Latest from the North.
We continue our selections from the latest Northern papers which have been received. We shall see a glorious nation, a restored Constitution. We shall see a liberty in whose bright say Georgia and Massachusetts will shelf hands that never shall be separated again. These is love to be raked open yet. Now there is fierce of but there shall come concord, fellow and union; and when this comes we shall have that no foreign influence can break and shall over mar again. The Boston Liberator (Wm. Lloyd Garrison's paper) is not so well satisfied with it The objectionable features of the proclamation are its a vowed readiness to return to bloody stripes and horrible torture and lifelong (if he be not killed outright) any hunted man on the mere oath of the villain claiming him that he is loyal to the Government; its seemingly contradictory talk (for the first portion of it is a characteristic jumble of words) about emancipating the slaves of January. thus sufficient to enable Jeff. Davis and his traitorous Confederates to anticipate that measure themselves, and thus secure their independence by foreign Intervention;) its proposition to make a new overture to the slave States to sell their slave system at a bargain; and its mean absurd, and participative device to expatriates the colored population from this, their native land.View of a "loyal" border State journal.
The Louisville (Ky.) Democrate of the 24th, has a long article on the proclamation, from which we make the following extracts: The President of the United States has shown frequently a determination to resist the radicalism of his party, although his efforts to resist appeared, in the progress of events, to be giving way. The proclamation of yesterday morning shows that the abolitionists have pressed him into their service not entirely, but virtually. The long-solicited proclamation has come. It is virtually what the radicals desire. Although they can still find fault with it, they will accept it as a hopeful sign of progress. Those who desire the Union as it was and the Constitution as it is, can now expect little aid from the President. He has proclaimed in had, but intelligible English, that the slaves in any State, or part of a State, in rebellion on the first of January, 1863, are to be free. The army and navy are to recognize them as free. He does not say that the military power shall enforce their proclaimed right to freedom; but they shall not repress any efforts the slaves make to be free. Here the President is not as explicit as the abolitionists would desire. The army and navy are not required to aid the slaves to obtain practical freedom, but they are forbidden to put down an insurrection among slaves it one should be started.--The right to freedom is, however, recognized; the next step is a natural one, and will follow if the initiative is taken. On what shadow of authority can the President rest this proclamation? Will military necessity cover an act of this sort? If it will, then may not State organizations be abolished, and State lines be obliterated, by a military proclamation? May not political rights be conferred on slaves by proclamation in all the States, free as well as slave? May not Indiana and Illinois, be compelled to allow negroes to make their homes in those States? May not all provisions of State Constitutions be over-ridden by a simple proclamation of the President? Slaves cannot be set free in this State, unless they are removed from our limits; that is a constitutional provision — can it be overridden by a proclamation? If a State cannot nullify a plain right of the Federal Government, where does the Federal Government get the power to nullify the right of a State? In our opinion the President has as much right to abolish the institution of marriage, or the laws of a State regulating the relation of parent and child, as to nullify the right of a State to regulate the relations of the white and black races.--This attempt to execute laws, by trampling laws equally valid under foot, is absurd. By all true interpretations of military necessity, the power dies with the necessity — it has no permanent vitality. It may be said that individuals who are striving to overthrow the Constitution and the Government have no right to complain if their constitutional rights are disregarded. We grant the abstract justice of that, but let us see how it is operates if it could be carried into effect. It is not individuals that are to be affected, but States and parts of States. So no matter what an individual may be disposed to do, if he live in an infected district he suffers the penalty. He is compensated if he proves his loyalty, the President, says, but how is he to fulfill his promise? Where is he to get the means and appropriate them? Congress has made no appropriation adequate to such a purpose, and we have every reason to believe that such an appropriation will never be made. It is a promise that the President has no power to fulfill, and we may go a step further and say there is no power in the Government to fulfill such a promise for it has not the means. It will require all the funds the Government can raise to put down the rebel armies; at least all that a people will be willing to furnish.--Will the loyal States shoulder the additional burden of compensating the owner for his slaves, and then colonizing them in addition? * * * In the name of Eternal Justice, what right has a Government to inflict penalties for disloyalty, produced by the impotency of the Government itself? Let it first show its power to protect the citizen against the despotism of the rebellion, and then punish him if he remains disloyal by constitutional penalties, not by arbitrary proclamations against laws and constitutions. When the Government is able to do this the rebellion is over, and the military necessity — the only plea for this exercise of unwarrantable power — ceases. So that there can be rationally no place for it. It will be seen that Kentucky Maryland, and Missouri, and Western Virginia, do not come under this proclamation.--that part of it which is entirely without law; but by an article of war the military forces are not to be used to return slaves escaping from their owners. We have no objection to that; and we presume they are not to be used to entice slaves from their owners, or to conceal them in their camps. Let the latter be observed, and it is all we ask. There is no military necessity to interfere with the operations of the civil law in this State, unless the law is broken by the military themselves. As we have said, the active, conscious rebel has no fight to complain if his constitutional rights are not secured; if he loses, it is his chosen condition. He is an enemy of the Government, and if he be a man he will ask no rights under a Constitution he tries to overthrow. We speak for a Constitution we support, and for loyal men, and for those who have been loyal, and would be, if the Government were able to perform its part of the bargain in giving them protection. And what are you going to do about it? Give up the Union and join the rebellion, because Abraham Lincoln has issued a mischievous, pestilent proclamation? If Mr. Lincoln were the Union, we should give it up, and then we should ask no favors and no justice from that source; but this Union belongs to thirty millions of people — not to the President. They will control its destiny, not any President. Nor will his conduct alter our determination to fight forever for the Union of these States. Dissolve the Union, and then what? Do you escape emancipation? Would not war come? And would it not then be a crusade against slavery? The rebellion has brought all this upon us. It cam bear no other fruit. The more power it gets the more calamities it will inflict. Let the rebels now lay down their arms and obey the laws of the Federal Government, and this proclamation of the President is a nullity. They can relieve the country of any dangers or injustice from such a source. They will not do that; not an iota of their pride and ambition will they sacrifice. We can only say to them what we have always said: Obey the laws and drop this rebellion, or we shall compel you; and when that is done, we shall settle the account with the President for this proclamation.The experience of Wm Henry Hurlbut in the South--Choice extracts.
Mr. Wm. Henry Huribut, who was not hung as a spy during his sojourn in Richmond, is publishing in the New York Times a series of letters to Hon. Amasa A. Parker, entitled ‘"Fifteen Months at the South."’ He says after Secretary Benjamin refused him a passport he ‘"took rooms in a retired part of the city, and awaited a favorable opportunity to escape."’ He had full liberty to observe things in and around Richmond and feels warranted now in admitting that-- Seeing the actual condition of affairs at Richmond, witnessing the successive penica which attended the destruction of the Merrimac and the battle of Fair Oaks, and knowing the real condition of the Southern army during the spring and early summer, I confidently anticipated the reduction of Richmond, and was not unwilling to await the triumphant entrance of the national forces. At last Huribut, after the ‘"national army,"’ under McClellan, escaped, made his escape, too, ‘"in a vehicle in open daylight."’ How he improved his leisure time in Richmond the following extracts from one of his letters will show: I wish, sir, that the worthy citizens who still dream of reconstructing the Union by ‘"conciliating the South,"’ and extending the hand of friendship to these ‘"erring brethren,"’ could have been with me in Richmond in January last to witness the receipt of this news from the Trent. The man who in the face of what I then heard and saw, could hope for a renewal of old fraternal relations, on the old basis of compromise between the South and the North, might be safely intrusted. I think, with the task of inducing the Fope to crown Victor Emanuel King of Italy, in the capitol at Rome.-- And yet, when this news came to Richmond, the Southern people were firmly convinced that the war was near its end. The Northern advance had not yet begun, and few men believed that it ever would begin in any formidable shape, Zellicorfer, it is true, had been defeated; but in an advance made by Southern troops upon a National position. Hilton Head had been occupied, but with no discernable result beyond the desolation of a few Carolina plantations, and the fortification, on a much more extensive scale than before, of all the approaches to Charleston. Forts Henry, Donnison, Hatteras, Roanoke Island, the evacuation of Bowling Green and Columbus the surrender of New Orleans — all these were yet to come. The South in January was confident of speedy peace, and in a comparatively amiable mood of mind. Yet it is my firm belief that any man, no matter what his station, who should have proposed to the people of Richmond in January the reconstruction of the Union, no matter on what terms, would have been then and there form to places. By slow but sure degrees, the masses of the Southern people, the non-slaveholders, as well as the slaveholders, (although I do not attach much importance to this distinction, remembering that the slaveholders the ideal of the non-slaveholder, and that in sympathies and passions the two classes are indeed but one,) the enterprising slave-drivers of the Red river and the Mississippi, as well as the stationary slave-breeders of the North-Atlantic States, have been trained up, through thirty years of our history, to anticipate the collision which the Northern deed to suppose possible its crash was upon us. The simple result of this training had been the gradual development of a positive suctional antipathy, so deep and real that it is offered to no inconsiderable extent by the very slaves themselves. Of course there are negroes, and not a few of them, who by their natural good sense, or their accidental advantages of education, are enabled to understand enough of passing events to make them associate the name of the ‘"Yankees"’ with their own hopes of liberty. But the average negro of the South has unquestionably imbibed a vague horror and dislike of the ‘"Yankee,"’ a horror and dislike which time and experience will no doubt wear away, but which must be expected to co-operate with the natural docility and the cat-like local attachments of the negro race, in making the negroes subservient to the war policy of their masters wherever the armies of the Union fall actually to fix themselves, and to supersede the old social order by a new. Even the intelligent among the blacks, those who comprehend the meaning of the freedom they desire and are willing to do their part towards securing it, are too intelligent not to recognize the fact that there is a mass of negro ignorance and, prejudice to be overcome before the slaves can be made to put forth their hands to the armies of the North. Their own feeling on the point was admirably expressed to me by a very claver and faithful servant whom I employed at one time during my stay in Richmond. ‘"We want to do better Massa, but we want be better to come to us; we don't want to go to it."’ With the exception, perhaps, of the negroes in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, which have been the penitentiary States of slavery, and have absorbed the most dangerous classes of the negro population, the negroes of the South do not present such elements of insubordination and turbulence as existed in Hayti, where the slave population had been constantly recruited from the aboriginal children of warlike Africa.--They are in the main a quiet and comparatively contented peasantry, not easily roused to action out of their ordinary grooves, and strongly influenced, as it is but natural they should be, by the prejudices and the passions of their superiors. I have never believed that the negroes of the Atlantic South would be regarded by their masters as a hostile element in the pending war, and my experience of the past year has only confirmed me in the conviction that so long as the slaves can be kept out of contact with the armies of the Union, so long all expectations of damage to the Southern cause from them must prove delusive. * * * * I might have supposed that this ferocity of the public temper had been engendered by the prosecution of the war, had I not seen its manifestations in the very outset of the struggle, and in parts of the country quite beyond the reach of that flame of invasion which Mr. Davis has described as ‘"firing the Southern heart."’ The interpretation put by the Southern public upon such General Orders as those of Gen. Butler at New Orleans, and Gen. Pope in Virginia, might be pleaded, perhaps, in palliation of such blood-thirstiness as I saw displayed by an educated and accomplished Virginia surgeon in July, 1862, over the reported slaughter, after surrender, of nearly one hundred Massachusetts soldiers, by Louisiana troops of Kemper's brigade. This gentleman, in the presence of a circle of visitors, quietly stated, without one sigh of disapprobation or horror that after one of the engagements before Richmond, a number of New England troops, (he thought nearly a full battalion blousing their way in a swamp, came out upon a much superior force, of Louisiana infantry. The Northern men reversed arms in sign of surrender. ‘"Recover your arms, "’ shouted the Southern commander, ‘"we refuse your surrender;"’ and there upon the Louisianian proceeded with bullet and bayonet to put to death every single man of the force before them. Fearful as this story is, it may perhaps, as I say, be credited to the exasperation consequent upon the popular misrepresentations of the Northern military policy, and the inconsiderate tone adopted by certain National officers. But how are we to account for the murders, in cold blood of Northern citizens in Georgia and Tennessee, which, as I am unwillingly forced to believe, took place in the early summer of 1861? How are we to account for the malignant delight with which the most disgraceful stories of violence perpetrated upon Northern men were repeated in the Southern papers long before the battle of Manassas Plains?A picture of the Governors composing the Altoona Convention.
A correspondent of the New York Herald, writing from Altoona, Pa., gives pen and ink pictures of the Governors of the States composing the present Union. They are worth perishing: The first of these officials who attracted our attention as we entered the hotel was Governor Andrew, of Massachusetts, who, from his activity, important bearing, loud conversation, and general flourish, would a stranger to believe he was the great man of the occasion. He was everywhere, and took particular pains to inform those to whom he was introduced that he had telegraphed to Boston to have a ratification meeting held to endorse the action of this Convention the moment that they had concluded their labors, and urged upon the other Governors to do the same, that the echo might reach Washington from all parts of the country immediately after the action of the conference was made known there, and thus have greater effect upon the Administration.--Governor Andrew is rather below the medium height, probably about five feet four or five, some what stoutly built, and walked as though one leg was a trifle shorter than the other, and always threw his head back and chin up; has a full, reddish face, his head as near round as it well could be, his hair brown and quite curly, but not very thick, and were appear of gold spectacles. It was frequently remarked by observers, in my presence, that they expected to see in every feature of Governor Andrew the marks of humanity, and that in person he was the representative of the higher or human feelings of mankind, but that they regretted to say that-his features and physiognomy indicated the very reverse. The next person who attracted my attention was Governor Sprague, of Rhode Island. He is slimly built medium height, and has the appearance of a person about eighteen years of age, without any expression of the countenance or the eye that would indicate that he possessed the dash and energy that the newspapers have given him the credit for. The pictures in the pictorial papers make him far better looking than he really is. He was dressed in black, in every particular plain, without any shirt collar, and wore a fatigue military cap. The most striking contrast in appearance with these two officials was that of Gov. Bradford, of Maryland. It needs but one glance at his countenance, to catch but one expression of his eye, to discover that he possesses a superior with the energy and will to use it. He is a person of medium stature, modest and courteous in dress and appearance, and has reached that age in life when mankind are supposed to possess mature judgment. His face is neither full nor spare, but between the two, smoothly shaven, with an expression about the mouth and eyes that denotes superior intelligence, accompanied with eloquence as a speaker. His eyes are large, full, lightish color, and expressive, his head larger than usual in men of his physical build; large and full about the intellectual and humane organs. In fact, he possesses the marks of the humane and higher and nobler, feelings of mankind that I expected to find in Gov. Andrew. Should I have been called upon to select from the officials there the most talented the most eloquent, the most humane, and the most energetic, decided and every way reliable, taking their physiognomy as my test, I should have selected Governor Bradford, of Maryland. Gov. Washburne, of Maine, has been so long before the public that a description of him will be unnecessary. It is enough to state that he is not a man of large stature, but has a pleasant countenance, and every appearance of a strong mind without any great brilliancy, but fully reliable wherever placed. In my opinion he stands ahead of the other New England Governors at the conference, and is fully identified with the radical element, as his countenance Indicates that he would be. Barry, of New Hampshire, is a large person, and is plain and farmer like in his appearance, without any show or desire to be obtrusive, with heavy eye brown, large face, with every indication of a strong mind, without any particular brilliancy, but rather inclined to be slow in action. He was accompanied by Counsellor Pillsbury, a tall, slim person of mild manner. They seemed to consult together on every question. Governor Curtin, of Pennsylvania, possessed about as striking an appearance as any of the gubernatorial officials. He is in the neighborhood of six feet in stature, tolerably well proportioned, very easy, and somewhat careless in his manner, every motion denoting energy, and yet, at the same time, one who would like to take the world easy.--He has a full, short face, for a man of his height, and a playful expression about his eyes and mouth that would indicate that he delighted in telling an and humorous stories. His face is smoothly shaven; he wore a slouch hat most of the time, well pulled down over his forehead, and walked with his head inclined forward, with his hands in his pockets. He is easy and familiar in his manner, and beers the marks of superior intelligence, with the eye of a good stump speaker and a crafty and adroit politician, or rather of one possessing fact in whatever department of life he might be placed. Governor Tod, of Ohio, also bore the marks of possessing a strong mind, and of being a substantial, decided and, reliable, man. He is about five feet seven, stoutly built, without being corpulent, erect in form broad shoulders, large face and head, and a little bald in the vicinity of the crown. He is one of those men who have all the expressions of countenance and features that would indicate that he made up his own mind on all questions at and whatever hi dgment told him was right that he held to under all and every circumstance, but not in an offensive manner. He is in the neighborhood of fifty, strong and robust in appearance. Governor Pierpont, of Western Virginia, is a man less attractive in appearance than I expected, and somewhat of the style of a man who is usually got up in Ohio. He is large in stature, has a broad face, with whiskers and a good growth of hair; has a mild countenance, but at the same time an expression of will and determination. The features of his face are not indicative of a man who would be a leader of he public, but a man of good counsel without any particular brilliancy, with fair executive and little or no oratorical powers, is plain in his dress, with an absence of a desire for show or to attract attention. Governor Yates, of Illinois, is more showy in dress, and probably more dressy than most of the public men of the West. He is about five feet nine smooth face, dark eyes and hair, the combed with a great deal of care; has a sour and snappish expression about his mouth, with outlines of countenance that would indicate that he considered his opinion better than any one's else, and a desire to force all others to adopt his views, even to the extent of being offensive. Edward Solomon, who has become Governor of Wisconsin by eight of reversoin, is quite young in appearance, and has a very pleasant coountenance; is quite stylish in his dress, and pays considerable attention to the outer man; of light complexion, has brown hair, and wears it rather long; is of medium height and size, and has an intelligent countenance without any marks of greatness, brilliancy or depth. Governor Kickwood, of Iowa, is probably the most careless and indifferent man in his dress of any of the Governors present. He wore a large slouch hat, farmer-like coat and vest, no cravat, and his collar setting loose and slovenly about his neck, with a large brown face, prominent nose, and features that indicated him to be one of those unpolished but decided characters so characteristic of the new country of the West. In his speeches in the conference he always stood with one foot in a chair, leaning forward upon it, and in that attitude looked the person whom he was replying to directly in the eye.Pope's first Dispatch from the Indian country — his Antagonists "fall back."
The following Dispatch has been received at Washington: Dispatches from Col. Sibley, just received, state that a sharp engagement had taken place with the Sioux, near Yellow Medicine. About 30 Indians killed, and many wounded. Our loss five killed and thirty-four wounded. The Indians fell back towards Laginparle, Sibley following. John Pope, Major-General.
