Further Northern News.
We give this morning some further extracts from our latest Northern papers. They will be found very interesting, and some of them peculiarly significant in their bearing upon the present volcanic condition of affairs in the United States.
Projected attack on Mobile.
All the letters from the Southern coast to the Northern papers agree that a bombardment of Mobile has been determined on. A letter to the New York Times, from the fleet near New Orleans, says:‘ Next to Richmond Mobile is the most essential part to the vitality of the rebellion. With that for our stronghold instead of theirs Montgomery on the Alabama river, and Tuscaloosa on the Tombigbee, might soon be reached by our forces, giving us possession of the railroad system between the Eastern and Western States of rebeldom. This would cut their country in two more disastrously than the entire control of the Mississippi could effect it.
’ The reported means of repelling an attack on Mobile would be hardly credited, were it not that in the engagement below New Orleans their contrivances for defence were found to be quite as and as ugly as they had boasted them to be. It is quite as well, now, to pay some attention to such representations. It is certain they have had seventeen months in which to get ready. They say they have made a stand at Dog River Bar on the west side of Mobile Bay, six miles below the city, where they have sunk obstructions in the channel, driven in piles thickly on the outside of the same, and anchored a line of submarine torpedos still further out. That inside the obstructions they have heavily armed boats while on the shore are tier upon tier of earthworks, with batteries of rifled cannon. That they have one or two iron-clad gunboats, and a powerful side which ocean steamer armed, and plated on her bowlder "ramming."
But their chief glory is one "bright particular" ram, built in avoidance of all the errors of construction discovered too late in the Kindred of New Orleans, Vicksburg, and Hampton Roads. To cut short all brilliant and fearful accounts of it, you may suppose it to be such a piece of iron work and warring power, that both Volcan and Mars would jump at the chance of staking upon it then claims to Deity in those latter days when they pass for precious old humbugs.
How much the foregoing is entitled to consideration, I don't pretend to judge. It is the substance, keeping inside of probability of the carious representations to us at New Orleans and Pensacola. Yet, considering the immense importance of Mobile to the Southern Confederacy, we may expect to find every diabolical engine of destruction which rebel ingenuity can devise and construct thrown into the contest. I may say it is a general belief in this fleet that we are about to undertake a work, the magnitude and intensity of which is not appreciated at the North. After the terrific fight in passing the forts below New Orleans, it was very pleasing to be encouraged by papers from home with the supposition that we should have but light work at Mobile.
M'Clellan's deserted Camp.
The Petersburg Express says the deserted camp of McClellan, on James river, is the scene for the wildest waste and desolation:‘ Thousands of torn and half rotten tents, rusty axes, spades, shovels, fish barrels, beef barrels, and liquor cases, can be seen strewn broadcast over the ground. Minie balls, musket balls, cannon balls and shells, from the largest to the smallest size. He around in thick profusion. A great many of these articles are daily being gathered up we understand, by parties on the river, and elsewhere, who have an eye to the favorable turning of a penny. Leaden balls are worth twenty-five cents per pound, and thousands of pounds can be gathered up with little trouble. The cloth of the abandoned tents is worth six or seven cents per pound, and any quantity of this can be obtained down there. A curious circumstance about this camp is — that but very few graves can be seen. Whether the burying ground is as yet undiscovered by visitors, or whether the dead were carried away, is unknown to us — but there can be no denying the fact, that many an invading Yankee yielded up the ghost at Berkeley and Westover.
’
Yankee Fright at
A letter to the New York Herald says that on the 17th ult., General Ferry, commanding at Suffolk, received intelligence from scouts and others that the enemy in strong force had crossed Blackwater, and was then and there engaged in erecting a bridge across that sheet of water, for the purpose of transporting artillery and cavalry over, and to attack Suffolk that night. The letter adds:‘ As soon as General Ferry had been informed of these facts he immediately summoned his field officers to hold a council of war. Every precaution necessary to the safety of the town and our troops was taken, and Major General Dix informed of the existing circumstances. Owing to the distance the enemy would be compelled to march ere reaching Suffolk, no apprehension of an attack was felt that night; but the troops were, nevertheless, posted in such positions as to repel an advance of the rebels from every point. Captain Edwin Ludlow, Quartermaster at Norfolk, and Captain J. H. Liebenan, Adjutant General to General Vicle, were very active in forwarding ammunition and stores in large quantities. Both of these gentlemen labored zealously all that night to meet the requisitions made on them from Suffolk.
’ On Thursday morning, at an early hour, Major-General John A. Dix wishing to satisfy himself in relation to affairs at Suffolk, left Fortress Monroe on the steamer Metamora for Norfolk. At this place Captain Ludlow had a special train in waiting to take the General to Suffolk. General Dix was accompanied by his aide-de-camp, Lieut. John A. Garlins; Lieut. F. U. Farqebar, of the Engineer corps; Col. G. M. Alvord, 3d regiment New York volunteers; Brigadier-General Wessel and aids; Mr. Alexander Worrall, Superintendent of the Roanoke and Neaboard Railroad, and several others. As soon as General Dix arrived at Suffolk, he immediately rode around to the different places where there seemed the slightest possibility of an enemy's approach, and made the most judicious disposition of forces. From the arrangements thus made, it would be a difficult task to take Suffolk with a force of less than fifty thousand men. Heavy reinforcements have also been sent to General Ferry, and no tears are to be entertained as to our capability to hold Suffolk. On the contrary, the rebels may fear more from us of an advance. Major General Dix, had a true soldier, did not trust to reports, but was to see and judge as himself. When he was at Suffolk he rode a distance of about thirty miles before he completed his superior. the troops stationed at Suffolk, the recently titled up belonging to General their heavy rifled guns, commanded by Captain J. C. Lee, of the 29th regiment New York volunteers .
The retreat of the rebels — who is Responsible?
The New York Times cannot understand how the rebel army so successfully got out of Maryland after all the promises of its destruction. It says:‘ The country will share the surprise with which we learn, from our Washington correspondence this morning, that we have no force in the rear of the rebels on the South side of the Potomac. The order which was given for Sigel and Reinforcement to push toward the rebel rear for the purpose of intercepting them in case of defeat, was countermanded. This will doubtless surprise the rebels as much as it does according to our correspondent, who was surrendered with our army at Ferry, and who had free intercourse with this rebel officers there, they fully believed that was even then thundering in their rear. Why the order was countermanded we are not aware. We are bound to assume, we suppose, that it was for some good and sufficient reason; perhaps it is the lawful even to a doubt upon this point.--But certainly the country may very properly to know why so evident a precaution was not against the escape of the rebel army from the perilous position into which their audacity had betrayed them.
’ It was confidently asserted, when the rebels first crossed the Potomac and entered Maryland, that they would never leave it, that they would be completely hemmed in and utterly destroyed or compelled to surrender. It can hardly be supposed that all this was expected at the hands of Gen. McClellan. He was sent to attack them in front, and did it with vigor, skill, and success. If he had succeeded on Wednesday in turning their right flank, he could possibly have cut them off from access to the Potomac; and if he had more completely turned their right wing, he could have accomplished the same result. But he only succeeded in forcing them back toward the Potomac, leaving them free to renew the battle or retreat across the river. But he did his duty in defeating them; the responsibility of cutting off their retreat rested with others.
The rebels will not have an easy time of it in retreating to Richmond. They must be destitute of provisions, and the country through which they must pass has been pretty thoroughly stripped already of means to support an army. They have, however, saved all their transportation, and moved across the Potomac with a degree of order and celerity which does not indicate serious demoralization — and as they are accustomed to rapid movements, even under most embarrassing circumstances, we think it altogether probable that they will succeed in reaching their supplies at Winchester. Gen. McClellan is probably not in condition to make a very rapid or prolonged pursuit, and Gen. Halleck has lost so much time that he can scarcely hope to intercept the main body of the rebels. On Thursday a reconnaissance was sent to Thoroughfare Gap, and made the discovery that the path to the rebel rear was unobstructed. But we have had no information that any advantage was taken of this discovery, or that any started over the route thus disclosed. Gen. McClellan has it in his power, however, to the rebels very serious injury, if he is rapidly, and if with their rear guard do not delay him too long.
A Crack regiment.
The New York Tribute has the following "first rate notice" of a Young regiment now forming at New York:‘ There are thousands we would gladly fight for their country who shrink and foul language, the filth blasphemy, which are currently deemed inseparable from an army in the field. To such the new regiment offers an admirable opportunity raised under the auspices of the Young Methodist Christian Association, with the aid of near the Orthodox Protestant Churches in the seven of which will hold meetings in its behalf . It only accepts members who pledge to obey the laws of morality abstain liquor and profanity, and cherish habits of order and cleanliness. To those who would like to to the war in such company, fully resolved to disgrace is we heartily commend enlistment .
’
A Salute for Lincolns' .
The New York Independent which is charged by its contemporaries with to the league for the displacement of Lincoln the following complimentary notice of the :We have no doubt what that Mr. Lincoln means well, and do well for the country. But he is an man. He cannot carry the Government exigency.
But there is a country as President.--There is a cause as well as an Administration. Every prudent man for utter of the country if we have year as the last. Yet, we have the floating expedients, the same stationery .
It is not that the control the military affairs of the army in their beliefs and sympathies. is a match for the health of a of good blood.
The South is . It is the North, that . They have who knew how to control difficulties — to .
An opinion from Massachusetts about Lincoln's proclamation.
The Newburyport (Mass.) Herald (Republican) has an article, written before the issue of Lincoln's proclamation, on the propriety of issuing such a document and its probable effect. It says:‘ that objection to such a policy is that it would be a operative. How is it possible to reach the population designed to be effected by it? A proclamation is a simple piece of paper, and in it would answer the same purpose if it was a blank paper cast upon the winds as it would with any word that might be written upon and thus sent to the world, so far as the slaves are concerned. If it would produce an army to do its work, give arms for them to fight with, and bread to feed them, it would amount to something. For the President and his Cabinet to resolve that negroes shall be free, would be like eight boys resolving that the man in the moon, who has been his position since time begun, shall be free, the gun shall be wiped off. First boys invent a way to reach the moon and the old man therein — to reach the , and have your big map play upon these spots.
’ Now, we have been a year and a half attempting to penetrate this negro country where the slaves are, and every knows how much of that country we hold to control its institutions. Wherever we do hold we have emancipated without a proclamation to the same extent we could with out. A proclamation! a proclamation is the cry, Mr. Lincoln tried one proclamation on his first coming into power. He proclaimed that all the rebels should disperse within twenty days.--What did they says. "Let him come and disperse us! " Now, if he declares that all slaves shall be free in twenty days, what will they say but.--"Let him come and free them!" It would amount to Mr. Lincoln would still be in Washington and Mr. Davis would still be in Richmond, and white men would be free, and black men slaves as before.
But then the negroes would and do great things! How long shall we fool ourselves about these negroes? We talk of their rebelling, acting thinking, fighting, as we would if they were so many whites realizing the difference between freedom and slavery, and capable of going from slavery to freedom as we would from a prison to the open air. Go and tell a pet bird, catched and bred in a cage, of the glories of the field and woods and open the door to him — will he fly away. He may stupidly get out of the cage and be lost and die. --Take some or cannibal Pacific Islander, who does not know a written language, and give him a lecture on the philosophy of Bacon, the oratory of Burke, and the poetry of Shakespeare, and see how much love of literature and learning you can awaken in him. Take a Digger Indian who has lived on worms and roots all his days, as his father did before him, and give him — half worth and half root as he is — the bill of fare of the Tremont House or him to select dishes for his dinner. Take a Casper Hauser, and the prisoner of half a century in the Bastile, and talk to them of freedom and it would be the same.
Let us, then, exercise our reason a minute: First, then, these slaves are Africans, and not Europeans or Indians. They have no such love of freedom in their nature. If the Anglo-Saxon was a slave, he would leap to arms on the first occasion; if the North American Indian was a slave, he would die in all the solemn grandeur and dignity of the indian; if the African is a slave, he loves his master and clinch to him, for in his very nature — the nature that God gave — he feels dependence — and he looks up to the white man, and loves the white man. He is full of affection, full of reverence and respect, and seldom rises in revenge. We thought when the war broke out that all the negroes would rise. Did they? That was in the spring of the year, and then we said wait the Christmas holidays. Well, they came and went — what of them? Then we felt when all the white men of the South went to the slaves would kill the women and children. Did they? Let us learn; then, .
A Chapter on the freedom of speech.
The Metropolitan Record, the Roman Catholic organ at New York, has an article protesting against the course of the Government in checking up, these who do not agree with it in everything it does, it says:‘ It is an easy way of getting rid of an argument that one cannot answer, it is far than convincing an opponent; in fact, it is but is a man a Secessionist because he desires peace, or deprecates subjugation or wish that personal liberty was less . Is he a Secessionist because he to the discrepancies in official reports, or the of government, the incompetency of a General of the blunders of a statesman is he a Secessionist because he abhors the idea of companies and conquered taking the places of fellow citizens at this republic, because he wishes for as such Union as .
’ Is it secessionism to our Southern brother human beings still, that they have rights which it would be speech, more economical of public is it secessionism to long with a longing in which these people have no conception for the reconstruction of the Union on the basis of the Constitution, in the good old guarantees that satisfied the .
What better are we than they, or what better is the negro now than he in their day, that he should be made a bone of contention between the sections, a wedge to split up the Republic. Our revolutionary fathers never thought of legislating negroes into equality with white men; their sense of right was no more shocked by their exclusion from political privileges than it was by the exclusion of the idiotic, and they were right, for it in the case of the latter, inferiority or intellect is judged sufficient to place the individual below the level of the race why is not the same cause sufficient to place an inferior race below the level of a superior?
Is belief in this, secessionism? We think not, but we have heard men accused of secessionism for less. It would be well, therefore, to know what constitutes secessionism. It would be well to know if men are to be dubbed secessionists because they cannot think as Government thinks, or as every individual officer of the Government, from the Secretary of State down to the lowest patrol in a police district, thinks. For this is what we are coming to. Meet abolitionists or (as they prefer to be called just now) emancipationist, where you will, and presume to assert your right to think for yourself, to criticise with your lips what you condemn in your heart, proceed on the assumption that your right to differ from them is as clear as their right is to differ from you; refuse to accept their say so as an article of your political creed, and they discern at once that you are a secessionist.
In our opinion it is not wise to bandy about such charges recklessly; disloyalty to the Government should never be assumed, for in a like ours, under a Government elected like ours, to say that the people are disloyal is to say that the Government is unworthy.
Enforcing the draft in News — a New Inquisition with the old horrors — cell no. IV.
The New York World contains an account several columns long of the mode of conducting operations at the Provost Marshal's office there.--When a man is arrested for supposed disloyalty he is not allowed to send for witnesses, but his "affidavit" is taken and send to Washington. A bell is then struck, and a soldier appears who, upon the "That's all air" of the Provost, collars the unhappy prisoner and takes him into a cell "below"--which means under the building. When the man will be again heard of is a matter of conjecture alone.--The following is one of the cases related in the World's account.An individual was brought in for refusing to give his name to an enrolling officer.
Provost Marshal.--"What is your name, sir?"
Unknown.--"Well, I declined to give my name there, and I think I shall here. "
Provost Marshal.--"Oh, you think so. Now I'll tell you what I think. I think you'll give it before you've been here a great while."
He sprung the bell again.
"Here is a man who won't give his name. Take him down and give him number four. He will probably give his name before many hours."
The young man, who was not above 20 years of age, like a person hardly campes. He was pale and grant-looking, was needily dressed and had the appearance of having just come off a . He was taken down to the detective office, again interrogated, and again declined to give his name.
"Give him number four," said the officer in charge; and he was at once seized and hurried off to the fated locality.
Horror of horrors! Possibly no place since the black hold of Calcutta of the prison bulks of the revolution could compete with small number force at police headquarters.
Under the reign of the Provost Marshal it because part and parcel of the machinery of the other, and was used as occasion called to hold fast the worst class of the prisoners arrested, or such as we've the most flagrant cases.
Passing through the outer room of the detective office in the basement, you come into the sitting room-- badly ventilated chamber — the larger hall of which is underground. Midway in the room of the fight in a small half-glass door cut in a partisan, through which you enter upon a narrow corridor facing four small cells. These are number of, beginning at the south and one, two, three, four, the being at the extreme sight as you enter the which is scarcely wide enough to stand the passage of a man.
The sides of cell number four are herded up with board to the top. It is about three feet wide by six in depth. A stationary board fifteen inches wide is put up on the right hand for a sleeping pallet, and a three-cornered pine block fastened at one end of the board serves as a pillow — there being neither bed clothes, mattress, or straw. A water waste and dipper in one corner complete the furniture of the cell. The sides of the place are thickly coated with whitewash in the vain effort to purify it. The door is composed of iron bars about one inch in width, and a quarter of an inch in thickness arranged crosswise, so as to intersect each other at every two and a hall inches. At the top is a small aperture eight inches square.
The entire place swarms with vermin. In dog days, when the cell door was shut, and the door and window leading to the outer apartments were closed, the atmosphere was stilling in its character, while the vermin ran riot over the unfortunate victims, she could neither lie down nor sit down from very agony, sometimes imploring in Heaven's name to be let out, if only for a few moments. In the hottest weather of the season three persons have been confined in this cell at once, two of them sitting on the board and the third lying at full length on his face upon the floor, and all evidencing untold horror and misery.
Sergeant Young has often given direction to have the prisoners taken out at night, and allowed them to lie round on the floor of the outer room.
The individual above alluded to who would not give his name, was put in No. 4. The door of the cell was shut and bolted and the outer door was closed also, although it was one of the hottest days of the season. In fifteen minutes his cries were heard, the door opened, and he was found in a profuse perspiration with the vermin crawling over and tormenting him.
"For God's sake let me out of this," he said, "and I will do anything you want."
The man or beast that Number 4 cannot tame is . Every delinquent who is alluded to as an atrocious villain, is wished no worse fate than incarceration within its walls. "Number 4" is a by-word among the officers and frequenters of headquarters, and is promised as a sort of bugbear to such inmates of the detective office as behave themselves unruly.
One of the individuals who had been arrested for some criminal offence, upon reading an account in the paper of a rebel victory, laid the paper down as if in disgust; and remarked. "That's the way with our boys, just prick 'em and they run." The words were reported up stairs, and the order came down.
"Place him in number four. He will be pricked where he can't run."
The history of this awful receptacle for prisoners can never probably be fully told; and we have only briefly sketched it to show some portion of the machinery used in conducting the business of the provost marshal's office.
The Paris Constitutionnel on Seward's emigration Project.
The Paris Constitutionnel, after copying an extract from the London Times, giving a most deplorable account of the condition of the Federal arms at the present moment, adds, a relation to Mr. Seward's emigration circular; "And this is the moment chosen by the Government of the North to declare 'that at no previous time have the agricultural, manufacturing, and mining interests of the United States been so prosperous.' We should be content to laugh at so strange an assertion if we did not reflect that it might make dupes and victims in Europe, and draw to New York credulous emigrants, who, instead of the fortune which is insidiously promised them, would find no other resource than an enrollment in the Federal army. It is evidently a game which it is our duty to warn the public against."
