The Sun.
London, England, 1865-03-01 00:00:00

THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

(From the Times' Correspondent.)

NEW YORK, Feb. 14.

'Unpleasant truths are, and have to be, uttered to
the people both of North and South. At the great
war meeting, held at Richmond, immediately after
the failure of the peace negotiations, Mr. Benjamin,
the Confederate Secretary of State, declared that he
came before his fellow-countrymen to say disagree-
able things. He insisted that no further reinforce-
ments for the Confederate army could be drawn from
the white population, and that if the negroes were
not induced to volunteer on the promise of freedom,
and in large numbers, it would be necessary for Gen.
Lee to abandon Virginia to the enemy. It is true
that many of the Confederate leaders and the Con-
federate Congress do not take so gloomy a view of
the situation, and that the latter has declined to arm
the negroes, on the ground that the Confederacy is
not reduced to such a state of exhaustion as to de-
mand the trial of so perilous an experiment ; but
that men like Mr. Benjamin, and more especially
Gen. Lee, should be of a contrary opinion, is suffi-
cient to prove that the South is greatly suffering for
want of men. But the statesmen of the North, who
are not too deeply immersed in party politics and
mean intrigues for place and power to survey the
, whole situation of their country, the dark side as
I well as the light, with the sole object of discovering
the truth, might find as ample reason as Mr. Benja-
min to say disagreeable things. The North is urgently,
if not desperately, in want of men, and knows not
where to find them, except by resort to the dange-
rous process of a compulsory levy. It has tried
volunteering and pumped the well dry. It has had
recourse to high bounties, and been rewarded with
nothing better than the dregs of Europe, fellows
who enlisted in a dozen places game after the other,
only to desert as soon as they received a friction
of their hire, and never contributed a serviceable
man to the ranks of the army. And, more than
that, it has raised up in New York and other
cities a cloud of bounty brokers and swindlers, who
when they could not supply the duped and defrauded
Government with cripples and lunatics, with drugged
and hocussed sailors, and other strangers, with the
refuse of prisons and penitentiaries, with all the
vilest material in the form of humanity that the
vice and criminality of Europe and America could
afford, have resorted to wholesale forgery and pro-
vided imaginary recruits by the thousand, who had
no other existence than a fictitious name upon a
slip of printed paper, duly signed by officials who
would sign anything for 50 dols., or a smaller sum.
By these agencies the people, as well as the Govern-
ment, have been robbed of millions of dollars ; and
scores, if not hundreds of rural towns and villages,
the citizens of which imagined they had escaped the
draught by means of men purchased in New York
and elsewhere to fill their quotas, find that their
money has been expended in vain, and that not a
single recruit can be credited to their exertions. The
bounty system is so completely a breakdown, and
has produced such wrong and hardship to the en-
richment of a more atrocious crew of public plun-
derers than ever before afflicted a people, that no
possible means is left to recruit the Federal armies,
except a conscription, in which every man drawn
must be compelled to serve or purchase and be re-
sponsible for a substitute. The draught was to have
commenced to-morrow, according to the terms of
Mr. Lincoln's last proclamation, but in consequence
of the discovery of the enormous frauds perpetrated
within the last six months, as well as of the apathy
of.the population liable to draught, which has pre-
vented the proper enrolment in many cities, it is
probable that it will be postponed, no one knows
for how long a period. There are not wanting
hundreds of zealous supporters of the Government
and the war who recommend that the draught be
rigidly enforced, and predict that the people will
quietly submit to it. The result may prove that
these gentlemen are right, but it is useless to dis-
guise or deny the fact that the Governmentitself
is not quite so sure on the matter, and that it
hesitates to put the loyalty and determination of
Ithe people to a test so crucial. - Nor is the money
difficulty, though not equal to that of the South, to

PRICE 4d.1
STAMPED sd.

be lightly estimated. Mr. Fessenden's official report
on the debt and the present state of the national
finances, addressed to the Committee of Ways and
Means, and published yesterday evening, is by no
means a cheerful document, though it only admits
a debt of about 1,000 million dollars less than most
people anticipated. He reckons the debt bearing in-
terest in gold at $1,017,556,438 ; the debt bearing
interest in lawful money (i.e., greenbacks) at
$4608,570,952, and other liabilities at $457,608,054 ;
or in all, $2,153,735,444. This is merely the debt
incurred by the Federal Government in the prose-
cution of the war, and does not include any of the
liabilities inncurred for the same purpose by States,
counties, and towns, of which no general record has
yet been published or made out, but which holders
of real estate, upon whom the burden almost ex-
clusively falls, declare to amount to something that
closely borders upon confiscation. Mr. Fessenden
has but $10,000,000 and a fraction to meet his cur-
rent liabilities, or about sufficient to enable him to
pay his way for three days. Under these circum-
stances, and awaiting the slow and uncertain re-
turns from the Internal Revenue Act, no more than
enough to meet a third of the constantly accruing
claims upon the Treasury, he has, it is announced
in most of the journals, determined to put a loan of
$600,000,000 upon the market, with interest at 6
per cent. in greenbacks, and with liberty, if Con-
gress will accord it, to sell the bonds for such prices
as he pleases, at a discount, at par, or at a premium
as the state of public affairs and the confidence or
distrust of capitalists may warrant and determine.
It is likely that this exposition will be the last
act of the official life of the Secretary. Mr. Lincoln
yesterday nominated ex- Governor, and now Senator,
E. D. Morgan, of New York, as his successor ; but,
greatly to Mr. Lincoln's surprise, Mr. Morgan pru-
dently and peremptorily declined the perilous
honour. Mr. Fessenden was a bold man to assume
the responsibilities of Mr. Chase, and whoever shall
assume those of Mr. Fessenden will be bolder still.
He will have to choose between two alternatives,
either to continue the old system, and tide over the
day of retribution for the evil done, or inaugurate a
new and sounder system, which may precipitate a
catastrophe that is, in any case, inevitable. The
gentleman who appears to have the best chance of
the nomination is Mr. Hugh M'Cullogh, Controller
of the Currency at Washington, who, in a recent
letter, to which I drew favourable attention at the
time of its publication, declared himself againit in-
convertible paper money, and against the notion
that ft great public debt was a great public advan-
tage. Should Mr. M'Cullogh be offered and accept
the position, he will have a greater opportunity than
is often presented to make or to mar a very enviable
reputation.

The peace agitation has by no means subsided.
Though it is held to be proved by the Messages of
the Northern and the Southern Presidents that the
one party was as. firm upon reunion as the other
upon separation, it is considered that the Southern
emissaries offered Mr. Lincoln a trifling bribe for
the recognition of the independence of their country,
and that, although Mr. Lincoln felt himself bound
to reject it, his refusal was not so hearty or emphatic
as to convince his opponents in argument that they
might not renew it with better success upon a
future occasion. Mr. Seward, in his letter to Mr.
Adams, distinctly alludes to this by-play of the
negotiators when he says, " The insurgents seemed
chiefly to favour a mutual direction of the efforts of
the Government as well as those of the insurgents
to some extrinsic policy or scheme for a season
during which passions might be expected to subside."
In other words, although Mr. Seward did not
feel himself at liberty to speak so plainly, the
Southern emissaries hinted at the willingness of
their Governments to unite its armies with those of
the North for some such- " extrinsic " or foreign pur-
pose as the expulsion of the Emperor Maximilian
from Mexico, the conquest of Cuba and the West
India Islands, or the annexation of Canada, which
ever might be mutually molt -ttgreeable or safest to
attempt, the price of the alliance to be Southern in-
dependence, to be followed in due time by such
commercial and other favours as the North might be
glad to accept and the South to bestow. Those who
favour this idea, who are neither a small nor an
uninfluential class, have so inordinate an idea of the
power and resources of America, form so extravagant
an estimate of its future destiny, and underrate so
egregiously the power and resources of all the Euro-
pean nations, that they see no particular difficulty in
the way of the realization not alone of any one, but
of all these splendid projects. They are true types of
the American character—who bring rowdyism into
politics as well as into social life—and who are as
abundant at the South as at the North. Of course,
Mr. Lincoln and the North would prefer the sub-
jugation of the South by sheer force of battle to any
other solution of the enormous difficulties of the war,
and as long as Sherman gains victories and Grant
maintains the-dead lock, which virtually imprisons
the greatest Southern army and the ablest Southern
General in Richmond, Mr. Lincoln will be amply
justified in avoiding all tortuosities of diplomacy,
and directing his sole energies to the prosecution of
the war. It is vain, however, to deny or ignore the
fact that were the fortune of war to change, and a
great mishap to befall either Grant or Sherman, the
Southern offer, supposing it to have been made in
good faith, and either formally or informally, would
assume a very different aspect, and become accept-
able to a much more numerous and more respectable
class than the professional rowdies of American
politics.

The question of negro slavery having been settled
as far as the North is concerned by its abolition in
all the territories and States of the Union by the
constitutional act of Congress, to be followed, as
there can be no doubt it will be, by an equally con-
stitutional ratification by the requisite number of
three-fourths of the States, the question of the
social and political status of the negroes has come up
for discmgion. Mr. Wendall Phillips led the way,
and the crowd of smaller men are following. Illinois
has repealed the " black laws," which prohibited the
immigration or settlement of negroes within her
boundaries. Mr. Charles Sumner has introduced to
the Supreme Court of the United States a properly
qualified coloured gentleman to sit and practise as
the equal of Mr. Seward and all the other white
counsellors and attorneys who formerly monopolised
the business of the court. A coloured clergyman
has received a special invitation to preach in the
hall of the House of Representatives, and on Sunday
last delivered what is reported to have been an ex-
cellent discourse to a large congregation of mem-
bers and a great crowd of the public, including
many hundreds 'of ladies ; and Mr. Wilson, of
Massachusetts, has introduced a bill into the Senate
to compel all railroad and steamboat companies and
all stage and omnibus drivers to accommodate black
people in their conveyances on the same footing as
the whites, under the penalty of forfeiture of their
charters, and of fine and imprisonment against
captains, drivers, conductors, and others who shall
set law at defiance. The next movement is to de-
clare that the negroes shall have in all respects
thet h the
e
same political rights and privileges as people
white race ; and that they shall be eligible"fcootsrf
offices of President, Vice-President, and
of State, foreign Ambassador, Ministers
Admiral,
the people. The Rev. Mr. Beecher,.
,untdhaoyugevhen/eiiniggo,
Judge, or any other in the giftof theGlovvheornpamenntts
S
or
tz.
taelrozliyo for
advocated Mr. Vi'ne na
dseelirmFonhilclnif
which he specially pre-advertised for the purpose,
the accordance to the negroes of every social courtesy
and
e everyis
every
political right accorded to the white race.
There
reason to believe that all these mea-
sures will be duly carried, and that the theorists and
philanthropists will be able to sing loud praises of re-
joicing, or preach thanksgiving sermons in honour of
gtheenaletigeinsla,tthivoewterviumer pwhi:lioefh t3ihierir opinions. " .
Phillips believes toebee-
calculated for the improvement of both races, finds