Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 by Various

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These necessities which have dictated the conduct of the Federal
Government are overlooked, especially by our foreign critics.
The popular statement of the opponents of the war abroad is the
impossibility of our success. "If you could add," say they, "to your
strength the whole army of England, of France, and of Austria, you
could not coerce eight millions of people to come under this Government
against their will." This is an odd thing for an Englishman, a
Frenchman, or an Austrian to say, who remembers the Europe of the last
seventy years,--the condition of Italy, until 1859,--of Poland, since
1793,--of France, of French Algiers,--of British Ireland, and British
India. But, granting the truth, rightly read, of the historical
aphorism, that "the people always conquer," it is to be noted, that,
in the Southern States, the tenure of land, and the local laws, with
slavery, give the social system not a democratic, but an aristocratic
complexion; and those States have shown every year a more hostile and
aggressive temper, until the instinct of self-preservation forced us
into the war. And the aim of the war on our part is indicated by the
aim of the President's Proclamation, namely, to break up the false
combination of Southern society, to destroy the piratic feature in it
which makes it our enemy only as it is the enemy of the human race, and
so allow its reconstruction on a just and healthful basis. Then new
affinities will act, the old repulsions will cease, and, the cause
of war being removed, Nature and trade may be trusted to establish a
lasting peace.

We think we cannot overstate the wisdom and benefit of this act of the
Government. The malignant cry of the Secession press within the Free
States, and the recent action of the Confederate Congress, are decisive
as to its efficiency and correctness of aim. Not less so is the silent
joy which has greeted it in all generous hearts, and the new hope it has
breathed into the world.

It was well to delay the steamers at the wharves, until this edict could
be put on board. It will be an insurance to the ship as it goes plunging
through the sea with glad tidings to all people. Happy are the young who
find the pestilence cleansed out of the earth, leaving open to them
an honest career. Happy the old, who see Nature purified before they
depart. Do not let the dying die: hold them back to this world, until
you have charged their ear and heart with this message to other
spiritual societies, announcing the melioration of our planet.

"Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And Peace proclaims olives of endless age."

Meantime that ill-fated, much-injured race which the Proclamation
respects will lose somewhat of the dejection sculptured for ages in
their bronzed countenance, uttered in the wailing of their plaintive
music,--a race naturally benevolent, joyous, docile, industrious, and
whose very miseries sprang from their great talent for usefulness,
which, in a more moral age, will not only defend their independence, but
will give them a rank among nations.

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_History of Friedrich the Second, called Frederick the Great._ By THOMAS
CARLYLE. In Four Volumes. Vol. III. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1862.

Although History flows in a channel never quite literally dry, and for
certain purposes a continuous chronicle of its current is desirable,
it is only in rare reaches, wherein it meets formidable obstacles to
progress, that it becomes grand and impressive; and even in such cases
the interest deepens immeasurably, when some master-spirit arises to
direct its energies. The period of Frederick the Great was not one of
these remarkable passages. It was marked, however, with the signs that
precede such. Europe lay weltering and tossing in seemingly aimless
agitation, yet in real birth-throes; and the issue was momentous and
memorable, namely: The People. From the hour in which they emerged from
the darkness of the French Revolution, they have so absorbed attention
that men have had little opportunity to look into the causes which
forced them to the front, and made wiser leadership thenceforth
indispensable to peaceful rule. The field, too, was repulsive with the
appearance of nearly a waste place, save only that Frederick the Second
won the surname of "Great" by his action thereon. And it may be justly
averred that only to reveal his life, and perhaps that of one other, was
it worthy of resuscitation. To do this was an appalling labor, for the
skeleton thereof was scattered through the crypts of many kingdoms; yet,
by the commanding genius of Mr. Carlyle, bone hath not only come to
his bone, but they have been clothed with flesh and blood, so that the
captains of the age, and, moreover, the masses, as they appeared in
their blind tusslings, are restored to sight with the freshness
and fulness of Nature. Although this historical review is strictly
illustrative, it is altogether incomparable for vividness and
originality of presentation. The treatment of official personages is
startlingly new. All ceremony toward them gives place to a fearful
familiarity, as of one who not only sees through and through them, but
oversees. Grave Emptiness and strutting Vanity, found in high places,
are mocked with immortal mimicry. Indeed, those of the "wind-bag"
species generally, wherever they appear in important affairs, are so
admirably exposed, that we see how they inevitably lead States to
disaster and leave them ruins, while their pompous and feeble methods of
doing it are so put as to call forth the contemptuous smiles, yea, the
derisive laughter, of all coming generations. In fine, the alternate
light and shade, which so change the aspect and make the mood of human
nature, were never so touched in before; and therefore it is the saddest
and the merriest story ever told.

In bold and splendid contrast with this picture of national life flow
the life and fortunes of Frederick. If the qualities of his progenitors
prophesied this right royal course, his portrait, by Pesne, shows him
to have been conceived in some happy moment when Nature was in her most
generous mood. What finish of form and feature! and what apparent power
to win! Yet in what serene depths it rests, to be aroused only by some
superb challenger! No strength of thought or stress of situation seems
to have had power to line the curves of beauty. Observe, too, the
full-blown mouth, which never saw cause to set itself in order to form
or fortify a purpose. When it is remembered that in opening manhood this
prince was long imprisoned under sentence of death for attempting to
escape from paternal tyranny, and that his friend actually died on the
gallows merely for generous complicity in this offence against the state
of a king, and that neither of the terrible facts left permanent trace
on his countenance or cloud on his spirit, it should create no surprise
that nothing but the march of time was ever visible there. Though
trained in such a school, and in the twenty-eighth year of his age when
he reached the throne, he yet gave a whole and a full heart to his
subjects, and sought to guide them solely for their good. From this
purpose he never swerved; and though his somewhat too trustful methods
were rapidly changed by stern experience, his people felt more and more
the consummate wisdom of his guidance, and they became unconquerable
by that truth and that faith. Almost on the first day of his reign, he
invited Voltaire, the greatest of literary heroes, the most adroit and
successful assaulter of king-craft and priest-craft that ever lived, to
his capital and to his palace; and in a most friendly spirit consulted
him on the advancement of art and letters, exhausted him by the
touchstone of superior capacity, and even fathomed him by a glance
so keen and so covert that it always took, but never gave, and then
complimented him home in so masterly a manner that he was lured into the
fond belief that he had found a disciple. A mind so capacious and so
reticent is always an enigma to near observers. Hence it is that the
transcendently great may be more truly known to after-ages than to
any contemporary. By the patient research and profound insight of Mr.
Carlyle, Frederick the Great is thus rising into clear and perennial
light. What deserts of dust he wrought in, and what a jungle of false
growths he had to clear away, Dryasdust and Smelfungus mournfully hint
and indignantly moralize,--under such significant names does this new
Rhadamanthus reveal the real sins of mankind, and deliver them over to
the judgment of their peers. Frederick, indeed, is among them, but not
of them. The way in which he is made to come forth from the mountains of
smoke and cinders remaining of his times is absolutely marvellous. As
some mighty and mysterious necromancer quickens the morbid imagination
to supernatural sight, and for a brief moment reveals through rolling
mist and portentous cloud the perfect likeness of the one longed for
by the rapt gazer, so Frederick is restored in this biography for
the perpetual consolation and admiration of all coming heroes. In
comprehension and judgment of the actions and hearts of men, and in
vividness of writing, not that which shook the soul of Belshazzar in the
midst of his revellers was more powerful, or more sure of approval and
fulfilment. It is not only one of the greatest of histories and of
biographies, but nothing in literature, from any other pen, bears any
likeness to it. It is truly a solitary work,--the effort of a vast and
lonely nature to find a meet companion among the departed.

1. _The Rejected Stone; or, Insurrection vs. Resurrection in America._
By a Native of Virginia. Second Edition. Boston: Walker, Wise, & Co.
1862.

2. _The Golden Hour._ By MONCURE D. CONWAY, Author of "The Rejected
Stone." _Impera parendo._ Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1862.

Seldom have political writings found such accomplices in events as
these, whose final criticism appears in the great Proclamation of the
President. Two campaigns have been the bloody partisans of this earnest
pen: the impending one will cheerfully undertake its final vindication.
Not because these two little books stand sole and preeminent, the
isolated prophecies of an all but rejected truth, nor because they have
created the opinion out of which the President gathers breath for his
glorious words. Mr. Conway would hardly claim more, we think, than to
have spoken frankly what the people felt, the same people which hailed
the early emancipationing instinct of General Fremont. We see the fine
sense of Mr. Emerson in his advice to hitch our wagon to a star, but
there must be a well-seasoned vehicle, with a cunning driver to thrust
his pin through the coupling, one not apt to jump out when the axles
begin to smoke.

At the first overt act of this great Rebellion, anti-slavery men
perceived the absurdity of resisting a symptom instead of attacking the
disease. They proclaimed the old-fashioned truth, that an eruption can
be rubbed back again into the system, not only without rubbing out
its cause, but at the greatest hazard to the system, which is loudly
announcing its difficulty in this cutaneous fashion. But Northern
politicians saw that the inflammatory blotches made the face of the
country ugly and repulsive: their costliest preparations have been well
rubbed in ever since, without even yet reducing the rebellious red;
on the contrary, it flamed out more vigorously than ever. Their old
practice was not abandoned, the medicines only were changed. The wash
of compromise was replaced by the bath of blood. And into that dreadful
color the tears and agony of a million souls have been distilled, as if
they would make a mixture powerful enough to draw out all our trouble
by the pores. The very skin of the Rebellion chafed and burned more
fiercely with all this quackery.

If Slavery is our disease, the Abolition of Slavery is our remedy. Our
bayonets only cupped and scored the patient, our war-measures in and out
of Congress only worked dynamically against other war-measures far more
dogged and desperate than our own. The sentence of Emancipation is the
specific whose operation will be vital, by effecting an alteration in
the system, and soon annihilating that condition of the blood which
feeds our fevers and rushes in disgusting blotches to the face. "No,"--a
Northern minority still says,--"every fever has its term; only watch
your self-limiting disease, keep the patient from getting too much hurt
during his delirium, and he will be on 'Change before long."

No doubt of that. He loves to be on 'Change; of all the places in the
country, out of his own patriarchal neighborhoods, not even Saratoga
and Newport were ever so exhilarating to him as Wall Street and State
Street, and he longs to be well enough to infest his whilom haunts.
Slavery is a self-limited disease, for it suffers nothing but itself to
impose its limits. In that sense the North would soon have his old crony
on the pavement again, with one yellow finger in his button-hole, and
another nervously playing at a trigger behind the back. For the North
was paying roundly in men and dollars to renew that pleasurable
intercourse, to get the dear old soul out again as little dilapidated as
possible, with as much of the old immunities and elasticities preserved
as an attack so violent would allow.

The President said to the deputation of Quakers, "Where the Constitution
cannot yet go, a proclamation cannot." This was accepted by a portion of
the North as another compact expression of Presidential wisdom. It was
the common sense, curtly and neatly put, upon which our armies waited,
and for whose cold and bleached utterances our glorious young men were
sent home from Washington by rail in coffins, red receipts of Slavery to
acknowledge Northern indecision. It was the kind of common sense which,
after every family-tomb has got its tenant, and wives, mothers, sisters
tears to be their bread and meat continually, would have jogged on
'Change snugly some fine morning arm in arm with the murderer of their
noble dead.

For, though neither the Constitution nor a proclamation can quite yet go
down practically into Slavery, Slavery might come up here to find the
Constitution in its old place at the Potomac ferry, and without a toll
or pike to heed.

It seemed so sensible to say, that, where one document cannot go,
another cannot! And yet it depends upon what is in the document. If the
Constitution _could_ go South now, it would be the last thing we should
want to send, at this stage of the national malady. It contains the
immunity out of which the malady has flamed. Its very neutrality is the
best protection which a conquered South could have, and a moral triumph
that would richly compensate it for a military defeat. Would it not have
been quite as sagacious, and equally aphoristic, if the President had
said, "Where a proclamation cannot go, the Constitution never can
again"? He has said it! And if the proclamation goes first, the
Constitution will follow to bless and to save.

Both of these little books of Mr. Conway are devoted to showing the
necessity for a proclamation of emancipation, as simple justice, as
military policy, as mercy to the South, to put us right at home and
abroad, to destroy at once the cause of the Republic's shame and sorrow.
He combats various objections: such as that a proclamation of that
nature would send home instantly the pro-slavery officers and men who
are now fighting merely to enhance their own importance or to restore
the state of things before the war: that a proclamation of emancipation,
finding its way, as it surely would, to the heart of every slave, would
breed insurrections and all the horrors of a servile war: that such
a document would not be worth the paper which it blotted, until the
military power of the South was definitively broken: that it would
convert the Border States into active foes, and make them rush by
natural proclivity into the bosom of Secession. Mr. Conway disposes well
of a great deal of trash which even good Republican papers, upon which
we have hitherto relied, but can do so no longer, have vented under all
these heads of objections.

He writes with such enthusiasm, and is so plainly a dear lover and
worshipper of the justice which can alone exalt this nation, that we are
carried clear over the wretched half-republicanism which has been trying
all the year to say eminently sound and unexceptionable things, we
forget the deceit and expediency whose leaded columns have been more
formidable than those which rolled the tide of war back again to the
Potomac. Great is the animating power of faith, when faithfully brought
home to the universal instinct for righteousness. Mr. Conway was born
and bred among slaveholders, knows them and their institution, knows
the slave, and his moral condition, and his expectations: so that these
inspiriting prophecies of his are more than those of a lively and
talented pamphleteer.

His earnest purpose in writing lifts us pretty well over some things in
his style which seem to us discordant with his glorious theme. He has
a way, as good as the President's, to whom much of his matter is
addressed, of making his apologues and stories tell; they are apt, and
give the reader the sensation of being clinched. One feels like a nail
when it catches the board. But sometimes the transition to a grotesque
allusion from a fine touch of fancy or from the inbred religiousness
of the subject is abrupt. Jean Paul may offer you, in his most glowing
page, a quid of tobacco, if he pleases; the shock is picturesque, and
sometimes lets in a deep analogy. But the hour in which Mr. Conway
writes, the height of faith from which his pen stoops to the mortal
page, the unspeakable solemnity of the theme, which our volunteers are
rudely striving to trace upon their country's bosom with their blood,
and our women are steeping in their tears, ought to drive all flippancy
shuddering from the lines in which sarcasm itself should be measured and
awful as the deaths which gird us round.

But the two volumes are full of power and feeling. They are written
so that all may read. Their effect is popular, without stooping
deliberately to become so. They are among the brightest and simplest
pages which this exciting period has produced. It would be a great
mistake to gauge their effect by what they bring to pass in the minds of
cabinet-officers, editors, and party-leaders: for they put into plain,
stout language the growing instinct of the people to get at the cause of
the war which lays them waste.

Some of the most effective pages in these volumes are those which lament
the dread alternative of war, and which show that emancipation would be
merciful to all classes at the South. It is no paradox that to free the
slaves to-morrow would restore health to the South and regenerate its
people.

And we are glad that Mr. Conway speaks so emphatically against that
measure of colonization, whether the proposition be to deport the
contrabands to Hayti, or to tote them away to Central America under the
leadership of intelligent colored representatives of the North. All
these are plans which look to the eventual removal of the only men
at the South who know how to labor, and who are now the only
representatives there of the country's industrial ideas. We pray you,
Mr. President, to use the money voted for colonizing purposes to rid the
country of the men in the Border and Cotton States who cannot or will
not work, slave-owners and bushwhackers, who kill and harry, but who
never did an honest stroke of work in their lives, and whom, with or
without slavery, this Republic will have to support. Take some Pacific
Island for a great Alms-House, and inaugurate an exodus of the genuine
Southern pauper; he is only an incumbrance to the industrious and
humble-minded blacks, from whose toil the country may draw the staples
of free sugar and free cotton, raised upon the soil which is theirs by
the holy prescription of blood and sorrow. "If it were not for your
presence in the country," says the President to the colored men, "we
should have no war!" If it were not for silverware and jewelry, no
burglaries would be committed! Don't let us get rid of the villains, but
of the victims; thereby villainy will cease!

Let Mr. Pomeroy be sent to annex some of the Paumotu or Tongan groups,
where spontaneous bread-fruit would afford Mr. Floyd good plucking, and
Messrs. Wigfall, Benjamin, and Prior could even have their chewing done
by proxy, for the native pauper employs the old women to masticate his
Ava into drink. There they might continue to take their food from other
people's mouths, with the chance now and then of a strong anti-slavery
clergyman well barbecued, a luxury for which they have howled for many a
year. That is the place for your oligarchic pauper, where the elements
themselves are field-hands, with Nature for overseer, manufactures
superfluous and free-trade a blessing, and plenty of colored persons to
raise the mischief with. That is the sole crop which they have raised at
home. Let their propensities be transferred to a place unconnected with
the politics or the privileges of a Christian Republic.

But let this great Republic drive into exile the wheat-growers of the
West, the miners and iron-men of Pennsylvania, and the farmers of New
England, as soon as these men who have created the cotton-crop which
clothes a world, and who only wait for another stimulus to supersede the
lash. Let them find it, as in Jamaica, in a plot of ground, their seed
and tools, their hearth-side and marriage, their freedom, and the
shelter of a country which wants to use the products of their hands.

If it be an object to stretch a great band of free tropical labor across
Central America, to people those wastes with ideas which shall curb
the southward lust of men, and nourish a grateful empire against the
intrigues of European States, let that be done, if the colored American
of the Border States is willing to advance the project. Let the project
be clearly understood, and its prospective upholders frankly invited to
become men, and aid their country's welfare. But never let colonization
be opened like an artery, through whose "unkindest cut" some of the best
blood of the country shall slip away and be lost forever. We want the
cotton labor even more extensively diffused, to conquer John Bull with
bales, as at New Orleans. Let no cotton-grower ever budge.

_The Life and Letters of Washington Irving._ By his Nephew, PIERRE M.
IRVING. Vols. I and II. New York: G.P. Putnam.

If to be loved and admired by all, to have troops of personal friends,
to enjoy a literary reputation wide in extent and high in degree, to
be as little stung by envy and detraction as the lot of humanity will
permit, to secure material prosperity with only occasional interruptions
and intermissions, make up the elements of a happy life, then that of
Washington Irving must be pronounced one of the most fortunate in the
annals of literature. It is but repeating a trite remark to say that
happiness depends more upon organization than upon circumstances, more
upon what we are than upon what we have. Saint-Simon said of the Duke of
Burgundy, father of Louis XV., that he was born terrible: it certainly
may be said of Washington Irving that he was born happy. Some men
are born unhappy: that is, they are born with elements of character,
peculiarities of temperament, which generate discontent under all
conditions of life. Their joints are not lubricated by oil, but fretted
by sand. The contemporaries of Shakspeare, who for the most part had
little comprehension of his unrivalled genius, expressed their sense
of his personal qualities by the epithet gentle, which was generally
applied to him,--a word which meant rather more then than it does now,
comprising sweetness, courtesy, and kindliness. No one word could
better designate the leading characteristics of Irving's nature and
temperament. No man was ever more worthy to bear "the grand old name
of gentleman," alike in the essentials of manliness, tenderness, and
purity, and in the external accomplishment of manners so winning and
cordial that they charmed alike men, women, and children. He had the
delicacy of organization which is essential to literary genius, but it
stopped short of sickliness or irritability. He was sensitive to beauty
in all its forms, but was never made unhappy or annoyed by the shadows
in the picture of life. He had a happy power of escaping from everything
that was distasteful, uncomfortable, and unlovely, and dwelling in
regions of sunshine and bloom. His temperament was not impassioned; and
this, though it may have impaired somewhat the force of his genius,
contributed much to his enjoyment of life. Considering that he was an
American born, and that his youth and early manhood were passed in a
period of bitter and virulent political strife, it is remarkable how
free his writings are from the elements of conflict and opposition. He
never put any vinegar into his ink. He seems to have been absolutely
without the capacity of hating any living thing. He was a literary
artist; and the productions of his pen address themselves to the
universal and unpartisan sympathies of mankind as much as paintings
or statues. His "Rip Van Winkle" and "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" are
pictures, in which we find combined the handling of Teniers, the
refinement of Stothard, and the coloring of Gainsborough.

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