AMERICAN AFFAIRS.
THE battle of Murfreesboro', inconclusive in result and uninteresting in details, may yet prove, in some respects, the most important fought during the civil war. It did not, indeed, reveal a General, the one great need of the North, for General Rosencrantz fought throughout with the contempt for strategy natural to an American; but it demonstrated, beyond all question or cavil, that Americans possess the qualities which best supply the deficiency. Theirs is the bull-dog grasp and tenacity which Englishmen believe to be the right of the Anglo-Saxon, yet refuse to their own descendants. General Rosencrantz won the field by sheer pluck and determination, by fighting on for three days after he had been fairly beaten. Any army but an American or English one would have retreated after the terrible repulse of the 30th of December ; and any general but an American or English one, with his right wing driven in, his left outflanked, his centre repulsed, his front commanded by a victorious enemy, his baggage- train captured by cavalry, and his rear in possession of guerillas, would have either capitulated or awaited with resignation the final attack. General Rosencrantz hammered and hammered away in incessant charges, often leading them himself, till at last he found the weak place, and his enemy, whose pertinacity was only less than his own, retreated in ex- cellent order. It is said that the credit is due to the Western men, who are far superior in physique to the men of the Eastern seaboard cities ; but as Londoners make the most unconquer- able, and Parisians the most warlike soldiers on earth, that explanation seems weak. The fact that the soldiers at Mur- freesborough were half of them German emigrants, on whom discipline sits more easily than on the born American, is much more important ; but the main truth we conceive to be this. General Rosencrantz used brave half-drilled troops in the way in which brave half-drilled troops ought to be used, in the way in which the generals of the Convention used theirs,—in incessant charges made with little regard to loss, and con- tinued till the enemy, utterly worn out, beat the required retreat. No particular object was gained in all those four days of fighting ; the men lost could ill be spared, and General Rosencrantz has still to fight his way inch by inch before he can claim to hold any territory beyond range of his guns. But, Murfreesboro' being the test, the "dour" race can, in America as everywhere else, beat the " chivalric " one, and if the North can only hold out, and obtain at last a field where the conditions are pretty equal, victory on that field is certain to be with her.
That is not a slight success, for it is hope, which the North was beginning to want. The people are hopeful still, for freemen accustomed to meet emergencies for themselves are very slow to despair; but the leaders,were losing heart. They were beginning to doubt, as England doubted in 1855, whether free institutions, excellent in themselves, did not necessarily lack somewhat of force. They seemed, like constitutional systems in the Crimea, apt to break down in battle. I secret distrust of freedom, apt to beset all governing men, began to grow round their hearts, and threatened an immediate panic and a speedy, disgraceful peace. A well contested and equal battle, maintained for four days with varying success but ulti- mate victory, was exactly the remedy needed to tighten relax- ing knees ; and, unless we are greatly mistaken, Governor Seymour's message of 6th January, in which he only promises to uphold the laws, is a very different document from the one he would have issued had General Rosencrantz been destroyed. There is hope in the Council at Washington ; hope not diminished by the report that the Southerners shot in cold blood all negroes captured at Murfreesboro'. News flies as fast and as secretly among slaves as among natives of India, and henceforward negroes will understand that when they meet the South they must give up hope of quarter. That execution alone is worth a reinforcement of twenty thousand men.
There is, moreover, another effect of this contest which is more important than this. The friends of the South assert that all this slaughter is useless, that this waste of life and energy, of treasure and reproductive power, is incurred for the mere sake of battle. Rosencrantz has not occupied thirty square miles of ground. If all Tennessee were secure, the Federals would be no nearer to the undisturbed possession of Virginia, much less of the Cotton States. It is all just and all true, that criticism, provided the object of the war be really, as it is ostensibly, the subjugation of the South. No Southerner can denounce more strongly than this journal has done the lavish waste of a nation implied in any such project. Tropical countries, when defended, are always beyond assault. A French army could conquer Italy at less cost than it will occupy Mexico ; and had the natives risen en masse, the reconquest of Hindostan would have been impos- sible, even to England. Nature in those regions fights against the invader, every mile takes its day, every thicket is a jungle- fortress, every ravine a moated position, every plain a Sahara. The country exhausts the troops before they find the foe, and a days' march in the sun kills more than a day of battle. The systole diastole of victory and defeat waged for seven years in such a land would break any nation's heart, as it broke that of Roman legions, who, after conquering the Macedonian world, turned back before horsemen who were in all respects—except the advantage 'of a soil which it was possible to devastate—the equivalents of Indian cavalry. But the Northern leaders cannot, by this time, entertain any such wasteful idea. Their object has long been not to conquer the South, but to prevent the South from extending ; not to reject all peace, but to accept only a peace of which they shall dictate the terms. They intend palpably that the new North shall embrace Western Virginia—hence admitted into the Union ;—Tennessee, now fought for ; Missouri now voting emancipation by heavy majorities in the Assembly and unani- mously in the Senate ; Kentucky, which will probably cost another campaign, and all the grand regions west of the Missis- sippi. Shorn of these great territories, the South loses in the Border States the roughest and bravest section of her fighting class, the Missourians who invaded Kansas, the Tennesseans who cheered at Fredericksburg, the Kentuckians who, in their pride of form, weight, and physique, quote themselves as the only specimens of true American men. They lose the enormous field, large as Europe within the Vistula, offered by Texas and Arizona ; they lose their route to the Pacific, and with it a China trade ; and they lose, above all, their dream of a conquered Mexico and a slave empire round the Gulf. They are reduced to a republic, powerful, certainly, in its extent, in the proved valour of its inhabitants, and in its dangerous social system, but incompetent to dictate to a continent, or to menace a Republic which, in thirty years, may and probably will, double its population of free men. Slavery is confined to a definite area, and—what Northerners, we are sorry to say, value very much more—so also is their most dangerous rival. Surely, upon the principles which, since the tenth century, have guided the action of States, these are ends worth a contest, or if not the commencement of a great war, at least the Continuance of one begun. And all these ends have, so far as we can perceive—and, though hoping always for enfranchisement, we have no sympathy with the American Union fever—at last been brought within reach. With the victory of Murfreesboro' it becomes possible to hold the Western Border State, till, like Missouri, it has voted the emancipation which can never be recalled, and with the cap- ture of Vicksburg, the Mississippi will become once more a Northern highway. Vicksburg is not yet captured, and may not be for weeks, for General Sherman, by the latest accounts, had failed in his second charge; but the power which, equal on land, also commands the water, must, in a riverine contest, at length defeat the enemy who can fight on one element alone. The attempt will be renewed and renewed till it somehow or other—possibly in a wretchedly blundering way—is made, like Murfreesboro', to succeed. Englishmen, for once false to themselves, are full of regard for the tropical dash and energy displayed by the Southern leaders. For ourselves, we confess our sympathy goes with the narrow-minded resolute race whose unflinching pluck and stubborn persistence finds, like our own, no leader, but who, without one, attain by sheer stubbornness the ultimate magnificent end. Our countrymen would have been proud enough of Murfreesboro' in the Crimea.
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