THE "SELF-RESTRAINT" OF THE SOUTHERN MANNERS.
New York, October 29, 1861. PERHAPS the news of the week which is really most important is the movement for peace in Alabama, where resolutions have, actually been introduced in the Legislature proposing negotiations, on the basis of the restoration of the Union. The resolutions were, tabled it is true, but they were discussed ; and when men can bo found to bring forward such a proposition and others to discuss it, that itself shows a disposition and a possibility which a year ago was hardly to be hoped for. The Alabama law-givers also adjourned without providing the Governor those means of defence for the, State which were the very object of his calling them together.
Some of the State agents appointed by Governor Seymour have been arrested at Baltimore and tried for attempted frauds in the transmission of soldiers' ballots from the army to their homes in this State. There seem to be grounds for the accusation ; but the matter is probably exaggerated. In any case Governor Seymour cannot be personally involved.
In my last letter I told you, apropos of the St. Alban's affair and in illustration of the readiness of slaveholders to use deadly weapons, of a Tennessee,an blazing away into a barber's shop because a door slammed to behind him. Had I but waited a few days I might have found my illustration nearer home ; indeed only a few minutes' walk from my own quiet neighbourhood. Tho incident was told me by an eyo.wituess. A few evenings ago an old gentleman who was getting into an omnibus opposite the Fifth Avenue Hotel felt the stout cane with which he steadied his steps suddenly snatched from his grasp ; and turning his head to look after the rudesby or robber, he saw a man using his cane to Om- mit a violent assault upon another who was accompanied by a lady. The assaulted man immediately drew a revolver and fired at his assailant, who rapidly retreated into an apothecary's shop under the hotel. But as he retired he drew his pistol. The other, nothing daunted, fired again and again, following him into the shop, in which, beside the attendants, there were four or five persons making purchases. You know perhaps that the neighbourhood where this occurred is in the most elegant and what is called the most fashionable part of the city. But this was no New York affair ; the combatants were both Kentuckians,— two of the thousands that our civil war has sent northward. As you may imagine, there was a speedy scattering of the startled folk in the apothecary's shop, and a great excitement in the street. But after the first surprise there was no alarm, and before the man who fired first had emptied his revolver he was seized by a bystander, who pinioned his arms with a grip he could not cast off. " Let me go," he cried, "you damned Yankee,— or I'll blow your damned brains out." " That may be," was the reply, d' but—, and the rest, my informant lost in the confusion. However, it meant that at any rate he couldn't go, and iu a minute both were disarmed and placed in custody. The men were Kentuckians, as I mentioned before, and they were also brothers-in-law. Both were slaveholders of courae, but one was a Secessionist and the other a Unionist. The Secessionist had only a day or two before been released from Fort Lafayette, where he bad been confined, as ho believed, upon infor- mation given by his brother-in-law that ho was engaged in the service of the insurgents. Both these men, were in a certain sense gentlemen, and of sufficient wealth and influence to be at largo the next day, and to keep the discussion of their slight misunderstanding out of the newspapers. This is one of those affairs the occurrence of which in this country has done much to form the opinion held in yours as to "Americans " in general. But in the Free States they happen very rarely ; and then it is almost safe to say that the actors in them are never men born on this side the ocean and on this side of the boundary of slavery. I told this story to my English friend who gave me some information about the repentant Georgia Secessionist of whom I wrote two or three weeks ago. This gentle- man, by the way (the Englishman), is one of the soberest and most substantial of your countrymen, and in addition to my own know- ledge of his entire trustworthiness, I have the highest testimony as to his character from your side of the water. Why I mention this you will see. When I had told him the shooting story he replied, " I am not at all surprised at it. I lived among those people nearly ten years,'and know them through and through, and I should be surprised at nothing that any one of them should do." He then told me this frightful story. When the secession troubles first broke out, and while preparations for war were going on, a man who had been in his employment for years, a Tennessean, declared himself loyal to the Government, and attempted to gather around him a few others like-minded that they might do something to resist the secession movement. Whereupon he was taken by a band of these fire-eaters, and having been vilely abused, was hanged without ceremony. The party went off upon some other fiendish business, and coming back three hours afterward, found their victim hanging but still alive. The rope, originally too long—they were amateurs—had stretched just enough to let the tips of the man's toes touch the ground ; and there, with hands pinioned, he had hung, just ready to give up the ghost, but still living in torment. Then these—well, call them what you will—took an iron bar and broke the man's legs so that they would no longer support him, and strangulation then ended the poor creatures agony. Remember that it is not an " American," but an Englishman who is telling you this story about what passed in his own immediate neighbourhood, among men whom he had known for years. It happened, too, not as a part of the retribution so-called for " Federal outrages," but before a shot had been fired, and months before the Government had taken the first steps in its own defence. Well I think that you will pardon me for a certain feeling of grim satisfaction at learn- ing that the brother of that tortured man took a small party after the war had broken out and attacked the ringleader of his murderers in his house, and left him dead upon his own threshold, thrust through with eight avenging bayonets. In the same neighbourhood, my friend informed me, and for the same reason, an old man of great respectability was taken and thrust into a miserable hole about twelve feet square, a kind of cellar paved with cobble-stones. His age and his character made his persecutors shrink from killing him outright, or even starving him to death, and so they gave him a little miserable food every day. But they kept him in that place, without a bed to lie upon, or a chair, without a change of clothes, or water to wash in, and did not allow him to leave it for any purpose, or allow any person to enter it, until the poor old man died from the misery and loath- some horrors of his situation. "This," said my friend, "they do to each other. What do you suppose they will stick at with you if they get a chance ?'"I'his man, it is worth while to say, although an Englishman, and always believ- ing in his own words, that " a black man must have some rights," had never been what we call an Abolitionist (and very few Englishmen who live here are), until the war broke out. Then, after living a little while amid such scenes as he told me of, be came northward, though with much difficulty, in spite of his being a British subject, and since has been an Abolitionist of the root and branch order, enforced thereto by the evil influence which he has seen slavery exert upon the slaveholders and his poor non- slaveholding parasites.
Perhaps you may not see, but I clearly see, the influence of slavery in that style of speech to which I will apply no other epithet than the complimentary one, the plantation style, of which Mr. Davis, he having given up hope of intervention, and being not before the world, but far off in the interior of South Carolina, gave us a specimen the other day. " Does any man think," he said, " that we can conquer the Yankees by retreating before them, or do you not know that the only way to make spaniels civil is to whip them ?" Perhaps you think that this admirable Mr. Davis, so decorous, so self-restrained, so dignified, has been be- trayed into this arrogant vaunting only by irritation at recent reverses. Read, then, this extract from a speech made by him at Stevenson, Alabama, in February, 1861 :—
" Your border States will gladly come into the Southern Confederacy within sixty days, as we will be your only friends. England will recog- nize us, and a glorious future is before us. The grass will grow in the Northern cities where the pavements have been worn by the tread of commerce. We will carry war where it is easy to advance—where food for the sword and torch await the armies in the densely populated cities, and though the enemy may come and spoil our crops, we can raise them as before, and while they cannot rear the cities which it took years of industry and millions of money to build."
Mr. Davis, however, is not peculiar in this vein. More than two years after he made that speech the Richmond Inquirer, of October 16, 1863, after stating the Confederate terms of peace which closed in these words, " That is to say, the North must yield all ; we nothing," added this paragraph :— " As surely as we completely ruin their armies—and without that is no peace nor truce at all—so surely shall we make them pay our war debt though we wring it out of their hearts."
This, however, pleads some distinguished advocate of peace, is but an exhibition of over-weening confidence, rather in bad taste, perhaps ; but those " Southern gentlemen " are never guilty of any blackguardism. Well, perhaps they are, as any one may see who rearla this extract from the Richmond Examiner of January 26th :— " The practice of vilifying the Yankees is becoming common. . . . . . . . One would suppose that creatures so abounding in the stenches of moral decomposition would never be alluded to in decent society. But somehow the habit of expectorating upon the vermin that swarm the Northern dunghill has gotten the better of gentle natures, and the time drags heavily on the Southerner who refuses to indulge himself some twenty times a day in a volley of direful anathemas against the Yankees So the tiger that laps blood, and the beetle that gorges excrement, are but Yankees of the animal kingdom, accommodating the wants of nature ; and it were folly to impute to them the improper motives in partaking of their ghastly and sickening repasts. It follows that our feeling toward the people of the North, the scarabosi and vipers of humanity, should be characterized neither by rage or nausea, but by a fixed, cheerful, Christian determination to interpose sufficient obstacles between them and ourselves ; to curb their inordinate and bloody lusts by such adequate means as natural wit suggests, and, as a general thing, to kill thorn wherever we find them, without idle questions as to whether thoy are reptiles or vermin. A certain calm- ness of mind is requisite to their successful slaughter. The convulsions of passion are out of place when one is merely scalding chinches,"
" Chinches" is alaveholding for bugs. They are too elegant there to use the unmitigated word. I had copied out many other illus- trations of the chivalric style, but my space warns me to be con-
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