Up to this meeting of Congress a deep obscurity hung over both the North and the South. Of the South next to nothing was known on the same continent till the letters of the “Times’” correspondent lifted the curtain here and there. A group of fugitive planters, every few days, might tell of the state of affairs in their own neighbourhood; and there were newspapers and manifestoes of the Confederate Government: but planters ready to fly were exactly the men least likely to be informed of Secessionist affairs; and the Southern newspapers are really unreadable—which they would not be if they contained genuine information. They are, as far as we can judge here, full of dreams and boasts, of virulent slander, and of lies prepared for a local or general public which must be humoured or led. From amidst this ugly haze, the “Times’” correspondent has brought out groups of clear facts from which it is possible to derive some definite impressions and anticipations. The effect of the series of letters is undoubtedly to satisfy people in general that the Confederacy cannot succeed, if the Federal Government decides that it shall not. Throughout the North this will be learned for the first time through the Englishman’s correspondence with home; and we may expect to see one effect of his disclosures in the homage which will now be paid him in places where very rash and insulting things have been publicly said of him, merely because he went to see the South with his own eyes. It showed a sad want of self-respect in certain Northern citizens to assume that to see the South must be to advocate its cause; just as it was, more recently, to fancy that because England would not take sides with the North, she must be “aiding and comforting” the South. Such incidents show that the Free States have been much like Europe in their ignorance of the actual plans, operations, and resources of the Confederacy.
Almost as great an obscurity hung about the Federal Government till the Fourth of July. I need say nothing here of the folly of complaining of the President for his apparent slowness, as long as there was no evidence of irresolution. Everybody now admits,—as one consequence of some grievous accidents to the Federal forces,—that a trustworthy military organisation cannot be made out of a crowd of civilians in a day, or a week, or a month. There was no due supply of officers; and they cannot be had for the asking. When the great converging forces began to move southwards, the world began to see what General Scott and the Government had been doing; and perhaps we may end in wondering how so much could have been effected in so short a time. This march into Virginia, after Washington was secured, revealed the action and intention of the War Office; and at the same time, the frank explanations of the President and the Finance Minister have made all plain as to the policy of the Government, and the means which it is proposed to employ.
What we may be said to know, then, is that the Secessionist public are still in a state of delusion about the prospects of their cause, imagining that England and France will either sustain it, or prevent any disastrous results of the conflict: that the Southern public is still deceived about the amount and quality of force that the North has produced: that the Southern troops are not well furnished for the war; nor disposed for the discipline which their commanders know to be necessary: and that poverty presses hard upon large sections of society in the Slave States, where the citizens’ resources are drawn from them without any prospect of being replaced. They give their cotton and tobacco to the Confederate Government for paper acknowledgments, which serve as currency now, and are to be redeemed some time or other: but there is nothing to sell, and nothing to buy; no prospect of an income for anybody, heavy taxes to pay, and the land producing less than ever before, because those who should look to it are gone to the wars, or fugitives to the Free States. If the Confederate leaders are more able than they at present appear to sustain the conflict they have provoked, a little time will show it. At present, nobody believes that they can stand their ground.
One cause of this impression is the character of the war which they wage. It is not warfare, but assassination. It seems to be copied from the Indians, whom they have mixed with their force;—fellows whose notion of war is brandishing their long knives in the streets of Fredericksburg by day, and skulking at night to destroy as many enemies as possible in detail. All through New England there are households mourning the loss of some son or brother who has been murdered at his post in the dark, without a chance of meeting his enemy. There must always be danger of the infection of this mode of warfare spreading through revenge; and there has been one striking instance of this already on the Northern side. A citizen has been so moved by the lynching of a brother in one of the Slave States, where the young man was hanged, under circumstances of cruel aggravation, merely for his Northern birth, that the thirst for revenge seems unquenchable. The survivor is described as incessantly on the watch to kill somebody in the Confederate camps; and as reckoning up his number as he would account for the business of his life. This seems, however, to be a single instance; and the Northern notion is of fighting battles in open field in broad day, and pressing the enemy southwards by the steady advance of weighty forces.
The question of success manifestly depends on the proportion of the Union party to the Secessionists in the Slave States. It remains true, as it has been from the beginning, that if the Federal Government is right in its estimate of the Union sentiment which exists in every State, there can be no doubt of the issue: and all controversy as to the event must turn on the soundness or unsoundness of that estimate. No sensible person in any foreign country will pretend to be able to form a judgment upon it, while the only public evidence is the flight of planters to the Free States, and the only testimony that which they bring with them from their neighbours. The truth will be known when the Federal forces render it safe for Union men to declare themselves; and not till then.
One of the strangest characteristics of the re-