23. K. Marx. American Matters !
London, December 13
The news of the fate of the Harvey Birch and the visit of the cruiser Nashville in Southampton harbour reached New York on November 29, but does not seem to have provoked the sensation that was every bit as expected in certain circles here as it was feared in others, hostile to the war.[132] This time, one wave broke on another. For New York was stirred up by the campaign for the election of the Mayor on December 3. The Washington correspondent of The Times, Mr. Russell, who spoils his Celtic talent by affecting English ways, pretends to shrug his shoulders in wonder at this excitement over the mayoral election.(1) Of course, Mr. Russell is flattering the illusion of the London cockney that the election of the Mayor in New York is the same kind of old-fashioned tomfoolery as the election of a Lord Mayor in London. It is well known that the Lord Mayor of London has nothing to do with the greater part of London. He is the nominal ruler of the City, a story-book character who strives to prove his reality by producing good turtle soups at banquets and bad judgments in cases of violation of police regulations. A Lord Mayor of London is a government figure only in the imagination of Paris writers of vaudeville and faits divers!(2) The Mayor of New York, on the contrary, is a real power. At the beginning of the secession movement the then Mayor, the notorious Fernando Wood, was on the point of proclaiming New York an independent city republic,[133] in collusion, of course, with Jefferson Davis. His plan foundered owing to the energy of the Republican Party of the Empire City.[134]
On November 27, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a member of the American Senate, where he had been beaten with a stick by a Southern senator(3) at the time of the Kansas affair,[135] delivered a brilliant speech before a large meeting in Cooper Union [136] in New York on the origin and secret motives of the slaveholder rebellion.(4) After his speech the meeting adopted the following resolution:
"The doctrine enunciated by General Fremont, with respect to the emancipation of the slaves of rebels, and the more recent utterances of General Burnside, Senator Wilson,(5) George Bancroft (the famous historian), Colonel Cochrane and Simon Cameron, foreshadowing the eventual rooting out of slavery as the cause of the rebellion, indicate a moral, political, and military necessity. In the judgment of this meeting, the public sentiment of the North is now fully in sympathy with any practicable scheme which may be presented for the extirpation of this national evil, and it regards such a result as the only consistent issue of this contest between civilisation and barbarism." (6)
The New-York Tribune comments, in particular, on Sumner's address:
"The allusion of Mr. Sumner to the coming discussions of Congress on the subject of slavery will kindle a hope that that body will at last understand where Southern weakness and Northern strength really lie, and will seize the instrumen-tality by which alone the rebellion is to be brought to a speedy and final extirpation. " (7)
A private letter from Mexico states among other things:
"The English ambassador(8) pretends to be a warm friend of the administration of President Juarez. Persons well acquainted with the Spanish intrigues assure us that General Marquez has been instructed by Spain to bring the scattered forces of the Clerical party together again, its Mexican as well as Spanish elements. This party is then to take advantage of the opportunity soon to be offered to beg Her Catholic Majesty s to provide a king for the Mexican throne. An uncle of the Queen (9) is said to have been selected for the position already. As he is an old man, he would soon leave the stage in the natural course of events, and since any clause concerning the nomination of his successor is to be avoided, Mexico would thus revert to Spain — so that the same policy would triumph in Mexico as in Haiti." [137]
Endnotes
[132] On November 19, 1861 the Nashville, a Confederate privateer, attacked the Unionist merchant ship Harvey Birch, arrested her crew, seized her cargo and burnt the ship. On November 21, the Nashville, with the consent of the British authorities, took cover in the port of Southampton. She was overtaken there by the Unionist cruiser Tuscarora, which was watching the movements of pirate ships. Not wishing to be accused of a breach of neutrality, the British authorities on February 3, 1862 ordered both ships to leave port, but detained the Tuscarora for 24 hours to enable the Nashville to escape.
[133] 1:53 At the beginning of January 1861, Fernando Wood, Mayor of New York City, proposed that in the event of disunion New York should constitute itself a free city and retain commerce with both sections.
[134] Empire City was a popular name for New York, the largest city in the Union. New York State, then the most populous, richest and politically most powerful State of the USA, was called the Empire State.
[135] During the debate on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, May 19 and 20, 1856 (see Note 15) the Republican Senator Charles Sumner made a speech ("The Crime against Kansas") exposing the slave-owners' schemes in Kansas and deriding the pro-slavery posture of Senator A. R. Butler of South Carolina. On May 22, the latter's nephew, slave-owning Congressman P. S. Brooks, attacked Sumner in the Senate, causing him serious bodily harm. It was only in 1859 that Sumner was able to return to politics.
[136] The Cooper Union—a higher educational establishment in New York, founded in 1859 by the philanthropist Peter Cooper, a manufacturer and inventor.
[137] From 1849 to 1861, the Dominican Republic (in the West Indian island of Hispaniola, or Haiti), which had freed itself from Spanish domination in 1821, was, owing to a succession of coups d'état, alternately governed by a pro-Spanish party and one favouring union with the neighbouring state of Haiti. Spain re-annexed the republic at the invitation of President P. Santa Ana in 1861, but had to withdraw its troops in 1865, following an anti-Spanish uprising.