Go forth, ye warriors for the right! Lift high the banner of the free! Shine far into Oppression's night, Bright oriflamme of Liberty! For, God be praised, the lowering cloud So long impending overhead, Which nations thought our funeral shroud, Shall prove our victory-robe instead.

O maiden, who with tender smile, O wife, who with enslaving kiss, Some dearly loved one would beguile From duty in a field like this; Conjure before thy tearful sight The glories future years shall know, Unclasp thine arms—in Freedom's fight, Bid him be valiant,—bid him, 'go.'

Be with him both in camp, in field, With tender thought and earnest prayer; Think, those who Freedom's weapons wield, God makes his own peculiar care. And if he fall,—as chance he may,— Rejoice the glorious boon is thine, To lay thy heart-flowers of a day On Freedom's grand, eternal shrine!

O warrior, nerve thy courage well! For fierce and stern the strife will be,— Oppression, Wrong, the powers of hell, War against Right and Liberty. Fight, for the victory must be thine; No nobler strife the world has known Since first the Saviour, all divine, Brought life to man from God's high throne.

And ye, who sit in seats of power, The instruments of God's high will, Be ye not wanting in this hour So big with future good or ill. Fail not, for Freedom's car rolls on Resistless in its glorious way; Some shall to honor be upborne, They who oppose be crushed to clay.

Hark! from the sunny Southern plains There comes a sound still swelling on, The clanking of a million chains, The cry, the groan, the lash, the moan.

That sound for years has gone on high; The hour of judgment comes apace, The day of right and liberty, Of freedom for the human race.

Speed, speed the day, O righteous God, To break the fetters, dry the tears, To raise the slave, so long downtrod, Through the dark age of by-gone years! Give but to us the sword of power, To work thy ends, in thine own way, To see the promise of the hour Of this the world's most glorious day.



ACROSS THE CONTINENT.

In the tense, absorbing excitement of our life-and-death-struggle for national existence, events which in calmer times would quicken every pulse, and arrest universal attention, pass all but unnoticed; as historians record that during the battle between Hannibal and the Romans by the Lake Thrasymene, the earth was shaken and upheaved by a great natural convulsion, without attracting the observation of the fierce, eager combatants; or, as Byron tersely phrases it,

'An earthquake rolled unheededly away,'

being regarded, if regarded at all, as one of the incidents of the tremendous collision of Europe with Africa.

When, early in March, 1844, John C. Fremont, with thirty or forty followers, astonished Captain Sutter by dropping down from the Sierra Nevada upon his ranche on the Sacramento, the old Switzer could not have been more completely dumbfounded had he been told that his visitors had just descended from the clouds, than he was by the truthful assurance that they were an exploring party, who had left the United States only ten months before, and had since made their way across the continent. To pass the Sierra in winter had hitherto been deemed an impossibility, and, indeed, the condition of Fremont's surviving beasts of burden—thirty-three out of the sixty-seven with which he started—proved the presumption not far out of the way. To traverse the continent at all, even in summer, on a line stretching due west from the Hudson, the Delaware, or the Potomac, to the Pacific Ocean, was an unattempted feat, whereof the hardships, the dangers, were certain, and the success exceedingly doubtful. A very few parties of daring adventurers had, during several of the six or eight preceding summers, pushed up the Platte from the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains, followed the Sweetwater from the point where the North Platte emerges from the heart of those mountains, running to the northward, and having thus passed through the great central chain of North America (for the Sweetwater heads on the west side of the mountain range, and the South Pass, through which it seeks the Platte, is a broad elevated gap, wherein the face of the country is but moderately rolling, and the trail better than almost any where else), turned abruptly to the north-west, crossed the Green River source of the Colorado, which leads a hundred miles farther north, and soon struck across a mountainous water-shed to the Lewis or Snake branch of the Columbia, which they followed down to the great river of the west, and thus reached the coveted shore of the Pacific,—that Oregon which they had chosen as their future home, mainly because it was, of all possible Eldorados, the farthest and the least accessible. Trappers, hunters, and Indian traders, few in numbers, and generally men of desperate fortunes, who realized that

'The world was not their friend, nor the world's law,'

had, for several decades, penetrated every glen of the Rocky Mountains, and traced every affluent of the great river in quest of their respective prey; but the wild, desolate region watered by the Colorado, the Humboldt, or the streams that are lost in the Great Salt Lake, or some smaller absorbent of the scanty waters of the Great Basin, had never proved attractive to our borderers, and for excellent reasons. It is, as a whole, so arid, so sterile (though its valleys do not lack fertility wherever their latent capacities can be developed by irrigation), and its game is so scanty and worthless, that old Bridger (pioneer of settlers at the military post in northern Utah, now known as Fort Bridger) was probably the only American who had made his home in the Great Basin when Fremont's exploring party first pitched their tents by the border of Great Salt Lake, in September, 1843.

The discovery of gold in California, in the summer of 1847, closely following the military occupation and conquest of that country by the United States, wrought a great and sudden revolution. Of the few Americans in that region prior to 1846, probably nine tenths had rounded Cape Horn to reach it, while the residue had made their way across Mexico or the Isthmus of Darien. It was 'a far coy' at best, and very tedious as well as difficult of attainment. We have in mind an American of decided energy, who, starting from Illinois in May or June, 1840, with a party of adventurers, mainly mounted, reached the mouth of the Columbia, overland, in December, and California, by water, in the course of the winter; and who, starting again for California, via Panama, in the summer of 1847, was nine months in reaching his destination. But the tidings that the shining dross was being and to be picked up by the handful on the tributaries of the Sacramento wrought like magic. Early in 1849, steam-ships were dispatched from New York for Chagres, at the mouth of the river of like name on the Isthmus of Darien, whence crowds of eager gold-seekers made their way across, as they best might, to Panama, being taken in small, worthless boats up the river, so far as its navigation was practicable,—say sixty miles,—and thence, mounted on donkeys or mules, for the residue of the distance, which was perhaps half as far. Short as this portage was, it soon came to be regarded with a terror by no means unjustified. The ascent of the rapid, shallow, tortuous stream was at once difficult and dangerous; the boats were of the rudest construction; the boatmen little better than savages; rains fell incessantly for a good part of each year; the warm, moist, relaxing climate bred fevers in the blood of a considerable percentage of those so suddenly and so utterly exposed to its malarious influences; while the road from Cruces, at the head of navigation, being but a rugged bridle-path at best, was soon worn by incessant travel into the most detestable compound of rock and mire that ever aggravated the miseries of human life. Arrived at quaint, dull old Panama, the early adventurers long awaited with fierce impatience the steamers which were to have anticipated their coming, and been ready to speed them on their way; and many were goaded into taking passage on sailing vessels, which were months in beating up to the Golden Gate against the gentle but persistent breezes from the west and north-west which mainly prevail on that coast. Rarely has human endurance been put to severer tests than in the earlier years of gold-seeking travel by the Isthmus route to California.

The Panama Railroad—commenced in 1850, and finished in 1855, at a total cost of $7,500,000, for a length of forty-seven and a half miles—very considerably reduced the expense, whether in time or money, of the Isthmus transit, diminishing its miseries and perils in still greater proportion. It is one of the noblest achievements, whereof our countrymen are fairly entitled to the full credit. A ship-canal or railroad across the Isthmus had been proposed, and commended, and surveyed for and estimated upon, by French, South American, and other officials and engineers; but the execution of the work was left to our countrymen, and not in vain. Contractor after contractor abandoned the undertaking in despair; hundreds, if not thousands, of laborers—Irish, Chinese, and others—were sacrificed to the deadly miasma of the swamps and tropical jungle which thickly stud the route. But the work was at last completed, and the railroad has now been some six years in constant operation, reducing the average length of the actual transit from a week to two hours, and its expense and peril to an inappreciable quantity. It is a cheering fact that the capitalists who invested their faith and their means in this beneficent enterprise have already had returned to them in dividends the full amount of their outlay, and are now receiving twenty per cent. per annum. Their road has shortened the average Isthmus passage to and from California by at least a full week, and immensely diminished the danger of loss by robbery, accident, or exposure, beside building up a large trade which but for it would have had no existence.

Yet the Isthmus route to California is only by comparison acceptable, even for passengers and goods, while for mails it was at best but endurable. It is nearly twice the length of the direct route from the Atlantic seaboard, while for the residents of the Evart Valley it is intolerably circuitous. A letter mailed at St. Paul for Astoria or Oregon City, or at Omaha for Sacramento, must, under the regimen of the last ten years, be conveyed overland to New York, or by steamboat to New Orleans, where it might have to wait ten or twelve days for an Isthmus steam-ship, making a circuit of twice to thrice the distance by a direct route to its destination. There has been, indeed, for some four years past, a tri-weekly overland mail from St. Louis via New Mexico and Arizona to San Diego, in the extreme south of California,—a route nearly a thousand miles longer than it need or should have been, and evincing a perverse ingenuity in the avoidance not only of Salt Lake and Carson Valley, but even of Santa Fe. This long and mischievous detour—one of the latest of our wholesale sacrifices to Southern jealousy and greed—has at length been definitely abandoned, and, instead of a tri-weekly mail via Elposo and the Gila, together with a weekly by Salt Lake, and a fortnightly or tri-monthly by the Isthmus, we have now one daily mail on the direct overland route from the Missouri, at St. Joseph or Omaha, via the Platte, North Platte, Sweetwater, South Pass, Fort Bridger, Salt Lake, Simpson's route, Carson Valley, and thence across the Sierra Nevada to Placerville and San Francisco, in shorter time than was usually made by way of the Isthmus, at less cost than that of the three mails which it replaces, while the immense advantage of a daily mail each way, over a tri-monthly or even weekly, needs no elucidation. The territories of Colorado, Utah, Nevada, are thus brought into intimate and constant communication with the loyal States, and made to feel the mighty pulsations of the National heart, in this heroic and eventful crisis of the Republic's history.

But this not all, nor the best. The old Congress, among its many wise and beneficent measures, enacted that the government should aid whatever company would for the lowest annual stipend establish and maintain a line of Electric Telegraph from Missouri or Iowa to California. A contract was accordingly made with the Western Union Telegraph Company, under which active operations were commenced last spring, under surveys previously made. The grand train of four hundred men, one hundred great prairie wagons, and six or eight hundred mules or oxen,—a portion of the cattle for the subsistence of the party,—started westward from Omaha, Nebraska, in June last, and on the 4th of July commenced pushing on the construction at the point which it had already reached, some two or three hundred miles further west in the valley of the Platte. It may give to some an idea of the destitution of timber on the great American Desert, to know that the greatest distance over which poles had to be drawn for the elevation of the wires of this telegraph was only 240 miles! Fresh teams were from time to time dispatched on the track of the working carts with additional supplies, and the line was pushed through to Salt Lake City by the 18th of October. Six days afterward, that point was reached by a like party, working eastward from Carson Valley, on behalf of the United Telegraph Companies of California, and the young Hercules by the Pacific vied with the infantile but vigorous territories this side of her in flashing to Washington and New York assurances of their invincible devotion to the indivisible American Union. So great and difficult an enterprise was probably never before so expeditiously and happily achieved in the experience of mankind.

The distance—some 1,500 miles—over which a working line of electric telegraph has thus been constructed and put in operation in the course of a single season is one of the minor obstacles surmounted. The want of timber is far more serious. From the sink of Carson River, less than one hundred miles this side of the Sierra, to the point at which the construction of the line was commenced on the Platte as aforesaid, there is no place at which a tree can fall across the fragile wires; there is probably less timber in sight on that whole sixteen hundred miles than is to-day standing in some single county of New York, Pennsylvania, or Ohio. From the forks of the Platte to the valley of the Sacramento, there is not a stick of growing timber that would make a decent axe-helve, much less a substantial axletree. The Sierra Nevada are heavily though not densely wooded nearly to their summits, but mainly with stately evergreens, including a brittle and worthless live oak; but the tough, enduring hickory, the lithe and springy white ash, the ironwood, beech, and sugar maple, are nowhere to be seen. A low, scrubby cedar and a small, scraggy white pine thinly cover a portion of the hills and low mountains of Utah; the former is shorter than it should be for telegraph poles, but stanch and durable, and is made to do. The detestable cotton-wood, most worthless of trees, yet a great deal better than none, thinly skirts the banks of the Platte and its affluents, in patches that grow more and more scarce as you travel westward, until you only see them 'afar off' on the sides of some of the mountains that enclose the South Pass. The Colorado has a still scantier allowance of this miserable wood; but the cedars meet you as you ascend from its valley to the hills that surround Fort Bridger. Where cotton-wood is used for poles,—and there are hundreds of miles where no other tree is found,—it will have to be replaced very frequently; for it decays rapidly, and has a fancy for twisting itself into all manner of ungainly shapes when cut and exposed to the sun and parching winds of the plains.

Water, next to wood, is the great want of the plains and of the Great Basin. Travel along either base of the Rocky Mountains, and you are constantly meeting joyous, bounding streams, flowing rapidly forth from each ravine and coursing to the arid plain; but follow them a few miles and they begin to diminish in volume, and, unless intercepted by a copious river, often dwindle to nothing. The Republican fork of the Kansas or Kaw River, after a course of some thirty to fifty miles, sinks suddenly into its bed, which thence for twenty miles exhibits nothing but a waste of yellow sand. Of course there are seasons when this bed is covered with water throughout; but I describe what I saw early in June, when a teamster dug eight feet into that sand without finding a drop of the coveted liquid for his thirst-maddened oxen. Two months later, I observed the dry bed stretched several miles farther up and down what in winter is the river. Passing over to Big Sandy, the most northerly tributary of the Arkansas, I found dry sand (often incrusted with some white alkaline deposit) the rule; water the rare exception throughout the twenty or thirty miles of its course nearest its source. At Denver, on the 6th of June, Cherry Creek contributed to the South Platte a volume amply sufficient to run an ordinary grist-mill; ten days afterwards its bed was dry as a doctrinal sermon. My first encampment on the North Platte above Laramie was by a sparkling, dancing stream a yard wide, which could hardly have been forced through a nine-inch ring; but though its current was rapid and the Platte but three miles off, the thirsty earth and air drank up every drop by the way. Big Sandy, Little Sandy and Dry Sandy are the three tributaries to be crossed between South Pass and the Colorado, and the latter justifies its name through the better part of each year. Golden River runs through too deep a narrow valley and bears too strong a current from the snowy peaks in which it heads to be thus dried up; so with Bear, Welso, and the Timpanagos or Jordan, the principal affluents of Salt Lake, which tumble and roar between lofty peaks the greater part of their respective courses; but when you have crossed the Jordan, moving California-ward, you will not find another decent mill-stream for the five hundred miles that you traverse on your direct (Simpson's) route to the sink of the Carson. At intervals which seem very long, you find a spring, a scanty but welcome stream rushing down between two mountains, to be speedily drunk up by the thirsty plain and valley at their base; but you will oftener pass some 'sink' or depression below the general level of the valley you are traversing, where a shrewd guess has led to brackish or sulphurous water by digging two or three feet. A mail station-keeper lost his oxen, at a point a hundred miles south-west of Salt Lake; they had wandered southward on the desert, and he followed their trail for (as he estimated) a hundred miles, without finding a drop of water, when he gave them up, still a day's tramp ahead of him, and turned back to save his own life and that of his suffering horse. He might, I presume, have gone a hundred miles further without finding aught to drink but their blood.

This dearth of wood and water can hardly be realized from any mere description. A life-long denizen of Europe, or of the cis-Alleghany portion of this continent, is so accustomed to the unfailing presence or nearness of trees and springs, or streams, that he naturally supposes them as universal as the air we breathe. In a New Englander's crude conception, trees spring up and grow to stately maturity wherever they are not repressed by constant vigilance and exertion, while brooks and rivers are implied by the existence of hills and valleys, nay, of any land whatever. But as you travel westward with the Missouri, springs, streams, woods, become palpably scarcer and scarcer, until, unless in the immediate valley of the Platte, Arkansas, or some more northerly river that rushes full-fed from a long course among the snow-crowned peaks of the Rocky Mountains, your eye ranges over a vast expanse whereon neither forest, grove, nor even a single tree, is visible. If the country is rolling, springs may at long intervals be found by those who know just where to seek them; but streams are few and scanty, save in winter, and in later summer they disappear almost entirely. Beyond Salt Lake, the destitution of wood in Utah and Nevada is far less than on the Plains, but that of water is even greater. Fifty miles from water to water is the lowest interval in my experience on Simpson's route; but I only traversed the eastern half of it, turning thence abruptly northward to strike the valley of the Humboldt (formerly known as the St. Mary's), which rising in the north-west corner of the new Territory of Nevada, hardly fifty miles from the southern or Lewis branch of the Columbia, flows southward from the Goose Creek Mountains that cradled and nourished it, and thence hardly maintains its volume (which is that of a decent mill stream) in its generally south-west course of three hundred and fifty miles, till it is two thirds lost in a lake and the residue in a reedy slough or sink, a hundred miles from the Sierra Nevada and forty from the similar sink of the Carson, a larger and less impulsive stream which drains a considerable section of the eastern declivity of the Sierra Nevada only to meet this inglorious end. Doubtless, the time has been when a large portion of western Nevada formed one great lake or inland sea, whereof Pyramid and Mud Lakes, and the sinks respectively of the Carson, Walker and Humboldt rivers, are all that the thirsty earth and air have left us. The forty miles of low, flat, naked desert—in part of heavy, wearying sand—that now separates the sink of the Humboldt from that of the Carson, was evidently long under water, and might, to all human perception, have better remained so.

I can not comprehend those who talk of the Plains and the more intensely arid wilds which mainly compose Utah and Nevada becoming a great stock-growing region. Even California, though its climate favors the rapid multiplication and generous growth of cattle and sheep, can never sustain so many animals to the square mile as the colder and more rugged hills of New York and New England, because of the intense protracted drouth of its summers, which suffer no blade of grass to grow throughout the six later months of every year. Animals live and thrive on the dead-ripe herbage of the earlier months; but a large area is soon exhausted by a herd, which must be pastured elsewhere till the winter rains ensure a renewal of vegetation.

But the grasses of the Great Valley and of a large portion of the Plains are exceedingly scanty where they exist at all, so that the teams and herds annually driven across them by emigrants and traders suffer fearfully, and are often decimated by hunger, though they carefully seek out and adhere to the trails whereon feed is least scanty. Many a weary day's journey, even along the valleys of the North Platte and Sweetwater, brings to view too little grass to sustain the life of a moderate herd; those who have traversed the South Pass in June will generally have just escaped starvation, leaving to those that come straggling or tottering after them a very poor feed. The carcasses of dead animals, in every stage of decomposition, thickly stud the great trail from the banks of the Platte westward to the passes of the Sierra Nevada, and, I presume, to the banks of the Columbia, bearing mute but impressive testimony to the chronic inhospitality of the Great American Desert, which is almost everywhere thinly overgrown by worthless shrubs, known to travelers as grease-wood and sage brush;—the former prickly and repellant, but having a waxy or resinous property which renders it useful to emigrants as fuel; the latter affording shelter and subsistence to rabbits and a poor species of grouse known as the 'sage hen,' but utterly worthless to man and to the beasts obedient to his sway.

Yet the daily Overland Mail is an immense, a cheering fact, and the Pacific Telegraph another. A message dispatched from any village blessed with electric wires on poles in the Atlantic States will probably reach its destination in any city or considerable settlement of California or Nevada within a few hours, while every transpiring incident of the war for the Union is directly flashed across the continent to the journals of Sacramento and San Francisco, and will often be devoured by their readers on the evening after its occurrence. The Republic may well be proud of having achieved two such strides in her onward, upward course, in the midst of a great and desolating war, and with confidence implore a God of beneficent justice to hasten the auspicious day when we shall be able to telegraph her children by the far Pacific that her enemies are baffled, vanquished, humbled, and that there opens again before her a long vista of unbroken and honorable peace.



WHAT TO DO WITH THE DARKIES.

A NEW AND ORIGINAL PLAN FOR SAVING THE UNION ON SOUTHERN PRINCIPLES.

There can be no question that the overwhelming difficulty of the present day, is the proper disposal of the Negro.

The writer of these lines takes the liberty of believing that the war is virtually a settled affair. There has been, there is, no diminution of Northern determination to push on and keep pushing until the wings of the eagle again stretch from Maine to the Rio Grande. The administration is sustained, as from the first, by ever increasing majorities. The daily defeats of those politicians who are known to sympathize with secession, the wreck of the peace party, and the growing indignation of the country, as manifested against all halfway men and measures, are becoming what in sober seriousness can not be regarded as other than a tremendous moral spectacle. In medio non tutissimus ibis.

Yet at the bottom of this foaming cup of joy remain the black dregs. I would not invidiously compare the unfortunate black to the 'dregs of the populace,' since labor in any form must not be lightly spoken of. But it would be the weakest of euphuisms to affect ignorance of the social position which he occupies, and which, not to increase the misery of his position, is indubitably 'at the bottom of the ladder.' But that which is at the bottom of the ladder may seriously affect its position and standing. There is a fearful and thrilling illustration of this, to be found in a popular cut graphically described in these words:

A negro on the top of a high ladder, white-washing, a hog lifting it up from beneath. 'G'way dar,—you'm makin' mischief.'

President Lincoln is understood to favor emigration. This looks well. Carry the blacks away to Liberia. Unfortunately I am informed that eight and a half Great Easterns, each making one trip per month, could only export the annual increase of our Southern slaves. This speaks in thunder tones, even to the welkin, and provokes a scream from the eagle. It is impossible.

But what shall we do with our blacks, since it is really impossible, then, to export the dark, industrial, productive, proletarian, operative, laboring element from our midst?

I suggest as a remedy that they continue in our midst, with this amendment, that they be concentrated in that same 'midst' and the 'midst' be removed a little to one side. In other words, let us centre them all in one State, that State to be South Carolina.

The justice of this arrangement must be apparent to every one. It is evident that if the present occupation by our troops continue much longer, there will be no white men left in South Carolina, neither is it likely that they will ever return. Terror and pride combined must ever keep the native whites from repopulating that region. And, as South Carolina was especially the State which brought about this war, for the express purpose of making the black man the basis of its society, there would be a wonderful and fearful propriety in carrying out that theory, or 'sociology,' even to perfection; making the negro not only the basis of society, but all society there whatever,—top, bottom, and sides.

It is true that this absolute perfection of their theory was never contemplated even by the celebrated Hammond. But truth compels the deduction, and reason admits it. Verus in uno, verus in omnibus.

I trust that the reader will not be startled, nor accuse the writer of these lines of lacking patriotism, when he avows that since the Southern social philosophers have boldly started a tremendous and original theory, he should be very sorry not to see it fairly tested, tried, and worked out. Every great doctrine or idea, be it for good or evil, must and will work itself out, that of mudsill-ism and negro labor among the rest. Only I claim that it should be complete in its elements, eliminated of what the African, with a fine intuition of the truth, ingenuously terms 'de wite trash,'—yes, in the Southern social scheme the whites are trash,—and they only find their place as a sort of useless ornament, non-productive and inoperative, even according to their own ideas. Therefore the 'wite trash' must be eliminated.

There is yet another and a very beautiful argument to be adduced in favor of colonizing South Carolina with 'contrabands.' It must be apparent to the blindest eye that the negro inclines idiosyncratically to Southern institutions far more zealously than even Mr. Jefferson Davis can be presumed to do. He is the most driving of drivers, the severest of overseers, the most aristocratic of aristocrats, the most Southern of Southerners. The planter despises poverty, but what is his contempt of a poor white man compared to that of his slave for such wretchedness? What indeed is the negro but an intensified Creole? His very color reflects that of his swarthy lord. The planter is tanned, but the negro is 'black and tanned,'—tanned always on the face, and not unfrequently on the back!

The black, left to his own instincts in Africa, develops the Southern sociology to a degree which casts entirely into pitiable pettiness the puling despotism of the calaboose and slave market. Witness Dahomey, where all lives, all fortunes, all persons, are cooerdinated in one perfect 'system' of subjugation to one sable Jefferson Davis Gezo, who is de jure divino husband by a sublime fiction of law to every woman on the sacred soil of Africa, and master of the lives of all of both sexes. What to this stupendous and perfect theory is the impotent and imperfect scheme so lamely announced by the sociologists of the C. S. A.?

I claim that by every law of logic the Southern philosophers have proclaimed themselves inferior to the negro, and worthy to be swept away to make place for him. They have claimed for him the most important place in the body politic, and as, ex uno disce omnes, the whole should be homogeneous with a part, especially the main part, it follows that the negro, and the negro alone, should be allowed to rule in a land where, as Southerners declare, 'God clearly intended him to live.' Now if God clearly intended him to live there, it must follow that he did not intend white men to reside in those regions. It may be observed in this connection that the Bible forms the great basis of all Southern argument. If a Northern writer advances any of the ignorant and impious doctrines, so common among his kind, against slavery, he is promptly and properly met with the query, 'Do you believe in the Bible?' Now the Bible endorses slavery past, and 'of course' slavery present. But the Bible also insists that the curse of labor was laid on man by the eating of the apple. On all men, be it observed, without distinction of color. But the Southerners have claimed, time and again, that 'only the black can work in the South.' Therefore it logically results, on Southern grounds, that the white man has no business whatever in the South, since he must work somewhere, and it can not be in the land of rice and cotton. Who then should inhabit that sunny clime save the 'contraband'—who should there claim the respect due to the lord of the soil if not he?

'Yo que soy contrabandista Y campo a me respeto.'

The more I study this subject the more does my soul expand in awe as I watch the fearful unfoldings of the terrible moral law which governs the actions of humanity. Ah, Heaven! it is fearful, it is awful to consider how ignorantly we begin our beginnings without anticipating the marvelous endings to which they rise, even as a match ignorantly lighted may explode the dusky grain which sends a city skyward! The South has toiled to elaborate a philosophy and an empire on the Nigger—and, lo! at the end thereof looms up the tremendous Afreet realm of a perfect Niggerdom, in which the white element, which first started it into life, must logically be swept away, like the worthless exuviae of a shell from the head of a young dragon.

As one who boldly claims respect for the 'system' of the Southern Confederacy, but who wishes for its perfect development, I therefore suggest that South Carolina be set aside for the great experiment. Let the negro be there allowed to congregate and expand even to his utmost capacity. Let all the poetry and beauty of Southern institutions be concentrated in that happy realm, where, amid the groans of endless labor and the swinging of countless whips, he may show the world what he may become. Already the South has proved his capacity to work sixteen hours a day and dance all night—perhaps under black rulers he may be brought to work twenty hours a day, and give up dancing altogether. I claim, as one holding advanced Southern views, that this proposition be allowed a fair trial. If not, I shall at least have the satisfaction of having put my views before the world to bide their time. A truth never dies. Coming ages will at least do me justice. Magna est Veritas et prevalebit.



THE SLAVE-TRADE IN NEW YORK.

The National Convention which in 1787 framed the Federal Constitution, despite its firmness and patriotism, was, like all public bodies, evidently not entirely devoid of a spirit of compromise. A majority of its members were desirous of freeing the institutions of the young nation from the burden of slavery, and yet they consented to engraft the following provision upon the body of our American fundamental law:—

"The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit shall not be prohibited by Congress prior to the year 1808."

Congress was awake, however, even during the administration of Washington, to its duty in the matter, and an act was passed declaring the slave-trade to be piracy. Twenty years afterward the principal European sovereigns united in the same declaration, and so the execrable commerce was hurled beyond the pale of international law. There is now no probability that it will ever regain its rank 'on change.' But its illegitimation does not seem to have greatly circumscribed its activity. In the face of apparent danger, it has continued to flourish, and there has been hardly more risk to a pirate with a living cargo from Gaboon, than would be encountered by an ordinary merchantman from pirates in the Gulf. Indeed, there were many who believed and feared, prior to the breaking out of the present rebellion, that the next compromise between the North and South would be the repeal of all laws prohibiting the African slave-trade. So rapidly yet so insidiously was the South obtaining an entire control in the councils of the nation.

It was notorious that a large proportion of the vessels which were engaged in the infamous traffic were owned and fitted out by Northern capitalists. The General Government did not exert itself in good faith to carry out either its treaty stipulations nor the legislation of Congress in regard to the matter. If a vessel was captured, her owners were permitted to bond her, and thus continue her in the trade; and if any man was convicted of this form of piracy, the executive always interposed between him and the penalty of his crime. The laws providing for the seizure of vessels engaged in the traffic were so constructed as to render the duty unremunerative; and marshals now find their fees for such services to be actually less than their necessary expenses. No one who bears this fact in mind will be surprised at the great indifference of these officers to the continuing of the slave-trade; in fact, he will be ready to learn that the laws of Congress upon the subject had become a dead letter, and that the suspicion was well grounded that certain officers of the Federal Government had actually connived at their violation.

The number of persons engaged in the slave-trade, and the amount of capital embarked in it, exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been until of late the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Portland and Boston are only second to her in that distinction. Slave dealers added largely to the wealth of our commercial metropolis; they contributed liberally to the treasuries of political organizations, and their bank accounts were largely depleted to carry elections in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. It was natural for the leaders of the party which they had aided, to accord to them, as an equivalent, many facilities for carrying on their business. There is indeed no occasion for wonder at the countenance and impunity long given to such auxiliaries. If a few of them chanced to be of Knickerbocker stock, and to bear the talisman which affords admission to the higher circles of Gothamite respectability, it is only what might have been expected. There are such men everywhere, even in the Tombs.

It requires no miraculous gift to be able to perceive why the late administration at Washington was sensitive as to the visitation of American vessels of doubtful character, by the officers of British cruisers. There was no principle at stake; but the slave-dealing interest had demanded as an immunity, that the piece of bunting known as the American flag should be allowed to protect from scrutiny every suspicious ship over which it should be raised. They had the power or influence to command; and the administration obeyed.

The present administration appears to have awakened somewhat to this subject. The principal appointments for the Atlantic ports were given to men of anti-slavery proclivities. The new marshal of the southern district of New York was of different material from his predecessors, and fortunately he was no novice. He was familiar with the habits of the men engaged in the slave trade; he was ambitious and eager to signalize himself for efficiency. In three months he had seized nine vessels, and arrested twenty-eight men who had outfitted, commanded, or served on them.

The Secretary of the Interior now resolved that the business should be broken up in every port of the United States. He accordingly issued an order to the several marshals of the States and districts lying upon the seaboard, directing them to assemble at the city of New York, on the fifteenth day of August, 1861, for the purpose of agreeing upon a system of measures for the effectual suppression of the slave-trade in American ports.

Burton's old Theatre, formerly dedicated to the 'sock and buskin,' and famous during the religious revival of 1858, was now occupied by this convention of marshals. Waiving unnecessary parliamentary usages, these ministers of the law sat with closed doors, and discussed familiarly the business in which they had engaged. They investigated carefully the whole subject in its minuter details, and visited the slave brigs and schooners which had been captured and were then lying at the Atlantic Dock in Brooklyn. A plan of operations was concerted, by which the marshals of the different districts should co-operate with each other in detecting and bringing to justice persons guilty of participating in the slave-trade. The results of this measure can not fail to be beneficial; and, indeed, the marshals have already become so active and efficient, that the capitalists who have maintained this branch of commerce are actually contemplating its transferment to European ports. So much for the convocation at Burton's Theatre. Let us now examine the principal features of the traffic, and the practices of those by whom it is conducted.

SLAVE DEALING IN NEW YORK.

The principal slave captains and chief officers of vessels engaged in the slave-trade have their residences and boarding-places in the eastern wards of the city, most of them being between James and Houston Streets. They are known to every one who has an investment in the business. Indeed, they are all members of a secret fraternity, having its signs, grips, and pass-words. 'While I was in Eldridge-street jail,' said one of them, 'Captain Loretti was captured and brought there. He did not know any one, but I shook hands with him, and we became acquainted at once.'

The arrival of a slave captain from one voyage is the signal for preparation for another. Negotiations are carried on, generally in the first-class hotels. The contracts for the City of Norfolk and several other notorious slavers were made at the Astor House. The risk of detection is less at such a public place than it would be at a private office.

A man who had failed in business on Greenwich Street was recently engaged in fitting out these vessels for their African voyage. He was first sent to procure apparatus for the refining of palm oil. This was but a blind, the practice being to take out the machinery, and employ the boiler for culinary purposes, until the vessels had got out to sea, and there was no farther necessity for duping inquisitive persons. This man was also commissioned to purchase wooden ware, champagne, and other necessary articles. Such were the business agents and their duty; all was liberally paid for and promptly supplied.

As soon as a vessel is ready and officered for the voyage, measures are taken to procure a crew. Slave-traders employ for this the services of 'runners,' who constitute a caste of pariahs of the most degraded kind. A conscientious scruple would seem never to enter into their calculations. They would hardly recognize a precept of the decalogue except by the circumstance of its violation. Earning their livelihood thus basely, debauchery and crime constitute their every-day history. These persons keep a record of the names of men who have served on slave ships, or been guilty of mutiny, or other villany. So accurate is their information and so expert are they in their estimate of character, that they seldom commit a blunder, or furnish a seaman who is not the man for the vocation. The crew which they select are indeed 'picked men.' They are of every nationality, and are taken from the seamen's boarding-houses in the lower wards of the city.

A few years since, the information was received in New York that a yacht was lying in Long Island Sound, and that circumstances warranted the suspicion that she was intended for the slave-trade. The marshal, with a display of enthusiastic zeal for the execution of the laws, proceeded to the place with a strong force of assistants, and took charge of the yacht; but subsequent investigations failed to criminate her. The reputed owner declared that he had fitted her out for a pleasure excursion; that was all. The vessel was discharged, and a few months afterward landed a cargo of negroes on the coast of Georgia. So easy has it been to deceive the Federal officers. The owner of the yacht afterward declared that he paid ten thousand dollars to get his vessel clear of the harbor of New York.

The obtaining of a clearance at the custom-house was not a very difficult matter. Slavers were never detained by any extraordinary curiosity on the part of those having cognizance of their departure. They had but to assume a transparent disguise, raise the American flag, and keep up the show till they arrived at the intermediate port. Here the national ensign was changed, the papers of the vessel were altered, and necessary arrangements were made for receiving a cargo of slaves.

Factories or agencies are maintained on the African coast, where the vessels obtain their living freight. The captains seldom go on shore except for purpose of observation. Each vessel generally takes with her from New York a Spaniard to transact the business. The complement being obtained, it only remains to get away and beyond the cruisers. The action of the Federal government, some years since, in relation to the visitation of vessels, has been effectual in impairing the energy of the British squadron, which has been maintained on the coast of Africa, pursuant to the treaty of Washington. As for the American squadron, it never co-operated heartily in the matter of suppressing the slave-trade; and the vessels were generally absent for the purpose of obtaining coal, or for repairs, whenever there was opportunity of making a capture.

But the capitalists of New York do not depend entirely upon these precautions. Their vessels are occasionally taken; and then the men on board must be protected, or they will disclose everything. Not only are appliances used to make an examination result in a discharge, but a corps of attorneys is kept under pay to defend those who fall within the clutches of the law. The impunity which has attended these men is notorious.

CAPTAIN LATHAM.

Some time ago the brig Cora was captured at sea and brought by a prize crew to the port of New York. Her commander, Captain Latham, was incarcerated in Eldridge-street jail. Hendrickson, the mate, was, however, permitted to communicate to his friends on shore, who procured a boat, pulled quietly to the side of the brig, received him on board, and took him ashore. His clothing and other property were conveyed to the office of the marshal, and he was not only permitted to go and take them away, but to visit his acquaintances in Eldridge-street jail. It was an easy matter to arrest him, but the marshal remarked to an associate that he did not care how the man made his money.

Captain Latham, meanwhile, remained at the jail. At the time referred to, that place would seem to have been as jovial and sociable as a club-room. The present marshal, not liking the arrangements, removed all the Federal prisoners to the Tombs, where they could be kept more securely and excluded from seeing improper visitors. The men who were engaged in the slave-trade were in the habit of visiting their friends in 'Eldridge Street,' and holding regular carousals. They were permitted to visit there, it is said, at late hours in the evening, and as early as seven o'clock in the morning. A man residing in the seventh ward, but doing business on South Street, would come of a Saturday night and pay the board of the officers of the captured slave vessel. A Spaniard named Sanchez, now a prisoner at the Tombs, was a frequent guest; and occasionally a marshal would be present. Others were also permitted. The prisoners whom they visited were allowed to come into the office; champagne and other liquors would be produced, and the company would have a 'good time.'

Captain Latham is one of the most ingenious men. He has learned the gipsy art of dyeing his face; and he can elude the closest observer. When he falls into the power of the ministers of the law, he is shielded by the efforts of the heaviest capitalists who have engaged in the slave-trade; and they honor all his demands. At his examination he was identified by the marshal's assistants, and by two persons who were employed at the custom-house. It was arranged, however, that when he should be arraigned for trial, each of these persons should profess himself to be unable to recognize him. One of them is said to have received five hundred dollars, and the others two hundred apiece, for this want of memory.

After remaining some twelve weeks at the jail, Captain Latham determined not to await a trial. He obtained the aid of one of the marshal's assistants; a 'friend' of his, who has a place of business in Wall Street, advancing three thousand dollars. One of his attorneys was also in the secret. A writ of habeas corpus was obtained from the recorder, and dismissed for want of jurisdiction. This was all done to elude suspicion. A ticket for a passage to Havana was procured; and on the day that the steamer was to sail, a carriage, in which were Sanchez, the marshal's assistant, and a friend, drove to the jail. Bidding farewell to his fellow-prisoners, some of whom knew what was going on, Latham left his apartments and took a seat by Sanchez. The four drove to the clothing warehouse of Brooks Brothers in Broadway, purchased a suit of clothing, and ordered another. It was now almost the hour for the steamer to leave. Latham returned to the carriage, and was driven to the pier, arriving there just in time to get on board. It is said that he has since returned to New York; but only his friends have recognized him. The men who aided his escape are now in prison.

It does not appear that the capitalists who are engaged in this traffic are as profuse toward other prisoners as they were to Captain Latham. There was among those who were removed from the jail to the City Prison, one man who had sailed as mate with Latham. When he was captured he was in the employment of a house in Beaver Street, which has also a branch in Havana. He too had formed a plan of escape by bribing a warden and getting a friend to personate one of the marshal's assistants, who should profess to come for him by an order from a commissioner. But when his wife applied to his employer for money to carry out this plan, she was dismissed with a solitary dollar. This prisoner had probably fallen from favor, and was therefore abandoned to the mercy of the law.

The names of the prominent slave-traders, their residences and places of business, are known to the marshal. Several of them have fled from the city; among them, a woman of wealth residing in St. Mark's Place. Their operations have been largely curtailed, and it has become almost impossible for a slaver to leave New York. With the concert of action agreed upon by the convention at Burton's Theatre, it is to be hoped that the slave-trade will be exterminated in every Northern port. Some legislation by Congress to increase the powers of the marshals, and efficient action on the part of the executive, are all that is now required to sweep the infamous commerce from the ocean.

Since the above was written, Captain Gordon, of the slaver Erie, has been convicted of piracy, before the United States Court for the Southern District of New York. It is needless to say that this conviction is the completest triumph which Freedom has yet gained in our country against her adversary. It indicates more clearly even than any event of the war, that Southern social influences are yielding, and that ere long we shall be free from all their taint. Like the defeat of Fernando Wood, like the breaking up of the Peace Party, like the rapidly progressing crusade against old political corruption, it shows that there is a reformation afoot which will work wonders, and prove to the world that the mass of corruption in this country, so generally attributed to the working of republican institutions, is in reality due to a diametrically opposite cause—to the influence of a party which in all its feelings is essentially that of despotism. May we all live to see its last trace obliterated from the free North.



LITERARY NOTICES

THE REJECTED STONE: OR, INSURRECTION vs. RESURRECTION. By a Native of Virginia. Boston: Walker, Wise & Company, 245 Washington Street.

It is to be regretted that the native of Virginia who penned this volume has not published his name, that the world might know who it was that produced the most vigorous, unflinching, and brilliant work which has thus far resulted from the war. In sober seriousness, we have not as yet, in any journal or in any quarter, encountered such a handling of facts without gloves; such a rough-riding over old prejudices, timidities, and irresolution; such reckless straight-forwardness in declaring what should be done to settle the great dispute, or such laughing-devil sarcasm in ripping up dough-face weakness and compromising hesitation. Its principle and refrain, urged with abundant wit, ingenuity and courage, is simply EMANCIPATION—not on the narrow ground of abolition, but on the necessity of promptly destroying an evil which threatens to vitiate the white race. In the beginning the author points out the inevitableness of the present war, and that our political system has been hitherto a sacrifice to Slavery for the time, but also a running up of arrears in favor of Liberty.

'In forming this government, Slavery clutched at the strength of the law; Freedom relied on the inviolable justice of the ages. They have both had, they must have, their reward. That it was and is thus, is apparent from the very clauses under which Slavery claims eminent domain in this country; they are all written as for an institution passing away; the sources of it are sealed up so far as they could be; and all the provisions for it—the crutches by which it should limp as decently as possible to the grave—were so worded that, when Slavery should be buried, no dead letter would stand in the Constitution as its epitaph. It is even so. No historian a thousand years hence could show from that instrument that a single slave was ever held under it.' ... 'Slavery now appeals to arms because Freedom, in her slow but steady progress, has left no informality—no flaw—which can be seized on to reverse the decision she has gained in any higher court.'

The style of this book is remarkable. The wealth of simile which bursts out genially and involuntarily is only paralleled by its strange variety, recalling CARLYLE in pleasant, piquant singularity. Its humor is irresistible; none the less so for being keenly satirical. We regret that our limits forbid copious extracts from these treasures, but do the more earnestly entreat the reader to buy the volume and make himself familiar with it. Whoever our Virginian may be, he is a rising star, well worth observing. We find him at times a gleaming enthusiast,—a man burning with the spirit of the war, involuntarily uttering the most thrilling passages of Scripture,—and again provoking laughter by dry humor and cutting jests. Let the reader in illustration take the following paragraphs in the same sequence in which they occur in the original work.

'"Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!" said dying Julian the apostate. The North may, and will, now collect the bones of her great-browed children who yielded because she said yield; the fallen pillars of her crumbled church; her children whose wounds yet smoke fresh from the state of Slavery;—and broken now upon the stone she so long refused, shall write as their epitaph.

Vicisti Humanitas!

(The Privateer.) 'A cry comes up to the ear of America,—a long, piercing cry of amazement and indignation,—recognizable as one which can come only when the profoundest depths of the human pocket are stirred. The privateers are at large! They have taken away my coffee, and I know not where they have laid it. They have taken my India goods with swords and staves. For my first-class ship they have cast lots!

'Was such depravity ever known before? So long as it was a human soul, launched by God on the eternal sea, that they despised; so long as it was only a few million bales of humanity captured; so long as it was but the scuttling the hearts of mothers and fathers and husbands and wives,—we remained patient and resigned,—did we not? But coffee and sugar—Good God! what is that blockade about? To seize a poor innocent sloop—has Slavery no bowels? And its helpless family of molasses barrels;—can hearts be so void of pity? Slavery must end. The spirit of the age demands it. The blood of a dozen captured freights crieth to Heaven in silveriest accents against it.

'Brothers, there is a laughter that opens into the fountain of tears.'

In a letter to the President, in which the Executive is reminded that it is not often in this world that to one man is given the magnificent opportunity which the madness of a great wrong has placed within his reach,—as indeed in every chapter,—the real crisis in which this country is now involved, and the only means of prompt and effectual extrication, are pointed out with irresistible vehemence and shrewd intelligence. The author declares, and truly enough, that there are resources in this land, did we only draw on them, which would close this war with the closing of this year. The futile and frivolous objections which have been urged against this great scheme of warfare for the present, and of national progress in future, are most ably refuted; while through all runs the same vein of satire, wit, scholarship and manly sincerity. It is, in a word, a good book, and one fully suited to these brave and warlike times.

THE WORKS OF FRANCIS BACON, Baron of Verulam, Viscount of St. Albans and Lord High Chancellor of England. Collected and edited by James Spedding, M.A., Robert Leslie Ellis, M.A., and Douglas Denyn Heath. Boston: Brown & Taggard. Volumes I. and II.

Much has been said in praise of the monks of old for preserving works of solid wisdom; but why can not a good word be said for those publishers of the present day who confer a service by not merely embalming, but by reviving and sending forth by thousands into real life the best books of the past? There are many authors who are quoted by everybody, and read by very few, simply because good modern editions of their works, at a moderate price, are rare.

BACON is preeminently one of these; so much, indeed, is he a case in point, that BULWER in speaking of the celebrated axiom, Knowledge is Power, employs him as an example to warn a young scholar from quoting at second-hand an author whom he has never read.

The present edition includes all the works extant of Lord BACON, embracing, as we learn from SPEDDING'S preface (which has the rare defect of being much too brief), a biography, which in minute detail and careful finish, and facts hitherto unpublished, will far surpass any before written. Yet, to stay the appetite of the reader, anxious to revive the main points of BACON'S life, he gives in this first volume the short biography by Dr. WILLIAM RAWLEY. In addition to these introductions, we are gratified by a general preface to BACON'S Philosophical Works, by ROBERT LESLIE HARRIS, one to the Parasceve by JAMES SPEDDING, and a third to the De Augmentis Scientiarum, in which BACON'S claims to be the creator of what is popularly and generally understood as the Inductive Philosophy are most fairly examined; not in the spirit of the common biographer who always canonizes his subject through thick and thin, but in that of an impartial seeker for truth, resolved to naught extenuate and set down naught in malice. It is believed by many that BACON was simply so fortunate as to have his picture stand as the frontispiece of the new Philosophy, when in truth other contemporaries, who made great discoveries by following precisely his method, as, for instance, GALILEO, were quite as much entitled to the glory. But examination of BACON'S works proves that though the great work of proof never was completed by him, that which he embraced, foresaw, and projected, was of that vast comprehensiveness which fully entitles him to be regarded, not merely as the most proper of names whereby to indicate the author of Induction (since the world must always have a name), but in reality the one of all others who best understood what form the development of science must assume to become perfect. The treatment of this question by the editors is truly interesting, and worthy their great undertaking.

The two volumes before us, in addition to the prefaces and biography, embrace the Novum Organum, 'the Parasceve,' and the work De Augmentis Scientiarum. It is to be regretted that the English versions, corrected by BACON himself, were omitted, but those who would read the translations are mostly capable of reading 'Baconian Latin.' As they are, they will be most gratefully accepted by thousands. The forthcoming volumes will embrace the English works. We would here wish that the editor had not, as he informs us he has done, modernized the spelling,—but here the majority of readers will perhaps be thankful that such is the case. As regards typography, paper, and all outward grace, this edition leaves literally nothing to be wished for, while a short critical article on the portraits of BACON leads us to infer that the exquisitely engraved head of the philosopher, given in the first volume, has been made accurate at the cost of great research and labor.

THE OLD LOG SCHOOLHOUSE. By Alexander Clark, Editor of 'Clark's School Visitor.' Philadelphia: Leary, Getz & Co.

Mr. CLARK is the most modest of writers; one in whose writings unaffected simplicity and freedom from literary conceit is manifest on every page. He appears in all the many sketches which constitute this volume to have written for the direct purpose of pleasing and teaching youthful readers or quiet and pious grown persons. He neither eyes the world through a lorgnette or a lorgnon, nor affects a knowledge of all things, nor even hints at it. Yet it is precisely in this that the charm of his stories consist—they are perfectly rational, and told in the plain language which becomes them. It is to be desired that Mr. CLARK will give us a volume of sketches devoted entirely to that Western and rural life which he sketches with such felicity.

SONGS IN MANY KEYS. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1861.

It is only a few years since HOLMES was little known to the general reader save as a humorist. A series of writings of the most varied character have since appeared, displaying more fully his greatly varied ability, so that the reader will not be surprised to find in this, his last wreath of poetic blossoms, a rich variety of every hue, from the lightest tints of mirth to the sombre shades of tender pathos. The variety of feeling awakened by these lyrics is remarkable—and to say that, is to bear sympathetic testimony to the excellence of each separate piece. Even the beautiful ballad of 'Agnes,' chronicling the loves of Sir Harry Frankland and Agnes Surraige of the Hopkinton Frankland mansion, and which will be deemed one of the most perfect of new ballads of the olden school, does not seem the chief flower, after inhaling the home sweetness and heart aroma of many of the minor lyrics in this volume. As for the humor, is it not of HOLMES? 'The Deacon's Masterpiece,' and 'Parson Turrell's Legacy,' are of the very best, of the triple est brand; it is only to be wished there were a hundred of them. Of that strange blending of pathos with humor, and the 'sentiment of society,' in which HOLMES equals, or, if you will, surpasses PRAED, there are several exquisite examples. But buy it for yourself, reader, and you will not regret the purchase, for the harder the times, so much the more, as we opine, does the world need cheering poesy.



BOOKS RECEIVED.

SOME OF THE MISTAKES OF EDUCATED MEN. A Biennial Address before the Phrenokosmian Society of Pennsylvania College, Gettysburg, Pa. By John S. Hart, M.D. Delivered Sept. 18, 1861. Philadelphia: C. Sherman & Son, 1861.

An excellent address, which has attracted much comment and quotation from different journals since its publication.

THE COTTON KINGDOM: A Traveler's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. Based upon three former volumes of journeys and investigations by the same author. By Frederick Law Olmstead. In two volumes. New York: Mason Brothers, 1861.

The best record extant of social or commercial facts and figures illustrative of the entire South.

LADY MAUD. By Pierce Egan. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers.

We learn with regret that this is the only complete and unabridged edition of Lady Maud, since from a hasty examination of its chapters we judge that the more the work were abbreviated the better would it be for the public.

RECORD OF AN OBSCURE MAN. 'Aux plus desherites le plus d'amour.' Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

A work of very decided merit, though one advancing views and sentiments which can not fail to provoke opposition and argument from many readers. Of its interest, as well as of the talent of the author, there can be but one opinion.

SPARE HOURS. By John Brown, M.D. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1861.

A beautiful reprint of the Horae Subscivae, beginning with 'Rab and his Friends,' followed by many congenial sketches, the whole forming one of the most fascinating volumes of light reading which has appeared for years.

THE SOUTHERN REBELLION AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION. A History of the Rise and Progress of the Rebellion. New York: James D. Torrey, No. 13 Spruce Street.

A well written, weekly current chronicle of the events of the war, prepared from copious sources. The arrangement of this work is excellent.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS. By Charles Dickens. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1861.

Another addition to the excellent duo-decimo edition of DICKENS'S complete works, published by PETERSON.

RELATION OF THE AMERICAN BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS TO SLAVERY. By Charles M. Whipple. Boston: R. T. Walcutt, No. 221 Washington Street, 1861.

WOMAN'S RIGHTS UNDER THE LAW. In three Lectures delivered in Boston, January, 1861, by Caroline H. Dall, author of Woman's Right to Labor, &c. Boston: Walker, Wise & Co. 1861.

THE REBELLION; its Latent Causes and True Significance, in Letters to a Friend abroad. By Henry T. Tuckerman. New York: James G. Gregory, 1861.

LIGHT INFANTRY DRILL in the United States Army. T. B. Peterson & Brothers. Philadelphia, 1861. Price, 25 cents.



EDITOR'S TABLE

It was usual, of old, to characterize as Annus Mirabilis, or A Year of Wonder, any twelvemonth which had been more than usually prolific in marvels. The historian who may in future days seek a dividing point or a date for the greatest political and social struggle of this age, can hardly fail to indicate 1861 as the Annus Mirabilis of the Nineteenth Century in America. That heart does not beat, the brain does not throb on earth, which is capable of feeling or appreciating the tremendous range of consequences involved in the events of this year. We hear the most grating thunder-peals of horror; the whole artillery of death and disaster roars and crashes from fort and field; there is blaze and ruin, such as this continent knew not perhaps even in the primeval times of its vanished Golden Hordes;—and again there rise prophetic organ-tones of solemn praise; merry bells ringing the carillon of joy; sweet voices as in dreams singing of the purple evening peace; while mysteriously and beautifully, beyond all, breathes the Daughter of the Voice—that strangest of prophecies known to the Hebrew of old, softly inspiring hopes of a fairer future America than was ever before dreamed of. For, of a truth, above all sits and works the awful destiny of man, proclaiming as of old, amid strange races now forgotten, that the humanity which bravely toils and labors shall live, while the haughty and the oppressor and the sluggard, puffed up with vanity, shall all pass away as the mist of the morning.

It is worth while, at the conclusion of such a year, to look about us; to see what has been done or what is now doing, and to surmise as well as we may what great changes the future may bring forth.

A year ago this country was plagued and disgraced beyond any on the face of the earth by swarms of professional politicians; by men who regarded all legislation as one vast Lobby and Third House, and 'ability' as the means of turning corruption to their own personal advantage. These miserables, whether on the Northern or Southern side, tacitly united in driving all legislation or congressional business from its legitimate halls into the procrastinating by-paths, in order that they might make speeches and magnify themselves unto Buncombe, and be glorified by the local home press because of their devotion to—the party! The party! That was always the word. Where are these men of froth and wind now,—these heroes of the stump and the bar-room? Passing away into nothing, at headlong speed, before the great storm of the times. Now and then they 'rally'—there was one ghastly wig-and-hollow-pumpkin effort at recovery in the trembling, rattle-jointed Peace Movement of these last summer months. Where is it now? There answers a gay laugh and merry stave from the corners of irreverent weekly newspapers:—

'The piece of a party, called the party of peace, Like everything else which deceases, Has gone where the wicked from trouble shall cease, For the party of peace is in pieces.'

Or we may see now and then wretched election meetings, as of late in New York, where a worn-out FERNANDO WOOD and others like him gabble as much treason as they dare. It is all played out—Mozart, Tammany, and all the trash. Rummy, frowsy candidates, treating Five-Point graduates, and shoulder-hitting bravos yelling at the polls, are beginning to be disgusting and anti-national elements. Their very existence is an insult to these great, serious and glorious times of manly war, when young men are beginning at last to 'think great.' A few more gasps by the politicians and down they must go into infinite depths of congenial darkness, to be remembered only as allied to 'the abominable state of affairs before the war.'

It is no small thing to have driven so much of the old iniquity out; but from this and that side come murmurs that there are but few signs of the young genius coming in. Oh, for one hour of Dundee! Oh, for a WEBSTER in the cabinet, whose right arm should go forth and take hold of England and Frank-land of the East, while his left swept the isles of the South with fearful power! Oh, for the fierce old Dandolo of America, who was not blind, but whose piercing glance at this hour would dart through many a diabolical diplomatic difficulty—for ANDREW JACKSON! Oh, for the trumpet tones of CLAY—of MARCY—for one brave blast of that dread horn of olden time which rang so bravely to battle!

Friends, have patience. Remember that these men, and all like them, were slowly born of great times, and that we must await time's gestation. In this age there spring no longer heroes dragon-tooth born into full fighting-life inside of 2.30. But so surely as stars shine in their rounding life, or water runs, or God lives, so surely are these days of storm and sorrow and tremendous travail bringing slowly on their legitimate fruit of great ideas and great men. Young man—whoever you are—be sacred to yourself now, and, for a season, serious and pure and noble—for who knows in these times to what he may grow? But a century ago, this land lay buried in obscurity. Here and there young land-surveyors and country store-keepers wondered that destiny had buried them on Virginia farms and in Yankee backwoods. But war came,—no greater than this of ours—one involving no grander principles of human dignity and freedom,—and the young 'obscures' darted to the heaven and took glorious places amid the constellations of fame. 'When the tale of bricks is doubled,' says the Hebrew proverb, 'Moses comes.'

We hear much said of the honest, sturdy, no-nonsense virtues of the old revolutionary stock, both male and female. The thing is plain enough—they had passed through serious times and great thoughts, through trials, and sorrows, and healthy privation, and come out strong. Just such will be the stock of men and women born in spirit of this war. It is making the old material over again. It was all here as good as ever, but wanted a little stirring up, that was all. He who has seen in the sturdy East and glorious West the unflinching honesty and earnestness with which men are upholding this war to the knife and knife to the hilt, as PALAFOX phrased it,—or, as the American hath it in humbler phrase, 'from the wheel to the hub and hub to the linch-pin,'—has no doubt that at this minute it was never so popular, never so determined, never so thoroughly ingrained, entwined, inter-twisted with the whole life-core and being of our people. 'We suffer—but on with the war! Hurrah for battle—only give us victory! Do you ask for money, arms, ships?—take all and everything to superfluity—but oh, give us victory and power!' Out of such will as this there come the greatest of men—giants of a fearfully glorious future. When we look around and see this red-hot iron determination to see all through to the victorious end, we may well feel assured that the day of great ideas and of great men is not far off.

It is superb for a stranger to see how the spirit of the Revolution still lives in New England, and is voiced and acted by men bearing Revolutionary names—it is magnificent to behold the stream, grown to a thunder-torrent, roaring and foaming over the broad West. Hurrah! it still lives—that old spirit of freedom, its fires are all aflame, and it shall not again smoulder until the whole world has seen, as it did before, that it is the light of the world, and the pillar guiding as of old to the promised land.

If 1861 had brought nothing else to pass it would be supremely great in this, that amid toil and trial, foes within and without, it has seen the American people determine that Slavery, the worm which gnawed the core of its tree of life, shall be plucked out. Out it shall go, that is settled. We have fought the foe too long with kid gloves, but now puss will lay aside her mittens and catch the Southern rats in earnest. It is the negro who sustains the South; the negro who maintains its army, feeds it, digs its trenches, squires its precious chivalry, and is thereby forced most unnaturally to rivet his own chains. There shall be an end to this, and our administration is yielding to this inevitable necessity. Here again the great year has worked a wonder, since in so short a space it has made such an advance in discovering a basis by which all Union men may conscientiously unite in freeing the black. There have been hitherto two steps made towards the solution. The first was that of the old Abolition movement, which saw only the suffering of the slave and cried aloud for his freedom, reckless of all results. It was humane; but even humanity is not always worldly wise, and it did unquestionably for twenty years defeat its own aim in the Border States. But it worked most unflinchingly. Then came HELPER, who saw that the poor white man of the South was being degraded below the negro, and that industry and capital were fearfully checked by slavery. In his well-known work he pointed out, by calm and dispassionate facts and figures, that the land south of 'Mason and Dixon's' was being sacrificed most wastefully, and the majority of its white inhabitants kept in incredible ignorance, meanness, and poverty, simply that a few privileged families might remain 'first and foremost.' These opinions were most clearly sustained, and the country was amazed. People began to ask if it was quite right, after all, to suffer this slavery to grow and grow, when it was manifestly reacting on the poor white man, and literally sinking him below the level of the black. This was the second movement on the slave question, and its effect was startling.

But there was yet a third advance required, and it came with the past year and the war, in the form of the now so rapidly expanding 'Emancipation' movement. HELPER had shown that slavery had degraded the poor whites, but the events leading to the present struggle indicated to all intelligent humanity that it was rapidly demoralizing and ruining in the most hideous manner the minds of the masters of the slaves—nay, that its foul influence was spreading like a poison mist over the entire continent. The universal shout of joyful approbation which the whole South had raised years ago when a Northern senator was struck down and beaten in the most infamously cowardly manner, had caused the very horror of amazement at such fearful meanness, among all true hearted and manly men, the world over. But when there came from the 'first families' grinnings of delight over the vilest thievery and forgery and perjury by FLOYD and his fellows,—when the whole South, after agreeing in carrying on an election, refused to abide by its results,—when the whole Southern press abounded in the vilest denunciations of labor and poverty, and in Satanic contempt of everything 'Yankee,' meaning thereby all that had made the North and West prosperous and glorious,—and when, finally, it was found that this loathsome poison was working through the North itself, corrupting the young with pseudo-aristocratic pro-slavery sympathies,—then indeed it became apparent that for the sake of all, and for that of men in comparison to whose welfare that of the negro was a mere trifle, this fearful disease must be in some form abated. The result was the development of Emancipation on the broadest possible grounds,—of Emancipation for the sake of the Union and of the white man,—to be brought about, however, by the will of the people, subject to such rules as discussion and expediency might determine. This was the present Emancipation movement, first urged by that name in the New York Knickerbocker magazine, though its main principles were practically manifesting themselves in many quarters—the most prominent being the well-known proclamations of Generals BUTLER and FREMONT.

'Emancipation' does not, as has been urged, present in comparison to Abolition a distinction without a difference. HELPER desired the freedom of the slave for the sake of the poor white man in the South and for Southern development. Emancipation goes further, and claims that nowhere on the American continent is the white laborer free from the vile comparison and vile influences of slavery, and that it should be abolished for the sake of the Union and for the sake of all white men. It may be dim to many now, but it is true as God's providence, that whether it be in our Union, or out of it, we can no longer exist side by side with a state of society in which it is shamelessly proclaimed that labor, man's holiest and noblest attribute, is a disgrace; that the negro is the standard of the mudsill, and that the state must be based on an essentially degraded, sunken class, whether white or black. Yet we might for the sake of peace have long borne with all this, and yielded to the old lie-based 'isothermal' cant, had it not resulted, as it inevitably must, in building up the most miserable, insolent, and arrogant pseudo aristocracy which ever made the name of aristocracy ridiculous, not excepting that of the court of the sable Emperor FAUSTIN of St. Domingo. It is all very well to talk of Southern rights; but humanity and progress, or, if you will, law and order, industry and capital, have their rights also, aye, and their manifest destiny too, and no one can deny that; reason as we may, or concede as much as we will, there the facts are—the principal being the utter impossibility of a slave-aristocracy—rotted to the core with theories now exploded through the civilized world—existing either in or out of a neighboring republic in which freedom

'Careers with thunder-speed along.'

So we stand at the parting of the ways. But the problem is half solved already. The year 1861 closes leaving it clear as noon-day that emancipation in the Border States is a foregone conclusion, and that, reduced to the cotton belt, it can never become a preponderating national influence. As for the details of settlement, calmly considered, they present no real difficulty to the man who realizes the enormous industrial and recuperative energies of this country.

'What are we to do with one or two million of free blacks?' asks one. A few years ago, when it was proposed to banish all free persons of color from Maryland, a cry of alarm went up lest Baltimore alone should be deprived of fifteen thousand of 'the best servants in the world.' 'How shall we ever pay for those who may be offered for sale to us, if we resolve to pay for their slaves all Southerners who may take the oath of allegiance?' Eight days' expenses of the present war would pay more than the market price for all the slaves in Maryland! But these objections are childish. Right against them rises a tremendous, inevitable destiny, which must crush all before it. So much for 1861.

We would urge no measure in this or any other relation which shall not have received the fullest endorsement of two thirds of the loyal American people. As regards all foreign interference, let it never be forgotten that public opinion after all prevails in all Western Europe, and that this would long hesitate ere it committed a national reputation to an endorsement of the Southern Confederacy. It is apparent from the authentic and shameless avowals of the Southern press that Mr. SLIDELL, the cut-short ambassador, was authorized to solicit a French protectorate of LOUIS NAPOLEON,—to such incredible baseness has slave 'independence' sunk,—and, as we write, much discussion is waged whether England will take in ill part our arrest of a man charged with such a monstrous mission! Let England imagine herself dependent on such a protectorate for her cotton, and the thought may possibly occur that it would have been better to have sided at once openly and squarely with the North. But John Bull is strangely changed in these times, and Yankee protection is inconceivably more awful to him than the slavery with which he has been for twenty years so much disgusted.

'The heart it pincheth sore, But the pocket pinches more.'

And now with the New Year. Amid red-flashing war and wild strivings we look bravely and hopefully forward into the future, and see amid these storms blue sky rifts and golden sun gleams. Already strong and practical advances in education, in political economy, in industry, in all that is healthier and sounder in life, are beginning to manifest themselves. This country can be in nothing put back by this struggle, in no wise weakened or injured. It is our hope and will that in these columns some share of the good work may be honestly carried out. We wish to speak under the most vital American influences to the American people, ambitious of being nothing more nor less than soundly national in all things. We see a new time forming, new ideas rising, and would give it and them a voice in such earnest and energetic tones as the people love. We call not only for the matured thought, but also for the young mind of the country, and beg every man and woman who entertains vigorous and practical ideas to come out boldly and speak freely. Think nobly, write rapidly! Remember that every letter printed in these times will take its place in history. The forgotten comment of the moment will rise up in after years to be honored perhaps as the right word in the right place. The day is coming when the songs and sentences of this great struggle will be garnered up into literary treasuries, pass into household words, and confer honor on the children of those who penned them. Lay hand to the work, all you who have aught to say, aid us to become a medium for the time, and honor yourselves by your utterances. There are a thousand reforms, innumerable ideas fit for the day, ready to bloom forth. Write and publish; the public is listening. Now is the time, if it ever was, to develop an American character, to show the world what treasures of life, strength and originality this country contains. Beyond the old conventional belles lettres and aesthetic scholarship which limited us in peace, lies a fair land, a wilderness it may be, but one bearing beautiful, unknown flowers, and strange but golden fruits, which are well worthy a garden. Let all who know of these bring them in. The time has come.

We have been questioned from many of the highest sources as to the future tendency and scope of our magazine. Let us say then, briefly, that we hope to make a bold step forward, presenting in our columns contributions characterized by variety, vigor, and originality, to be written by men who are fully up with the times and endeavoring to advance in all things. In a word, we shall do our best to give it exuberant life—such as the country and age require. We shall advocate the holy cause of the UNION with might and main, and leave no means whatever neglected to urge the most vigorous prosecution of this war, until the sacred principles of liberty as transmitted to us by our forefathers have been fully recognized and re-established. Believing in Emancipation, subject to the will of the majority and the action of the administration, we shall still welcome to our pages the properly expressed views of every sound 'Union man' or woman on this or other subjects, however differing from our own. We shall urge the fullest development of education as the great basis of future social progress, and shall have faith in making woman's intellect and labor as available as possible in all respects. We shall hold to the belief that in constant industrial development, the increase of capital, and the harmony of interests between these, lies the material salvation of the country, and that labor in every form should be continually ennobled and socially dignified.