THE CAPTURE OF MR. DAVIS :—EUROPE ON THE ASSASSINATION.
[FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.]
New York, May 19, 1865. Exit the so-called Confederate Government, running, in Mistress. Davis's petticoats. A most preposterous stage direction for the close of our bloody drama, but still the true one. Our awful tragedy has concluded in the anti-climax of this ridiculous farce. The steamer of Wednesday last took you out the news that Mr. Davis was arrested at Irwinaville, Georgia, on the 10th. Irwinsville is well down toward the Florida line, and he was evidently making for the Gulf shore. Roused by the firing of our soldiers at each other (they had a stiff little skirmish before they found
out who was who), he donned his wife's crinoline and other feminine accompaniments, and started for the woods. But he could not put on her shoes, and " from the hoop's bewitching round," not managed with that dainty art that guards and guides its customary revelations, peeped forth a shoe, not exactly of the
size and shape that have power to wound. The Yankee boys knew their Hercules by his foot, and soon brought him up all standing. The collapse of the rebellion was so sudden and so complete already, it had vanished so utterly that it could fall no farther except into the ridiculous, and there it has gone headlong. The country, hardly recovered from the shock and the sorrow of its late bereave- ment, has exploded in inextinguishable laughter. The news arrived on, Sunday, and by Wednesday afternoon boys began to cry caricatures of " Jeff. Davis in petticoats" about the streets. Already half a dozen have appeared, varying in size from a small card with the one figure to a large lithographic sheet ex- hibiting the scene with its accessories, including the mat Mrs. Davis uttering the caution which she gave to the soldiers, "Don't provoke the President, for he might hurt you." This strange incident, which makes the leader of the re- bellion appear hardly to advantage, in one respect at least, by the side of the assassin of Mr. Lincoln, has had a remarkable effect upon public feeling. It has done much to relax the stern determination which was very widely felt before its occurrence with regard to the punishment which Mr. Davis should suffer if he were arrested. The manner of the arrest has relaxed the brow of Justice. The culprit is arraigned at the bar of public opinion. But, as the reporters sometimes say, the Court could not preserve its gravity. Solvuntur tabula rise. This feeling, however, may be but temporary ; and should it prove so the case is a serious one. Serious for the country as well as for Mr. Davis. For my simple self, I am inclined to be sorry that he did not get off. Once out of the country, he would soon have be- come and would have remained an object of contempt and ridicule to the very people who were lately under his authority. We might have trusted his punishment to the men whom he and others like him misled to their ruin. But now that we have our prize, I am afraid that it will prove to be a white elephant. Arrested, Mr. Davis must be tried ; tried, he must be convicted ; convicted, how can he be made an object of executive clemency, except upon the ground that treason, levying war against the Republic by one of its citizens, is hereafter to be regarded. as a venial offence. That is the difficulty, or otherwise a great and powerful nation might well be magnanimous and merciful to an enemy once pow- erful, but now utterly ruined and forlorn. We have caught our pest, but so did Uncle Toby catch his, and we can well afford to say with him, " Go, poor devil, get thee gone ! Why should I hurt thee? This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me." Was there ever a more striking contrast than that between the close of the public careers of the two foremost men in this tre- mendous conflict? One careless of his life, and dying upon the summit of success, mourned by a great nation and eliciting unpre- cedented respect and sympathy from all Christendom, the other, having led his followers to destruction, arrested as he " skedaddled " across a corn-field, to save his neck in his wife's petticoats.
The honours paid to our deceased President in Europa, and especially in Great Britain and France, have of course been re- ceived by us with marked attention. Not, however, with the least surprise. Those which were paid by that large and eminently respectable class of candid, thoughtful, and philanthropic men, who, while firmly devoted to the interests and attached to the principles of their own Governments, yet saw in the maintenance of ours the establishment of constitutional liberty and the hope of freedom for all mankind, and who, although sometimes criticizing us with severity and sometimes misunderstanding us, have always treated us with respectful consideration, and have wished for our national prosperity—these condolences, and particularly those that came from England, have been none the less grateful, none the less prized, because they were not unexpected. Those, too, which were paid by public bodies and by certain prominent and power- ful journals, and which were so carefully worded as not to commit the persons who directly or indirectly took part in them to any expression of friendliness toward this country or its Government, have also their due appreciation at our hands, and are recognized as very becoming to those from whom they emanate. All civilized people must abhor assassination ; and as to decorous expressions of sympathy, Great Britain is a great nation, and noblesse oblige. The sorrow, too, in these quarters has a very genuine appearance, and to us seems just. But we may be permitted perhaps to feel some regret that the murder of our President was a condition precedent to the manifestation of this generous approbation. And I will venture still farther, and confess 'that, Owing to some great defect in our mental organization, it is difficult for us to see how the man whose abilities were only sneered at, and whose purposes were unreservedly reviled one day, could on the next be found by the sneerers and the revilers worthy of so much admiration and so much praise.
It is chiefly with reference to a remark that " there is no single point in politics which it is so important for Englishmen to under- stand as the character of the American President," and to a sub- sequent discussion of Mr. Johnson's character in The Spectator of May 6, which I apologize for saying in these columns seemed to me very able and very just, that I ask the privilege of repeating here an opinion expressed by me in a former letter. Writ- ing within two hours of Mr. Lincoln's death, I said that the assassination " would have no more effect upon the course of events than if the assassin had killed a War-Office clerk or a drum- mer-boy." This was hardly what I have just called it, an opinion; it was a conviction. The course of events thus far, I submit, has fully justified my prediction. In fact, except for the signs of mourning, it would not have been possible to discover during the past month that the country had suddenly lost the political head of its affairs. And as to all essential points of home and foreign policy, the same undisturbed progress of political events will continue until the people, manifesting their will according to the Constitution and the laws, demand a change. The character of the President has much to do with the efficiency with which our Government is ad- ministered, but little or nothing with the ends which that Govern- ment seeks to attain. Here a statesman or a soldier may acquire dis- tinction and great influence, but never—never—power. He may be President, and have the craft of Jefferson, the will of Jackson, or the wisdom of Lincoln, but he must be content to remain an in- strument and not an agent—the mere executive officer of the nation, doing its will as it is expressed in the laws which have been and are from time to time passed by Congress, which itself is controlled, and sometimes, it must be confessed, hampered, by the Constitution. It may be to our loss that this is so, but so it is. No man knows this better, more gladly recognizes it, than Andrew Johnson. Coming from the uncultured classes, he will labour for the advancement of those classes with peculiar relish, but with no disregard of the reasonable expectations of others. His talk has sometimes been very " Red," but the stump speeches of a man seeking political advancement in Tennessee, with the whole slave- holding oligarchy of the South banded against him, are no key to his policy as President of the United States. And when he says, "You are the people, hence you cannot do wrong," it is with no in- tention of putting in an English form that foolish aphorism, " Vox populi vox Del," but simply of saying that the people have the right to manage their own affairs, without responsibility to any one but themselves and God, and that if they manage them ill they may suffer, but no one has any right to call them to account. In a word, he means that they govern, not are governed ; and so cannot do wrong in the sense of doing what they have not a right to do. Even this freedom of action he would not dream of denying is limited in this country by that only safeguard yet discovered for the rights of minorities in republics—a written constitu- tion, and in all countries by the best discoverable rule of moral right.
As to the two points which The Spectator, judging Mr. Johnson by his speeches, not unreasonably supposes he will seek to establish by his administration, the complete and final abolition of slavery, and with it of distinctions of colour, and the declaring the Union a Republic one and indivisible, it is important to remark,-1st. That Congress and the people have already decided that slavery shall be extinguished, and that if they did not so decide the President's voice in the present condition of affairs would count almost as nothing upon the subject. 2nd. That if by a Republic oue and indivisible it is meant that the national integrity shall be preserved; and the authority of the National Government be para- mount in national affairs, and allegiance be solely due to that Government, that it is to establish this very point (upon the oc- casion of asserting that authority to prevent the planting of slavery in the Territories) that the war just over was fought. The slave- holders told us that we were not a nation. We knew that that was false. But if it were true that this nation had been struggling to the birth for eighty years and had not yet been born, we were determined that it should be born, like Caesar, with the sword. If by the Republic one and indivisible is meant the abrogation of local independence in local affairs, and the merging of our Com- monwealths in one consolidated nation, the President of the United States has as much and as little to do with that as the Queen of Great Britain, and it could not be accomplished by an army of Andrew Johnsons led by Ulysses Grant. Mr. John- son is a wilful, perhaps an aggressive man, and may have "a disposition to act in emergencies with revolutionary energy." But in casting the horoscope of his administration itmust be remembered that the emergencies which might possibly have given scope to his revolutionary energies are past ; past but yesterday, but as completely past as our War of Independence. They are history. In the time of civil war Congress, with the hearty approval of the people, committed to the gentle, self-distrusting Abraham Lincoln some extraordinary powers. Now, while the echoes of that war are yet mingling in our ears, we will not allow the stern and self- reliant Andrew Johnson to try in secret the conspirators against the life of our good President. The Government has done away with secrecy in that trial, admits reporters and a certain number of the public, and this, under the circumstances, is accepted as a compromise, though not with satisfaction. Mr. Johnson's revo- lutionary energy, if he has it, is out of place. The task before him is to bring the country as quickly back•as possible to its con- dition before the war, less only slavery and its evil consequences. The revolution is made to his hand; it is completed. The duties which he will have to perform will be of great importance, but mainly those of civil administration. He must punish guilt, beget confidence, restore prosperity in the South. As to the Republic, it stands as firm as it did in the last generation, no firmer. A fearful storm has passed over us of which our fathers, hardly heard the mutterings. But do the winds shake the hills or unseat the mountains? We do not boast this strength as ours, nor is this confidence the growth of recent events. This Government is based upon principles as eternal as the foundationa of the earth. In what seemed to you, and some of us, the darkest hour of our trial, I never knew one Yankee, except the toadies and trucklers to slavery, from the Secretary of State down to your correspondent, who was so poor in spirit as to lack that faith. Mr. Seward's despatches are his witnesses, and this correspondence may be mine. The London Times says of the assassination,• "Nobody can tell how to forecast the possible results of the thunderclap. Never was crisis so unfathomable hi its import, or so completely beyond the scope of political divination." To us this is but solemn nonsense.
A YANKEE.
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