Various - Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1.

V >> Various >> Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1.

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Some twenty years ago Newbern had what no other Southern town possessed,
a commerce of its own, that is, vessels built, owned, and sailed by its
own people. Many of these--then engaged in the West-India trade--were
partly manned by slaves who belonged to the proprietors of the vessel or
its captain, and at times, when other seamen could not be procured,
these slaves were allowed to make a voyage to a Northern port, but as
their value yearly augmented, and the risk of their suddenly
disappearing, not again to visit 'Dixie,' increased in a corresponding
ratio, they gradually retired to other duties where their services were
less precarious.

And here I will relate an anecdote which an old salt once told me when I
was strolling along the wharves of this ancient town in his company.

In consequence of a bar, or 'swash,' which stretches inside Ocracoke
Inlet, (at that time the only passage to the sea,) the vessels take in
but a part of their cargoes at Newbern, while lighters with the
remainder accompany them across the 'swash,' where the lading is
completed. Quite a number of small craft are thus constantly employed,
and they are generally manned and commanded by slaves. In this trade was
once engaged 'Jack Devereaux,' an intelligent black man who formerly
belonged to the Devereaux family--one of the F.F.s of Newbern--but who
had latterly become the property of H---- & C----, a mercantile firm
then doing a flourishing business there. He was captain of a famous
lighter, which for its enormous carrying capacity had received the
cognomen of 'Hunger and Thirst.' In due time the firm of H---- &
C----dissolved, and C---- 'moved West,' leaving an undivided half of
Captain Jack in the hands of his attorney. Jack had sailed the craft 'on
shares,' and compromised his services by monthly wages to his masters,
and so had gradually accumulated some hundreds of dollars. Not fancying
his new share-holder, he concluded to invest his hard-earned dollars in
his own bone and muscle, or in other words, buy half of himself. After
considerable higgling, he made the bargain, paying five hundred dollars
for the share. On the next trip to the bar, as the entrance to the sea
is usually called, there came up one of those sudden hurricanes known as
a Southeaster, whose force nothing can withstand. The small craft was
foundered, and Jack, after floating for a long time on a plank, finally
drifted on to a sand-spit, and was saved.

Finding a passage home, he landed on the 'old County Wharf,' a
melancholy, disheartened, and depressed individual, and without
conferring with a single person, made his way to the attorney, from whom
he had so lately purchased himself, and by dint of persuasion succeeded
in having the trade canceled and his money returned. Jack was then
himself again. He recounted over and over his adventures by flood and
field to his wondering friends, and said no man, white or black, could
imagine the trouble he felt when floating on that plank, the waves
breaking over him every moment, when he considered he had just bought
half of 'dat nigger' that was now going to destruction, and paid all the
money he had for him. But he had 'traded back,' and then if he was
drowned, 'he wouldn't lose a cent by it.' It was long after this event
when he told me he would never again risk a cent in 'nigger' property,
it was too 'onsartin' entirely. Jack was a good deal of a wag, and told
this story with a gusto I can not describe.[A] But if Captain Jack is
still on this 'side of Jordan,' he has doubtless ere this found 'nigger'
property still more 'onsartin.'

Let us, however, turn from the past to the present condition of affairs
in Newbern. Secession would never have originated there. When
South-Carolina passed its act of folly and madness, it met with a firm
opposition from the old Whig party, which still had here a vital
existence. Every exertion was made throughout the State to repel the
insidious influences of the demagogues of South-Carolina and Virginia,
and but for the Jesuitical management of the politicians at Richmond,
the 'Old North' would have remained loyal. But all the efforts of the
true Union men could not avail in warding off the storm that swept over
the South; and the Convention at Raleigh passed, or rather was forced to
assent to, the Act of Secession, on the twentieth of May, 1861. In
August the fortifications below Newbern were commenced, and continued
for some months, and well garrisoned, till they were supposed capable
of defending the town against any force that might be brought against
it. General Burnside, however, attacked them on the fourteenth of March,
1862, and after a sharp battle the rebels fled, and he occupied the old
place as a military conquest. All the wealthy and prominent citizens
fled, and have not returned.

The present condition of things will not long continue; a more permanent
government, either civil or military, will soon be established, and with
it must come a new era which will settle for all time the destiny of
Newbern.

Should the leading men of the town and all Eastern North-Carolina make
an effort and throw off the incubus that slavery has for a century
placed over it, a bright career of prosperity would open before them. A
new emigration, bringing energy and industry, would restore their
worn-out lands, drain their swamps, educate their youth, and make
Newbern echo with the hum of manufactures and commerce. The enterprise
of such a people would soon open a channel from the Neuse to Beaufort
harbor, and so avoid the shoals and dangers of Ocracoke and Hatteras,
and with the present railroads, make it the port of exchange for a wide
extent of country. The times are propitious; already the true men of the
State--and their name is legion--are anxiously awaiting the fall of
Richmond, when they will decide for the old flag and the Union, never
again to repudiate it.

* * * * *

OUR BRAVE TIMES.

I wonder if we, as a people, have any conception of the grandeur and
glory of the Times in which we are living; if we at all appreciate the
importance of the history which is being lived all around us; if we feel
the colossal magnitude of the every-day events which so crowd upon us
that we have hardly time to grasp them; if we are fully aware of the
infinite possibilities of what has been so well called this 'fearfully
glorious present'? I think not, and I do not know that it is possible
for us to do so. Only when we look back upon it from the hight of the
far-off future, shall we see the country through which we are journeying
in all its grand, sweeping outlines, its majestic proportions, and its
imperial tints of coloring. The days of peace and tranquillity in a
nation as in a life are robed in colors sweet and grateful to the
eye--softened hues of green and gold--but the days of war and
tribulation are days of scarlet and crimson, and all that can be seen in
heaven and earth is black and flame; but the days when Right achieves
great triumphs, even through bloodshed and desolation, are days of
imperial purple, hues royal in their magnificence. Thank Heaven that,
through the days of blood and black, we have at last reached the purple
days of life as a nation. A little more than a year of war, and now the
skies are brightening. Thank God! for they have been black, black, black
with horror and suffering and crime. And yet such a year as this, I am
almost persuaded, is worth a score of years of peace. It certainly has
achieved more for truth and humanity and God than the score of years
which preceded it. As a nation, we had become almost despicable. Such
supple, yielding slaves of 'Democratic' demagogues; such cringing,
fawning, knee-bending, hand-kissing agents of the diabolical, traitorous
Slave-Power; such apologists and supporters of Wrong; such
pusillanimous, weak-hearted advocates of the unpopular Right; such
slaves to Cotton and its threats, that we had almost lost the God-given
independence of American freemen, and seemed--thank God! events have
proved only _seemed_--to be entirely given up to money and mechanics,
to have become, indeed, a nation of peddlers. So much so, indeed, that
our prophets were stoned in their own lands, our apostles stricken down
in the national councils, and the few voices that were raised for God
and humanity, from out the miry slough of a trafficking age, were almost
unheard in the general din which went up from all the nations, and the
burden of whose song seemed to be: 'There is no God but Cotton, and we
are all his prophets.' But the moment the first gun was fired, how all
this changed! How regally the whole nation rose up! How magnificently
she threw off the garment of rags and filth which had hidden her fair
proportions, and donned the imperial toga of humanity, and wrapping the
rich folds of the gorgeous mantle around her, stood out before the world
in all the dignity of freedom and virtue--a form which made the whole
earth glad and the heavens clap their hands in exultation. What giant
leaps the nation made in manhood and heroism, strides following each
other thick and fast, until the most cynical of the doubters of humanity
began to open their eyes, and acknowledge that they would not have
thought her capable of such unexampled deeds. The national heroism which
the Northern people have displayed is indeed unparalleled. They have
risen up as one man to the support of the Government. They have offered
property and life and the most sacred treasures of the heart upon the
shrine of constitutional liberty. At the sound of the drum, they have
left the farm and the barn, the anvil and the mill, the church and the
forum, and formed into the grand army of invincibles which, at the word
of command, have marched forward, conquering and resistless. They have
borne patiently with delay and defeat, with blunders and crimes, with
humiliation and taxation, and have, in short, proved themselves
_Americans_ worthy of the name. Of course, national heroism has inspired
individual heroism, and to-day the country blazes from frontier to
metropolis with gallant records of daring deeds. Their number is
infinite; they can not be individually remembered, but only massed
together, one sublime mosaic by which the gallantry and heroism of the
free, untrammeled North is proved. We doubt not there is a leaf for each
hero in the heroic record of heaven, and the due share of hero-worship
paid to each by those angels who love to pore over the chronicles of
earth. And we mourn less over the coming of this war at the present time
than we should, did we not perceive that sooner or later it was
inevitable. It was written in the fate-book of God. Never before was war
so emphatically a war of principle. It mitigates the suffering much to
know this. It is something to know that all the brave men who have
fallen have fallen for the right; and when we believe so, we do firmly
believe that their death will give liberty and happiness to millions yet
to be. We can not think but that their lives are well spent. There are
some who are written upon God's muster-scroll as martyrs to liberty. Who
would not esteem it a happiness and a glory to belong to this Old Guard,
who from age to age have rallied and rallied and rallied to the support
of liberty, to the rescue of this holy sepulchre from the hands of
desolators and barbarians, who have ever fought where the fight was
thickest, have ever been the advance-guard of the world in its onward
progress, and been enshrined in the great heart of the world, there to
glow like the stars forever and ever? Is it a hardship to die that one
may live forever? Is it a hardship to die that millions who now live in
wailing and woe, in chains and degradation, may live in happiness and
freedom in all time to come? The voice of the great army of American
freemen rolls back the answer, like the majestic anthem of the sea, No!
a deep, continuous no, which echoes from the broad Atlantic to the
sunset-dyed Pacific, from the summits of Nevada to the great lakes of
the North. Yes, I tell you the whole people feel the depth and
sacredness of this war; they feel it to be, as Carlyle said of the
French Revolution, 'truth, though a truth clad in hell-fire.'

Then forward, noble army of the brave and true! Rally and forward, and
forward again, until every Malakoff of Wrong is reduced, and every
suffering Lucknow of our country hears the slogan of deliverance. You
have glorious successes to cheer you now. You can think of Somerset and
Donelson, and all the glorious battles of the war--of forts taken, of
enemies driven, of towns evacuated, of the great cities of the enemy in
our hands, of all the stirring, glorious successes of our army and our
flag--and even had you none of these to think of, you could think of our
cause, and this would be enough. Then let the bugles sound, the trumpets
clang, the drums beat, the cannons roar, and we will march, and rally,
and forward, and charge and charge and charge, until victory or death
crown our labors; and if death to us, so let it be--it will be victory
to our successors. This is the spirit of our Northern army. Sing
plaudits to it, ye sons of song. Let your eloquence be inspired by it,
ye golden-mouthed men--ye Everetts and Sumners. Write of them, ye gifted
who would live in the coming time. Weave garlands for them, ye
white-handed and lily-browed. Write anthems and oratorios for them, ye
men of music. Pray for them, each and all of you, night and day, with
heart and voice. But we can not, if we would, overlook the desolation
which the war has brought and must bring upon our favored land. We can
not conceal from ourselves the fact that, end when it will, or how it
may, it must bring desolation to thousands of happy households, and
inflict never-healing wounds upon thousands of happy hearts. For every
man who falls in battle some one mourns. For every man who dies in
hospital-wards, and of whom no note is made, some one mourns. For the
humblest soldier shot on picket, and of whose humble exit from the stage
of life little is thought, some one mourns. Nor this alone. For every
soldier disabled; for every one who loses an arm or a leg, or who is
wounded or languishes in protracted suffering; for every one who has
'only camp-fever,' some heart bleeds, some tears are shed. In far-off
humble households, perhaps, sleepless nights and anxious days are
passed, of which the world never knows; and every wounded and crippled
soldier who returns to family and friends, brings a lasting pang with
him. Oh! how the mothers feel this war! If ever God is sad in heaven, it
seems to me it must be when he looks upon the hearts of mothers. We who
are young, think little of it, know nothing of it; neither, I think, do
the fathers or the brothers know much of it; but it is the poor mothers
and wives of the soldiers. God help them! But the theme is too sad--let
us leave it. And amid this wild rush of war, let us not forget our
individual duties and responsibilities. Carlyle truly says: 'Each of us
here, let the world go how it will, and be victorious or not victorious,
has he not a little life of his own to lead? One life--a little gleam of
life between two eternities--no second chance to us for evermore.' Let
us not forget the loves, the amenities and charities of social life. Let
us not forget that the education of the world must go on as ever, that
the great virtues of charity and self-denial must more than ever be
exercised, and that the discipline and perfection of our own characters
is as ever our grand life-work. Then let the angry waves of tumult dash
up and froth at our feet, let the skies blacken and the tempest roar,
God is over all. This one thing we are to remember, and be cheerful.
Browning says:

'God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world.'

THE CRISIS AND THE PARTIES.

From two points of view, the great and preeminently _American_ nation
vibrates at present in a crisis of immense historical significance. The
first is, that of the war between the United and so-called Confederate
States, which is virtually a strife between Free Labor seeking to
enlarge its sphere and retain its power against agricultural aristocracy
maintained by slave labor. All the energies and theories of industrial
progress, of science, and of constant intellectual development; in a
word, all that is most characteristic of 'the spirit of the Nineteenth
Century,' is enlisted on the one side; all that is fading out and
wearing away, with all that characterizes the unwisest conservatism has
taken its last stand on the other. It is the old story of 'the
generation which comes and of that which goes,' reduced to the intense
form of a fierce fight. All of this--but little understood within a very
few years--has been of late made generally intelligible on this side of
the border, thanks, perhaps, as much to Mr. Hammond's word 'mudsill' as
to any other cause. In the short sentence which declared that there
should always exist, in every community, one ever-sunken and permanently
degraded class, the great point of difference between the South and
North was set forth in a form intelligible to the humblest capacity, and
it _was_ understood--how well has been shown in many a bloody field.

The other crisis in which we are at present involved is domestic and
purely political. It is the growth of opposing political parties, and
its existence is undoubtedly to be regretted, if we take only a
_superficial_ view of the causes of its birth. We could all wish for
some time to come--perhaps forever--to see only a single Union-party,
with all men, looking neither to the right nor the left, pushing
steadily on to the great goal of unity, commercial development, and
social progress. But we forget that so surely as night follows day, even
so surely, in every community, will there be a conservative section and
a progressive; the 'extreme right' of the former consisting of frozen
conservatives, advocating the preservation of every antiquated evil,
because it has acquired in their eyes a halo of 'respectability,' while
on the 'extreme left' of their opponents will be found the radical
innovators, for whom no extravagance of reform is too great; so that as
each molecule or group of atoms has its positive and negative electrical
point, and as each atom in turn obeys the same law, so we see the
positive and negative poles of North and South again reflected in the
rapidly increasing divisions among us of Conservatives, who, by a
singular fatality, still indicate the plebeian origin which they would
now so gladly disown by the term Democrats; and, on the other hand, of
Republicans, nick-named at present Radicals--somewhat unjustly; since
the term is strictly applicable only to a very limited portion of their
number.

There were men of high intelligence among the founders of the _old_
Democratic party; men who understood in many respects the true interests
of humanity and its inevitable tendency, under the influences of free
labor, free schools, and science. But with the masses, it owed its
growth to the old assumed 'natural antagonism' of labor to capital, or
of 'the poor against the rich.' It was essentially the same party as
that which was played upon by low demagogues like Cleon in the old Greek
day; by men who stirred up the poor and ignorant against the privileged
and rich, for their own selfish advantage. Of late years, more
enlightened and intelligent views have prevailed in all parties, and the
Cleons of the present day have been compelled to adventure more and more
among the lowest and most ignorant for dupes. For the workman is
gradually learning with his employer that there is a harmony of
interests and a gradual adjustment of the prices allotted to the
relative values of time, labor, brains, and capital, and that the most
serious obstacle to this adjustment is, the keeping up of a constant
warfare between laborers and employers. It is the skilled _employe_ who
becomes himself the capitalist in due time, under a peaceable and
well-organized system, as labor and brains rise in value, and the
greatest impediment to his rise is a settled state of war between
himself and the employer. Education and political equality, the
competition of capital, and the ever-increasing appreciation of
intelligence, are constantly promoting this harmony and enabling labor
to secure its rights.

It is easy to see how the ancient Democracy, or rather its leaders,
having for many years held political supremacy and shared the spoils,
actually took the place of their opponents, and, in their decline,
naturally enough, formed a coalition with the intensely aristocratic
South. Meanwhile, what became of the once aristocratic Opposition, with
its 'silk-stocking gentry,' as they were termed? Like the Democracy, it
died a natural death, so far as the active enforcement of its principles
was concerned, after those principles had no longer a foundation in the
social developments of the age. Here and there, an old and incurable
devotee to mere forms or party shibboleth, who could not comprehend the
new order of thought, went over to the 'Democratic' conservatives. Of
such were the old gentlemen who, in Philadelphia, voted for the white
waistcoat and immaculate snowy neck-tie of James Buchanan. They fled to
their ancient foes, that they might die happily in the holy odor of
respectability, quite ignorant that a new gospel of what may be termed
Respect Ability was being preached, and building up a higher and grander
order of nobility than they had ever dreamed of.

Meanwhile, the arrogance of the South and its desperate struggle to
secure political preponderance, by extending slavery to the territories,
developed in the North a free-soil and free-labor party, which received,
most appropriately, the name of Republican. The doctrine of free-labor
being intimately allied to every other form of social freedom, and of
active thought and social science, had a natural affinity for
'intellect.' The old Opposition, which had boasted, or been taunted
with, possessing 'all the dignity,' including that of superior culture,
swelled the ranks of this new party with writers and thinkers of
eminence. So it grew in power, taking in, of course, many varied
elements, both good and bad.

As might have been expected, the proper conduct of the war, and the
disposal of the enemy in case of victory, soon led to decided
differences between the Democracy, who could not--owing to ancient
custom--throw aside their love for the name, or their antipathy to the
new doctrines which threatened their power. The mass of them had grown
up in firm alliance with the South, and duped and cat's-pawed as they
had been--irritated as they were at the treachery of their old allies
and despite the noble service which many of them rendered, in fighting
the common foe--many have never been able to hate _ab imo pectore_ the
men of that false and foul feudal party which, when the rupture fairly
came, expressed for their old allies a scorn and contempt deeper even
than they felt for 'the Abolitionists.' In vain the South protested
fiercely that it meant disunion and nothing but disunion, and made its
words good by offering, both in Europe and in its own press, to
sacrifice, if need be, even slavery, rather than be longer bound to the
North; still, the remaining ultra Democracy could not, would not, even
now _will not_ believe that the South would or could be so unfriendly.
It was this hope of compromise and conciliation which lost us forts, and
ships, and millions of dollars in munitions of war; for it was said:
'The South is only boasting, and must not be driven to extremes.' With
eyes wide open to the thefts, the Democratic leaders smiled a languid,
cowardly assent, and let the enemy prepare for war. And war came. It
might have been prevented; it might, beyond all doubt, have been limited
and crushed; but the hand of the braggart South had been so long on the
throat of the doughfaces, that they dared not move, and the doughfaces
were in power. The country at large has had to pay dearly for that old
doughface love for the South; it is paying every day in lives and money.

Even now, it is amazing to see how the leaders among the Democracy,
while pecking the South with the bill, continue to fondle it with the
wing. Again and again, since the war began, they have humiliated the
North and encouraged the desperate foe by efforts at peace-parties,
conciliations, outcries for amnesty, and entreaties not to 'exasperate'
the enemy. They have urged and advocated the maintenance of slavery, the
great cause of Southern arrogance and secession, with as much zeal as
any Southron of them all, and fiercely deprecated any allusion to a
subject which can no more he kept from consciousness than can a deadly
and madly irritating cancer. Every suggestion, even the mildest and most
equitable, for arranging this difficulty, has been stigmatized by them
as out of place and time, while their press has, without exception, as
we believe, given currency to statements denouncing directly as
swindlers and prostitutes the innocent and well-meaning men and women
who went South with the sole object of clothing, nursing, and teaching
the disorganized masses of blacks set free by our army. In all of this,
we have a melancholy illustration of the difficulty with which
unthinking men of the blind mass which rolls itself away into 'parties,'
and follows its leaders, embrace new truths or shake off old habits of
slavery.

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