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

AMERICA.

(From the Times' Correspondent.)
NEW YORK, May 23.

The Americana, in the pride of their success in
the subjugation of the South, are pleased to be
facetious in recalling to mind the many errors into
which English statesmen and English journalists
have fallen in the course of the long struggle against
the " rebellion," and in comparing the apparently
bright and hopeful prospects of the Union at the
present time with the anticipations formed at the
commencement and during the progress of the war.
It is quite true that the attentive and deeply in-
terested foreign observers who thought the war a
mistake, likely to end in the loss of liberty both to
the North and South, have been at fault as regards
the power of the South to resist, and of the North
to subdue ; that the sudden catastrophe of the last
six weeks has been a surprise ; and that the North,
if not the South, still retains the forms of liberty,
leaving it uncertain, and for the future to decide,
whether its spirit has not departed. But con-
ceding that European opinion, moulded by the ex-
perience of European nations and by the lessons of
history, has not been able, with all the lights at
its command, to forecast with accuracy everything
that has happened, the Americans themselves can
scarcely claim the credit of greater perspicacity. If
slavery has been really abolished, and the Union
actually restored, and settled on the firm founda-
tion of liberty, fraternity, good will, and mutual
interest—which is certainly open to doubt—there
are but few, if any, American statesmen or jour-
nalists of any note or influence who are entitled to
claim superiority of wisdom over their European
critics, and to vaunt with truth that they always
foresaw the end, or struggled hopefully and with-
out misgiving to attain it. " I have no purpose,
directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institu-
tion of slavery in the States where it exists," said
Mr. Lincoln in his first inaugural address ; " I be-
lieve I have no lawful right to do so ; and I have no
inclination to do so." Circumstances, however, did
not conform themselves to Mr. Lincoln's determina-
tion, and he did at a later period what he believed
he had no right to do, and violated the Constitu-
tion that he might preserve the Union. " The dis-
ruption of the American Union," said Mr. Seward
in a public lecture delivered in Baltimore long
before the war, "is inevitable. When that dis-
ruption takes place, be it sooner or later, the Ame-
ricans will offer to the world a shining example of
the virtue of Republican institutions, and will sepa-
rate peaceably and without bloodshed." This
sentiment he repeated in Washington in 1858. All
the world knows how completely he changed his
opinion, and how constantly he maintained that the
war of which he made himself the champion was to
he but a small war, to last for 90 days only. The
late Mr. Edward Everett was originally of opinion
that the North ought to concede the independence
of the South, that the continent was large enough
for two separate Confederacies, and that trading
interests would keep the two at peace, even if they
had no larger amount of political intercourse than
France has with Great Britain. Mr. Greeley, the
life-long and consistent enemy of slavery, was ori-
ginally opposed to the war, and in the winter of
1863 was willing to make peace on the basis of
Southern independence, if the North could not re-
stow the Union by force of arms by the Ist of May
following. Mr. Johnson, the actual President,
supported the claims of General Breckenridge for
the Presidency, and voted for the Crittenden com-
promise, which would have guaranteed the perpe-
tuation of slavery in the Cotton States, and pre-
vented a war by yielding all that the South claimed.
Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of War, the most high-
handed, peremptory, and persevering opponent of
the South from the day that he assumed office until
the present hour, declared when Mr. Lincoln was
originally elected that Secession was just. " Even
so lately as the first battle of Bull Run," says the
World of Saturday last, Secretary Stanton adhered
to his original convictions in favour of Secession and
treason ; laughed at the discomfiture of the Federal
troops, and derided anew the possibility of coercion."
The New York Herald, which now calls for the hang-
ing of Mr. Jefferson Davis, supported the South in
1860 and 1861, and only changed its tone when a
mob threatened to burn down its printing-office,
and during the first three years of Mr. Lincoln's
Administration criticised his acts with greater
asperity than was ever exhibited by any European
journal. Mr. Wendell Phillips, a far more dange-
rous and more polished opponent, exhausted the
very copious vocabulary of his elegant sarcasm
in denunciation of the late President, and was
among the first to raise the cry and vindicate
the right of Secession by declaring the Union " a
league with Death and a covenant with Hell," which
every Northern man who detested slavery had a right
to break up if he could, or depart from if it pleased
him. Mr. Fernando Wood, the great wielder of the
Democracy of New York, believed at the outset that
the Union was not only destroyed, but it would be
split up into a half dozen or dozen fragments, and
that the only safety for his darling metropolis, the
emporium and the pride of the continent, was to
become, like Hamburg and the Hanseatic towns of
Germany, a free city, yielding allegiance to none but
its own mayor and magistrates. Nor were the
Southern leaders less at fault In forecasting the
future than their Northern rivals. Grass was to
grow in the streets of New York for want of traffic,
caused by the interruption of its Southern trade.
Cotton was King, and Great Britain and France
were to kneel at his feet and own his supremacy.
Mr. Jefferson Davis declared that Richmond was of
no particular value to the Confederacy, beyond the
pride of holding it against " the detested Yankees,"
and that if forced to abandon it he could carry on
the war for 20 years in the mountain fastnesses of
Virginia. Gen. Lee was not more fortunate in the as-
sertion that the cities of Mobile, Savannah, Charles-
ton, and Wilmington cost more to defend them than
they were worth, and that if he had liberty to aban-
don them he would for the first time be in a position
to show the North what the war really meant. The
Chicago Convention of August, 1864, which nomi-
nated Gen. M'Clellan for the Presidency, declared
that " the war was a failure." The assertion was
true at the moment, and only ceased to be true a
few weeks later, when the Confederate Gen. Hood
marched towards Nashville, where Gen. Thomas
was in sufficient force to foil and crush him, and
thus left General Sherman and his army free to
march in the opposite direction, from Atlanta to the
Atlantic, and change the whole aspect, condition,
and fortune of the war by one apparently rash, but,
in reality, wise and vigorous movement. General
Hood's folly and General Sherman's wisdom revolu-
tionized everything. If they put European opinion
wrong, they did the same by that of America. In
fact, the war has been a surprise to everybody, and
until the bloodless victories of Sherman had put a
new face on events there was scarcely an American
competent to form an opinion who did not believe
that the war on the part of the North was a war for
a boundary and for the possession of the Mississippi
rivers, rather than one for the subjugation of a gal-
lant people having the same language as themselves.
Under circumstances
like these European observers
can afford to let the Americans laugh if they will at
the errors of estimate or opinion into which they fell
in the course of the conflict. If Europe was wrong,
America was not right ; and mutual mistakes ought
to teach them mutual tolerance. And in this con-
nexion it should be added, for the instruction of
Americans who are bat too willing to believe the
contrary, that many of the most ardent of the sup-
porters of the South in its claim of independence
took that side, even though encumberedthe
incubus and unpopularity of slavery, not because with
they loved the South, but because they loved liberty
in the North, and were conscientiously of opinion
that the ultimate result of so fierce and so protracted
a struggle would be a state of affairs incompatible
with liberty in either of the two sections; and that
Republicanism on the North American Continent
would yield, after an interval of anarchy and
a series of usurpations, to a stringent and in-
evitable military despotism. Time alone can show
whether these fears are ill-founded, and four years
are but a short hour in the life of a nation.
At this moment of triumph the exultation of the
people is such that any one who ventures to hint that
the war is not positively ended, and that on the west
of the Mississippi there still remains a large country