/^^ 
 
 SPY 
 
George Washington Flowers 
 Memorial Collection 
 
 DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 ESTABLISHED BY THE 
 
 FAMILY OF 
 
 COLONEL FLOWERS 
 
THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 Letters on the Policy and Inauguration of 
 the Lincoln Var. 
 
 WRITTEN ANONYMOUSLY IN WASHINGTON AND ELSEWHERE. 
 
 By EDWARD A. POLLARD, of Virginia. 
 
 Author of " Black Diamonds." 
 
 Justum et tenacem propositi virum, 
 Non civium ardor prava jubentium, 
 Non vultus instantis tyranni, 
 Mente quatit solidA." — Horace. 
 
 RICHMOND, VA. 
 
 WEST & JOHNSTON: 
 
 145 Main Street. 
 
 1861. 
 
Entered according to Act of Congress, 
 
 BY WEST & JOHNSTON, 
 
 In the Clerk's Office of the Eastern District of the Confederate 
 
 States of America. 
 
 MACFARLANE * FERGUSSON, PRTNTEr-S, 
 
PREFATORY, 
 
 The author of these letters, once a Union man, as long as 
 there was a prospect of acquiring and maintaining the con- 
 stitutional rights of the South in the Union, and of realizing 
 a hope of Christian peace and charity therein ; once averse, 
 on politic grounds, to the early movements of secession, as 
 offering a violent resource for w^hat he then hoped might be 
 moderately remedied, sees that Union now affected to be 
 maintained by a despotism, and the former issue of secession 
 now converted into one where the right of self-government 
 is on one side, and a war of despotism, usurped powers, com- 
 pulsory purposes and wanton atrocities is on the other. 
 
 In the essential alteration of the issue, he can only be for 
 the independence of" the South, when it is no longer to be 
 treated by its opponents on moral and constitutional grounds, 
 but to be contested by a despot's war; and against <hat war 
 and that despot, who has murdered the peace of his country, 
 he acknowledges all the feeling of opposition that a true and 
 patriotic and justly indignant spirit may offer for the vindi- 
 cation of the right. 
 
 To vindicate the now rightful spirit of the South, and to 
 strip despotism to its nakedness, he has written the following 
 letters, which he hopes to continue for good. If there are 
 liarsh expressions to be found in them, it is sufficient to say 
 that he has regretted the necessity of speaking harsh words 
 of harsh things; and that he will be satisfied to repent the 
 use of censure and sarcasm as untruthful, unchristian and 
 unmanly, only when they are proved to have been undeserved. 
 
 Near WASHiNaTON City, J%dij, 1861. 
 
SECOND EDITION 
 
 A portion of the first edition of this volume, published in 
 Maryland without the name of the author or printer, was 
 sold in that State and in the District of Columbia — as many 
 as one hundred having been sold in one day, by a single 
 dealer, in the city of Baltimore. The largest portion of the 
 edition was, however, suppressed and destroyed by the 
 author himself, under personal constraints of necessity. 
 
 In ofiering a renewed edition of these letters to the people 
 of the Confederate States, the author claims for them, aside 
 from any personal interest, with respect to the parties to 
 whom they are addressed, some value as related to the 
 historical literature of the war, particularly in exposing the 
 circumstances of its inauguration, and the policy which has 
 conducted it from its beginning to the full and precise 
 declaration of its objects. The volume of letters, from the 
 fall of Sumter to the date of the meeting of the last Congress 
 at Washington, completes, in fact, what is the most important, 
 because the initiatory part, of the history of the war. 
 
 Richmond, Va., November, 1861. 
 
xnsriDB2c. 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 I. Letter to President Lincoln, written at Washing- 
 
 ton, 
 
 9 
 
 IT. Letter to President Lincoln, written at Washing- 
 ton, 17 
 
 in. Letter to President Lincoln, written at Washing- 
 ton, 26 
 
 IV. Letter to President Lincoln, written near the 
 
 Government, 33 
 
 V. Letter to the Editor of , written in 
 
 Maryland, 44 
 
 VI. Letter to Secretary Seward, written in Mary- 
 land, 52 
 
 VII. Letter to President Lincoln, written in Mary- 
 land, 63 
 
 VIII. Letter to Doctor Tyng, written in Baltimore,. . 75 
 
 IX. Letter to General Scott, written in Maryland,. . 85 
 
 X. Letter to Mr. Everett, written in Maryland, . . . 8'.' 
 
LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 
 
 Washington City, D. C, April 13, 1861. 
 To the President of the United States: 
 
 Sir: Permit me to address jou respectfully, 
 but none the less earnestly ; for neither the 
 magnitude of the events which happened this 
 day, nor the thoughts of a freeman's patriotism 
 at any time, can be satisfied with expressions 
 concealed or softened, except to that point of 
 respect due to magisterial office. 
 
 I can testify to you, sir, my poignant regrets, 
 as a lover of my country, and even as a Christian 
 lover of peace, at the collision at Sumter. But 
 these feelings are not without a reference of my 
 judgment to where the responsibility for the actual 
 commencement of hostilities may lie ; though it 
 may be that recriminations cannot lessen the force 
 
10 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 of patriotic regrets, or control the consequences 
 of what is already accomplished. I am aware, 
 sir, that the belligerent supporters of your Ad- 
 ministration counterfeit a sense of satisfaction in 
 the plea of the government acting on "the defen- 
 sive" — a plea which you yourself have again 
 affirmed to-day in your reply to the Virginia com- 
 missioners. Unfortunately for you, sir, the plea 
 is weakened by the force of the circumstance that 
 the Government, in the first instance, might have 
 avoided a conflict, and that the real responsibility 
 reaches back to the threshold of the controversy. 
 The policy of war has been determined, neces- 
 sarily determined, not by the bombardment of 
 Fort Sumter, but by earlier events, that plainly 
 and voluntarily led to this result and furnished its 
 provocation. 
 
 I should suppose, sir, that when a party does 
 what he knows to be a sure act of provocation, 
 it is quite equivalent to the first blow, on the 
 principle, which is familiar to small lawyers, if 
 not to statesmen, that a man intends the natural 
 (and still more strongly, if anticipated) conse- 
 quences of his acts. 
 
 The country will explore the source, and there- 
 
LETTER TO THE PEESIDENT. 11 
 
 fore the real seat of the responsibility. It will 
 look back to the primary cause of war, without 
 resting on those secordary events which have no 
 responsible character in themselves, because deter- 
 mined, procured, and looked for in the very outset 
 of the policy of which they are the fruits. 
 
 It cannot be doubted, sir, that you procured 
 the battle of Sumter; you had no desire or hope 
 to retain the fort; you neglected to fight, until 
 every chance of doing so with success had passed 
 away ; and when at last you did draw your sword 
 against the sovereignty of South Carolina, the 
 circumstances of the battle, the non-participation 
 of your fleet in it, show that it was not a contest 
 for victory, but only a shallow trick to entitle you 
 to the advantages to be derived from an action for 
 assault and battery. It was, sir, a trick — a trick 
 to transfer easily, and under false pretences, the 
 matters in dispute between the two sections from 
 the arbitrament of reason to that of arms. How 
 is it that you hope to make yourself not responsi- 
 ble for this unnatural and shocking appeal to 
 war? Was not your formal intimation to the 
 Montgomery Government that you were about to 
 resort to force, a challenge to arms ? Could the 
 
12 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 South have hecn expected to disregard such a 
 challenge? Or, if, sir,- you were only amusing 
 yourself with idle menace, are you any the less 
 culpahle because you excited a quarrel by bully- 
 ing instead of bravery? Your responsibility for 
 the commencement of hostilities, sir, is already a 
 histoi'ical fact, and completes the character of 
 your policy as one of blunders, perfidy and blood- 
 guiltiness. 
 
 Had you, sir, acknowledged the independence 
 of the seceded States — acknoivledged it for pur- 
 poses of pacification — you might have accom- 
 plished what war cannot only never obtain for 
 you, but of what it will surely rob you. You 
 might have kept the support of the intelligent 
 and commanding portion of your party. You 
 would certainly have secured the sympathies o. 
 the border States. You would- have erected a 
 standard under which the masses of Union men 
 in the South, who never could be expected to 
 rally under a standard of war, could have served 
 to a man. You would have reduced the excitement 
 that threatened the Government to channels lead- 
 ing to the happy and naturally aided restoration 
 of peace. 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 13 
 
 Now, "all is lost, save honor' — not honor as 
 the knightly King who wrote the phrase intended 
 it, but "the honor" of having "acted under the 
 forms of the Constitution" in a fratricidal war! 
 The government that, in the broad and liberal 
 enlightenment of modern times, seeks to admin- 
 ister constitutional and public law on a policy of 
 punctilios, is none the less behind the age, 
 whether in Central Europe or on the shores of the 
 Atlantic. The advisers of such courses of states- 
 manship have not read the lessons of history 
 aright — not oven the latest. You yourself, sir, 
 must have forgotten the lessons even of the Italian 
 war. You forgot that the kingdom of Italy has 
 been ushered so lately into existence through the 
 very teeth of the treaties of Vienna. You for- 
 get that Austria has reaped the fruits of the 
 policy recommended to you, and found them, to 
 her cost, in insisting on the punctilios of those 
 treaties — the most boasted part of the "public 
 law of Europe" — to maintain a "war footing" in 
 her Italian possessions, and in losing them by the 
 very effort to make her authority more secure. 
 
 Look to our own war of independence. Those 
 who have despised and declaimed against the 
 
14 LETTERS OF l^HE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 policy of an acknowledgmentj or even a quasi 
 acknowledgment (no matter what the guise or the 
 purpose) on the part of your Government of the 
 independence of the seceded States, forget the 
 history and traditions of those times. The policy 
 referred to does not present the specious question, 
 as they would have you, at least, if not the 
 country, believe, of governmental honor or dis- 
 honour — certainly no more than the acknowledg- 
 ment of the independence of the American 
 colonies, advocated by a portion of the Whig 
 party, presented the alternative of honor or dis- 
 honor to the British Crown. Do you suppose, 
 sir, that Pitt and his noble coadjutors were any 
 the less Englishmen, or patriots, or statesmen, for 
 having attempted to resist the unnatural and un- 
 profitable war which the British government was 
 preparing to make upon the seceded colonies? 
 Or can it be said in this day (although it possibly 
 might have been said formerly by tory papers) 
 that when Lord Effingham and the eldest son of 
 the Earl of Chatham threw up their commissions 
 in the army rather than serve in a war against 
 their colonial brethren; and when General Ogle- 
 thrope refused the splendid bribe of the office of 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 15 
 
 commander-in-chief of the British forces against 
 America, that they acted in a traitorous or igno- 
 ble spirt, or bore the taint of cowardice upon 
 their names. For myself, I believe that these 
 examples of generosity, of far-seeing patriotism, 
 patient under insults and clamor and misrepre- 
 sentation, may give the most proper lessons to 
 the captious and belligerent ^'patriotism" of our 
 own day. Had Great Britain rightly observed 
 them, she would have saved herself the blood and 
 treasure of a seven years' war. Would that she 
 had listened to the appeals of the colonies, when 
 they declared, through the Continental Congress 
 of 1775, that ''they had not raised armies with 
 the ambitious design of separating from Great 
 Britain; and that they should lay their arms 
 down when hostilities should cease on the part of 
 the aggressors, and all danger of their renewal 
 should be removed!" She did not listen, and 
 she drove them into independence. Be assured, 
 sir, that your Government has yet to have the 
 lesson enforced upon it, that the spirit of inde- 
 pendence, misconceived or not, is but developed 
 by war, with the unavoidable circumstance of in- 
 sisting, at each stage of its progress, on new and 
 
16 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 further demands, when the first movements might 
 have well been held in check by the simple energy 
 of patience. 
 
 Respectfully, 
 
 THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
LETTER TO THE PBESIDENT. 17 
 
 II. 
 
 LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 
 
 Washington City, D. C, April 16, 1861. 
 To the President of the United States : 
 
 Sir: Your proclamation of war is before the 
 country; and the spirit that dictated it is already 
 caught up in the revengeful exultations of Black 
 Republican presses over the prospect of blood. 
 I say blood, sir; for however you may gainsay it, 
 or jest about it, it is the curse of fratricidal blood 
 that you have pronounced, distinctly and irrevo- 
 cably. I say jest, sir ; for surely you did but 
 jest, when you said in your inaugural that you 
 would take the forts and arsenals (like Shylock's 
 pound of flesh) without a drop of bloodshed ; and 
 you did but jest, when, with the cannon peals of 
 Sumter on the air, you protested to the Virginia 
 commissioners that you would modify your in- 
 augural, only so far as to "perhaps cause the 
 United States mails to be withdrawn" from the 
 seceded States ; and 3^ou do now but jest when mus- 
 
18 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 tering to fields of civil war a land force of seventy- 
 five thousand men, you yet proclaim that the 
 places of the government only are to be repos- 
 sessed, and that "• the utmost care" is to be taken 
 to " avoid any devastation, any destruction of or 
 interference with, property, or any disturbance 
 of peaceful citizens in any part of the country !" 
 Alas, sir, have you nothing better to offer to an 
 agonized country than the same flimsy and harle- 
 quin disguises of the trifler, with which you 
 tricked yourself out for the entertainment of the 
 crowds of idlers that watched your progress to 
 the capital ? Nothing very terrible to happen — 
 no devastation — no disturbances, and yet an 
 army of seventy-five thousand men called to your 
 corbmand for service on land, and the most mon- 
 strous proportions of civil war already erected in 
 staring ghastliness over the whole country ! Sir, 
 this is not ingenuous — it is not appropriate — it 
 is, I tell you, sir, the trifling of the jester in the 
 Chamber of Death ! 
 
 So far as the legal aspects of your proclama- 
 tion are concerned, you have violated the laws in 
 the very appeal you make to them. You have 
 usurped the power of Congress to declare war. 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 19 
 
 You have called out the militia, not as the act of 
 1795 (which the law adviser of your govemment 
 has vainly sought to distort for your purposes) 
 indicates, in aid of the civil authorities, but to 
 supersede them, and to inaugurate war in its most 
 deformed nakedness. You have attempted, too, 
 to make the militia of this district subject not 
 only to the rules and articles of war in point of 
 discipline^ which is the legal limit of your au- 
 thority, but to denude them of the character of 
 citizen soldiery, to swear them by oaths to your 
 person, and to constitute them into praetorian 
 bands. This may be military genius, and decision ; 
 but to a plain man it seems like military despot- 
 ism. A war begun and invoked in the name of 
 law, and yet disregarding the law even in the 
 ceremonies of its inauguration, promises nothing 
 but shame and disaster. 
 
 But suppose, sir, that the most unbounded suc- 
 cess should attend your arms ; suppose you should 
 heap up the most immense treasures of victory 
 and blood, where, after all, would be your gains ? 
 You cannot reclaim sovereign States, except as 
 conquests; and as conquests, they would be to 
 you worse than useless. 
 
20 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 Why, then, sir — and the question is very sim- 
 ple — make that an occasion of war, where war 
 would be unnatural, and in the end, wholly un- 
 profitable ? Even when a government is an empire, 
 instead of a confederation, there may be occasions 
 where the acknowledgment of the independence 
 of a seceded province, even, resolved on indepen- 
 dence, may be policy, and statesmanship, and 
 patriotism. Is it any the less so now than when 
 Great Britain was besought by her best patriots 
 to restrain herself from war upon her American 
 colonies, and to concede their demands. You, sir, 
 and your party, profess to believe the South a 
 spotted and degraded section, doing dishonor to 
 the name and position before the world of what 
 was once our common country. Why, then, seek 
 to reclaim these people to your intercourse ? Why 
 pursue them in their retreat ? Pharoah attempted 
 to reclaim the hated Israelites, that they might 
 not go out of the land of Egypt. But, mark 
 you, he sought to reclaim them as slaves ! 
 
 Is, sir, your own heart surely hardened like that 
 of the Egyptian king ? Let me remind you, sir, 
 if not, perhaps, a student of your Bible, of the 
 outlines of that awful drama by the Red sea. It 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 21 
 
 was there, on the boundary of battle, that Moses 
 spoke to his countrymen, who cried in their fear 
 to return to the land of bondage, and, in the clear 
 heroic terms of his own towering faith and cour- 
 age, gave the command: "Fear ye not, stand 
 still ; for the Egyptians whom ye have seen to 
 day, ye shall shall see them no more forever!" 
 
 You have appealed to the issues of war ! Let 
 those issues, then, decide ! When the reason and 
 the better feelings of a man, or even a "Presi- 
 dent," are stifled, it will be useless to preach to 
 him even the lessons of the Bible. 
 
 The fact, sir — the fact which, at once, reveals 
 the infamous desire of the war you have in- 
 augurated, and the immensity of the prize in issue 
 for the South — is that that unhappy section has 
 been used to contribute the bulk of the revenues 
 of the government, to build up the North, and to 
 enrich her enemies by every form of tribute. The 
 Northern plutocratic power would have it con- 
 tinued so. It would still derive its forty to fifty 
 millions of annual revenue from the South, 
 through the operations of the tariff; it would, 
 still, batten on the Southern trade in its markets, 
 a recent aggregate of which is stated at four 
 
22 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 hundred millions of dollars a year ; it would stilly 
 from unequal taxations, and different sources of 
 tribute in the intercourse between the sections, 
 reap its immense harvest of gain, which a Northern 
 writer has calculated at over two hundred mil- 
 lions of dollars per year, and which, sir, repre- 
 sents the annual aggregate tax or cost of the 
 "glorious Union" to the South. 
 
 It is this prize, wrapped in the pretences of 
 Stars and Stripes, for which you will contend ; 
 and believe me, sir, it is, for this also that the 
 South will press its war, and out of which it 
 can afford to pay the extremest expenses of that 
 war. 
 
 You, sir, now, after the elaborate illustration 
 of your traits of statesmanship, will have the 
 advantage of showing other resources of your 
 extraordinary character, and of exhibiting, what 
 you are said to possess, the splendid stores of 
 your military genius. You have commenced well, 
 sir. You are a stern master — a most excellent 
 military ruler. You are already a Nero in your 
 own capital. 
 
 I congratulate you upon your almost perfect 
 establishment of military terrorism over a parasiti- 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 23 
 
 cal city. You have filled your capital with troops. 
 You have set up a political inquisition in Wash- 
 ington, by the process of military test oaths, 
 wringing from men's consciences all that is 
 precious to men's freedom. You have opened 
 markets on the green in front of the War De- 
 partment to buy of starving men in your capital, 
 for soldier's pay and rations, their bodies, and 
 principles, and consciences. You have surrounded 
 yourself with every element to inspire terror 
 around you. Your minions and your parasites 
 are this day hunting through the streets of Wash- 
 ington, to do violence, by threats, at least, to 
 every man who dares to oppose your Administra- 
 tion. And, for the first time, and, as I firmly 
 believe, for the last time, in the history of our 
 country, a Government, still holding on to the old 
 name and the old traditions of our national inde- 
 pendence, is striving to cow under the very 
 shadow of the capital — the ancient mansion of 
 American liberty — the ancient freedom of senti- 
 ment and of utterance. 
 
 But, sir, beware ! The terrorism is not yet 
 complete in your capital. It is true that many 
 of those, who, when danger was distant, were 
 
24 LETTEES OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 loudest and bravest in the censure of you and 
 your party, are satisfied now to sneak around the 
 streets of Washington, anxious to play the part 
 of ^''hen hussies" for the -women and children, 
 speaking with "bated breath," or pleading new 
 scruples for submission, with the slime of their 
 cowardice tracking them through the crowd. But 
 let me assure you, sir, that there arc in the midst 
 of your federal city men of a different character 
 and purpose — men who know their rights — and 
 men who rejoice with more than Roman pride, 
 that whether they stand on a foreign soil, or 
 beneath the folds of their seven-starred banner, 
 they stand as free'citizens, under the protection 
 of their own free republic. You will not subdue 
 them. You cannot coerce them. You will be 
 sorry to touch a hair of their heads. 
 
 Take care, too, that the terrorism you have 
 established in Washington does not react upon 
 yourself. Do not tremble for your person, sir ! 
 I do not mean that. But I do warn you that the 
 reign of terror, already inaugurated in Washing- 
 ton, stands, this day, as a despotic example before 
 the country ; that revolt may soon stand you, 
 face to face, in your capital; and that the time 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 25 
 
 may come when Washington, oppressed and crush- 
 ed down by tyranny, and beleaguered by armies, 
 fresh from fields of victory, will have nothing to 
 oppose to them but the wretched bodies and vaga- 
 bond uniforms of starving janizaries. Then, sir, 
 tremble — tremble ! 
 
 The splendid and chivalrous Roman Tribune, 
 that founded the latter Rome, consented to escape 
 from the throne of the Caesars in the disguise of 
 a baker; but it was only when the walls of his 
 Capitol were falling around him, and the sounds 
 of its ruins was already in his ears. Will you, 
 sir, wait until then? — or will you, with nerves 
 already shattered by your midnight escapafle to the 
 shallow refuges of Washington, choose to escape 
 now? 
 
 I am, &c., 
 
 THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
26 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 III. 
 
 LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 
 
 Washington Citf, D. C, April 20, 1861. 
 
 To the President of tlie United States: 
 
 Sir : In one sense, I must congratulate you : 
 in another, permit me to express my pity for you. 
 The masked author of ''Junius" tells us that 
 the counsels and expedients of party, rather than 
 higher principles of policy, determined for Eng- 
 land the war upon her colonies ; and that the pro- 
 curers of this war, while intending only the ruin 
 of an opposition in parliament, " in effect divided 
 one-half of the empire from the other." 
 
 A victory, sir, culminating in such grand his- 
 torical results, you, yourself, have just illustrated. 
 The time has come when it is clearly seen that 
 you have done your strictest duty to your party. 
 A simple man, possessed only of that degree of 
 intelligence that may be expected to be acquired 
 in the contracted and vulgar life of a Western 
 village, you have conceived no vain ideas of 
 
LETTER TO THE PEESIDENT. 27 
 
 statesmanship above the integrity of ^'the Chi- 
 cago phitform," and have disdained all counsel- 
 lors beyond your associations with "the thorough" 
 Republicans of your party.. In the spirit of 
 fidelity to party, you have determined the issue 
 of war for your country. You know very w"ell 
 that the Union is peace; that you cannot estab- 
 lish it by arras. You know very well that glory 
 is to be wrested only from a foreign enemy; and 
 that it is never to be purchased from the victories 
 of a civil war. You have made war, sir, neither 
 for the reparations of evils, nor for the glory of 
 arms. You have made it at tlfie command of a 
 political party resolved "to rule or to ruin." 
 
 Enjoy, sir, the felicities of your situation. You 
 have obeyed the behests of your party : hasten to 
 prepare yourself for their servile congratulations. 
 The men who have hurried you to the exploit of 
 war, will not spare their praises. The vile priest 
 of the Abaddon, who prays his god for "war red- 
 der than blood," will set you up as an idol among 
 the demon glories of his religion. The mobs will 
 cry "Hosannah." Even the ken-marked and 
 hobbling wretch, who edits the great organ of 
 Abolition for your party in the North, will ex- 
 
28 LETTEES OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 liaust himself to spew over you his clotted praises, 
 as if in some sort of beastly adoration of your 
 person ! 
 
 But, sir, let this be the limit of your rejoicing. 
 The Union is lost forever. The jewelled States 
 of the South are lost to you, and gained for Inde- 
 pendence forever. A war confronts you to pro- 
 claim that independence in your ears, and to 
 drive you, with denuded crown, from the soil 
 that it is about to consecrate to the eternal liber- 
 ties of the South. 
 
 ^'Ilis majesty," said the great commoner, pro- 
 phesying the libei'ty of the American Colonies on 
 the floor of parliarcent — "his majesty may wear 
 his crown, but, without the American jewel in it, 
 it will not be worth wearing." 
 
 It is said that you are even already alarmed for 
 the safety of your person, on account of circum- 
 stances daily surrounding you to make you a 
 prisoner, in spite of Northern succors, in your 
 own capital, I pity you, sir. I might have told 
 you, months ago, that the South had no fear of 
 any war you might make, and that the effort of 
 your proclamation to frighten her people, and 
 even your twenty days' grace to "the combina- 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 29 
 
 tions" would not strike the sudden terror or sub- 
 mission in their hearts that you anticipated. You 
 may satisfy yourself with a short-lived tyranny, 
 with desultory atrocities, with a display of arms ; 
 but, plainly, sir, you are not the man to sustain 
 a war in the nineteenth century, in the interest 
 of an usurped government, and in opposition to a 
 people, resolved to take their own destinies into 
 their own hands. 
 
 I am glad for the sake of my country, sir, to 
 be satisfied on reflection that the war you will 
 wage will be contracted in its powers beyond what 
 you anticipated. It is said that you have abund- 
 ant offers of Northern succor ; that twenty thou- 
 sand men in the coalpits of Pennsylvania, alone, 
 have offered you their services ; and that you even 
 boast of your opportunity to introduce a religious 
 element to exasperate the war, by hiring German 
 Protestants, "to a man," and animating them 
 against the true and steadfast Catholic patriots of 
 the country. But, sir, all these are but the boasts 
 of a weak cause — the rhodomontade of the streets 
 of Washington. Be pacified, sir. Your Dutch 
 troops will find employment enough in guarding 
 the passes of the Long Bridge, and in poking 
 
30 LETTEES OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 bayonets at half-breeched newsboys about the 
 Departments, without entering upon the task of a 
 massacre of the Irish. 
 
 Look, sir, to the South. Are we to believe 
 that your proclamation, received in Montgomery 
 with derisive laughter, scorned by North Carolina 
 and Kentucky, with all the speed with which the 
 lightning of the telegraph could bring their mes- 
 sages of defiance to you, thrown back in your 
 face by Virginia, with the treatening stamp of 
 her foot already on the banks of the Potomac — 
 can even you, sir, believe that this mighty procla- 
 mation has subdued one throb of Southern cour- 
 age, or subtracted one man from the lists of her 
 cause of independence! No, sir, it has multi- 
 plied them. Your effort to alarm the South has 
 only alarmed yourself. Your collection of North- 
 ern troops, numerous it may be, but unanimated 
 to fight by any of those sentiments, which give 
 victory in battle, has but given new accessions 
 and new ardors to a people fighting for their 
 liberties, and possessing all that confidence, and 
 all those great moral principles of victory inspired 
 by a war of independence. 
 
 I thank God, sir, that my own native State, 
 
LETTEE TO THE PEESIDENT. 31 
 
 Virginia, is, this day, not listening to the time- 
 server. What her Convention may determine I 
 know not ; but I know that her lineal people will, 
 ultimately determine nothing to the dishonor of 
 their glorious State — nothing in the shallow spirit 
 of cowardice, or of mean compliance with- present 
 power. Virginia will not listen to counsels con- 
 ceived in such a spirit. She will listen, let me 
 assure you, sir, to higher sources of inspiration 
 than your own — to the voices of her history — to 
 the commands of her mission — to the thunder- 
 toned messages that, commenced at Sumter, will 
 soon peal around the peninsula of the Atlantic. 
 Break the unity of the South ! She never will. 
 Fold her arms with wailing cries of ^'peacel" 
 She never will. Take argued repose from you! 
 She never will. Stand still when the battle is on 
 the air, and the ground is sown with the blood of 
 her brethren ! She never — never will. 
 
 Sir, you cannot terrify the South. In vain will 
 her people explore your own. character, for evi- 
 dences of the conqueror. You may be a san- 
 guinary man. You exhibit no traits of being a 
 warlike one. Guarded by praetorian bands in 
 your capital; encompassed with ten armed at- 
 
32 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHEKN SPY. 
 
 tendants, it is said, in your sleeping room ; with 
 liberty to practice still all the levities of your 
 character, even in the darkest hours of your 
 country's agony and suffering; not even inter- 
 mitting your drawing-room entertainment on the 
 evening- of the day of the commencement of the 
 civil war at Sumter, you do, indeed, resemble 
 Nero, the blood-thirsty trifler, not Caesar, the 
 conqueror. 
 
 Sir, I am sorry to disappoint your vanity, or 
 to abate your courage. But the truth, the fact — 
 the exclamation of pity for you, and the prophecy 
 of victory in the war of liberty — is, that the South 
 does not fear you ! 
 
 I am, &c., 
 
 THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 33 
 
 IV. 
 
 , LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 
 
 Near the Government, April 27, 1861. 
 The President of the United States: 
 
 Sir : You are said to flatter yourself that you 
 have now succeeded in expelling from Washing- 
 ton all who have dared to utter a word in oppo- 
 sition to your Administration. It is true that 
 you have driven many of them out by armed 
 mobs invested with the gilded livery of your ser- 
 vice. Stationed on the highways and the by-ways, 
 they have sought to kidnap men or to buy their 
 souls for your service; divided into innumerable 
 press-gangs they have daily explored the grog- 
 geries for victims ; detailed as spies, they have 
 constantly furnished to you, or your minions, lists 
 for proscription ; or straggling about the streets 
 as liveried bullies, they have sought to entrap 
 men into private quarrels, or to force them to 
 self-defence, that the mob in waiting might over- 
 power and murder them. Such, sir, is the con- 
 
34 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 dition of subjection to your imperial will to which 
 you flatter yourself that you have reduced the 
 city of Washington. The country will remember 
 its history. It will remember that it has been 
 accomplished while 3"0ur partisans, including even 
 the ruffian knight of Kansas, who guards with a 
 hundred men your convivial night hours, have 
 been holding meetings in the sacred precincts of 
 the churches of Washington, to insist upon and 
 to exclaim upon, with the old puritanical ribaldry 
 of righteousness, /r(?e speech for ^'the Lord's peo- 
 ple," but for none besides. 
 
 But, sir, you flatter yourself with one mistake. 
 Many of the enemies whom you think to have 
 expelled by your military mobs, have left Wash- 
 ington on other accounts. They hope to see you 
 again. The mission of the National Volunteers 
 was fulfilled in your capital before they left it, or 
 before the minor organ of your Administration 
 essayed to procure their arrest. Be careful, more- 
 over, sir, how you give yourself up so entirely to 
 the belief that all your enemies in Washington 
 are expelled or subdued to fear — " Youi' lists are 
 not yet full enough^'' cried the weary and trem- 
 bling Robespierre to his secretaries, after months 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDEIST. 35 
 
 had been vainly spent in assuring, by the extent 
 of his proscriptionSj the Reign of Terror in the 
 capital of France. They ivere not full enough. 
 A few days passed, and the gaunt and cowardly 
 tyrant of Paris was in the hands of the avengers, 
 and borne along the streets with the shout of the 
 '''guillotine' in his ears. 
 
 However entertaining it may be to some minds 
 to observe the terrors of a tyrant, or to witness 
 their realization, permit me, sir, to pass to notice 
 some other lessons which you have given to the 
 country in the condition of things you have main- 
 tained at your capital. In the small district 
 where your authority is, for the moment, supreme, ' 
 you have naturall^^ given the truest examples of 
 your theory and designs of government for the 
 whole country. They are examples in which the 
 wantonness of a Republican majority, the terrors 
 of the cowardice of its leaders, exhibitions of 
 military terrorism, oaths of feudal allegiance, and 
 the subordinations of patriotism to the servile 
 sentiments of vassalage contend for preeminence 
 in the display. They are, in short, the most 
 proper examples of the despotism which you de. 
 
36 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 sire to establish over the whole country, and in 
 which you essay to maintain its union. 
 
 When will the country learn that your idea of 
 maintaining the old Union of the States is simply 
 despotic — conceived in no historical enthusiasm 
 for restoring past glories — animated by no patri- 
 otic desires contemplating the good of the whole 
 country — but coldly and sternly calculated in the 
 narrow spirit of the despot. I do not accuse 
 you, sir, without a record. Your own speeches — 
 and those speeches intended, too, as special expla- 
 nations of your purposes— condemn you. When 
 you were visited by a committee of the clergy of 
 Baltimore, with messages and implorations for 
 peace, you answered them in* a style too vulgar 
 and trifling to show the least real regard either 
 for the Union or the peace of the country. In 
 the accounts of such a conference, it was to be 
 hoped that at least one historical sentiment might 
 have dropped from your lips, or some words of 
 grave, or, at least, decent concern for the destinies 
 of the country. But the country was disap- 
 pointed even in the small expectation of decency 
 in your manners. You are said to have expressed 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 37 
 
 no concern, but that for the safety of your person ; 
 to have given no other explanation of the war 
 you were waging than a desire to secure the 
 revenues of the South still to the coffers of your 
 treasury ; and to have had the effrontery, at last, 
 to declare in the same breath in which you pro- 
 claimed your fears and cowardice, that you were 
 determined to maintain your reputation for 
 ''spunk'" in the prosecution of hostilities. Alas, 
 sir, consider the spectacle : A committee before 
 you, dignified by the holy offices of religion, and 
 yet more dignified by their special mission of 
 charity, entreating, in the last emergency, the 
 restraint of the war you had declared, and you 
 answering them with the explanations of that war 
 in the needs of the treasury and your panic fears 
 of being hanged, and with the wretched phrases 
 and anecdotes of vulgar wit ! I will not dwell on 
 such a spectacle. 
 
 The accounts, sir, of your interview with the 
 Baltimore committee are only paralleled, as they 
 may be, in a measure, explained by the well 
 known habits of your life in the retreats of the 
 executive mansion. It is, indeed, a curious fact 
 of history, that the worst tyrants have been 
 
38 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERT^i SPY. 
 
 remarkable for their levities of behavior, and 
 have rather increased in the most terrible dis- 
 tresses of their country the frivolities and en- 
 joyments of their palaces. You, sir, are said 
 to illustrate this imperial peculiarity in the occu- 
 pations of*jest and conviviality in the White 
 House, at the very time you are contemplating 
 the proscriptions and massacres of your country- 
 men. You are no more willing to give up the 
 trifles and privileged buffooneries of your position 
 than to yield the substantial symbols of your 
 power. You are not willing to return to your 
 old resources in the taverns of Springfield, You 
 wish to remain the trifier and tyrant of the White 
 House; consoled by "experienced nurses" (whom 
 Miss Dix has promised you); compelling ''the 
 old soldier," who protects you, to low familiarities 
 with your person; and comforting yourself with 
 the vulgar gloatings of the bully over the terrors 
 of those v«^ho are afraid only because they are 
 more cowardly than himself. 
 
 Indeed, such are the trivialities of your dispo- 
 sition, sir, that I can testify that you have not 
 even yet restrained the pleasant liberty of the 
 lady of the White House to prosecute her pur- 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 39 
 
 chases in the "dollar stores" on the avenue. 
 Twice this week I have had the pleasure of ob- 
 serving her there in the feminine elation of cheap 
 ''bargains." 
 
 But to return, sir, to a very brief analysis of 
 your disclosures to your Baltimore visitors. We 
 are left to understand by them that your motives 
 for war arc double : to save your revenue in the 
 South, and to assure the protection of your person. 
 If, in the compass of possibilities, you should 
 attain the first — conquer the South to that point 
 whereat you might be able to collect, by force, a 
 revenue in her borders — consider that it could 
 only be at the price of massacres which could 
 never be repaid, and wdth the lo,-s of all the great 
 interests w^hich may be enumerated in the peace 
 and liberty of a country. If you should accom- 
 plish the second motive — the individual safety of 
 Abraham Lincoln — it would be, sir, still more 
 questionable in what respect your country would 
 be a gainer. 
 
 If the regards fo your personal safety are 
 really uppermost in your mind, why not, sir, 
 effect them by the obvious means already at your 
 command? Why not declare for peace? It 
 
40 LErrERs of the southert^ spy. 
 
 might instantly restore the safety of your person. 
 Why not resign, making your resignation on such 
 conditions, or with such understandings with your 
 constitutional successors as to call for a new 
 election to the chief executive office? It, under 
 present circumstances, would be the master-stroke 
 of your life. It would be but giving to the peo- 
 ple, impressively and directly, a question too 
 grave for any one man to decide. It would leave 
 ycu without the reproaches of weakness, and with 
 the undying honors of having submitted a civil 
 war to the last resort of arbitrament. It would 
 imitate the conservative and virtuous feature of 
 the British Government (which, in many respects, 
 was the model for our own,) in the capacity it has, 
 by a change of ministry, which is virtually the 
 governing power, to adapt itself to changes of 
 circumstances, and to conform itself, at all times, 
 to public sentiment. It would — if this consider- 
 ation can plead to you above all — save your per- 
 son with decency and with certainty. But no, 
 sir — you will not adopt these obvious and honor- 
 able modes of escape. The truth is, you are 
 anxious to save your person, but you are anxious 
 to save it as that of an enthroned despot. 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 41 
 
 Do I not, sir, rightly interpret your feelings, 
 or do I err in verbal accuracy in calling such a 
 war of "safety" a war of despotism. Look back, 
 sir, only to the date of your proclamation, and 
 you will see that you have already fulfilled all the 
 conditions of a war of bad faith and aggression, 
 and already confirmed, beyond the possibility of 
 a doubt, the character of your hostilities as those 
 of a tyrant. 
 
 When you made your proclamation, you then 
 indicated that the forces you summoned therein, 
 were to be used to repossess the forts on the 
 Southern coasts. You have already falsified this 
 declaration of purpose. Under new pretences of 
 protecting Washington, you have completely 
 turned attention from the Southern forts, to 
 invest Virginia and Maryland with your forces. 
 Washington is but the strategical point of the 
 campaign. It will enable you to seize Alexan- 
 dria, to command the important heights of the 
 Potomac, and to occupy the Northern portions of 
 Virginia with subsidiary forces. On the other 
 hand, the possession of the equally important 
 point of Fortress Monroe is calculated to give 
 you command of the low countries of Virginia. 
 
42 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 You are already in possession of the two import- 
 ant passages into Virginia. You have secured a 
 safe and uninterrupted transit through Maryhmd, 
 not willing, as yet, to risk the Thermopylae of 
 Baltimore. You have not only violated the sov- 
 ereignty of Maryland in the usurpation of an 
 absolute right of way, but that right, which you 
 insisted upon for yourself, you have been prompt 
 to deny to the people of the State itself! Your 
 forces are to have free transit through the terri- 
 tories of Maryland, but the people of Maryland 
 are not to enjoy the same right in their own ter- 
 ritories. They are already cut oif from Wash- 
 ington, and from Annapolis, while your own 
 troops pass uninterruptedly between these 
 points. 
 
 These movements, sir, betray the designs of an 
 aggressive war waged by a desperate tyrant. You 
 are said to boast already that, with the command 
 of the Chesapeake, and of the larger portion of 
 the Potomac bouudary, to have effectually cut off 
 the connection between Maryland and Virginia, 
 and Avith Washington and Fortress Monroe in 
 your possession, to "'liold the wolf hy the ears.''' 
 We shall soon test the justice of your boast: 
 
LETTER TO THE PEESIDENT. 43 
 
 we already know and appreciate the spirit of des- 
 potic subjugation in which it is uttered. 
 
 Virginia, sir, may have been betrayed into some 
 degree of inertness by the false implications of 
 your proclamation ; and there may have been 
 traitors in her own borders to help her to the 
 false conclusion of maintaining what is called a 
 '^ defensive' position. But the brave and enthu- 
 siastic spirit of her people will soon override the 
 formularies of delay and of that caution in which 
 treachery often finds at once its own concealment, 
 and the means of seducing others. It will, it 
 must soon confront you on the banks of the 
 Potomac; it will, it must, at the last, brave you 
 in your capital ; it will, it must, as sure as the 
 prophecies- of necessity, lay your proud city in 
 such ruins, as will leave nothing hereafter to be 
 fought for. Carthago delenda est. Remember 
 the end; it approaches; it involves your own des- 
 tiny — perhaps the life you have nursed with guards 
 and bolts, and fattened with convivial joys, only 
 for a sacrifice for the sword of the avenger. 
 I am, &c., 
 
 THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
44 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF 
 
 Maryland, May 1, 1861. 
 To the Editor of 
 
 Sir : It is related of an ancient wagoner that 
 having got his vehicle into a difficult pas^, he im- 
 plored Jupiter to extricate him. After long im- 
 portunities in prayer to the god, to show hi\n out 
 of his difficulties, he, at last, received the simple 
 answer, ^'put your shoulder to the zvheel." 
 
 The bemired State of Maryland is imploring 
 to be delivered from the difficulties, and terrors 
 of her position. Let me say, the only way to do 
 it, is to "put the shoulder to the wheel;" and 
 while men delay to do this, it is plain she will only 
 sink deeper in the mire and mold of her position. 
 
 It is strange indeed, that men of Maryland, 
 who were going about a few days ago with the 
 decantatum of "secession" on their lips, are now 
 struck with a sudden stupor. They say that they 
 can do nothing, that they are powerless, that the 
 
LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF 45 
 
 reversion of public sentiment, under the influence 
 of the fears of the people, is now irresistible. 
 
 The fact is, sir, that there is a reversion, and 
 a reversion which is one of the most naked and 
 shameless tergiversations of the times. While 
 too many are satisfied to rest the cause of liberty 
 on mere protestations of feeling, or on idle invo- 
 cations for help, a constant appeal is being made 
 by others to the fears of the State, to drive her 
 back into the refuges of the Union: all manly 
 sentiment, all generous sympathies, and that spirit 
 of devotion which is the spirit of independence, 
 are choked by spectral fears, or crushed in the 
 selfish and narrow considerations of the present. 
 
 Maryland is advised to try no "crucial experi- 
 ments," but to betake herself to the safe position 
 of a temporising policy, in which she may give 
 the advantages of her neutral position to the 
 Lincoln Government, and yield the privileges of 
 her soil for the present, to its troops, and, possi- 
 bly, hereafter join the Southern Confederacy, but 
 only in the event of the successful establishment, 
 or the acknowledgment of its independence. This 
 dishonorable, cheating, double position — this pre- 
 cious, safe game of ambidextrous neutrality — is 
 
46 LETTEES OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 now the constant theme of recommendation that 
 assails the ear. Even one of the hitherto most 
 excellent and patriotic journals of Baltimore is 
 now prompt to recommend the duplicity and ad- 
 vantages of such a position. The copy of this 
 journal which lies before me at the date of this 
 writing, advises a pledge of good faith, made on 
 the honor of the State and without reservation, 
 not to take up arms against the Federal Adminis- 
 tration, so long as the city of Washington is held 
 and occupied by them ; nor to offer any hostility 
 or opposition to the Administration, or the army 
 assembled for its support upon the soil of Mary- 
 land. It adds in cold, confident, shameless terms 
 the following explanation of its choice : 
 
 "The result of this position would secure to 
 "the Administration the enjoyment of all the ad- 
 " vantages to be derived from the territory of a 
 "neutral, with the assurance of absolute safety 
 "within that territory; and with the possible 
 "maintenance of peaceful relations until the 
 "Union was restored, if that be practicable, or 
 " until the independence of the Southern Confed- 
 '^ eracy is recognized.'' 
 
 Such wretched ambiloquy as this — such a miser- 
 
LETTER TO THE EDITOK OF 47 
 
 able cheat as this is sought to be imposed upon 
 the honor of Maryland, and the honor of that 
 cause, which she proposes to pollute by mercenary 
 and chaifering embraces. God forbid that this 
 should be the choice of Maryland ! God forbid 
 that she should sell her destinies and honor to 
 any of the infamous bids to pollute her — to the 
 cheats of the press ; or to the suggestions of ter- 
 rorism; or to Gov. Hicks' plain-spoken propo- 
 sition to debauch her; or to the gold of "the 
 commercial centres" of the North, already busy 
 in corrupting her honest choice ; or to the cunning 
 toils of the wizen-faced King of Plug-Uglyism, 
 who seeks to purchase by Maryland's infamy the 
 seat in Congress that he has already assoiled by 
 his own treachery! 
 
 Sir, I cannot write with patience of these at- 
 tempts to betray a State, whose heart and honor 
 are alike noble. ExcUse me for my warmth. 
 And pray understand, also, my own position on 
 this question, not as that of recommending instant 
 and reckless secession to Maryland, but of ad- 
 vising only active, willing, laborious, thorough, 
 and spirited preparations for what in the end 
 must be, and should be her position. Her sister 
 
48 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 States of the South appreciate the present, help- 
 less situation of Maryland, and do not ask, as 
 they cannot expect, her immediate separation 
 from the Union ; but they do expect that she will 
 not be idle, or submissive, or indifferent, but that 
 she will prepare herself; that she will arm her- 
 self; and that in undiminished spirit she will 
 await the time, when she may declare herself, 
 purely and bravely, and, above all, without mean 
 reference to what side victory inclines to, a mem- 
 ber of the Southern Confederacy of States. 
 
 God forbid that any should be so unjust, or so 
 athirst of blood as to condemn the present en- 
 forced suspension of her action. But I condemn, 
 sir, the designs of her enemies to take advantage 
 of the present necessary spell to place her in a 
 position of irretrievable and certain submission to 
 the misgovernment of the North. I condemn the 
 cheat of imposing upon her the farce of a one- 
 sided neutrality, unable to protect itself, and the 
 next necessary step of which will be union with 
 the North. And I alike condemn that pretence 
 of neutrality, which is to enable her to adopt, in 
 the course of events, whichever side is proved to 
 be the stronger, and which, while professing desire 
 
LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF 49 
 
 for the connection of Maryland with the Southern 
 States, makes itself safe bj reserving the alter- 
 native of siding with the Lincoln Government, in 
 the event of their discouragement. 
 
 It is unnecessary to expose here the positions 
 of Gov. Hicks' message. Sir, it is not worth the 
 prick of a pen to disturb it. Whatever the Legis- 
 lature of Maryland may do, it is some satisfaction 
 to know that it will be entirely without reference 
 to his recommendations; and whatever scheme 
 may be determined by it to advise or provide for 
 the suspension of the State's action, it will, at 
 least, be unlike the clotted lump of nonsense, 
 which he has recommended as *' neutrality." 
 Very truly, yours, 
 
 THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 Maryland, May 16, 1861. ********* 
 Since the above letter was written, Maryland has 
 fallen further within the grasp of the despot. 
 About thirty thousand foreign troops are on her 
 soil to-day ; the Legislature has been wholly inane, 
 and has assented to the attitude of submission 
 indefinitely ; the city of Baltimore has been sub- 
 jected to military occupation and to the insults, 
 
50 LETTEES OF THE SOUTHEEN SPY. 
 
 for a time at least, of the dawdling and inebriate 
 proclamations of an obese, epauletted Yankee; 
 and wliile efforts have been plainly in progress to 
 disarm the State, and to violate her military 
 organization, her shuffling Governor has sought 
 safe occasion to ape the tyranny he obeys, and to 
 make a call for four regiments of volunteers to 
 answer the requisition of the now old and spent 
 war proclamation, made a month ago by the cousin 
 of humanity perched in the Executive Chair at 
 Washington. The soldiers, the apes, the time- 
 servers, and the mummies, are the curse of Mary- 
 land. And )7hat of the patriotic, liberty-loving 
 men of the unhappy State ! — Said a hero in the 
 trials of the Revolution of 76: ''too many flatter 
 themselves that their pusillanimity is true jiru- 
 dence; but in perilous times like these, I cannot 
 conceive of prudence without fortitude!" — that 
 is not active bravery and prowess, which are 
 sometimes untimely, but ''' fortitude:'' the patient, 
 confident, heroic spirit, which, while it waits for 
 opportunity, makes both it and the preparations 
 to use it. Let Maryland act on this hint — let 
 her make, as best she can, both ' the opportunity 
 and the preparation to strike home with the aveng- 
 
LETTER TO SECRETARY SEWARD. 51 
 
 ing arm — let her preserve and exercise her forti- 
 tude — let her do this; or let her assume at once 
 a repose of irretrievable infamy ! Nullum est 
 tertium. 
 
 s. s. 
 
52 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHEKN SPY. 
 
 VI. 
 
 LETTER TO SECRETARY SEWARD. 
 
 Maryland, May 10, 1861. 
 
 To Mr. Secretary Seward: 
 
 Sir: You have been for many years an object 
 of public curiosity. Excelling in the conceal- 
 ments and disguises of empty declamation, re- 
 markable for the glosses of your style of expres- 
 sion, and exhibiting that command of language 
 which makes it perform the office of concealing 
 rather than expressing thoughts, and which was 
 so happily illustrated in your well-known compo- 
 sition of the Inaugural of the Illinois President, 
 your sentiments and your character have been 
 very differently estimated in the opinion of the 
 public. You have been regarded as a statesman 
 it the parts of the North, where people, judging 
 from their own stand-points of character, have 
 esteemed statesmanship to consist in low cunning 
 and artful non-cominittals of evil designs ; and to 
 them your very New England visage of narrow 
 
f 
 
 LETTER TO SECRETARY SEWARD. 58 
 
 and skulking selfishness has been taken as an 
 index of Yankee wisdom and ability. By others, 
 sir, who profess to have pierced the disguises of 
 your character, you are condemned as a dema- 
 gogue^ a character baneful in the days of peace, 
 but in the great peril of a country, then the most 
 heartless mercenary and dangerous of wretches. 
 
 I am truly sorry, sir, to see this latter estima- 
 tion of your character confirmed by your recent 
 exhibitions of the narrow and demagogical states- 
 manship that you have so long sought to conceal. 
 An acute man may long find resources of conceal- 
 ment in ambiguous and artful words; but the 
 word and spirit of his expressions, especially 
 should he be over-fond of talking and writing, 
 will eventually betray his sentiments and designs 
 to the mind of the people. 
 
 In the last Senate, you made a glowing appeal 
 for the Union ; you confessed it to be in danger ; 
 you besought sacrifices, even of party, to sustain 
 it. You must have been only amusing the people 
 with these declarations; for in your late official 
 letter of instructions to the recently appointed 
 minister to France, you urge him to assure that 
 government of the fact that the idea of a perma- 
 
54 LETTERS OF THE SOTTTHERIS' SPY. 
 
 nent disruption has never entered into the mind 
 of "^'any candid statesman in this country," and 
 of the certainty, too, of the continuance of "the 
 constitutional Union," and that, too, as an object 
 of '•^ affection r' 
 
 How, sir, do you explain this inconsistency? 
 Is the Union in less danger now, when war is 
 proclaimed, than when, in the season of conven- 
 tions, you delivered your glossed and Jesuitical 
 speech in the Senate for its preservation? Is it 
 the fact that no statesman in this country con- 
 ceives the possibility of its rupture ? Pardon me, 
 sir, are you truthful in this? I acknowledge, sir, 
 that there is a magnanimous part in these decla- 
 tions, and I congratulate you for it. You are 
 willing to confess that you were no statesman in 
 once contemplating the danger of the Union. 
 You arc willing to make yourself out as formerly, 
 a fool. But, sir, will the country be satisfied to 
 take even this magnanimous confession : for, re- 
 member, sir, there is yet a more scornful name 
 than that of fool, and for calling which, incon- 
 sistency sometimes affords equal grounds. 
 
 You have abandoned your exclamatory states- 
 manship for the Union to adopt in its stead the 
 
LETTER TO SECRETAEY SEWAED. 55 
 
 wisdom of jour master, and to substitute for your 
 former anxieties his vulgar apothegms of '''all 
 rights'' '■'nohody hurt,'" and ^'"nothing goiyig 
 wrong.'' You are, indeed, a supple tool. Now 
 when the Union is imminently threatened, you 
 exchange the fears you had for it, when it was 
 only moderately threatened, for Abraham Lin- 
 coln's vulgar and insolent confidence, on which 
 you improve by the art which is peculiarly your 
 own. You misrepresent. You misrepresent a 
 great government, inaugurated under the solemn 
 and imposing forms of State authority ; already 
 sustained by nearly eight millions of people ; 
 exercising among them all the ordinary functions 
 of government, and receiving their willing obedi- 
 ence, and standing l^efore the world for rightful 
 recognition — you misrepresent it as a disorganized 
 insurrection, from which nothing is to be feared, 
 and you rank it with the passing and incidental 
 "changes" in the history of the Union. 
 
 This, sir, is in consistency, at least, with the 
 war proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, of which 
 I can now well believe the report that you were 
 the scrivener. In that proclamation, which had 
 to be bungled into conformity to a tortured law 
 
56 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERTT SPY. 
 
 and to a perverse misrepresentation of facts, it 
 was necessary to style States acting under the 
 solemnities bf organic bodies, as *' unlawful com- 
 hinations;'' and to support, still further, the af- 
 fectation of a mere raid, we had to be refreshed 
 with another Lincoln iana, in warning four or five 
 millions of people, standing on their own soil, to 
 return within twenty days to their Jiomes ! What 
 an example of seriousness, of truthfulness, of 
 justice, of patriotic courage and patriotic rhetoric, 
 I leave the world to admire. 
 
 I am willing to admit, sir, that the misrepre- 
 sentations you couched in this famous proclama- 
 tion, and that you have attempted now to renew 
 to the Governments of Europe, would be most 
 richly, as they are most impotently, ridiculous, if 
 they were not so foul with falsehood, as to excite 
 disgust as well as derision. Why conceal the fact 
 of the existence of a Government in the South, 
 recognised within its own jurisdiction, and exer- 
 cising all the powers for revenue, civil order, 
 legislation, the administration of justice, peace 
 and war ? Why atttempt to degrade a great revo- 
 lutionary fact by misrepresenting it as an insur- 
 rection or raid ? You, sir, are best able to answer 
 
LETTER TO SECKETAEY SEWARD. 57 
 
 these questions. You know best your own pur- 
 poses for degrading the Soutbein movement to 
 the proportions of an incidental insurrection. 
 You know best the extreme necesi^itj for balking 
 tlie European recognition of the Southern Con- 
 federacy. But, sir, you attempt a vain and 
 shameless task, when you seek to encounter a 
 question so serious and critical by attempted con- 
 cealments and falsifications of facts op n to all 
 the world, and which all the world is interested in 
 examining. 
 
 'the Governments of Europe, you may rest 
 assured, A\ill not take tlie facts regarding the con- 
 dition of affairs in the South on the representa- 
 tions of inimical statements at Wasliington. They 
 will ascertain and estimate them for themselves. 
 Indeed, the very expedients employed in the con- 
 duct of hostilities on the part of your Govern- 
 ment, as well at on the side of the South — block- 
 ades, letters of marque, &;c., — will constrain the Eu- 
 ropean powers, so far from recognising your dwarfed 
 representations of insurrection, sedition, &c., to 
 govern their action on the basis of the actual ex- 
 istence of war, and to recognise the South as a 
 
 belligerent. This, sir, you may see, opens tL© 
 4 
 
58 LETTEES OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 door at once to the recognition of a de facto 
 Government. 
 
 You, sir, not only have committed yourself to 
 a bad and superrogatory task in seeking to impose 
 upon foreign governments your misstatements of 
 facts in the South, but you have also traveled out 
 of the way to communicate through the letter to 
 Mr. Dayton, the mere opinions and sentiments 
 of the Government at Washington to oppose the 
 recognition of the Southern Confederacy. Such 
 blunders and ignorance in diplomacy were scarcely 
 to be expected from you. It was to be supposed 
 that you were at least acquainted with the simple 
 rules, to govern a matter of ordinary diplomatic 
 routine. You have proved yourself another ex- 
 ample that the greatly learned are sometimes not 
 above the blunders and ignorances of common 
 men. You are another Gundling — another great 
 light in "the Tobacco Parliament," to settle pub- 
 lic affairs. But it was to be supposed that you 
 were, at least, not more ignorant and thrasonical 
 than Gundlings generally are. It was to be sup- 
 posed that you were, at least, aware that the 
 question of the recognition of a de facto Govern- 
 ment was to be determined by facts, and not by 
 
I 
 
 LETTER TO SECRETARY SEWARD. 59 
 
 the opinions and views of tliat Government \vliic]i 
 it had succeeded. It was to be supposed that you 
 had the small amount of knowledge to apprehend 
 that the question of the recognition of the South- 
 ern Confederacy by Foreign Powers, w'as, for 
 them, a question lying with the Southern people, 
 and having nothing to do with the Federal Gov- 
 ernment, that is ipso facto foreign to those people. 
 The doctrine that must determine the recog- 
 nition abroad of the Southern Confederacy, is so 
 simple and severe, that it is, indeed, astonishing, 
 sir, how you could have so mistaken it as to inter- 
 pose the question wdth the views and opinions of 
 the Lincoln Government, as to the reality of the 
 Southern Confederacy. The question has nothing 
 to do with these. It is one of fact, and that fact 
 simply the determination whether the new Gov- 
 ernment sustains itself, and is recognized and 
 obeyed tuitldn the limits of the jurisdiction it 
 claims. It matters not whether it is a revolu- 
 tionary Government; it matters not whether it is 
 contested by a former regime ; it is sufficient that 
 it is recognized and obeyed by its oivn peoiole^ and 
 performs steadily among them the regular func- 
 tions of a Government. 
 
60 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 To recommend a new Government for recog- 
 nition abroad, it should assureilly fulfil these con- 
 ditions — that is, be found in steady exercise of 
 governmental functions, and be acknowledged and 
 obeyed within the limits of its local jurisdiction. 
 Beyond those lim.ts the inquiry ceases. It is the 
 obedience of its own people that essentially makes 
 tlie Govei-nment, It is not necessary, sir, to refer 
 for these plain doctrines of recognition to the prece- 
 d.mts of general history, or to the recent illumi- 
 nation of the whole subject in Europe by the 
 Italian question. Our Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence finds for us the jus. powers of Government 
 in ^^ the consent of the governed." 
 
 But without looking back now to the distin- 
 guished examples of history as to the recognition 
 of de fac'o Governments, you might at least, sir, 
 refi-esh your mind by teachings so recent as those 
 of the real statesman who was but one remove 
 your predecessor in the high office which you now 
 encumber with j^our pompous ignorance. I refer 
 to the doctrines declared by jNIr. Marcy on the 
 Nicaragiian question, as establishing for our own 
 Govei-nraent the most recent and strictly defined 
 precedent for the recognition of powers de facto, 
 
LETTER TO SECKETART SETVATtD. 61 
 
 and doing so by putting the whole question on 
 the simple doctrine of the reality and of the 
 acknowledgment of the new Government by the 
 consent of the people composing it. 
 
 Such, sir, are at once the guides and the assur- 
 ances for the recognition of the Soutliern repub- 
 lic. I will not be led now into the discussion of 
 their truth or probability. I liave not written 
 for the purpose of a general discu-sion of the 
 doctrine of recognition, but onl}' to show you, sir, 
 how the plainest outlines of that doctrine have 
 been violated by your false, intermeddling advices 
 to the Governments of Europe. Be, at least, sir, 
 truthful and decent in your zeal for Mr. Lincoln's 
 Government. Be serious, sir : restore ^^oui'self 
 to the society of third-rate politicians: do not dis- 
 gi'ace them by having your falsehoods and cheats 
 too plainly detected! Cease your busy misrepre- 
 sentations to Foreign Governments — cease your 
 boastful assurances of Abraham Lincoln'.s "one 
 Government and one Nation" — cease your dis- 
 semination of the views of a Government, which 
 no longer has any jurisdiction of a case that is 
 given to the judgment of the world: and be 
 satisfied for justice and decency alike to leave the 
 
62 LETTEKS OF THE SOUTHEEN SPY. 
 
 question of the recognition of the new Govern- 
 ment in the South, where it belongs by history, 
 by precedent, and by right — to the impartial 
 ascertainment of the state of facts existing within 
 the limits it has appointed for its own jurisdiction. 
 I am, sir, &c., 
 
 THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
LETTER TO THE PKESIDENT. 63 
 
 VII. 
 
 LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 
 
 Maryland, May 30, 1861. 
 To the President of the United States: 
 
 Sir: The course of despotism is that of rapid 
 and aggravated progression. Commencing with 
 doubtful claims of power, it hurries to plain usur- 
 pations of it, and, at last, seizes the sceptre of 
 absolute authority. In little more than a month, 
 your course, sir, has illustrated the rapid steps of 
 despotism from its first unlawful act to the last 
 extremity of the usurpation of power. The 
 catena is complete. You commenced with a 
 proclamation of war against the South. What 
 have you done since ? You have more than quin- 
 tupled the army in disregard of the provinces of 
 Congress. You have strangled the liberties of 
 the people. You have caused the military arrest 
 of citizens in jurisdictions where the Federal 
 Courts have been in uninterrupted operation. 
 
64 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 You have caused their house to be searched, and 
 blank warrants to be distributed for inquisitions. 
 Youhave suspended the writ of habeas corpus. You 
 have administered to the army and civil officers 
 of the Government a new and altered oath of 
 allegiance. You have broken the sanctity of 
 private correspondence, seizing the despatches 
 preserved for years in the telegraph offices. You 
 have violated the right of the people to keep and 
 bear arms, robbed even the public authorities of 
 arms in their possession, and of their purchase, 
 and denied the right of a State, still remaining 
 in the Union, to continue the privileges, which 
 the Constitution has named and provided as 
 "necessary to a free State." A State remaining 
 in the Union is no longer free. A citizen remain- 
 ing in the Union is no longer free: he is subject 
 to arrest, by military process; to search, at 
 pleasure ; to espoinagc, even in his private corres- 
 pondence; to imprisonment, without recourse to 
 the courts; to tests, whenever you choose to exact 
 them ; and to deprivation of arms, whenever your 
 power may be thought to slacken, or your coward- 
 ice may happen to be shaken by alarms. 
 
 Such, sir, is but a hasty grouping of the acts 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDEISTT. 65 
 
 by which you have violated both the wisdom and 
 the law of the Constitution, and erected a throne 
 of despotism in your frightened capital. But the 
 character of a despot is not completed by mere 
 violations of law. There are violations of honor, 
 morality and truth, more infamous than excesses 
 of authority. It is of these, sir, that I would 
 tell you as gloriously crowning you with a com- 
 plete despotism — of these that I would remind 
 the country, as staining you, beneath the gauds 
 of the robe, with the very dregs of infamy. 
 
 The present stage of the war dcvelopes two facts 
 which happening close together, at once expose 
 and complete its policy. We see, first, the false 
 tokens of your Government to the world : next, 
 its betrayed pretences to its own citizens. 
 
 While, sir, your Government was attempting to 
 amuse Europe with misrepresentations of the 
 present war as a local mutiny, it was giving the 
 lie to itself, and repeating it at every step in its 
 own line of policy at home. You had assumed 
 to estabhsh, as against the South, a blockade, a 
 severely belligerent and punitive right, at the 
 same time that you protested against the recog- 
 nition of the South as a belligerent. You insisted 
 
66 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 upon the denial to the South of a right that your 
 own belligerent position towards her had called 
 out. Not only this, you insisted upon the ex- 
 cision of the right of privateering from the South 
 that your own Government had, in 1856, ex- 
 pressly reserved for the very occasion in which 
 the South assumed to exercise it, namely, to sup- 
 ply the deficiency of a naval power. 
 
 You were caught, sir, in your own inconsist- 
 encies. It was not to be supposed that the very 
 right your Government had laid the foundation 
 for in its own position of belligerent, and that 
 it had preserved, as a careful tradition of its own 
 policy, was to be denied to the South by the 
 world, only for the interest and benefit of your 
 own Government. That, sir, would have been a 
 degree of stultification and of subservience to 
 your purposes, that you had no right to expect 
 from the world. Your supreme commands at 
 home, and the absolute fawning obedience of a 
 lickspittle and hungry constituency have encour- 
 aged you to rather too high a dictation. Do not 
 fret yourself, sir, with false expectations. Do not 
 imagine that the world will surrender its consci- 
 ence to you because Yankeedom has done it; that 
 
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. 67 
 
 it -will accept your falsehood and despotism, be- 
 cause " the Northern unit" thinks it truth and 
 valor and honesty; and that it -will listen un- 
 questioningly to your maxims of public law, be- 
 cause ''the great North" thinks and licks them 
 over as sweet morsels of wisdom, and anoints 
 them with the slime of its own grovelling passions. 
 
 Do not be illogical, sir. Do not mistake the 
 sentiments of Illinois for the opinion of Europe. 
 You have disgraced yourself and the great North 
 enough already by the dancing and shuffling policy 
 of your Premier towards the Governments of 
 Europe. 
 
 Your blockade of the Southern coasts is already 
 despised; it cannot be maintained. England and 
 France are determined to have their cotton, to- 
 bacco and naval supplies from the seaports of the 
 South. A line of such extent, with the numer- 
 ous inlets on the coast from the James River to 
 the Savannah, could, in the nature of things, by 
 no application of the naval force at your com- 
 mand, be blockaded. Equally vain with the at- 
 tempt to maintain a blockade, on such a line, con- 
 stantly and vigilantly assailed by the whole com- 
 merce of Europe, will be your attempt, sir, to 
 
68 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 resist the public ackno^vlc(lgment and exercise of 
 the right of privateering on the part of the South 
 — a right which was conceded to Greece in her 
 revolt, and to the South American republics in 
 their struggle for independence, and which, I re- 
 peat, was retained by your Government in ex- 
 press and permanent terms. The precedents of 
 the Government at Washington will be turned 
 against itself. " The militia of the seas" will 
 destroy the commercial and navigating interests 
 of the North ; they will scour the South Pacific 
 as well as other oceans of the world; they will 
 penetrate into every sea, and will find as tempting 
 prizes in the silk ships of China as in the gold- 
 freighted steamers of California. The reversion 
 upon your Government, sir, of its own maxims of 
 public law is only needed to complete the ruin of 
 the North, not only in her commercial interests, 
 but in the immediate issues of the present war. 
 The negation of the right of search will estop 
 you from discovering contraband goods under the 
 neutral flag of England or of France. It will 
 leave the trade in contraband as free as any other. 
 A moment's reflection will show you, sir, that the 
 fixed precedents and cherished traditions of your 
 
LETTER TO THE PEESIDENT. 69 
 
 own Government have only to be completely 
 turned against itself by the world, to reduce it 
 to the most miserable imbccibility, and its people 
 to their knees, and the deploring there of their 
 own self-purchased destruction. The question 
 alone remains, whether this complete reversion 
 will be made ; — and this question I am satisfied to 
 leave to the justice and to the interest of the 
 European Powers, when both these motives are 
 conjoined and harmonized, to determine their 
 action. 
 
 Heartily, sir, do I give thanks that the ambi- 
 tious falsehood you sought to introduce into your 
 foreign policy, on the subject of the present war, 
 has not only been disappointed of its end, but 
 has introduced a new element of controlling im- 
 portance into this war. This element, which you 
 have, unluckily for yourself, introduced, I believe 
 to be almost vital and decisive. It will subordi- 
 nate a controversy, which you hoped to keep in 
 your own hands, and within the narrow restric- 
 tions of Mr. Seward's Yankee statesmanship, to 
 the public law and the public opinion of the 
 world. These are enduring, far-reaching, and 
 ultimately decisive powers. Falseness and ag- 
 
70 LETTEES OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 gression, sir, in the war you are waging, can only 
 be fatal to yourself. As abroad, the same policy 
 has brought you into difficulties, so, at home, it 
 ■will surround and destroy you. As the falsehood 
 by which you sought to entrap the conscience and 
 judgment of Europe has come back with retribu- 
 tive justice, so the falsehood of your policy at 
 home will recoil and strike back upon yourself. 
 The exposure of your policy to the world is suf- 
 ficiently found in your intermeddling in Europe: 
 it is seen at home, now, and in the light of day, 
 in your invasion of Virginia. 
 
 This act, sir, has completed the infamy of your 
 character. You have perpetrated it against all 
 promises and pledges; you have multiplied by it 
 lalsehood on falsehood; you have put imagination 
 on the rack to perceive what limit there can be 
 fixed to your unscrupulousness, or what bounds 
 set to a mendacious Government. Pretext has 
 been exchanged for pretext, until the country, 
 sir, has actually been bewildered at your enormous 
 resources of falsehood. If, from all the slough 
 of your proclamations, the mess of words you 
 called an Inaugural, and the confused nonsense of 
 your speeches, official and unofficial, one distinct 
 
LETTER TO THE PEEStDENT. 11 
 
 proposition was drawn bj the country, it was that 
 you would not make an aggressive war upon the 
 South. You defined for yourself the meaning of 
 such a war, when, in your wayside speech at 
 Indianapolis, you essayed a distinction between 
 repossessing the forts, &c., in the South, and in- 
 vading its territory, the latter of which only you 
 esteemed to be war in its aggressive sense. Have 
 you forgotten that distinction, sir? Th6^ country 
 has only to look back upon it to discover your 
 flagrant falsehood. Can you not cure it, sir, by 
 some new distinction — some new pretext, so as to 
 bring this invasion of Virginia under the terms 
 of the Indianapolis speech, and the proclama- 
 tions and manifestoes of a later date ? Can't the 
 adept Premier help you to a new logic, or a new 
 falsehood? — or was he too plainly discovered in 
 his ingenious ways by Judge CampMl, when the 
 Judge, the equal of Mr. Seward in political 
 position, twice charged him with " overreaching 
 and equivocation," and he, the great representa- 
 tive man of the great North, twice slunk u|tD 
 silence under the charge? 
 
 Those, sir, who are committed to support you 
 in all things, and to all extremities, are easily 
 
72 LETTERS OP THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 satisfied with explanations for every inconsistency 
 or outrage you may choose to enact. Address 
 yourself to these creatures, sir. You can, per- 
 haps, explain to them that you have seized Alex- 
 andria to reclaim her as part of the District of 
 Columbia ; you can, perhaps, parade to them a 
 pretext that you have been called into Virginia, 
 "to protect Union men;" you may, perhaps, con- 
 vince thofm that Alexandria is one of "the places" 
 of the Government within the purview of the 
 war proclamation; you may possibly even per- 
 suade the hang-mouthed lisieners on your wisdom 
 and bravery, that there is some old, strange claim 
 of the Government to be revived to the odd-named 
 Newsport-Newspoint at the mouth of the James 
 River. As there are sometimes no limits to the 
 mendacious utterances of a man, so, sometimes, 
 there appear to be none to the servile acquies- 
 cence of fanatics and flatterers. 
 
 Virginia, and the honest world that regard her, 
 sir, need not another word from you. Both 
 understand you. You would repeat upon her 
 your easy conquest of Maryland, seize her rail- 
 roads, step by step, plant her with your troops, 
 and then lay your strangling grasp upon her 
 
LETTER TO THE PREvSIDENT. 73 
 
 liberties. The falseness of policy, sir, super- 
 animates the energy to oppose it. Your treachery 
 has inspired all the vital forces of Virginia to 
 compass your ruin, and directed all the scorn of 
 the world to accomplish your infamy. 
 
 Filthy with falsehood, covered with treachery 
 as with a garment, you will be, at once, expelled 
 from Virginia, as by a sword of fire, and be 
 driven from the honest conversations of the world, 
 as a leprous despot, shunned and yet marked, 
 hated at id yet despised. The world, sir, has not 
 yet outgrown the feelings which the inspired ac- 
 counts of the first invader of man's kingdom of 
 peace were intended to inspire. It is not likely 
 to forget them — not likely to be unreminded of 
 the old story of the Serpent, in the false words, 
 subtle, gliding invasions, and anfractuous policy 
 of Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 Without a word of premonition, against all 
 promises and all expectations, in the night time, 
 while the stars of the approaching rtorning alone 
 watched in the sky, you glided into Virginia, 
 silently and beautifully as a serpent in his slime 
 and glittering scales. Let it be so ! Let the 
 serpent coil himself strongly ! " The wisest of 
 
74 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 beasts," he is yet not the strongest. There are 
 talons to fight him, to strip him, and to tear his 
 writhing folds between heaven and earth, as his 
 golden scales fall one by one in the sunshine, up 
 which the eagle flies with his prey. 
 
 I am, &c., 
 
 THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
LETTER TO THE KEY. DR. TYKG. 75 
 
 VIII. 
 
 LETTER TO THE REV. DR. TYNG OF NEW YORK. 
 
 Baltimore, 1861. 
 Br. jS. a. Tyng: 
 
 Sir: Your office admonishes me to address you 
 respectfully. Be pleased, sir, however, to distin- 
 guish between the respect which I readily give to 
 your office, and that which I must be studious to 
 withhold from your person. 
 
 Sir, you are a minister of the gospel. May 
 our Almighty Father in Heaven pardon me, if I 
 say, in any other than the deepest humility and 
 distrust, that I, too, am a member of His Church 
 on earth, and a suppliant at the throne of His 
 mercy. 
 
 Religion may have its military ideas, sir ; they 
 are ideas of necessity, not of wrath. It may be 
 proper, it may be dutiful, though unwelcome, in 
 a Christian man, sometimes to speak harshly, to 
 chastise falsehood, and to let loose his wrath upon 
 evil men. In connections with the secular press, 
 
76 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERTq- SPY. 
 
 I may have spoken with severity. I claim the 
 right to use it against bad men in high places, 
 murdering my country or betraying it. But, sir, 
 even the Language of just denunciation, I wouki 
 restrain against you, a priest of the church ; — 
 but, understand, sir, not that I esteem you less 
 false or murderous than the politicians ^Yhom you 
 serve, but because you are clothed in an office, 
 holy and venerable in itself, however wretched 
 and abandoned the man it may cover. The 
 apostle was sorry to have denounced the whited 
 Pharisee, who would have stopped his words with 
 blows, because he "wot not that he was the high 
 priest." 
 
 I will endeavor to write cahnly; but I will not 
 be satisfied to write less than truthfully. 
 
 Some time ago, sir, in making a hasty journey 
 into the North, in which I was enabled to observe 
 mutely, but narrowly, the sentiments and the 
 signs of that section, there was put into my hands 
 a New York paper of your own persuasion, con- 
 taining a report of a Sunday sermon, delivered 
 by you before the Bible Society, on the occasion 
 of the presentation of Bibles to the troops enlisted 
 for war upon the South. I will not foul my sheet 
 
LETTEH TO THE REV. DR. TYNG. 11 
 
 with the name of this paper; and I deem it 
 equally unnecessary, sir, to assoil it by the ex- 
 tended report of your extraordinarily vile remarks 
 on this sabbatical occasion. 
 
 You were not satisfied to name my country- 
 men, and your "brethren" (to use the fondling 
 term of the old poisoning hypocrisy of the North,) 
 as ^^pirates;'' you condemned them to a fate, at 
 which demons only could rejoice; you consigned 
 them to nameless horrors, and declared your belief 
 that ^^the Bible ivould singe and scald their pol- 
 luted hands!'' There were Northern troops 
 standing around you in the clamor and passion 
 for blood. They cheered you, sir. You replied 
 that '-^they ivere worthy of the Bible:'' in the 
 animation that their shouts inspired, you ex- 
 claimed, " how their names will glisten in glory/" 
 You boasted of your own prowess in the work of 
 death. You declared, in tlie bloody bravery and 
 dialect of a murderer, that, as to the rebellious 
 Southerners, "YOU ivould shoot them down as 
 mad dogs!" 
 
 I shuddered to read such speeches, sir. But 
 the horror of my feelings I cannot describe, as I 
 continued to read what else fell from ministerial 
 
78 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 lips, poisoned -with sickening shouts for blood. 
 You spoke of the regiment of one " Billy Wilson," 
 composed, as is notorious, of the thieves, coster- 
 mongers, "fighting men" and murderers of New 
 York. In rather strangely clerical phrase, and 
 in a language which I had thought confined to the 
 petting endearments of the Bowery, you referred 
 to them as ''■rare birds." You spoke of their 
 prowess. You, sir — jou, an officer of God's 
 church, to administer its comforts, and to teach 
 its great mystery of salvation in fear and trem- 
 bling, " ventured to say," that the salvation of 
 these abandoned men might, probably, be obtained 
 "by the consecration they had made of them- 
 selves!" In the report, there is an interpolation 
 of "cheers" at the promise. 
 
 Great God, sir, is it possible that such aAvful, 
 mocking, flippant, demon blasphemy should be 
 uttered in the name of His church, and of His 
 blessed Son, who "taketh away the sins of the 
 world," and the utterer live on unconsumed by 
 the Divine vengeance ! 
 
 Sir, I promised you no words of denunciation. 
 There can be none such for this. 
 
 By the way, sir, you took occasion to remark 
 
LETTER TO THE KEY. DE. TYKG. 19 
 
 to your Avild auditors, that you had "served 
 eighteen years of your ministry in Virginia." Is 
 this really true? You will pardon me for ques- 
 tioning it, not only after the expressions of your 
 desires for the drenching of this State in blood, but 
 because, sir, of your total unlikeness, in every 
 appearance, to all I have ever seen of the clergy 
 in Virginia. Certainly, you have retained but 
 little of the simplicity of the clerical manners of 
 the South. You are known to be a "fashionable 
 preacher," sir, over-fond of the sumptuousness 
 and delicacies of your house, and of keeping 
 great company around you. This class of clergy 
 must have been extinguished in Virginia when 
 you left it. 
 
 To shift further comments on your Bible-Society 
 sermon, sir, and to avoid, for a moment, feelings 
 which, while I dwell upon it, I must confess to be 
 both indignant and distressful, I will tell you of a 
 little experience of my own among the Episcopal 
 clergy of the South. 
 
 In last winter, sir, on a rapid visit into 
 
 a portion of the South, I passed one of the most 
 wholesome and pleasant episodes of my life. On 
 an occasion^ which I need not particularize, I 
 
80 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 stopped at the house of an okl and beloved digni- 
 tary of our church, ^Yhose piety, Christian scholar- 
 ship and venerable years, are matters of fame 
 and respect throughout the whole country. I had 
 seen so much abroad, at least, of the fine living 
 and ostentations of the superior ranks of the 
 clergy, that when I approached the neighbour- 
 hood of this Nestorian diocesan of the Episcopal 
 Church, I naturally amused myself with fancying 
 the mode of my reception, in what I thought 
 would be some splendid mansion filled with im- 
 posing displays of comforts and luxuries, and 
 offering only a stiff and aristocratic welcome On 
 the part of its lordly occupant. Never, sir, w^ere 
 delusions more entirely dispelled. 
 
 As I alighted at the porch of a farm-house, at 
 once studiously plain and studiously tasteful, a 
 bent figure, with white locks, came out to meet 
 me. His eyes were the most gentle I ever recol- 
 lect to have seen; there was a deep, clear peace 
 in their expression, that at once subdued and 
 charmed. Ilis voice, as he bade me welcome, 
 had the music of gentle and benevolent old age. 
 The room into which I was conducted was both 
 parlor aud study, and I looked in vain for one 
 
LETTEE TO THE REV. DR. TYNG. 81 
 
 evidence of luxury to mark the rank of the great 
 scholar and Episcopalian. It was as bare, but as 
 perfectly neat as the worn and carefully brushed 
 suit of black in which he was clothed. The floor 
 of the room was uncarpeted, though it was the 
 depth of winter; the furniture was scanty, it 
 would have been almost nothing on taking out 
 the immense book cases that covered portions of 
 the walls ; a common deal chair, with a writing 
 leaf, that the venerable man afterwards told me 
 was a relic of his college days, was placed in the 
 chimney-corner, and near it a large velvet-furred 
 cat, evidently a pet, purred in the delight of the 
 warm corner, and reached to the caresses of her 
 master. 
 
 In this simple home I found the learned and 
 evangelical Christian, whose name was venerated 
 in all parts of the Union. The plainness and 
 gentleness of his life won my instant esteem ; and 
 a religious conversation, inexpressibly sweet, com- 
 pleted the charms of his character. 
 
 My visit happened to be during the critical 
 times of the sessions of the Peace Congress in 
 Washington, when Virginia was exerting herself 
 with the greatest power and urgency for the safety 
 
82 LETTEES OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 of the Union. Never shall I forget the friction 
 and warmth of the feelings of my venerable host, 
 as he dwelt upon the last existing hope of the 
 maintenance of the Union. He paced the room 
 in the excitement of his feelings. A noble flush 
 would lighten up his aged features, as, at each 
 palise in his walk, he would declare how "noble" 
 it was in Virginia to strive as she was striving 
 for the Union of our forefathers, and how 
 "proud" he was of the Old Dominion in her 
 Christian and national mission. He hoped and 
 prayed for the preservation of the Union : he 
 deplored the recklessness of the North in this 
 respect ; but not one word of enmity, or of tem- 
 per, or even of exaggerated speech fell from his 
 lips. Sir, you cannot wonder that I was struck 
 by the example of such a life. When, long be- 
 fore daybreak, I prepared to set out to meet the 
 train on the railroad, I found my venerable host 
 already up before me, having built his own fire, — 
 a custom, which, at nearly eighty, I learn, is still 
 regular with him at dawn — and when I shook 
 hands with him in the dark at the gate, with the 
 flakes of a snow storm, which, he quietly braved, 
 scattering themselves over his venerable person^ 
 
LETTER TO THE REV. DR. TYNO. 83 
 
 I felt that I liad parted with one of those ex- 
 traordinary okl Christian soldiers, clothed in the 
 apostolic graces of all courage and all gentleness. 
 Noble, beloved, venerable soldier of the Cross ! 
 Distressed, tossed and beaten about as my own 
 life may be, I feel that I can ever look back 
 upon that peaceful old man with an inspiration of 
 love and prayer for his long continuance in the 
 sweet conversations of his life, and in the dear 
 service of Christ. 
 
 Many months had elapsed, sir, between this 
 singular visit in the South and my perusal, on 
 the waters of the Hudson, of your Sabbath oration 
 on the war that had already broken out. I 
 turned the pages of the New York paper in which 
 I read it. On one of the pages I caught the title 
 of some other religious remarks on the existing 
 war. They bound me with their beauty; they 
 expressed and breathed a Christian charity, that 
 I had yet found in no treatment by laity or clergy 
 of the unhappy war; they insisted upon the stern 
 and unwelcome duty of the writer's State, cast 
 out of the Union, as it were, to resist, with 
 Christian manliness, the war thrust upon her; 
 but they called yet for every limit of forbear- 
 
84 LETTERS OF THE SOrTHERN SPY. 
 
 ance, they invoked charity, they expressed all 
 abhorrence of blood, they plead the charities as 
 well as the duties of the terrible emergency. I 
 hastened to find the signature to these at once 
 courageous and gentle remarks, uttered so evi- 
 dently in the moving and tender spirit of our 
 holy religion. It was the name of the venerable 
 host, who had so welcomed me, and taught me 
 new examples of life. It was the diocesan report 
 of the Right Rev. William Meade, Bishop of Vir- 
 ginia ! 
 
 Sir, I will say no more. I will not wound you 
 with the contrast. Promise only to read these 
 noble remarks, to repeat them to the North: and 
 then, confronting them with your own words of 
 bloody zeal, the two may stand, the two must 
 stand to be judged not only in the sober second 
 judgment of men, but in the sight of God, "not 
 in the words which man's wisdom teacheth." 
 With respect for "the priest," 
 
 THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
LETTER TO GENERAL SCOTT. 85 
 
 IX. 
 LETTER TO GENERAL SCOTT. 
 
 Maryland, July 3, 18GI. 
 Lt. G-en'l Winfield Scott, ^c, ^c, ^c. 
 
 Sir: Some persons who depreciate your great- 
 ness, declare that your vanity is so excessive that 
 it even rejects the sympathy of your friends. I 
 allow myself to doubt this; and I refuse, sir, to 
 pass by your misfortunes without condoling with 
 them. 
 
 It is, indeed, a shame that you, sir, ''an old 
 soldier," and, as your admirers so justly say, one 
 of the greatest Captains of the age, sliould be 
 subjected to the infamous doubts of Northern 
 papers, as to your military prowess, and even to 
 egging annoyances of the Cabinet, because you 
 have delayed to start on your triumphal career to 
 Richmond. Who, sir, is the intermeddler in the 
 Cabinet that will insist upon prying into and an- 
 noying your plans of military wisdom ? Is it the 
 
86 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 pragmatical spirit of Montgomery Blair that 
 gives you this annoyance — or the curiosity of 
 ''the little woman" from Illinois? Speak out, 
 sir. Let the people know who dares to question 
 or confront the wisdom of him, "who has passed 
 his whole life in the service of his country." 
 
 Do not allow the Northern papers to wound 
 your vanity. Do, sir, as many great men have 
 had to do — console yourself with your own reflec- 
 tions of your greatness. If you have not yet 
 "shelled" Richmond, or overrun Virginia, or 
 captured "Mr." Joiferson Davis — whose life, by 
 the way, you might have taken once, had it not 
 been for your unfortunate "wounds" from a fiiU 
 down stairs, which prevented you from accepting 
 the risks of the d2iello — why has the country 
 been so unjust as to have forgotten that you have, 
 at last, assuaged Mr. Lincoln's personal fears, 
 and gained a victory in the "moral results" of 
 every conflict that has yet happened ! And what 
 deeds have you not enacted on your sofa in 
 Washington, despite the pangs of the gout — 
 what brilliant strategies have you not pointed out 
 with the long reed with which you have reached 
 from your sick couch to your military maps — and 
 
LETTER TO GENERAL SCOTT. 87 
 
 what important assurances have you not sent, 
 from day to day, to the White House, that "no- 
 body was hurt!" 
 
 The North, sir, — and even Mr. Montgomery 
 Blair, are ungenerous only because they are igno- 
 •rant. They do not know your plans; they mis- 
 took them for the easy and cheap expedient of 
 marching to Richmond, and planting the Stars and 
 Stripes in Capitol Square. You have disdained 
 such easy victories: you have matured a more 
 brilliant plan, and the country only depreciates 
 it, because it docs not know it. 
 
 Do you not recollect, sir, when a mutual friend 
 in your private room lately urged to you to dis- 
 close your plans to him, what you said to him in 
 reply. He asked how you proposed to subdue 
 "the rebels." With knit brows, you opened 
 your wide hand, and slowly and tightly closed it. 
 The emphatic and eloquent reply needed no 
 words. You proposed, with one broad grasp, to 
 crush and strangle the miserable traitors. How 
 grand such a plot of warfare — how much better 
 than an easy march to Richmond — how worthy 
 of the applause of the North, if it had only im- 
 agined the existence in your mind of a plan 
 
88 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN" SPY. 
 
 SO comprehensive, so brilliant, and so satisfac- 
 tory ! 
 
 Sir, you have concealed your wisdom. The 
 North has misapprehended you, the Cabinet have 
 not been taken into your confidence ; and they 
 have censured you, only through mistake. Re-* 
 trieve, sir, your misfortunes ; afford to the North, 
 and to the Government, an opportunity -io recall 
 their misjudgments, and to ascribe to you the 
 hosannas of their praise. You will soon have the 
 one hundred and eighty thousand troops in Vir- 
 ginia in your tightened and deadly grasp. You 
 will easily strangle them all. The North has only 
 to be patient, and you, sir, can still afford to be 
 insolent to the Government, and asperous, as 
 ever, to all vulgar inquisitors. 
 I am, &c., 
 
 THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
LETTER TO EDWAED EVERETT. 89 
 
 LETTER TO EDWARD EVERETT. 
 
 Maryland, July . . . . , 1861. 
 
 To Mr. Edivard Everett: 
 
 Sir: There are several kinds of falsehood. 
 There is the open and direct falsehood; it is 
 known in vulgar society as the lie, and is applied 
 generally to men who are coarse and unartificial 
 in their statements. Then there is the genteeler 
 falsehood by implication ; it is called by milder 
 terms than the lie, only because it lacks its vulgar 
 simplicity. Lastly, sir, there is still a more 
 finished and educated kind of falsehood, that as- 
 sumes the appearance of truth, and that some- 
 times uses the most elegant arts and the highest 
 polish to engage belief. I will not denominate 
 the order of this last kind of falsehood. How 
 well I might be able to illustrate it in comments 
 on the terse expression that he who " lies like 
 truth most truly lies" — for decent reasons, believe 
 me, sir — I forbear to essay. I am not fond of 
 
90 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHEKN SPY. 
 
 vulgarities; I, generally, discard them from my 
 lexicon; and I certainly shall endeavour, sir, not 
 to wound your fine taste by inelegant words. 
 
 Permit me, sir, rather to share in your own 
 fastidious elegances of style ; and in declining 
 credence to the statements of your lately pub- 
 lished letter on the war, addressed to a gentle- 
 man of Virginia, to testify how much it reads ^'like 
 truth," and with what art and polish it is arranged. 
 With this commencement, sir, which you are, no 
 doubt, too much accustomed to flattery to value as 
 highly as is intended, permit me to proceed to dissent 
 from some of the views of your letter referred to. 
 
 It is not strange, sir, that you should begin the 
 statements of your letter with a compliment to 
 yourself. This is sometimes a common habit of 
 great men. You assert that, until recently, you 
 " sustained the South at the almost total sacrifice 
 of influence and favor at home." I am not aware 
 that this fact is as generally known as you presume 
 it to be. What have you done for the South? I 
 ask for information, sir. Of course, I am not 
 disposed "to argue myself unknown;" I aru not 
 ignorant of you, sir. I know that you wrote and 
 recited over the country a very flowery oration on 
 
LEITER TO EDWARD EVERETT. 91 
 
 the pater patrice; — I hear that your eloquence 
 never fails of feminine admiration; — I am ap- 
 prised that yoa are a Latin and Greek scholar, 
 acquainted with many of the modern tongues, 
 and famous for the elegance of your language ; — 
 I have seen it abundantly advertised that you 
 "wrote for the New York Ledger," — I have read 
 the celebrated classic letter which you signed, 
 offering the tenderest sympathy to Senator Sum- 
 ner for his chastisement in the Senate at the 
 hands of a Southerner, whom you eloquently de- 
 nominated as brute and assassin; — I am told 
 that you have made innumerable Fourth-of-July 
 speeches ; that you are a great orator, that you 
 can commit the longest speeches to memory, that 
 you have all the rules and artifices of eloquence 
 at your fingers ends ; — and I am even reminded 
 of your matchless trick of eloquence in having 
 once bribed a waiter, at a dinner at Faneuil Hall, 
 to leave a small miniature flag sticking in a pyra- 
 mid cake by your plate, that in the speech ex- 
 pected from you, you might take it up by a sort 
 of dramatic surprise, and hold it aloft to match 
 your peroration in an apostrophe to the Stars and 
 Stripes. Pardon me, sir, for mentioning so small 
 
92 LETTERS OF THE SOLTDHERN SPY. 
 
 a circumstance. Even small things are interest- 
 ing of the great. You cared for the flag only to 
 match a figure of speech in your oration ; — and 
 even beyond this petty episode of a patriotic din- 
 ner, let me beg you, sir, to take care that you 
 have not given more important hints, that, as a 
 literary man of too much artifice, you have been 
 fond of employing the sentiments and symbols of 
 patriotism as mere dramatic elements, with no 
 feeling higher or worthier in their use than that 
 of heightening your eloquence, or adding to the 
 graces of your composition. 
 
 I will not return to question what you have 
 done for the South. Grant, sir, that you have 
 done wonders to "sustain" her. You say that 
 you have done so "at the almost total sacrifice of 
 influence and favor at home." Unfortunately, in 
 this expression, sir, you are too intent upon prais- 
 ing yourself to apprehend the conclusion it im- 
 plies. This conclusion can only be, that the 
 Northern people have been "almost totally" op- 
 posed to the rights of the South, and that those 
 who have sustained them have done so at the 
 loss of "influence and favor." This is an im"- 
 portant confession, and as logical as it is import- 
 
LETTER TO EDWAED EVERETT. 95 
 
 ant. I would not hurt your vanity, sir, especially 
 after you had helped me to so important a fact. 
 But could the South, sir, think it sufficient to 
 repair the confession you make of the general 
 hostility of the North towards her, that you sus- 
 tained her! How, too, sir, does this confession 
 consist with the after-declaration of your letter 
 that the South was fully protected in the Union? 
 W.ere you, sir, the North — were you to give that 
 protection, without "influence and favor at home" 
 — were you to assure the sustaining of her by 
 the recitation of the Washington oration, or the 
 aid of Ledger literature, or the resources of new 
 and even more dramatic inventions of rhetoric ? 
 I will not deny that you are a great man, sir; I 
 am only constrained to suggest that you too 
 greatly value your services. 
 
 I pass to the statement next in order in the 
 studied composition of your letter. You assert 
 that you were well aware, partly from facts "with- 
 in your personal knowledge,'' of the existence of 
 a conspiracy of thirty years standing, among 
 Southern politicians, to rupture the Union ; and you 
 add, that " the slavery question was but a pretext 
 for keeping up agitation and rallying the South!" 
 
94 LETTEES OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 This, sir, is too serious a matter of news to be 
 treated by me in any other than the most serious 
 style. Is it possible, sir, that you have so long 
 been guilty of the misprision of the treason of 
 this conspiracy, or of that part of it within your 
 personal knowledge, divulging so grave and trea- 
 sonable tews neither to the Government nor to 
 the country! You have criminally concealed 
 facts that you profess made you acquainted with 
 the inceptive steps of the conspiracy in the South 
 that you now believe Mr. Lincoln to be right in 
 scourging as "rebellion." How far removed is 
 such conduct, sir, from "treason," in view of the 
 Northern definitions of that term, and the late 
 seizure of telegraphic dispatches to discover men 
 as traitors, who knew of the conspiracy, with 
 which you now boast an early personal acquaint- 
 ance? 
 
 But there is still another, even more painfully 
 glaring inconsistency in your statement quoted 
 above. This statement follows just after your 
 boast of sustaining the South, and in it, you style 
 the slavery question but a pretext for agitating and 
 rallying its people. If you did sustain the South, 
 sir, I do not conceal my gratification at this circum- 
 
LETTER TO EDWARD EYEREIT. 95 
 
 Stance ; — but, however I might delight in observ- 
 ing Northern men standing up in defence of the 
 rights and guarantied institutions of the South, I 
 would certainly be sorry to see any one of them 
 sustaining a people on an issue, which he might 
 hereafter confess to be a pretext, or giving his 
 support to any cause at the expense of honesty. 
 
 Briefly, sir, on the confessions of your own 
 statement, did you act patriotically, according to 
 your present standard of patriotism, in so long 
 concealing your "personal knowledge" of the 
 Southern conspiracy: — or did you act any more 
 honestly in sustaining the South when you were 
 convinced that the question of protecting her 
 institutions was but a pretext, and a mere element 
 to vitalize her conspiracy against the Union ? It 
 would be a needless and harsh gratuity for me, 
 sir, to answer these questions. It might betray 
 me into an offensive plainness of style, that might 
 be thought vulgar, in its applications to a highly 
 educated conscience like your own. You, cer- 
 tainly, have the fastidiousness of language to give 
 nicer answers to such questions than a plain man 
 too much accustomed to call things by their right 
 names. 
 
96 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 I pass, sir, to that portion of your letter more 
 particularly applicable to the present emergencies, 
 and which is, in fact, the gist of your communi- 
 cation. You admit that, up to the time of the 
 possession of Fort Sumter by South Carolina, it 
 was your opinion that if the seceded States were 
 "determined to separate, we had better part in 
 'peace.'' You cannot do less, sir, than make the 
 admission of this your former opinion; you had 
 busied yourself too much in notifying it to the 
 country, to deny or to conceal it noAv. You are 
 left to hunt a pretext for the very sudden con- 
 version of your policy of peace to your present 
 stimulations of a coercive war, and you pretend 
 to find it in the old and worn excuse of the attack 
 on Sumter. In one sense, the excuse is merely 
 ridiculous. But it covers too deep a meaning to 
 be dismissed so lightly. Whenever men are found 
 making excuses for changes of opinion, irrational 
 and opposite to facts, you may depend upon it, 
 sir, that they are rather seeking to save their 
 hypocrisy from too great an exposure than to en- 
 lighten their motives to others. The Sumter af- 
 fair has afforded to thousands, in the North, a 
 most flimsy and false excuse for loosing passions 
 
LETTER TO EDWAED EVERETT. 97 
 
 of hate against the South that had all along been 
 festering in the concealments of their hearts. 
 That event suddenly convinced them that the 
 South was really resolved to separate; it discon- 
 certed their hopes and plans of seducing her back 
 into the Union by false and temporizing speeches ; 
 it utterly disappointed the Northern expectation 
 that the South was not really in earnest, and that 
 "all would come out right" by a little hypocrisy 
 and affectation on the Nothern side; it snapped 
 as a rotten net, their vile and cheap schemes of 
 getting the South back into the Union by art and 
 deceit; and men, finding no longer any purpose 
 for concealment, threw aside their former pro- 
 fessions, quickly determined to coerce what they 
 could not cozen. This, sir, is the whole explana- 
 tion of the Northern "reaction" at the occur- 
 rence at Sumter. 
 
 But permit me to examine a little closely what 
 you say of this moving event. I give you, sir, 
 the benefit of a full quotation, with italics of my 
 own. 
 
 It was my opinion that, if they [the Cotton States] 
 would abstain from farther agf!;ression, and were deter- 
 mined to separate, we had better part in peace. But the 
 
98 LETTEBS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 wanton attack on Fort Sumter (which took place, not from 
 any military necessity, for what harm was a single com- 
 pany, cooped up in Charleston harbor, able to do to South 
 Carolina? but for the avowed purpose of "stirring the 
 blood" of the South, and thus bringing in the Border 
 States), and the subsequent proceedings at Montgomery, 
 have wholly changed the state of affairs. The South has 
 levied an unprovoked war against the Government of the 
 United States, the mildest and most beneficent in the world, 
 and has made it the duty of every good citizen to rally to 
 its support. 
 
 The excuse of tlie Sumter attack has served 
 other parties beside yourself, sir, as a convenient 
 handle for hypocrisy and falseness. To be used 
 as such, of course, it has to be put into a con- 
 venient shape of words. You speak of it as "a 
 wanton attack." How wanton on the part of the 
 South — how, even, evitable on her part, when 
 the Administration made the direct challenge, 
 which the South had forewarned the Government 
 at Washington that it would be constrained to 
 accept? This is a simple question, sir; but it 
 presents, I am persuaded, the whole issue of the 
 Sumpter complication, and severely indicates 
 where the responsibility for the collision lies. 
 
 There is a very wretched argument in your 
 
LETTER TO EDWARD EVERETT. 99 
 
 statenent above, which, wretched as it is, permit 
 me to reverse against yourself. You say that 
 there was no "military necessity" for the posses- 
 sion of the fort by South Carolina, as it was able 
 to do her no harm. Then pray, sir, in what re- 
 spect greater was the military necessity for the 
 Government to retain it, if it was so powerless to 
 control or to affect the seceded State ? 
 
 It was no question of military necessity. The 
 Government at Washington wanted the fort as an 
 appanage of its sovereignty. So did South 
 Carolina. And its possession by the latter, sir, 
 was but the incident of the separation you say^ 
 you had recommended ! It was but the logical 
 and legitimate conclusion of your own policy! 
 Why should you complain that South Carolina 
 should be in possession — and even bloodless pos- 
 session — of the fort, which very fact is but the 
 essential and inevitable carrying gut of your own 
 early recommendation of her sep^irate^overeignty I 
 
 I am sorry, sir, that you are so poor a logician. 
 Is it possible that a letter,y6onta,j4iing such rub- 
 bish as the above, was, a^'the editors excused it, 
 "written without thougl^t of its publication" (al- 
 though it is a little re;oarkable that the copy of 
 
100 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 a private letter, written to a gentleman in Virgi- 
 nia, should find its way back, through all the 
 interruptions of the mails, to a paper in Boston.) 
 Excuses may be readily made for weak fallacies 
 in a literary man, or even in a contributor to " Bon- 
 ner's Ledger," who affects a logical style. I give 
 you the benefit of such excuses. But can there 
 be any, sir, for wilful and open misstatements of 
 facts ? 
 
 I had hoped to discover no such undisguised 
 committals in your letter, satisfied, when I com- 
 menced to read the opening of it, that there would 
 be no falsehoods in it that would not be polished by 
 your scholarship, or covered by the elegant arts of 
 your &\>j\e. I am disappointed in one paragraph. 
 There, unfortunately, sir, you have descended to 
 that vulgat openness and directness which I had 
 occasion to t;ondemn at the commencement of this 
 letter. You have amused yourself by making 
 one single paragraph a clot of falsehoods. 
 
 You say that "the accredited leaders of the 
 Republican party, including the President-elect, 
 uniformly pledged themselves to that effect," name- 
 ly, 'Ho remove all sincere alarm, on the part of 
 the South, that their constitutional rights were 
 
LETTER TO ED WARD EVERETT. 101 
 
 threatened:' You add, "that the two houses, by 
 a constitutional majority, pledged themselves, in 
 like manner, against any future amendment of the 
 constitution violating the rights of the Souths' 
 When, sir, did Abraham Lincoln ever give such 
 pledges? What more did the two Houses of Con- 
 gress do than to declare in favor of an amend- 
 ment that only re-affirmed the Constitution not to 
 abolish slavery in the States, which had the oppo- 
 sition of sixty Kepublicans in the House of Repre- 
 sentatives? To call such gratuitous legislation as 
 this concession and security to the South, is but 
 to add insult and wantonness to misrepresentation. 
 There is one excuse, sir, which you make for 
 the conversion of your former position looking to- 
 wards peace, to your present warlike attitude that 
 is so entirely personal, that I shall treat it with 
 becoming brevity. You say, "when General 
 Beauregard proceeds to execute his threat, his 
 red hot cannon balls and shells will not spare the 
 roof that shelters my daughter and four little 
 children at Washington, nor my own roof in 
 Boston. Must I, because I have been the 
 steady friend of the South, sit still, while he 
 is battering my house about my ears?" 
 
102 LETTERS OF THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
 Your excuse, sir, seems to be faithfully copied 
 from Abraham Lincoln's anxious pleas for the 
 safety of his person. Do not be alarmed, sir. 
 Nerve yourself to resist the magnetic influences 
 of the royal fears of President Lincoln. Recom- 
 mend your friends to do the same, before the 
 whole North is shaking in unison with the daily 
 tremblings of the occupant of the White House. 
 The terrible General Beauregard, ''•with his red 
 hot cannon halls and shells," will scarcely harm 
 you, especially as you have engaged his mercy in 
 advance, by attesting in the same breath, in which 
 you exclaim your fears of him, what a "steady" 
 friend vou have been of the South ! I conp^ratu- 
 late you on so early supplications for safety. I 
 would assure your fears, sir. But, really, so 
 strongly are they expressed, that in concluding 
 this letter, I must confess to be in doubt, sir, 
 whether I shall leave you to suffer more from the 
 disorders of your conscience, or the visions which 
 distress you of the dreadful Beauregard, with his 
 "red hot" implements of war. 
 
 In ending these lines, it is due to make one 
 explanation. The task of a writer is petty and 
 unworthy to answer arguments so vapid as those 
 
LETTER TO EBWAED EVEEETT. 103 
 
 just passed in review. Understand then, sir, that 
 I have noticed your letter only because it was the 
 production of a man holding a certain public 
 position that was, in itself, not beneath notice. 
 Permit me thus to dismiss you. Your public 
 position is not important enough to warrant any 
 further correspondence. 
 
 I am, &c., 
 
 THE SOUTHERN SPY. 
 
THE BOOK FOR THE TIMES. 
 
 BLACK DIAMONDS. 
 
 [ Second Edition.] 
 
 Characterized, by the leading presses of the country, as 
 the best book ever published on the Society of the South. 
 Kead the notices of the press. 
 
 ** SLAVE LIFE IN THE SOUTH."* 
 
 In general we are strongly averse to mixing up special 
 questions in ethics, or in politics, vpith what is called polite 
 literature. Artistically viewed, we doubt whether the 
 mixture is ever allowable. Even satiric poetry we take it, 
 forms no exception to the rule ; for it is the province of 
 that species of literature to attack wickedness and folly 
 from the standpoint of admitted maxims of morality and 
 wisdom, not to agitate debatable or unsettled problems. 
 The introduction into the novel or poem of subjects per- 
 taining to strict polemics, or to severe philosophy, as the 
 main purpose of the work, produces an incongruous asso- 
 ciation, which is never agreeable and is often disgusting. 
 \^ho wants to read a novel designed to illustrate the 
 beauties of free trade or a protective tariff? Who does 
 read Montgomery's maudlin poem, or Longfellow's senti- 
 mental cant in rhyme, on the awful sin of negro slavery? 
 
 * From the Neiv Orleans Delta. Editorial. 
 
 6 
 
11 BLACK DIAMONDS. 
 
 Since V e publication of Mrs. Stowe's " Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin," which led the van of a frightful procession of 
 books of a similar order on both sides of the slavery 
 question, every reader of experience, taste, and discrimi- 
 nation, is predisposed to turn with loathing from any issue 
 from the press whose title pa,^e has a perceptible squint- 
 ing toward the vexed and vexatious subject. lie is in- 
 clined to avoid it as a premeditated bore and deliberate 
 swindle — a delusion and a snare — a cunning "dodge," 
 by which he may be made the victim of self-inflicted 
 twaddle. Of course there is frequently much matter of 
 pith and moment in the i:umerous books in which the dis- 
 cussion of the slavery question, in all, or a few of its 
 aspects, is thrown into the shape of stories or sketches. 
 Indeed, there are some that touch the subject in a way so 
 incidental and natural, and with so little of a partisan or 
 disputatious spirit, that if the predisposition against them 
 be once overcome, they may be read with equal entertain- 
 ment and instruction. 
 
 Among the last productions to which we allude, we un- 
 hesitatingly place a small and unpretending volume, being 
 a series of short sketches of slave life in the South, in the 
 form of letters originally addressed by the author, Edward 
 A. Pollard, of Washington City, to his friend, David M. 
 Clarkson, of Newburgh, New-York. 
 
 The author appears to be a thorough Southerner in edu- 
 cation, opinion, sympathy, and attachment; yet, his let- 
 ters are remarhahly free from secimial prejudice and 
 acerhity, and, in truth, contain sketches that are amongst 
 the most Catliolic, and tolerant, and genial, we ever had 
 
NOTICES OF THE PRESS. HI 
 
 occasion to peruse. He would seem to have traveled 
 much, to have observed much, and to know much of 
 various countries and peoplos. But the negro nature he 
 especially knows, profoundly, intimately ; knows it, not 
 by intellection merely, but also by heart ; knows it, not 
 through the cold light of ethnological science only, but 
 most of all, through the warm, enkindling recollections of 
 boyhood and youth. The negro, who, in his true nature, 
 is always a boy, let him be ever so old. is better understood 
 by a boy, than by a whole academy of philosophers, unless 
 the boy element in the said philosophers is unusually long- 
 lived and prosperous. The author, in this case, guided 
 by his boy-knowledge of the negro, cannot misconceive or 
 untruthfully delineate him. How appreciative, how lov- 
 ing, how tender and sympathetic he is in his delineations, 
 
 we will let a few extracts show. 
 
 * -:f * * -x- ^ 
 
 From the Neio- York News. 
 Mr. Pollard, of Virginia, is a Southern gentleman of 
 
 the true stamp. He knows human nature well We 
 
 can promise all an ample reward for che cost and trouble 
 of an acquaintance with the contents of this most inter- 
 esting book. The letters are so many jewels in their way 
 — black by the subject, but brilliantly lightsome in it. It 
 is a little mine full of promised diamonds. Go and dig 
 deep within its limits and be satisfied. 
 
 Frovi Be Boio's Review. 
 It abounds in incidents of Southern slaves and masters, 
 illustrating, very happily, the patriarchal relation which 
 
IV BLACK DIAMONDS. 
 
 subsists between the races of the South, and defending the 
 institution more than all argument, from the assaults of 
 ignorance or prejudice. 
 
 From the Mobile Register. 
 
 They are, beyond doubt, the most life-like delineation^ 
 of the negro ever drawn with the pon. The work is origi- 
 nal in its conception, and on its first publication, in the 
 form of detached letters to a Northern friend, attracted 
 no little attention, and must have efi'ected much good in 
 free labor regions. It will I e read with interest at the 
 South also, and we trust that our section will not forever 
 deserve the reproach of despising its own literary talent, 
 and discouraging the treatment of the subjects which pon- 
 cern it most. 
 
 From the Lynchhurg Virginian. 
 
 Mr. Pollard describes the negro — his habits, his affec- 
 tions, his religion, his aspirations — not from hearsay, as 
 do most writers, but from actual observation of, and asso- 
 ciation with him. Reared in Virginia, he displays that 
 knowledge of negro character which can only be gained 
 from seeing him in his appropriate sphere — a laborer upon 
 a Southern plantation. It is the best portrait of the 
 Southern slave we have ever seen drawn. 
 
A BRILIIAXT AND SPLEPID SOlTIIEIiX BOOK. 
 
 In Press and will be ready Dec. lOlli. 
 
 CAUSE and CONTRAST; an Essay on the American Crisis. 
 
 By T. W. MacMahon. 
 Which ve will publish in a few days. We do not hesitate 
 to aver — for it has been so pronounced by competent and 
 distinguished critics — that this is among the most compre- 
 hen^ivt', brilliant, scholarly, charming, able and conclusive 
 books that has yet appeared in exposition of Southern politi- 
 cal philosophy. Its matter is eiudite and profound, and the 
 style in which i is compo>ed is rarely rivalled. While 
 blending the earliest transactioys of men with tjiose of the* 
 present, it is as fascinating as any novel — a wonc truly suit- 
 able for both sexes; for the student and the people. In 
 amplitude of illustration it is rich, classical and elegant; and 
 its logic is invincible. 
 
 The following are commendations by gentlemen who read 
 portions of the manuscript: 
 
 From the Richmond Whig. 
 " It discusses, with rare ability and learning, the institution 
 of slavery in all its aspects, as well as the social and political 
 distinctions between the people of the Confederate States 
 and those of the U. S. The style is ornate, gl< wing and 
 eloquent. We predict that it will produce a sensation; take 
 its place among standard literature; and have the etfect of 
 banishing from our midst the hurtful oftVpring of the morbid 
 and prolific press of the North." 
 
 From the Dispatch. 
 *'VVe have read portions of the MSS.. and we pronounce 
 it beMtitil'ul, excellent, and conclusive. We hope that it will 
 obtain the circulation that it merits, not only in America, but 
 in Europe." 
 
 We might continue similar extracts from the Examiner, 
 Charleston Mercury, and o her jourials, if space permitted. 
 The work wid be ready in a few days; one octavo volume, 
 pica type, and published at one dollar, with the usual dis- 
 count to the trade. 
 
 Orders, to receive prompt attention, should be addressed to 
 WEST & JOHNSTON, Publishers, 
 
 145 Main street, Richmond, Va. 
 
^■^ 
 
WEST & JOHNSTON, 
 
 Booksellers and iP-ablisliers, 
 
 PUBLISH and offer for sale the LARGEST COLLECTION 
 
 of MILITARY BOOKS in the Southern Confederacy. 
 
 Amongst them are — 
 COL. WiA[. GILHAM'S MANUAL FOR VOLUNTEERS 
 
 AND MILITIA OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES. 
 
 Price, $2 50— l.v Mail, $3. 
 A MANUAL OF 'MILITARY SURGERY, for the use of 
 
 tlie Sur{j;e<>iis m the Confederate Army. Price, $2 50 — 
 
 hv Mail, $3. 
 INSTRUCTIONS FOR FIELD ARTILLERY. Price, $1. 
 INSTRUCTIONS FOR FIELD ARTILLERY, extracted 
 
 from Gilham'a Manual for Volunteers and Militia — 50c. 
 THE TROOPER'S MANUAL. By Col. J. Lucius Davis. 
 
 New Edition — $1 25. 
 NEW MAP OF THE SEAT OF WAR IN VIRGINIA— 
 
 Oolurod— $1. ^ 
 
 MAP OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES-50c. 
 BAYONET EXERClSli: and SKIRMISHER'S DRILL. 
 
 Bv Ci)l R. Milton Cary. Beautifuil}' Illu.sirated— $1. 
 THE, VOLUNTEER'S HAND BOOK-50e. 
 HARDEE'S TACTICS— two volumes — the only complete 
 
 edition, with plates— 12 50. 
 THE SCHOOL OF THE GUIDES ; OR, THE PRACTI- 
 CAL SOLDIER. Illustrated— $1. \ 
 COL. RICHARDSON'S VOLUNTEER'S MANUAL—, 
 
 SI 50. • < 
 
 ROBERTS' HANDBOOK OF ARTILLERY-with ' 
 
 plates — $1. 
 BUCKHOLTZ'S INFANTRY CAMP DUTY— 50o. 
 BUCKHOLTZ'S SCIENCE OF WAR— 75c. 
 MAHAN'S OUTPOST DUTY— $1. 
 THE NEW MAP0F-V;RGINIA— $1. 
 SOUTHERN MILITARY MANUAL -$l. 
 PICTURE OF THE BATTLE OF BULL RUN, July 2l8t, 
 
 Iteautifully colored — $1. 
 ARMY REGULATIONS, adopted for the use of the Con- 
 federate States— 12 50. 
 
 IN PRESS AND NEARLY READY : 
 
 Cause and Contrast, an Essay on the American Crisis, 
 showing; the Antiquity, Universality, Justice and Perma- 
 nence of the Institution of Slavery.