The Sun.
London, England, 1865-05-27 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS

TIMES.—The intelligence of the capture of Mr.
Jefferson Davis will produce a feeling of uneasiness
and anxiety in every country in Europe. We had
hoped, and we seemed to have good reason to hope,
that either through the skill of his own dispositions or
by the wise connivance of his enemies, Mr. Davis
would have effected his escape from the land where
he has played his stake so boldly and lost it so com-
pletely. The hopes of the South are evidently
crushed beyond all chance of redemption, and it
would have been a wise as well as a magnanimous
policy to suffer its leaders to escape. To a politic and
generous conqueror there is nothing more embarrass-
ing than the capture of a vanquished enemy ; it is
one of those positions which he would anxiously en-
deavour to avoid. A long experience has taught
Europe at least this lesson. When William of Orange
found that King James had returned from Fever-
sham, he determined, if possible, to escape the diffi-
culties which would arise if he were compelled to make
him prisoner, and took very good care to do nothing
which might seriously tend to his arrest until he
knew he was completely out of danger. The Pro-
visional Government of France in 1830 conducted
Charles X. to the coast with all honour and respect,
and eighteen years afterwards Louis Philippe was
exposed to no molestation in his less dignified flight
to our shores. We confess it is with much anxiety
we look forward to the probable fate of the Southern
President. The utterances of Mr. Johnson have for
some time been such as to cause the liveliest uneasi-
ness in the minds of all who are anxious to see this
great strife terminated without the effusion of more
blood. If slaughter can heal the wounds of the
Republic, enough of human hecatombs have been
offered at its shrine ; there needs not another life to
establish the fortune of the victors. But the Pre-
sident has, ever since his accession, continually
talked of the guilt of treason, and we fear he has
determined to conciliate the extreme party of his
supporters at whatever expense of policy or of
mercy. We beg we may not be misunderstood. The
inhabitants of these islands have little reason to
sympathise with Mr. Jefferson Davis. He is known
to us as one of the most inveterate calumniators of
this country, whose policy it was to stir up the feel-
ings of every class of his countrymen against us.
We also remember him as the author and originator
of the famous Mississippi scheme of repudiation.
His plan of rebellion was founded on the idea that
the deprivation of cotton would be intolerable, and
that, driven by hard necessity, we should find our-
selves compelled to support the South with the
whole force of the empire. For the person who
can thus speculate as his means of success on the
miseries he can inflict on his neighbours we have
little respect, and if we plead for the life of Mr. Jef-
ferson Davis it is not from any esteem for his mo-
tives or sympathy with his character. Itis purely
in the cause and for the credit of the American
Union that we urge its statesmen? if there is yet

time, to consider again and again the extreme nn- and consoling in the prospect of such a death. lys
policy of shedding the blood of a man whom a little blood, he will feel assured, will not flow in vain.
success would have transformed from an attainted Broken as may now be the strength, crushed as
traitor into something very like a successful monarch. may now be the spirit of the South, the spirit is not
The stake has been played fairly, it has been lost dead ; the strength will be recovered, and the cruel
entirely, and the victor should be content with his martyrdom of its great chief, kindling it to revenge,
success. Of course it is quite possible for a Govern- will keep alive the love of liberty until the hour
ment able to put its own interpretation on'the Con- comes in which to renew the fight, which for a race
stitution which the sword has established to declare of freedom can only finally end with victory.
Mr. Davis and all who have acted with him during
the great civil war entitled to mercy, and to treat
the insurrection as an unsuccessful attempt to sepa-
rate two Sovereign States. We cannot, however,
help fearing that it is more in accordance with the
disposition of the present President to rule every
point in his own favour, and to treat an attempt to
break up a Confederacy as a rebellion against the
Government of a lawful Sovereign. Even if this
be his view, we venture to propose to him our
own example. We had a rebellion in 1848 in Ire-
land, but we disdained to dip our hands in the
blood of the rebels. We pardoned Smith O'Brien,
and Mitchell, and Meagher. In their case there was
no difficulty in ascertaining the law ; the crime was
perfectly well known, and the punishment equally
notorious. The capital punishment of Charles 1.,
whatever people may think of it now, was undoubt-
edly a great mistake, 'and probably one of the prin-
cipal causes of the long and dreary period which we
had to wait before the accomplishment of our liber-
ties was finally attained. Equally impolitic was the
execution of Louis XVI. Had we seized Washington
in the earlier days of the revolutionary war, we might
have considered ourselves justified in executing him
as a deserter, for he had once borne the King's com-
mission. But long before the end of the war we had
learnt to know him and respect him, and had he
fallen into our hands he would have been considered
entitled to all the courtesies due to a generous and
noble-minded adversary. All this is, of course,written
on the supposition, the truth of which we do not for
a moment doubt, that it will be foiind impossible to
connect Mr. Davis in any way with the atrocious
plot for the assassination of Mr. Lincoln. Our ob-
ject is not to palliate that enormous crime, and, if
it be possible to show that Mr. Davis was cognizant
of it, we have nothing to say in his defence. We
desire only to take the first opportunity of repre-
senting how enormous would be the guilt of corn-
*mencing a proscription which would give the tone
to all political contests in America for the next
century. We do not doubt that the punishment of
death has its uses, but they arise when it is em-
ployed really as a punishment and not as an act of
vengeance. Wise conquerors make as few martyrs
as possible, and for one cause that has suffered by
too great lenity, it is easy to point out a hundred
that have been ruined by too much severity.
Punishment is for the violation of municipal law.
The man who is able to set up a Government and
carry on a tremendous conflict for four years has
elevated himself beyond the reach of mere criminal
proceedings. Burke could not draw up an indict-
ment against a nation, and on Mr. Jefferson Davis
were concentrated the hopes and the feelings of a
brave and most unhappy people. Modern Europe
affords but one precedent for capital punishment in
such a case--the treatment of Poland by Russia ;
and that precedent is not one to encourage imita-
tion. When a people rise for a common object
they are not likely to be deterred by the prospect
of individual punishment, and when punishment
ceases to deter it ceases to be justifiable. •
HERALD.—The cavalry who captured Mr. Jeffer-
son Davis did their duty to the Government which
employed them, but they did it a very ill service.
If it were ever wise to build a bridge for a retreat-
mg enemy it was so in this case, and instead of
offering a reward for the apprehension of Mr. Davis,
the Northern Government should have ordered its
officers to facilitate his escape. It has caught him;
what will it do with him? It cannot let him go
scot free without falsifying all the declarations of
its head, and renouncing all purpose of punishing
the rebels ; it cannot inflict upon him the penalty
which his chief has threatened without covering
itself with everlasting infamy and perpetuating the
discord which it should be its object, as it certainly
is its interest, to allay. To confiscate the property
of Mr. Davis, to banish him, are measures which
the Northern Government might take without any
very great reproach, but they are measures which
Mr. Davis would have saved it the trouble of tak-
ing. It has set a price upon his head with very dif-
ferent intentions. It must bring him to trial for
participation in the murder of Mr. Lincoln, or for
treason. His acquittal, which in a fair trial must
follow, will cover it with shame. His condemnation,
obtained by the foul means from which Mr. Andrew
Johnson it is known will not shrink, and his execu-
tion in consequence of that condemnation, would
excite it against all the best of his own citizens and
earn for it the loathing of the rest.of the world. It
is the misfortune, we will not say of Mr. Jefferson
Davis—for to him it can be a small sacrifice to die
for the cause in which he has so often risked his life,
and to survive the overthrow of which must be an
inextinguishable anguish, but of the Northern
people, that the chief magistrate of the United
States, in whose hands the fate of the President
of the Confederacy lies de facto, although not
de jure, thirsts for the blood of his vanquished
adversary. Mr. Andrew Johnson is one of
those arrogant men who, professing the utmost
disregard for their opponents, keenly feel and never
forgive their superiority. He has fought, he tells us,
against the Southern aristocracy. We know that. he
is a renegade from the cause of the South. He has
had many a sharp encounter with Mr. Jefferson
Davis, , and suffered many a humiliation which he
burns to revenge. The ignorant, rough, fanatical
tailor, who by force of great demagogic powers has
won for himself a position in the party, had not
a few slights and rebuffs to put up with from the in-
telligent and educated gentlemen of the South
amongst whom he strove to make himself a leader.
All these slights, party and personal, he hastreasured
up, and promises.to revenge. Before the bright idea
struck him of forging evidence to denounce Mr.
Davis as an accomplice in the murder of Mr. Lincoln
he laboured to stimulate the animosity of the people
against his foe by talking constantly of treason and
the necessity of punishing it; and we must suppose
that the Southern President will therefore be ex-
posed to a double ordeal—be tried for a murder in
which he had no more part than Mrs. Johnson, and
if acquitted of that charge, in spite of all the intimi-
dation and corruption which will be employed to
assure his conviction, tried again for treason—that
is to say, for interpreting the Constitution of the
United States in precisely the same spirit in which
it had been construed by the dominant political party
ever since its enaction. We do not believe that there
is a man in the Northern States who believes
that Jefferson. Davis was privy in any way to the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but we are far
from assured that he will not be found guilty of that
crime by some tribunal, and condemned to death.
Andrew Johnson has set his heart upon murdering
his old foe, and he is a man who will sacrifice every-
thing to his hatreds. He has tools enough to his hand.
The dispenser of power for four years, he can easily
find a military tribunal which will accept the incre-
dible, the clearly disproved, stories of suborned wit-
nesses, or meeting secretly without even going
through the form of taking evidence and hearing the
accused; declare him guilty. Nor will such a court
make much difficulty in discovering that a treason,
provided for by the constitution of the United
States, and incurring the penalty of death upon the
scaffold, was committed by Mr. Davis and all who
threw in their lot with secession. Where the law
has been deliberately set aside, as it has been in the
Northern States ; where, as in these States, the
President of a republic has assumed an unlimited
and despotic power. and a state of siege de facto,
been established as cruel as any ever decreed in
Poland, there can be no difficulty in destroying any
man whose destruction the chief of the State de-
sires. The only hope that Mr. Davis may be treated
honourably and justly—that the reunited States
may not commence their new career by an act
branding them to all future times—rests in
the possibility that the nation may revolt against
the outrage which its chief proposes to commit
in its name, and make it impossible for
him to gratify his infamous designs. But that hope,
we must confess, is a very small one. The news-
papers of the largest circulation and greatest in-
fluence announce the capture of Mr. Davis in lan-
guage of fiendish exultation. They gloat over the
prospect of his judicial murder; and knowing, as
we must assume, the character of the public they
address, promise it a glorious satisfaction in the in-
dignities and pains to which the rebel President
will be subjected. Still we would fain hope, for
the sake of our common humanity, for our common
kindred, that the American people may show itself
in this critical hour more just, more generous, and
more sagacious than the drunken blackguard whom,
after the fashion of an ignorant African tribe, it has
chosen for its ruler, and the unscrupulous writers
who try to earn its favour by flattering its lowest
passions, and insist that the man whose rare abilities
and high character have conferred a lustre upon the
United States should be treated with fairness and
justice, if not with magnanimity. To express any
pity or anxiety for Mr. Davis himself would be to
insult him. Whatever fate his enemies may pre-
pare for him he will meet it, doubtless, with the
courage which has sustained him during the trying,
but glorious, years of his presidency. He has done
his duty. He has defended the cause of freedom
and of right with almost superhuman energy; and
having seen the noblest of his countrymen lay down
their lives for that cause, sacrifice themselves in the
hope. and the trust that their country would be suc-
cessful, now that the struggle is seemingly over,
and the South has sunk into despair, he must the
rather desire to seal his testimony with his blood.
To such a man there must be something inspiriting