conscriptions, and composed of decrepit old men and young boys, without experience of service, and wholly unfit for the field, it was somewhat of a task to dislodge them from the 'rat-hole' where they had sheltered in security while the two days' cannonade had thundered overhead. But by dint of scolding and swearing on the part of the officers of the staff, and an occasional use of the flat of the sabre, the unhappy creatures were finally marshalled out on the parapet where they made a show of numbers, and so helped out the gallant soldiers of the regular garrison.

"By this time, a glance over the parapet disclosed an irregular blue line of skirmishers trotting out across the sand plain at the front from a denser body of troops behind them; those in advance alternately putting up their muskets to fire at the men in the fort, and then burrowing like fiddler-crabs, behind hastily tossed-up piles of sand. A lively exchange of musketry fire ensued for a few minutes, but it lacked seriousness on the part of the attack, and presently lulled, showing the blue coats scampering back out of range. This was all that came of the land attack. If it had been pushed with vigor, as was the similar one a few weeks later, it is hardly probable that the fort, weakly garrisoned as it was, could have successfully resisted.

"When it was observed from the fleet that the military were retreating, the ships hauled off, out of action, but not without a long, vindictive spurt of terrific shelling at the land face, by way of parting salute.

"After two days' further waiting, spent in anxiously watching the fleet and the land forces which remained up to the beach, in sight but out of range, the garrison had the agreeable surprise and satisfaction of seeing the troops re-embark, and their transports, accompanied by the host of war-vessels, fade away out of sight to the northward. For the present, at least, the victory was left with Fort Fisher.

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The Chickamauga's detachment of thirty-two men and officers, what with the casualties due to their exposed position and to the bursting of their guns, had a ‘butcher's bill' of nineteen killed and wounded to show for their share in the two days' affair, and the following morning saw them a shabby, limping squad on foot, with a cart-load of disabled companions trailing on astern; marching back across the sandy plains to where the ship lay anchored in the river.

"They had received a kind congratulation from Gen. Whiting, and a cordial mention in his official report, as also pleasant demonstrations from gallant Col. Lamb and the garrison on leaving the fort; but perhaps the most stirring moments of their lives were still in waiting for them further down the point, at the navy works of Battery Buchanan, where the garrison was composed of some two hundred and fifty of their brother sailors. There, after a brief halt at the shut doors of the sally-port, the Chickamauga lads found themselves, cart and all, unexpectedly marched into the centre of a hollow square of tumultuously cheering sailors. After this episode, they were soon again at home and afloat in the Chickamauga. The second attack on the fort occured on January 15th, a few weeks later, and although the military officers of Fort Fisher kindly applied again for the detachment in the preparation for that affair, the ship was deemed too short-handed to admit of their going back. Thus they escaped a further harsh experience, and, as events proved, a certain capture. Their part in the subsequent operations was limited to such shelling of the attacking troops as the ship was able to accomplish from her position in the river.

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"From there they witnessed the second attack and the final capture of the fort. After that the ship was taken back to Wilmington, and subsequently burnt and sunk, higher up the river, where she lay at peace till some enterprising Yankee a few years later raised her hull and converted her into an inglorious West India fruiterer."

The fall of Wilmington was the severest blow to the Confederate cause which it could receive from the loss of any port. It was far more injurious than the capture of Charleston, and but for the moral effect, even more hurtful than the evacuation of Richmond. With Wilmington and the Cape Fear River open, the supplies that reached the Confederate armies would have enabled them to have maintained an unequal contest for years, but with the fall of Fort Fisher the constant stream of supplies was effectually cut off and the blockade made truly effective-not by the navy fleet, but by its captures on land.

T

CHAPTER XVI.

THE BLOCKADE.

HE diplomacy of Wm. H. Seward, U. S. Secretary of State during the years 1861-5, is a subject of much perplexity, and the more it is examined and analyzed with the light of contemporary and subsequent facts, the greater will be the difficulty in deciding whether it was more harmful to the cause of the United States than to that of the Confederate States. That he accomplished no practical result; that he humiliated the pride of the United States; that he abandoned the historical policy of the government from its beginning without successfully initiating any other in its stead, will be apparent to the most cursory reading of his diplomatic dispatches. And a closer examination will convince the reader that he exhibited an ignorance of geography, of history and of literature, which cannot be traced in the dispatches of any of his official predecessors. '

Nor was his temper and discretion suited to the management of diplomatic intercourse. His defects were so well marked and defined that to them may be directly traced several of those rebuffs and discourtesies which were given him

1 A few extracts from his diplomatic correspondence will establish the truth of this assertion. On July 7th, 1862, writing to Mr. Adams of Commodore Farragut'spassing the batteries at Vicksburg, he says: "Thus the last obstacle to the navigation of the Mississippi River has been overcome, and it is open to trade once more from the head waters of its tributaries, near the Lakes and Prince Rupert's Land, to the Gulf of Mexico."

Prince Rupert's Land lies on the eastern side of Hudson's Bay at least fifteen degrees of latitude, and, as a "bird flies, over a thousand miles from the sources of the Mississippi. So much for geography. His history is not more reliable. After calling the motto of the Order of the Garter, "the motto of the National Arms," he asserts that "Richelieu occupied and fortified a large portion of this continent, extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Straits of Belle Isle." The cardinal was dead and in his grave in the Sorbonne thirty years before the Missis

sippi was discovered, either at its source or its mouth. His literature is as defective as his geography and history are incorrect. Commending Mr. Harvey, U. S. Minister at Lisbon, for attending the erection of a monument to Camoens, he says: "The incident seems doubtless the more pleasing to us because it occurs at this conjuncture, when we are engaged in combating, in its full development, a gigantic error which Por tugal, in the age of Camoens, brought into this continent." Camoens died at Lisbon in 1579, and the Portugese slave trade in this hemisphere began in 1630. Such literary bungling is further clouded with a vulgarity and insensibility to decorum which never before dirtied the pages of American diplomacy. The euphemism by which when a household is gladdened by the birth of a babe, the convalescence of the mother is described in technical and courtly phrase: "that the mother is getting on as well as could be expected," was introduced by Mr Seward in a dispatch of July 18th, 1862, to Mr. Adams,

by Lord Russell, by M. Drouyn de Lhuys, and by Baron Van Luyden. The moral side of his character involved him in questions of personal veracity with M. Mercier which his most devoted friends have failed to satisfactorily explain. His political fortunes, or some other motive as yet unexplained, induced him to select for diplomatic positions abroad the Pikes and Foggs, and Judds, names which recall the grotesque characters of Dickens' novels, and whose performances and dispatches add to, if they do not embellish, the absurdities and crudities which fill the volumes of diplomatic correspondence for the years 1861-5. Of all the men selected to represent the United States at European courts only Mr. Adams at London, and Mr. Dayton at París, and possibly Cassius M. Clay at St. Petersburg, had any reputation for fitness or capacity beyond the narrowest limits of their homes; the rest were obscure and untrained fanatical stump speakers, and newspaper purveyors. To Holland he sent a semi-editor of a New York paper. At religious and bigoted Madrid he placed a German adventurer, the word is not used in an offensive sense, but as descriptive of the unfitness of Mr. Schurz.

One turns from these mental and moral defects to an absence of political convictions, and a vacillation of political purpose, that is astonishing. It is not surprising to read in a dispatch of March 9th, 1861, that "the President entertains a full confidence in the speedy restoration of the harmony and the unity of the government;" while the powers of Europe were advised by a dispatch to England of April 10th, 1861, that "The President neither looks for nor apprehends any actual and permanent dismemberment of the American Union, especially by a line of latitude. He is not disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of the South, namely, that the Federal goverment cannot reduce the seceding States to obedience by conquest, even although he were disposed to question that proposition. But, in fact, the President willingly accepts it as true. Only an imperial or despotic government could subjugate

as: "The work of pacification in the region concerned is going on as successfully as could be expected. You hear of occasional guerilla raids, but these are the after-pangs of revolution in that quarter which has proved an abortion."

He accuses Voltaire of having said, "Dieu est toujours sur le cole des gros canons.' No educated Frenchman would have said "sur le cote." What Voltaire did say to M. Le Riche was: "Le nombre des sages sera toujours petit. Il est vrai qu'il est augmenté; mais ce n'est rien en comparaison des sots, et par malheur on dit que Dieu est toujours pour les gros bataillons," and M. Bussy Rabutin wrote: "Dieu est d'ordinaire pour les gros escadrons contre les petits," but neither wrote sur le cote. And Minister Sandford informs Mr. Seward, July 3d, 1861, that "They would in no case make a treaty which should bind them to perpetual abolition of passports, vis-a-vis to my nation." He might have said with equal propriety, dos-a-dos!!

In such tawdry effusions the diplomatic dis

patches of Mr. Seward describe the British Colonial Empire as "extending from Gibralter, through the West Indies and Canada, till it begins again on the southern extremity of Africa:" and that "armed insurrections to overturn the government are frequent in Great Britain;" that most of the wars in modern times have been revolutionary wars;" that "the government of the Netherlands is probably an ally of Japan:" and, lastly, his singular forgetfulness or ignorance of the history of his own country, and of what Silas Deane and Dr. Franklin, and the Lees, and John Adams were sent to do and did, in Europe, when he wrote to Mr. Schurz that "it seems the necessity of faction in every country, that whenever it acquires sufficient boldness to inaugurate revolution, it forgets alike the counsels of prudence, and stifles the instincts of patriotism, and becomes a suitor to foreign courts for aid and assistance." These specimens of literary bungling and ignorance might be multiplied a hundred-fold if space only permitted."

thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary members of the State. This Federal republican system of ours is, of all forms of government, the very one which is most unfitted for such a a labor." The dispatch continues to explain how the Constitutution can be amended by a "National Convention," and concludes that while "the President will not suffer the Federal authority to fall into abeyance, nor will he, on the other hand, aggravate existing evils by attempts at coercion which must assume the form of direct war against any of the revolutionary States." Thus Mr. Seward sustained the political doctrine of the South that the Federal government had no constitutional right to coerce a seceded State, and par consequence, no power to declare war, proclaim blockade, or exercise any other hostile agency to reconstruct the Federal Union. The British government, thus advised of the principles by which Mr. Lincoln proposed to conduct his administration, must have naturally concluded that secession had divided the Federal Union into two confederacies, which were to be reunited only by discussion and agreement. Within ten days after that pacific declaration, Europe was astonished by the Proclamation of Blockade, of April 19th, 1861, from the Capes of Virginia to the mouth of the Rio Grande.

Blockade is a recognized agency of war only between independent nations. European governments had never seen a nation blockade its own ports; and as Mr. Seward had declared that this government had no constitutional right to coerce a State back into the Union, and had followed that declaration with a blockade, the conclusion was irresistable, that the seceded States were to occupy some intermediate position between independency and restoration to the Federal Union. Is it surprising that this anomalous and contradicting diplomacy should have determined European governments to assume a neutral position and to declare both the United States and the Confederate States to be belligerents? What other course was open to them? Hence, the Queen's Proclamation of Neutrality of May 13th, and that of the Emperor of the French of June 10th, 1861, were the consequences of Mr. Seward's diplomacy and of his blockade which constituted the Confederate States belligerents both on land and at sea. England and France recognized what Mr. Seward had done as the constitutional outcome of the absence of the right to coerce the States back into the Union, and as a declaration of war against the Confederate States for the purpose of conquering them, notwithstanding the want of constitutional warrant.

"The only justification that I have heard for this extraordinary concession," said Senator Charles Sumner "which unleashed upon our country the furies of war to commingle with the furies of rebellion at home, is that President Lincoln

1 Speech in the U. S. Senate on the Johnson-Clarendon Treaty.