Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/154

 This seems a fair enough statement of the case between North and South, so far as the mere question of fact as to responsibility for the war is concerned. Beyond this, one must go to the larger questions, whether any causes justify war, and whether this individual cause was one of them,—questions, as I have said, to which the English mind tends to return a negative answer, save when England herself is affected. The very men who could least see a pretext for a war by the Federal people against the seceded States were those who would most eagerly have rushed into a war to sustain the British claim in the Trent affair.

Lastly, there was a generous and an especially English motive for anti-Northern partisanship,—the feeling of sympathy with the weaker side, which was unmistakably the Southern; a generous motive, but not to be trusted too far in deciding between any two litigants. Besides the mere inferiority of strength, the splendid valor and enterprising spirit of the South stirred the British heart and blood, and commanded numberless good wishes; while, for some time after the first battle of Bull Run, a prejudice, not readily amenable to reasoning, clung around the Northern arms, and impeded many from doing full relative justice to the military temper and prowess of the Unionists. There was, moreover, a very wide-spread impression that the North was carrying on the war chieﬂy by means of mercenaries,—Germans, Irishmen, and "the offscourings of Europe," as the uncomplimentary phrase ran,—who enlisted for the sake of the bounty, and were equally prompt at exhibiting their indifferentism to the grave issues at stake and their blackguardism in dealing with the hostile populations. The Southerners, on the contrary, ﬁgured as a chivalrous territorial body driven to ﬁght “for their hearths and homes,” (I have even seen "their altars" in print,) waging a noble defensive war against preconcerted spoliation and despotism. To this moment, many people have phrases of the above sort upon their lips.

Then there were certain personal feelings which told powerfully in the same direction,—personal partly to the English as a nation, and partly to the more prominent actors in the war. The contrast between the American colonies of Great Britain throwing off their allegiance to the Old Country because they saw fit to do so for their own interests, and the government of the Federation of these same ex-colonies insisting that some of them, which in their turn see fit to break loose from the Federal pact, shall not do so, under the alternative of war and the pains of treason,—this contrast is assuredly a glaring one; many people considered that it amounted to a positive anomaly,—not a few to a barefaced act of tyrannic apostasy. The personal feeling of the English people, their national amour propre, conspired to lead towards this harshest construction of the facts: it was so tempting to convict our old adversaries out of their own mouths, and make them, by the logic of events, read out either their recantation of the Colonial Revolution, or their self-condemnation for the Anti-Secession War. I have already explained to what extent these views appear to me to be tenable, and where their weak point lies: that both the insurrection of the colonies against England, and that of the South against the Federation,—both the repressive measures of England against the colonies, and of the Federation against the South,—were in themselves founded on an indefeasible right, and abstractly defensible; and that the "casting vote," (so to speak,) in both cases, depends, not upon any wordy denial of the right, but upon a thorough estimate of all the attendant conditions, and prominently of the "mights of man."

So far for one phase of the personal question. The other phase pertained to the character and the deeds of some leading actors in the war-drama. To most English apprehensions, the hero of the war, from an early stage of it up to his tragic death, was Stonewall Jackson, whose place was afterwards taken, in popular esteem, though not in coequal