Sacramento Daily Union, Volume 22, Number 3315, 12 November 1861 — CHARACTERS OF THE REBELION. [ARTICLE]

CHARACTERS OF THE REBELION.

The German mind, with that clear philosophic insight which is one of its principal characteristics, discovers the true nature and bearing of the revolt against the quiet of the United States. ln a late number of the Preussiche Jahrbuch, an able quarterly periodical of Berlin, we fled this statod with remarkable distinctness and precision. Tbe revrolt of the Southern people against the American Union, it says, differs from every other revolt in history, and proceeds upon principles altogether unknown in Europe. It is not a rebelliou of the people agniust an unrighteous and oppressive authority, but of a dissatified class against the people. It is a conflict between a stagnant conservatism and a genuine progress, between despotism and liberty, between materialism, looking to its private ends, and idealism looking to the good of the race, between a relic of feudal barbarism and the inspirations of the nineteenth century. This is a true view of the case. The Southern rebellion reverses the precedents of hihtory, and appears in a wholly new character. There have been civil wars in different na tions, in which the various parties of the State have contended for the mastery ; there have been outbreaks of the masses, of greater or less numbers, against the constituted authorities ; but never before has there been so wanton and deliberate an attempt to annihilate a Government which had never practised any abuse, and which the rebels themselves admitted to be the best in the world. The insurrections of the Roman provinces against the Empire were the reactions of a subject people against an evershadowing centralism; the various peasant wars of the middle ages were the agonising throes of a poor down-trodden class of laborers against the enormous outrages of a corrupt and merciless privileged class ; and the fearful uprisings of the French mobs against the administration of Louis XVI., were only the culmination of a series of popular discontents, which, under the wicked and licentious rule of the Louises, bad been gathering head for nearly two hundred years. In the same wiiy, in ail the minor revolutions of Europe, iv Ivaiy, in Spain, in Huugary, in Ireland, tbt multitudes were induced to rise against their rulers because that rule was felt to be iniquitous, unjust and tyrannical. In every case, the insurgents designed to overthrow an abusive power, to eradicate deep-seated wrongs, to better the condition of the many, establish freer principles of government, and advance the great cause of human rights and human progress. Their uiins were always grand, noble and just, even wlien their means were inadequate or their proceedings vindictive and wrong. Bat our Southern rebels look to wholly different objects. They muke war upon a free and beneficent Government, against which no man has ever rightfully uttered a complaint, not to further any great principles of humanity, but to gratify their selfish ambitions. They brt-ak away from a republic whose corner 6tone in freedom, to erect another republic whose corner stone shall be slavery. They endeavor to overthrow a society which hae conferred unlimited privileges and blessings on the human race, and which is leaping forward more rapidly in the career of civilization than any other on the globe, to form another society in which the generic forces of civilization are fatally fettered and paralyzed. They are not content with a political experiment which has converted the wilderness of an immense continent into teeming fields, covered it with prosperous villages, filled its homes with plenty, sent the rich products of its industry to the ends of the earth, opened its hospitable mansions to the poor, the distressed and the wronged of ail climes, and won a glorious name among the nations. But the black and hateful spirit, of the primeval Satan, when he " eyed with jealous letr maligu" the luxuriant beauty of the early I'aradise, bus embittered their hearts and piqued their envy. They have l^ngod for oiher fields and another polity. They have longed for a state in which the many, deprived ot tho cbonce of !u---ture advancement, should be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and themselves the supreme and only lords. Visions of an equatorial empire danced before their minds— of an empire surrounding the Gulf of Mexico, us the ancient Roman empire surrounded the Mediterranean ; whose wings should be the cotton, the sugar, the rice and the spices of the rich tropical regions, and whose base, the eternal servitude of the African races. For that splendid dream they let slip the dogs of war, arrested tbe prosperity of thirty millions of people, turned robbery, arson and rape into the bosom of their own communities, and hazarded the peace of the whole civilized globe. There iB, moreover, a no 1* ss striking contrast in the characters of the men who promoted this rebellion and that of the agents of other rebellions, than there is in the grounds on which they have respectively proceeded. A cause which has no more moral worth in it than the cause of an incendiary who wantonly firea hia neighbor's house is not likely to attract a high class of supporters. In other great revolts, visionary and unsuccessful as they may have been, the chief agents have often won the admiration of mankind by the dignity and nobleness of their devotion. Thus, tho Americans have had their Washington, the Foieß their Kosciusko, the Italians their Garibaldi, the English their flauipden, and the Hungarians their Kossnth. All were men of a probity and honor which even their enemies were forced to respect. Iv the wild insurrection of the Irish in 1790- S the leaders wore moved by generous sympathies and exhibited the loftiest traits of heroism and persona! integrity. The names ot Fitzgerald and Emmet still kindle the love ef thoao who would not have approved the objects of their enthusiasm. Hut our Southern rtbds wili leave r.o such memories. Scarcely a conspicuous man among them is a man ot estimable virtues. Jefferson Davis, otherwise reputable perhaps, was a wilful repudiator; Stephens is a renegade, who betrayed tho cause he had eloquently defended ; Slidell, a blackleg and a peculator; Flovd, a thief; Benjamin, no better; Ross, their Commissioner in Paris, a fraudulent purveyor of estates ; Wigfall, a betrayer of trus's : Pryor, a coward ; and others, corrupt and reckless speculators. The illustrious and best virtue ot the South shrinks from the contact with such characters. It has retired into the shade; it is no longer seen in the front ranks; and base and seltißh natures usurp the general control. Thus, the American rebellion Has no elevation of principle to relieve its crimes, and will have no exalted personages to dignify its fall. No high, generous or holy purpose will propitiate the criticism by which an impartial posterity will judge it ; and no amiable and sweet, but misguided, enthusiasm in the character of its perpetrators will throw a tender charm over the recollections of its misdeeds.— New York Evening Pott. John Bkll Fallin. — A correspondent of the New York Tribune, writing from Nashville, Tennessee, lately, says :,'

At the time John Bell made public his address to the cause of the South, the belief generally prevailed in the North that his old love of whisky had got the better of his judgment and made him forget his former and bolter self. But I hare the testimony of one of his oldest political adherents, who worked harder for his election to the Presidency than any other man living, that his defection was caused by a failure of moral courage, rather than by enervation by over-indulgence in liquor. In past years there waa no man in the nation that stood up more boldly and fearlessly for what he deemed true and just than John Bell. But the waves of Sec ssion rolled t«o strongly and sweepingly over the portion of the State ho lived in, and instead of battling against them his heart gave way, and he allowed himself to be carried along by the current. Ambition — hope of realizing in sectional what he failed to reach in national spheres — perhaps had also something to do with his apparent abandonment of long cherished convictions. His personal enmity to Andrew Johnson, whom he found to have everything in his own way at Washington, is also alleged by some to have contributed to his sudden change of ground. My investigations in regard to the latter life of John Bell had made me acquainted with a fact which, .1 think, has never become known. It is, that his last visit to Washington was not made of his own accord, but at the direct instigation of Jeiferaon Davis, who sent a special messenger in the persou of a well known Georgia politician to him, to urge his interference at the Federal Capital in favor of the evacuation of the Southern forts. The conviction among his best political friends there was, that he allowed himself to be used as a mere tool in the hands of the rebel leaders, who cast him aside when they had no further employment for him, and he threatened to become a rival aspirant to popular favor. He resides 6ere with his snn-in law, or step-son, one of the numerous Yateman family. He is not enly politically but financially ruined, nod his love of liquor is said to have increased greatly of late-

Thk Bodkga Potato Crop.— The Santa Rosa Democrat says that the staple crop of the Bodega country— the potato— now aboat harvested, ia lesa than an average crop. The potatoes are not only " small and few in a hill," bat more or less affected with the rot.