Every day that you are in the South you come more and more to see that the "mean whites" are the controlling power. The landowners are not only few in number, but their apathy during the present crisis is surprising.
The men who demand their readmission to the government of eleven States are unkempt, fierce-eyed fellows, not one whit better than the brancos of Brazil; the very men, strangely enough, who themselves, in their "Leavenworth const.i.tution," first began disfranchis.e.m.e.nt, declaring that the qualification for electors in the new State of Kansas should be the taking oath to uphold the infamous Fugitive Slave Law.
These "mean whites" were the men who brought about secession. The planters are guiltless of everything but criminal indifference to the deeds that were committed in their name. Secession was the act of a pack of noisy demagogues; but a false idea of honor brought round a majority of the Southern people, and the infection of enthusiasm carried over the remainder.
When the war sprang up, the old Southern contempt for the Yankees broke out into a fierce burst of joy, that the day had come for paying off old scores. "We hate them, sir," said an old planter to me. "I wish to G.o.d that the _Mayflower_ had sunk with all hands in Plymouth Bay."
Along with this violence of language, there is a singular kind of cringing to the conquerors. Time after time I heard the complaint, "The Yanks treat us shamefully, I reckon. We come back to the Union, and give in on every point; we renounce slavery; we consent to forget the past; and yet they won"t restore us to our rights." Whenever I came to ask what they meant by "rights," I found the same haziness that everywhere surrounds that word. The Southerners seem to think that men may rebel and fight to the death against their country, and then, being beaten, lay down their arms and walk quietly to the polls along with law-abiding citizens, secure in the protection of the Const.i.tution which for years they have fought to subvert.
At Richmond I had a conversation which may serve as a specimen of what one hears each moment from the planters. An old gentleman with whom I was talking politics opened at me suddenly: "The Radicals are going to give the ballot to our n.i.g.g.e.rs to strengthen their party, but they know better than to give it to their Northern n.i.g.g.e.rs."
_D_.--"But surely there"s a difference in the cases."
_The Planter_.--"You"re right--there is; but not your way. The difference is, that the Northern n.i.g.g.e.rs can read and write, and even lie with consistency, and ours can"t."
_D_.--"But there"s the wider difference, that negro suffrage down here is a necessity, unless you are to rule the country that"s just beaten you."
_The Planter_.--"Well, there of course we differ. We rebs say we fought to take our State out of the Union. The Yanks beat us; so our States must still be in the Union. If so, why shouldn"t our representatives be unconditionally admitted?"
Nearer to a conclusion we of course did not come, he declaring that no man ought to vote who had not education enough to understand the Const.i.tution, I, that this was good _prima facie_ evidence against letting him vote, but that it might be reb.u.t.ted by the proof of a higher necessity for his voting. As a planter said to me, "The Southerners prefer soldier rule to n.i.g.g.e.r rule;" but it is not a question of what they prefer, but of what course is necessary for the safety of the Union which they fought to destroy.
Nowhere in the Southern States did I find any expectation of a fresh rebellion. It is only Englishmen who ask whether "the South" will not fight "once more." The South is dead and gone; there can never be a "South" again, but only so many Southern States. "The South" meant simply the slave country; and slavery being dead, it is dead. Slavery gave us but two cla.s.ses besides the negroes--planters and "mean whites."
The great planters were but a few thousand in number; they are gone to Canada, England, Jamaica, California, Colorado, Texas. The "mean whites"--the true South--are impossible in the face of free labor: they must work or starve. If they work, they will no longer be "mean whites,"
but essentially Northerners--that is, citizens of a democratic republic, and not oligarchists.
As the Southerners admit that there can be no further war, it would be better even for themselves that they should allow the sad record of their rising to fade away. Their speeches, their newspapers continue to make use of language which nothing could excuse, and which, in the face of the magnanimity of the conquerors, is disgraceful. In a Mobile paper I have seen a leader which describes with hideous minuteness Lincoln, Lane, John Brown, and Dostie playing whist in h.e.l.l. A Texas cutting which I have is less blasphemous, but not less vile: "The English language no longer affords terms in which to curse a sniveling, weazen-faced piece of humanity generally denominated a Yankee. We see some about here sometimes, but they skulk around, like sheep-killing dogs, and a.s.sociate mostly with n.i.g.g.e.rs. They whine and prate, and talk about the judgment of G.o.d, as if G.o.d had anything to do with them." The Southerners have not even the wit or grace to admit that the men who beat them were good soldiers; "blackguards and braggarts," "cravens and thieves," are common names for the men of the Union army. I have in my possession an Alabama paper in which General Sheridan, at that time the commander of the military division which included the State, is styled "a short-tailed slimy tadpole of the later sp.a.w.n, the blathering disgrace of an honest father, an everlasting libel on his Irish blood, the synonym of infamy, and scorn of all brave men." While I was in Virginia, one of the Richmond papers said: "This thing of "loyalty" will not do for the Southern man."
The very day that I landed in the South a dinner was given at Richmond by the "Grays," a volunteer corps which had fought through the rebellion. After the roll of honor, or list of men killed in battle, had been read, there were given as toasts by rebel officers: "Jeff.
Davis--the caged eagle; the bars confine his person, but his great spirit soars;" and "The conquered banner, may its resurrection at last be as bright and as glorious as theirs--the dead."
It is in the face of such words as these that Mr. Johnson, the most unteachable of mortals, asks men who have sacrificed their sons to restore the Union to admit the ex-rebels to a considerable share in the government of the nation, even if they are not to monopolize it, as they did before the war. His conduct seems to need the Western editor"s defense: "He must be kinder honest-like, he aire sich a tarnation foolish critter."
It is clear, from the occurrence of such dinners, the publication of such paragraphs and leaders as those of which I have spoken, that there is no military tyranny existing in the South. The country is indeed administered by military commanders, but it is not ruled by troops.
Before we can give ear to the stories that are afloat in Europe of the "government of major-generals," we must believe that five millions of Englishmen, inhabiting a country as large as Europe, are crushed down by some ten thousand other men--about as many as are needed to keep order in the single town of Warsaw. The Southerners are allowed to rule themselves; the question now at issue is merely whether they shall also rule their former slaves, the negroes.
I hardly felt myself out of the reach of slavery and rebellion till, steaming up the Potomac from Aquia Creek by the gray dawn, I caught sight of a grand pile towering over a city from a magnificent situation on the brow of a long, rolling hill. Just at the moment, the sun, invisible as yet to us below, struck the marble dome and cupola, and threw the bright gilding into a golden blaze, till the Greek shape stood out upon the blue sky, glowing like a second sun. The city was Washington; the palace with the burnished cupola the Capitol; and within two hours I was present at the "hot-weather sitting" of the 39th Congress of the United States.
CHAPTER IV.
THE EMPIRE STATE.
At the far southeast of New York City, where the Hudson and East River meet to form the inner bay, is an ill-kept park that might be made the loveliest garden in the world. Nowhere do the features that have caused New York to take rank as the first port of America stand forth more clearly. The soft evening breeze tells of a climate as good as the world can show; the setting sun floods with light a harbor secure and vast, formed by the confluence of n.o.ble streams, and girt with quays at which huge ships jostle; the rows of 500-pounder Rodmans at "The Narrows" are tokens of the nation"s strength and wealth; and the yachts, as well handled as our own, racing into port from an ocean regatta, give evidence that there are Saxons in the land. At the back is the city, teeming with life, humming with trade, muttering with the thunder of pa.s.sage. Opposite, in Jersey City, people say: "Every New Yorker has come a good half-hour late into the world, and is trying all his life to make it up." The bustle is immense.
All is so un-English, so foreign, that hearing men speaking what Czar Nicholas was used to call "the American tongue," I wheel round, crying--"Dear me! if here are not some English folk!" astonished as though I had heard French in Australia or Italian in Timbuctoo.
The Englishman who, coming to America, expects to find cities that smell of home, soon learns that Baker Street itself, or Portland Place, would not look English in the dry air of a continent four thousand miles across. New York, however, is still less English than is Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago--her people are as little Saxon as her streets.
Once Southern, with the brand of slavery deeply printed in the foreheads of her foremost men, since the defeat of the rebellion New York has to the eye been cosmopolitan as any city of the Levant. All nationless towns are not alike: Alexandria has a Greek or an Italian tinge; San Francisco an English tone, with something of the heartiness of our Elizabethan times; New York has a deep Latin shade, and the democracy of the Empire State is of the French, not of the American or English type.
At the back, here, on the city side, are tall gaunt houses, painted red, like those of the quay at Dort or of the Boompjes at Rotterdam, the former dwellings of the "Knickerbockers" of New Amsterdam, the founders of New York, but now forgotten. There may be a few square yards of painting, red or blue, upon the houses in Broadway; there may be here and there a paG.o.da summer-house overhanging a ca.n.a.l; once in a year you may run across a worthy descendant of the old Netherlandish families; but in the main the Hollanders in America are as though they had never been; to find the memorials of lost Dutch empire, we must search Cape Colony or Ceylon. The New York un-English tone is not Batavian. Neither the sons of the men who once lived in these houses, nor the Germans whose names are now upon the doors, nor, for the matter of that, we English, who claim New York as the second of our towns, are the to-day"s New Yorkers.
Here, on the water"s edge, is a rickety hall, where Jenny Lind sang when first she landed--now the spot where strangers of another kind are welcomed to America. Every true republican has in his heart the notion that his country is pointed out by G.o.d for a refuge for the distressed of all the nations. He has sprung himself from men who came to seek a sanctuary--from the Quakers, or the Catholics, or the pilgrims of the _Mayflower_. Even though they come to take the bread from his mouth, or to destroy his peace, it is his duty, he believes, to aid the immigrants. Within the last twenty years there have landed at New York alone four million strangers. Of these two-thirds were Irish.
While the Celtic men are pouring into New York and Boston, the New Englanders and New Yorkers, too, are moving. They are not dying. Facts are opposed to this portentous theory. They are going West. The unrest of the Celt is mainly caused by discontent with his country"s present, that of the Saxon by hope for his private future. The Irishman flies to New York because it lies away from Ireland; the Englishman takes it upon his road to California.
Where one race is dominant, immigrants of another blood soon lose their nationality. In New York and Boston the Irish continue to be Celts, for these are Irish cities. In Pittsburg, in Chicago, still more in the country districts, a few years make the veriest Paddy English. On the other hand, the Saxons are disappearing from the Atlantic cities, as the Spaniards have gone from Mexico. The Irish here are beating down the English, as the English have crushed out the Dutch. The Hollander"s descendants in New York are English now; it bids fair that the Saxons should be Irish.
As it is, though the Celtic immigration has lasted only twenty years, the results are already clear: if you see a Saxon face upon the Broadway, you may be sure it belongs to a traveler, or to some raw English lad bound West, just landed from a Plymouth ship. We need not lay much stress upon the fact that all New Yorkers have black hair and beard: men may be swarthy and yet English. The ancestors of the Londoners of to-day, we are told, were yellow-headed roysterers; yet not one man in fifty that you meet in Fleet Street or on Tower Hill is as fair as the average Saxon peasant. Doubtless, our English eastern counties were peopled in the main by low-Dutch and Flemings: the Suss.e.x eyes and hair are rarely seen in Suffolk. The Puritans of New England are sprung from those of the "a.s.sociated counties," but the victors of Marston Moor may have been cousins to those no less st.u.r.dy Protestants, the Hollanders who defended Leyden. It may be that they were our ancestors, those Dutchmen that we English crowded out of New Amsterdam--the very place where we are sharing the fate we dealt. The fiery temper of the new people of the American coast towns, their impatience of free government, are better proofs of Celtic blood than are the color of their eyes and beard.
Year by year the towns grow more and more intensely Irish. Already of every four births in Boston, one only is American. There are 120,000 foreign to 70,000 native voters in New York and Brooklyn. Montreal and Richmond are fast becoming Celtic; Philadelphia--shades of Penn!--can only be saved by the aid of its Bavarians. Saxon Protestantism is departing with the Saxons: the revenues of the Empire State are spent upon Catholic asylums; plots of city land are sold at nominal rates for the sites of Catholic cathedrals, by the "city _step_-fathers," as they are called. Not even in the West does the Latin Church gain ground more rapidly than in New York City: there are 80,000 professing Catholics in Boston.
When is this drama, of which the first scene is played in Castle Garden, to have its close? The matter is grave enough already. Ten years ago, the third and fourth cities of the world, New York and Philadelphia, were as English as our London: the one is Irish now; the other all but German. Not that the Quaker City will remain Teutonic: the Germans, too, are going out upon the land; the Irish alone pour in unceasingly. All great American towns will soon be Celtic, while the country continues English: a fierce and easily-roused people will throng the cities, while the law-abiding Saxons who till the land will cease to rule it. Our relations with America are matters of small moment by the side of the one great question: Who are the Americans to be?
Our kinsmen are by no means blind to the dangers that hang over them.
The "Know-Nothing" movement failed, but Protection speaks the same voice in its opposition to commercial centers. If you ask a Western man why he, whose interest is clearly in Free Trade, should advocate Protection, he fires out: "Free Trade is good for our American pockets, but it"s death to us Americans. All your Bastiats and Mills won"t touch the fact that to us Free Trade must mean salt-water despotism, and the ascendency of New York and Boston. Which is better for the country--one New York, or ten contented Pittsburgs and ten industrious Lowells?"
The danger to our race and to the world from Irish ascendency is perhaps less imminent than that to the republic. In January, 1862, the mayor, Fernando Wood, the elect of the "Mozart" Democracy, deliberately proposed the secession from the Union of New York City. Of all the Northern States, New York alone was a dead weight upon the loyal people during the war of the rebellion. The const.i.tuents of Wood were the very Fenians whom in our ignorance we call "American." It is America that Fenianism invades from Ireland--not England from America.
It is no unfair attack upon the Irish to represent them as somewhat dangerous inhabitants for mighty cities. Of the sixty thousand persons arrested yearly in New York, three-fourths are alien born: two-thirds of these are Irish. Nowhere else in all America are the Celts at present masters of a city government--nowhere is there such corruption. The purity of the government of Melbourne--a city more democratic than New York--proves that the fault does not lie in democracy: it is the universal opinion of Americans that the Irish are alone responsible.
The State legislature is falling into the hands of the men who control the city council. They tell a story of a traveler on the Hudson River Railroad, who, as the train neared Albany--the capital of New York--said to a somewhat gloomy neighbor, "Going to the State legislatur"?" getting for answer, "No, sir! It"s not come to that with me yet. Only to the State prison!"
Americans are never slow to ridicule the denationalization of New York.
They tell you that during the war the colonel of one of the city regiments said: "I"ve the best blood of eight nations in the ranks."
"How"s that?" "I"ve English, Irish, Welsh, Scotch, French, Italians, Germans." "Guess that"s only seven." "Swedes," suggested some one. "No, no Swedes," said the colonel. "Ah! I have it: I"ve some Americans."
Stories such as this the rich New Yorkers are nothing loth to tell; but they take no steps to check the denationalization they lament. Instead of entering upon a reform of their munic.i.p.al inst.i.tutions, they affect to despise free government; instead of giving, as the oldest New England families have done, their tone to the State schools, they keep entirely aloof from school and State alike. Sending their boys to Cambridge, Berlin, Heidelberg, anywhere rather than to the colleges of their native land, they leave it to learned pious Boston to supply the West with teachers, and to keep up Yale and Harvard. Indignant if they are pointed at as "no Americans," they seem to separate themselves from everything that is American: they spend summers in England, winters in Algeria, springs in Rome, and Coloradans say with a sneer, "Good New Yorkers go to Paris when they die."
Apart from nationality, there is danger to free government both in the growth of New York City, and in the gigantic fortunes of New Yorkers.
The income, they tell me, of one of my merchant friends is larger than the combined salaries of the president, the governors, and the whole of the members of the legislatures of all the forty-five States and territories. As my informant said, "He could keep the governments of half a dozen States as easily as I can support my half dozen children."
There is something, no doubt, of the exaggeration of political jealousy about the accounts of New York vice given in New England and down South, in the shape of terrible philippics. It is to be hoped that the overstatement is enormous, for sober men are to be found even in New York who will tell you that this city outdoes Paris in every form of profligacy as completely as the French capital outherods imperial Rome.
There is here no concealment about the matter; each inhabitant at once admits the truth of accusations directed against his neighbor. If the new men, the "petroleum aristocracy," are second to none in their denunciations of the Irish, these in their turn unite with the oldest families in thundering against "Shoddy."
New York life shows but badly in the summer-time; it is seen at its worst when studied at Saratoga. With ourselves, men have hardly ceased to run from business and pleasures worse than toil to the comparative quiet of the country house. Among New Yorkers there is not even the affectation of a search for rest; the flight is from the drives and restaurants of New York to the gambling halls of Saratoga; from winning piles of greenbacks to losing heaps of gold; from cotton gambling to roulette or faro. Long Branch is still more vulgar in its vice; it is the Margate, Saratoga the Homburg of America.
"Shoddy" is blamed beyond what it deserves when the follies of New York society are laid in a body at its door. If it be true that the New York drawing-rooms are the best guarded in the world, it is also true that entrance is denied as rigidly to intellect and eminence as to wealth. If exclusiveness be needed, affectation can at least do nothing toward subduing "Shoddy." Mere cliqueism, disgusting every where, is ridiculous in a democratic town; its rules of conduct are as out of place as kid gloves in the New Zealand bush, or gold scabbards on a battle-field.
Good meat, and drink, and air, give strength to the men and beauty to the women of a moneyed cla.s.s; but in America these things are the inheritance of every boy and girl, and give their owners no advantage in the world. During the rebellion, the ablest generals and bravest soldiers of the North sprang, not from the merchant families, but from the farmer folk. Without special merit of some kind, there can be no such thing as aristocracy.
Many American men and women, who have too little n.o.bility of soul to be patriots, and too little understanding to see that theirs is already, in many points, the master country of the globe, come to you, and bewail the fate which has caused them to be born citizens of a republic, and dwellers in a country where men call vices by their names. The least educated of their countrymen, the only grossly vulgar cla.s.s that America brings forth, they fly to Europe "to escape democracy," and pa.s.s their lives in Paris, Pau, or Nice, living libels on the country they are believed to represent.
Out of these discordant elements, Cubans, Knickerbockers, Germans, Irish, "first families," "Petroleum," and "Shoddy," we are forced to construct our composite idea--New York. The Irish numerically predominate, but we have no experience as to what should be the moral features of an Irish city, for Dublin has always been in English hands; possibly that which in New York appears to be cosmopolitan is merely Celtic. However it may be, this much is clear, that the humblest township of New England reflects more truly the America of the past, the most chaotic village of Nebraska portrays more fully the hopes and tendencies of the America of the future, than do this huge State and city.
If the political figure of New York is not encouraging, its natural beauty is singularly great. Those who say that America has no scenery, forget the Hudson, while they can never have explored Lake George, Lake Champlain, and the Mohawk. That Poole"s exquisite scene from the "Decameron," "Philomela"s Song," could have been realized on earth, I never dreamt until I saw the singers at a New Yorker"s villa on the Hudson grouped in the deep shades of a glen, from which there was an outlook upon the basaltic palisades and lake-like Tappan Zee. It was in some such spot that De Tocqueville wrote the brightest of his brilliant letters--that dated "Sing Sing"--for he speaks of himself as lying on a hill that overhung the Hudson, watching the white sails gleaming in the hot sun, and trying in vain to fancy what became of the river where it disappeared in the blue "Highlands."
That New York City itself is full of beauty the view from Castle Garden would suffice to show; and by night it is not less lovely than by day.