THE WAR AND THE PRESIDENCY. [FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.]
New York, March 12, 1864. HAD the steamer of last Saturday been detained twenty-four hours I could have sent you an account of the why and the how of Kilpatrick's movement upon Richmond. It was made, it appears, not in the expectation of taking and holding the seat of the rebel Government; but in the hope of surprising it, releasing the pri- soners at Belle Isle, and perhaps taking Mr. Davis and his Cabinet prisoners. It was much more nearly successful than we supposed at the date of my last letter. Kilpatrick penetrated the second line of defences round Richmond, attacked the third, and was not driven off; but owing to the failure of Colonel Dahlgren (who had been detached from and was expected to rejoin the main body) to appear, he felt obliged to abandon his enterprise, and make his way onward to General Butler's lines at Yorktown with all possible speed. In this last raid upon Richmond General Kilpatrick traversed six counties of Virginia within the enemy's lines by a route of at least two hundred miles, so little known to him and his command that the failure of Colonel Dahlgren to effect the expected junction before Richmond, and therefore the failure of the whole affair, was caused by the treachery of a negro guide. It affords me no satisfaction whatever to know that the guide was hanged instantly upon detection. Ulric Dahlgren himself, a young Scandi- navian, but native here and to our manner born, was killed by a party which lay in ambush in the woods through which the road lay by which he was pushing on to join Kilpatrick. The attack was made at midnight, and was successful in its main object, the interruption of the march of the detachment and the death of its gallant and determined young leader, who started on this enterprise with the yet tender stump of his amputated thigh strapped to his saddle. Nearly all of the detachment, however, succeeded in reaching our lines. The war correspondents and paragraphists of some of our newspapers have called the rebels who killed Dahlgren "mid- night assassins "—a very foolish ebullition of feeling. It was war, horrid enough, but only war. Any other people under like circum- stances would have done likewise. The Richmond papers publish orders and addresses said to have been found on Dahlgren's person, and which may be genuine. They, on their part, foam at the mouth about these orders, and particularly one p ae in them, which says, "we will not allow the rebel leader Davis and his traitorous crew to escape." This the Richmond editors will have it means that Mr. Davis and his Cabinet were to be taken, if possible, and hanged on the spot ; and thereupon they denounce Dahlgren and his party as Thugs and assassins, and call for their immediate death without trial by order of the military authorities. But, as one with half an eye and a whole idea in his head can see, it was only intended that Mr. Davis and his advisers should be taken prisoners and carried off within our lines; and any one who thinks that General Lee would not get Mr. Lincoln and his Cabinet into a corresponding position, if possible, takes the rebels for greater fools than they have shown themselves to be. But this belief, real or affected, has been made the occasion of putting the prisoners of war taken from us during this raid into dungeons, where they are heavily ironed, and where each one has a negro companion forced upon him by way of indignity. It is telegraphed from Washington, on the authority of the son of one of our Admirals, that on the approach of Kilpatrick to Richmond Mr. Davis ordered powder to be placed under the Libby Prison, and all others in which our men were confined, that if the attack were successful the prisons might be blown up. I am loth to believe this. And yet why not ? According to the laws of war, the Confederate leader would have been justified in ordering all the prisoners to be shot ; and must powder be inclosed in metal tubes to make it a lawful means of destruction? The fact seems to be that the insurgents at Richmond were, and still are, very thoroughly frightened. And well they may be frightened. What is the condition of a country which is thus passable to an enemy, and what the safety of a seat of government which can be thus attacked and almost taken temporary possession of by a dashing cavalry raid ? Apropos, General Longstreet was not in Richmond, but hundreds of weary miles away, on the borders of East Tennessee, where he remains. Of General Sher- man, whose movement threatening Mobile I have spoken of in my last two letters, we know nothing, except that he is returning slowly, and thus far safely, to Vicksburg.
The manner in which unity of feeling in the slave States is brought about, and in which the insurgent armies have been recruited, was strikingly exemplified at Raleigh, North Carolina, last week. Twenty-three men who had been forced into the rebel army and had deserted to us were found among the prisoners taken in a skirmish. They were condemned to be hanged as deserters. They were offered their lives if they would enter the " Confederate " service ; but, to a man, they spurned the offer, and died for the honour of the flag which they had volunteered to defend. It would seem that by the end of this war hanging will be an honourable death.
March 19.—The question now beginning to agitate our body politic is—" Who are to be the nominees for the presidental election in November?" The nominations will not be made until July ; but the intervening months will be passed by us in that public attack and defence of principles and men, and that dexterous use and, I freely admit, abuse of every measure of the party in power, for the purpose, on one side, of begetting, and on the other of destroying, public confidence, which in this country always precedes the great quadriennial election. Who are to be the candidates in the coming contest is yet uncertain. That is the very question which is to be decided during the turmoil, political and military, of the next three months. The leaders of the Democratic party still keep a bold front, and act as if they meant not only to go into the fight, but to win it. They are old campaigners and accustomed to victory, and they know that this bearing goes a great way to ensure success. But it must be confessed that the party is sadly distracted. The peace pro-slavery men, it is true, are in a small minority, and are openly set aside and scouted by their old asso- ciates. But there is in the very ostentation with which this is done a sign of some uneasiness, a plain indication of the lack of that calm confidence with which the party was wont to an-
nounce and remorselessly pursue its policy in days gone by, quite careless of threatened divisions in its ranks. So the peace
men will not be quiet ; but, on the contrary, they cry out more than ever that peace—slavery if pu choose—and State sovereignty form the only basis of a restoration of the Govern- ment upon the principles of the old Democratic party. oo
creatures They are right ; but they will see that the old Democratic party is as much among the things that were and
csnnot be again as the old Confederacy of States which was super- seded by the National Union in 1789. The larger and the wiser number of the party now acknowledge that their old fetish slavery has lost its power for ever, and they spit upon their fallen idol. They also sustain an unflinching assertion of the authority of the Government by force of arms. From present appearances the candidate of this party is to be General M'Clellan ; and I must confess that at this time I cannot discover another man in the whole country whom they could bring forward with any chance, not, I will say, of success, but of making even a respectable show at the election in November. His position, unfortunately for him as a soldier, is well suited to the needs of those who wish to use him for political purposes. For these War Democrats hope to un- seat the present Administration by attacking its war policyas feeble, inefficient, and wavering, and by making the people believe that Mr. Lincoln and his Cabinet have used their war powers chiefly to strengthen their party. Under these circumstances it is a great advantage that General M'Clellan is a martyr. He is to be held up ail the great soldier of the country, who was thwarted in his designa and finally removed from command because he was a Democrat, and, therefore, a Republican administration could not 4ford to allow him to have the chief glory of crushing the rebellion. ljnfortunately there is just enough semblance of truth in this pretenceto mislead the unthinking and confirm the stiffnecked among Otnaja who cling strongly to old party associations, and have open or lurking sympathies with their former allies, the slaveholders /Ant General M'Clellan, however, has not yet received as a candi- date the open adhesion of any of the prominent men of the Demo- cratic party. At the meeting held in New York during the past week to bring him forward (note particularly that it was held on the evening of St. Patrick's Day, and that nine-tenths of those present were half-drunken Irishmen !) no Democrat of even re- spectable position was present as a leader, with the single exception of Mr. Amos Kendall, who is so old and so bygone that I have hot even heard his name before this occasion since I was a boy. The Republicans—I can hardly call them as a body the sup- porters, of the Administration—are as incompact as the Democrats, with this additional disadvantage, that whereas the Peace Demo- crats are so comparatively few that what remains of the Democratic party exists almost as a whole, the Republicans are almost halved by their disagreement as to policy and ea to men. Mr. Chase, who ten days ago was the favourite, and the destined csncliciate for nomination with the radical abolition section of the party,„, has retired from the canvass, it is true. But he retired only because it seemed politic that he should do so ; because the people of his own State, Ohio, expressed a preference for the continuation of Mr. Lincoln in office. But there is nothing to prevent Mr. Chase from accepting the nomination of his party, if he should receive it, and if the Ohio delegates in convention should unite in making it. But meanwhile it is necessary that there should be some man brought forward by the radical party—some "standard-bearer," in the nauseous spread-eagle political slang of the day—whom they can use in their attacks upon the Administration of Mr. Lincoln. This is as necessary to the Democrats as to the Radical Republicans, for the object of both is the division of the body of electors upon whom Mr. Lincoln can rely. Should Mr. Lincoln, or any other man, receive the hearty and undivided support of all patriotic men who, whether they were called Democrats or Republicans three years ago, mean that the rebellion shall be put down and slavery extinguished, he would be elected as by acclamation. Therefore the Democratic leaders themselves are assisting adroitly to bring General Fremont's name before the people as the extreme anti- slavery candidate. For they know that Fremout has the very qualification as a candidate which makes M'Clellan so eligible. He is a martyr. The radical abolitionists (and by radical abolitionists I mean those who think only of slavery in this revolution, and would strike at it blindly, without any consideration of prudence as to fitness of time, or place, or circumstance, or feasibility), these men look upon General Fremont as a sacrifice to the time-serving policy. of Mr. Lincoln and his Cabinet, who, they say, were afraid that he would put down the rebellion too soon by destroying slavery, and thus by becoming the popular idol a the day carat them from power. All the disappointed and narrow-sonled men who cleave from the Administration which haa been blind to their merits or their claims attach themselves either to the M'Clellan or the Fremont faction, and thus the double opposition to Mr. Lincoln swells daily. The anti-slavery grumblers, "who are honestly dissatisfied with the manner in which the war lian been conducted, and whose candidate for the nomination was Mr. Chase, now tarn to General Fremont ; and I notice the yet ,most secret indications of a very strong effort to force his nomi-
nation upon the Republican party. I say force, because I am sorry to confess that I see signs of an intention to hold General Fremont's name over the nominating convention in terror, with the intimation that unless he receives the nomination of the party his friends will nominate him as an independent candidate ; and he has so many partizans, honest and otherwise, that this would go far to insure the election of the Democratic candidate. It is not im- probable that the preliminary skirmishing may be done under Fremont's name, and that when the convention assembles he may be dropped, and Mr. Chase, or even some other and hitherto almost obscure man, be taken up.
But I have confidence enough in the mass of my countrymen to believe that out of all this confusion and vacillation there will come a wise and firm policy, and that Mr. Lincoln will be the Union candidate who in November next will receive, among the tens of thousands of votes which four years before were given against him,
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