August 29th.—It is hard to bear such a fate as befalls an unpopular man in the United States, because in no other country, as De Tocqueville remarks (p. 200, Spencer’s American edition, New York, 1858), is the press so powerful when it is unanimous. And yet he says, too, “The journalist of the United States is usually placed in a very humble position, with a scanty education and a vulgar turn of mind. His characteristics consist of an open and coarse appeal to the passions of the populace, and he habitually abandons the principles of political science to assail the characters of individuals, to track them into private life, and disclose all their weaknesses and errors. The individuals who are already in possession of a high station in the esteem of their fellow citizens are afraid to write in the newspapers, and they are thus deprived of the most powerful instrument which they can use to excite the passions of the multitude to their advantage. The personal opinions of the editors have no kind of weight in the eyes of the public. The only use of a journal is that it imparts the knowledge of certain facts; and it is only by altering and distorting those facts that a journalist can contribute to the support of his own views.” When the whole of the press, without any exception in so far as I am aware, sets deliberately to work, in order to calumniate, vilify, insult, and abuse a man who is at once a stranger, a rival, and an Englishman, he may expect but one result, according to De Tocqueville.
The teeming anonymous letters I receive are filled with threats of assassination, tarring, feathering, and the like; and one of the most conspicuous of literary sbirri is in perfect rapture at the notion of a new “sensation” heading, for which he is working as hard as he can. I have no intention to add to the number of his castigations.
In the afternoon I drove to the waste grounds beyond the Capitol, in company with Mr. Olmsted and Captain Haworth, to see the 18th Massachusetts Regiment, who had just marched in, and were pitching their tents very probably for the first time. They arrived from their state with camp equipments, waggons, horses, harness, commissariat stores complete, and were clad in the blue uniform of the United States; for the volunteer fancies in greys and greens are dying out. The men were uncommonly stout young fellows, with an odd, slouching, lounging air about some of them, however, which I could not quite understand till I heard one sing out, “Hallo, sergeant, where am I to sling my hammock in this tent?” Many of them, in fact, are fishermen and sailors from Cape Cod, New Haven, and similar maritime places.
