THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

New Zealander, Volume XVIII, Issue 1741, 12 November 1862, Page 3

THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

[From the “ Times’ ” Correspondent.] New York, Aug. 11

“.It lust we haven Government.’’ Such on Saturday morning was the cry of the jubilant Republican party, willing to consent to any abridgment of the public liberty to gratify its political hatred. “At last we hive, a Government,’’ echoed the great crowd of silly people who admire vigour of action because it is vigour, and not because it is justice. “ At last we have a Government,’’ chimed in the astute fiends of the South, who do not choose to declare their real sentiments in a more straightforward fashion, for fear of Fort Lavayctte, and who maliciously applaud every act of tyranny committed by the Federal Government, in the hope that its ed'ect will be to disgust all moderate people with the war and the Administration. All these united their voices in one loud chorus, the last being the most obstreperous. The cause of the clamour, half exultant and half deprecatory, was that the War Secretary, with the President at his back, had promulgated an Imperial edict or ukase on the previous evening through the agency of the telegraphic wires, preventing all strangers and citizens from leaving the country without passports, and furthermore forbidding all persons whatsoever from proceeding beyond the limits of the particular State in which they happened to be domiciled. Here was a strong Government with a vengeance—strong as that of the Czar at Warsaw, and quite as arbitrary. The reason alleged—for Mr. Stanton and the President, unlike other despots, condescended to explain the grounds on which they acted —was that there was so rapid an exodus of persons liable to military service under the recent conscription, that it would be unjust to the Republic, and to the loyal persons wiio remained at the post of duty, to suffer such multitudes of people to expatriate themselves. The rabid Abolitionists and ultra Republicans were delighted with the act, justified on the tyrant’s plea of necessity, anil exhibited altogether so slavish a subserviency to power for the furtherance of their own party objects as to show how abundant are the materials for a despotism which exist in this country. If there be any ambitious and unprincipled soldier before Richmond, in the valley of the Shenandoah. at New Orleans, or elsewhere, “biding his time” to topple over into the mire and blood of the w r ar the shaky fabric of the Republic, and erect a new form of Government in its stead, he must have chuckled in the solitude of his tent or bivouac at the base servility and still baser intolerance of other people’s liberties which the last few days have exhibited throughout the North. Nor was this edict the only one of arbitrary power which Friday night produced for the study of such a soldier. The Habeas Corpus Act was again suspended throughout the country; and it was declared to bo treason in any person to discourage volunteer enlistments, either by speech or writing; treason .subjecting the offender to imprisonment in Fort Lafayette or any other of the Bastilles of the Atlantic coast, at the pleasure of the Government and without form of trial. As regards this Inst decree, it appeared to be taken for granted that such men as Mr. Wendall Phillips, who belongs to the dominant party by which Mr. Lincoln was elected to the chief magistracy, were not to bo affected; and treason is only to he considered treason when it flows from the mouth or the pen of a Democrat, or of some poor journeyman painter who has no one to advise, defend, or take any interest in him. It is Democrats alone, and those of the highest social standing, who are to languish in the forts on the seaboard on mere suspicion, without proof, or even charge against them. The Republicans arc exempt from the persecution, and may be as free as they please until democracy shall be laid utterly prostrate, and then, perhaps, tieir turn will come. The Etna and Saxonia steamers were advertised to sail on Saturday morning—the one for Liverpool, the other for Southampton. The passengers, unsuspicious of evil, and unaware of the telegraphic orders of the War Secretary, proceeded in due course to the wharves with their goods and chattels. They found the approaches and gangways in the possession of the police, were denied the right to travel if they were American citizens in the prime of life, and if they were aliens were consigned to the consulates of their native countries to obtain passports. Great were the uproar and dUcqntoftL oj] wliQrr> the govern.

merit had not the shadow of a claim, and who were returning home on business or pleasure, lost their passage in default of procuring passports at a moment's notice ; while hundreds of Irishmen, who had never been naturalized, and who in consequence of the war and the conscription had renounced all intention of becoming American citizens, were thrown back on their British nationality, and, unable to prove it without formalities occupying more than a day, were compelled to remain in New York till the sailing of another steamer. 1 happened, about eleven o’clock in the morning, to be at the wharf on the North River, alongside of which the steamers of the Inman line are usualfy moored, and was witness of the English and Irish discontent, and I must add of the Yankee insolence and brutality that were exhibited throughout the day. The police were courteous as well as firm, and bore the outburst of Irish anger with remarkable good humour; but the mob of Yankees, composed of lads too young and of gray-beards too old to be affected by the conscription, behaved—or misbehaved—in a manner that was very trying to the patience of the English, and still more so to the quarrelsome excitability of the Irish. The latter were mostly steerage or secondclass passengers, but seemed from their dress and the quantity of luggage they had brought, to be well-to-do people. They insisted that they were not American citizens, asked when America had ceased to be a free country, and vehemently denied the right of any policeman to deprive them of the liberty of going to Ireland by any vessel and on any day they pleased, if they had paid their passage-money. “ Get your passports, gentlemen,” said the police captain, “and you may go when you please.” “Is it a passport you mane,” said one sturdy fellow, who looked as if he could have enacted in his own person all the fun as well as all the fighting of Donnybrook, “and why r the devil did not you say so last week, when I would have had it ready for you ? Passports! and be hanged to you! It’s no passport that I’ll take to come back again, any how.” And he proceeded with a swarm of his countrymen in search of the office of the British Consul in a temper that bodied ill for any one who should tread upon his coat-tail on his way thither, or who should come with hostile intent within reach of his arm. Mr. Stanton had not deemed it courteous or necessary, in issuing his ukase, to acquaint the British or any other Consul with his intentions; and Saturday morning found those gentlemen suddenly overwhelmed with a mass of business, which they found it all but impossible to attend to. The British aud Prussian Consulates suffered most. The office of Mr. Archibald, who is temporarily absent in England, was so crowded with intending refugees from the conscription, that the acting Vice-Consul, Mr. Edwards," was unable to mount his own staircase without the assistance of the police to clear the way; and in the course of the day near upon a thousand persons, mostly Irish, and about two hundred of them persons who had paid their passage-money and intended to go home by the Etna or the Saxouia, were enabled to certify in due form that they were British subjects. The Vice-Consul opened his office for a couple of hours on Sunday to expedite the business so suddenly thrust upon him, and all this day (Monday) the crowd, bent on the same errand, has been equally great, and till equally determined to escape the draught or to leave the country. Similar scenes were enacted at the German Consulates; and the result of the three days’ work was that the United States lost some thousands of citizens, or persons who would have become citizens if it had not been for the draught ; and that the Americans who had been smitten with so intense a desire to visit foreign parts, and to leave M’Clellan, Pope, Butler, and the Federal Government to their late, whatever it might be, were compelled to remain in their native land until quieter times, and to learn to their sorrow that their Government had a heavy hand, and a powerful will that contains within itself a new law and a new constitution. Passengers, whether alien or American, who were proceeding to the West Indies or California, were subjected to the same interference and inconvenience. At the railway stations nil who attempted to book through to Canada —of whom there were many hundreds—found themselves in tiie same predicament as the ocean travellers, except a very few old gentlemen 15 or 20 years beyond the maximum recruiting age of five-and-lbrty, who claimed, as American citizens, the right to go to Canada if they pleased, and had the claim allowed. The terms of Mr. Stanton’s ukase were so stringent that they seemed to apply even to pleasure-travellers to Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. The consequence was that the usual weekly excursions of toil-worn and heat-exhausted citizens to the sea-side, from Saturday to Monday, were greatly diminished in number, many timid or ignorant people preferring to remain sweltering and simmering in the hot sun of New York rather than run the risk of offending the War Secretary, and of being conveyed to Fort Lafayette as skulkers and traitors. The average number of persons of all nationalities, including many Americans with Southern sympathies, who have led the country since the conscription was ordered, is said by those who have the means of forming an estimate, to have been at least 1,000 a day, while the voluntary enlistments for the army have not been half that number. The press of New York pretends to be very indignant at the runaways, whom it stigmatizes as “cowards” if they be Americans, and as “ ungrateful vagabonds” it they be Irish or Germans. But why cowards, it may be asked. The Americans do not deserve the epithet from their own countrymen or any one else, as they daily prove, and and will prove again whenever they fight in a cause with which they can sympathize. It seems to me that it is not because they are cowards, but because they object to fight against their fellow-citizens, and because they disapprove the inception, conduct, and principle of the war, that they refuse to shed their blood for the Federal Government, and adopt such means as they can to avoid giving their aid to the prolongation of the strife. Neither ought the Irish or Germans to be declared ungrateful because, having come to a country which they believed to be free, they desire to leave it when they discover it to be despotic ; or because they condemn the policy of a Government that considers the conquest of 10,000,000 of unwilling people to be dearer and more precious than the liberty, well-being, and progress of the 20,000,000 whom it goads to unprofitable and unnatural warfare. If the charge of ingratitude lies anywhere it lies against the Federal Government, that seduced the ablebodied population of the Old World to forsake their homes on the promise of liberty and exemption from the grinding taxation of Europe, to replenish, cultivate, ami enrich America, and that suddenly turns round upon them when they refuse to fight its battles voluntary, because their souls abhor the pretext on which the war is waged; and not only taxes them more heavily than they were taxed in their own countries, but enrols them in a conscription, ordered on the sole authority of the President, acting as if he were an irresponsible Czar, or other autocrat claiming to rule by right divine. These people have learnt to love liberty since they came to America, and do not understand that their duty is to allow their thews and sinews to be hired out for hangman’s work against the citizens of the Southern States, who have the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that they have themselves.

But though the threatened conscription has had these and other bad effects, and will have worse before many days, it has had one good effect for the Federal cause which the President perhaps intended. It has expedited the voluntary enlistments for the first batch of 300,000 men. The ’■* rowdies” and the mercenaries have been stirred up to clutch the bounty money, especially in the New England States, many of which have filled up their full quota of men since the decree for draught was issued. Whether the fact speaks most for the greediness, the patriotism, or the fanaticism of New England, I am unable to determine; but if greed and fanaticism go together and both assume the mask of patriotism, the spur and the whip are strong, and the result can be attributed to the particular cause which best suits the whim or the idiosyncrasy of the observer. In New York State, and throughout the West, where the Irish and Germans arc most abundant, and where the wages are higher than in the bleak North-east, the voluntary recruitment has not made such rapid progress, though the government organs would have it inferred that the numbers will be filled up before the loth. This I doubt, but I do not in the least doubt that the fact will be so stated whether it be true or false, and that the conscription will be relinquished as far as that batch is concerned. The opposition to the draught is so great iu some of the Western States that efforts have been made to induce the government to extend the time of voluntary enlistments from the 15th lost, to the Ist of October, but it is exceedingly doubtful whether the President is iu a position to accede to the proposition. August 12 The telegraph has been for once allowed to inform the people that there has been a severe battle, in which the Federal army has not been victorious. There had been vague rumours for some days of an approaching conflict in the Shenandoah valley between General “ Stonewall ” Jackson, who never boasts, and General I’opc, who does little else; sonic ol which rumours had gone so far as to allege, so lately as I riday last, that the rival forces had met on Thursday, and that Pope had been utterly routed. The reports were not generally believed; but they proved to be premonitory of the truth, though premature and exaggerated. The shock of arms took place on Saturday night, near Culpepper Court-house, on the road between Gordonsvillc, on the Virginia Central Railroad to Richmond, 1 and the once famous position of Manassas Junction, j As usual, the Federal journals insist that the Coufedci raty anu\ was three or four times more numerous than > their own; and that if the result was not a Federal j victory, it as the wqrit a dpvyq Uj wWfh

the Confederate loss was greater than their own. The loss on both sides is estimated at between 2,000 and 3,000 in killed and wounded, besides 1,000 prisoners. There does not appear to have been a general engagement, and the Federal army, if it has escaped, which is not yet placed beyond a doubt, escaped by good luck far more than by good management. General Banks held his own bravely against a superior force until General Pope came to the rescue. The latter gained no laurels in the encounter. He was evidently taken unprepared, and very narrowly escaped being made a prisoner, a catastrophe that would have carried delight into every Southern camp and household without being very disgraceful to the North. Such details of the battle ns have been allowed to appear will be found in the New York journals of the last two days—details from which it is difficult to extract the real history of the event. A more elaborate, and, possibly, a more faithful report was prepared for a Philadelphia journal, but was suppressed by General Pope, from which it may be inferred thas the Confederate advantage was much greater than Pope or the government thinks it wise at present to avow. Most likely the affair was only a preliminary skirmish, though on a scale of unusual magnitude, and the real battle, which may decide the fate of Washington and Baltimore and the fortunes of the South, is yet to come, or may be in progress at this moment. Wall-street has taken the matter rather quietly, and gold has neither gone up nor stocks gone down in consequence. The only thing that has gone down appreciably is the reputation of General Pope, who is too much of a boaster and too little of a performer to be a favourite of any one except of the President.

Altogether the signs and symptoms portend that the current week will be prolific of great events, both in the Shenandoah Valley and before Richmond. It is obviously the policy of the Confederates to strike heavy blows at both points before cither the mercenary volunteers or the unwilling conscripts of the North can be brought into action, that every one anticipates a speedy catastrophe. More than one half of M’Clellan’s army are prostrated by the heat of the weather (94 degrees in the shade), unwholesome food, and bad water; and the Confederates know it and will profit by the knowledge.

in the meantime a savage spirit seems to be taking possession of that portion of the Northern people who still indulge in the vain dream of Southern subjugation. The corruption of officials, the imbecility of the government, the inefficiency of the generals, the divided opinions on the subject of emancipation, the hostility of the foreign element of the population to the further prosecution of the war, the disinclination of the trading and professional classes to fight in their own persons, though they are willing enough to pay others to fight for them, and the unexpectedly long duration of the war have each combined to produce a feeling of exasperation that is fast assuming an aspect of bloodthirstiness. These people not only -approve every illegal and unconstitutional act that the President and his Secretaries commit or authorize, but they bellow lustily for confiscation and the gallows for the mildest forms of what they call treason. They support and admire Butler. They have faith in Pope—not because he is a good soldier, of which there is no proof, but because he is truculent and vain glorious. They think Blenker a good general, because he allows his soldiers to pillage. They affect to consider the charges against General Mitchell and Colonel Turchin to be purely malicious, though Turchin has very properly been dismissed from the army. They inveigh against M’Clellan because he is humane, and respects both the letter and the spirit ot the Constitution. They call the President a fool; and declare that his moderation will ruin the country. They call for the enrolment and arming of the negroes, both in the North and in the South. They insist upon a “ short shrift and a high gallows” for traitors great and small; and, last of all, they clamour for the infliction ot the penalty of death on all deserters from the Federal army. Though these rabid people are in a small minority just now, it is unhappily the tendency of revolulims to cast rabid minorities into the high places of power, and to maintain them there, until they in their turn are superseded by others more rabid than themselves. This class has grown bolder every day since the defeat of M’Clellan, and should General Pope be routed or captured in the Shenandoah Valley, or should any other great defeat and humiliation occur to the Federal arms, some “ great and stunning misfortune” as Mr. Wendell Phillips calls it, such as the capture of Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Washington —a result which that orator but no statesman openly declares he prays for—this class would in all probability make a desperate effort to supercede the President, and put General Fremont or some other theorist and abolitionist in his place. The whole.political atmosphere is surcharged with electricity, and the next thunderbolt that may be launched at the heart of the Republic may come from a Northern, and not from a Southern sky. The actual government is the government of the minority, and it is goaded to violence by a still smaller minority than itself. Were the people, who in their hearts detest the war, —were the wealthy citizens who are striving to escape from the vortex of revolution into the peaceable haven of Europe—were the countless friends of the old and deserted Constitution of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton to unite their incohesive ranks, and exhibit half the courage of Mr. Wendell Phillips and the bigots and zealots who agree with him, the conduct of affairs would come into

the hands of the majority, and there would be peace once more in this miserable and distracted country. But these quiet people depend upon a European mediation to save them. That failing, they know not where to look for security, or even for hope.

Ahkivml of the Tdscaeoka at Kiagstown,— The Federal sloop of war Tuscarora arrived at Kingstown, from Holyhead, on the 9th. On coming to anchor between the piers, she was boarded by Captain Robinson, R.N., inspecting commander of the coastguard and senior officer of the port; Capt. Hutchinson, K.N., harbour master; and Mr. Withicombe, chief chief officer of the coastguard. The sailors of the Tuscarora designate their ship a gunboat, and on expressing our surprise at her magnitude, they replied, “ We belong to a monster nation, and we must have monster gunboats.” When the Tuscarora arrived in harbour, the usual invitations were forwarded on board from the Royal St. George and Royal Irish Yacht Clubs to the officers of the ship, permitting them to be honorary members of the clubs during their stay in harbour. Captain Craven, wo understand, wished to teke in a supply of coals, but the authorities prevented him doing so until they communicated with the higher officials in London. The commander of the Tuscarorar received an intimation on the 12th from the Collector of Customs that he should leave the harboar without delay. The Tuscarora left, in consequence, on the 13th, aj T3oa.ni. Destination unknown. Tub Tuscarora.— The Tuscarora left the Belfast Lough on the 20th; her destination unknown. It now appears that she has been dodging the Ajax for the purpose of getting coals on board, in defiance of tho orders issced by the Admiralty, The Tuscarora coaled within three montas of a British port, and did not proceed, as she was bound to do, to the United States. She remained hovering about the coast,on the look out for Confederate vesself. She put into Kingstown harbour with the view of getcing coals. Unable to accomplish this there, partly in consequence of the return of the Ajax, she weighed anchor and stcaCcd with all speed to Belfast Lough, where, according to previous arrangement, she received a supply of coal amounting to 100 tons, havieg anchored outside the jurisdiction of the Harbour Commissioners. The Collector of Customs, Mr. Shelley, at once took the matter up and served notice on the Federal captain to depart in 24 hours. A revenue cutter was placed alonsido the Tuscarora to prevent fuather violations of the neutrality law’s, and at the same time the matter was reported to the Admiralty. The Belfast people ask, not unreasonably, what would have been done ij toe .Federal captain had refxsed to leave the Lough, and had persisted in taking coals on board. A telegram received from Belfast states that a suspicious-looking steamer was then entering the Lough. She was supposed to be tho Tuscarora, returning to take on board the rest of her supply of coal under cover ot night.