump,
may take possession of the majority.
There is another aspect of the negro question in
which, notwithstanding all the philanthropy of Mr.
Lincoln's proclamations and the debates in both
Houses of the Federal Congress, the North does not
show to advantage as compared with the South.
The South is alai events honest, even if it be in
error in its treatment of the negroes ; but the North,
which claims to be so much holier than its Southern
brother, permits the infliction of the most grievous
wrong against ablebodied black men, without taking
so much as the petty trouble of remonstrance. It
is at this moment, and has been for the last six
months, positively unsafe for a young male negro
to walk the streets of New York. If he be a sailor
just arrived in port from the West Indies, Cuba, or
Brazil, he is hunted by ruffians at all hours of the
day and night, and, if captured, sold into the
slavery of the military or naval service of the
United States. A recent case, only one of scores
that are every week brought under the notice of the
consular authorities of Great Britain, France, and
Spain, will show the modus operandi. Four coloured
sailors, of a British ship from Jamaica, were walking
through the river-side streets at the lower, or Bat-
tery end of New York, unconscious of danger and
unsuspicious of treachery, when they were set upon
in broad daylight by half a dozen crimps, bounty-
brokers, or other scoundrels of the same class, and
accused of being deserters from the Federal army.
In vain they protested that they were sailors and
British subjects. The gathering crowd took the
part of theft; n cts2ilants, and, on the promise that
they would be immediately liberated by the proper
authorities if their story were found to be true, the
men consented, with the exception of only one, who
contrived in the confusion to make his escape, to
proceed quietly to headquarters with their captors.
All trace of them has since been lost. General
Dix, on being appealed to by the British Consul,
has promised to do his best to discover and release
them, but with the compact and well organised
system of robbery opposed to his efforts will find
it difficult, if not impossible, to effect their libe-
ration. Such "prizes " are entered on the books
of the naval or military depots which receive them,
under names that are given to them by their cap-
tains ; and each " prize" of the kind is worth from
$5OO to $l,OOO, according to the state of the bounty
market at the time. Not a cent. of the money ever
reaches the victims of this new slave trade, but is
distributed at a rate agreed upon among the captors,
the examining surgeons, and the military or naval
officials, who wink at the iniquity. The anti-
slavery journals—the whole sympathies of which
are with the fiontAlern fkl 1-I,PAL, anti villielh nre never
weary of clamouring for the " vigorous prosecution
of the war," have no time to attend to such cases of
individual hardship as these. The Federal Govern-
ment wants men, and it does not become the truly
loyal patriot to examine too microscopically into

the means by which men are secured. This much,
however, must be said. If the British Government
were half as anxious to pick a quarrel with the Fe-
deral Government as the ruling party in America is
to pick a quarrel with Great Britain, it might find a
justifiable pretext every day of the week in the
treatment received in New York by British emigrants
and British sailors, both white and coloured.