We have from Mr. Whitaker, photographs, very recently taken, of General Beauregard, President Davis and Edward Ruffin, Esq, of Virginia, the eminent agriculturalist and secessionist.
General Beauregard has not a single Anglo-Saxon feature in his face. The whole tone of his countenance and attitude would lead any one to expect him to speak in some of the languages of continental Europe. It is a French face, but of the style of Cavaignac or Lamoriciere. It is of the solid type of Frenchmen.
Mr. Davis looks young for his age, which is well over fifty. He might be a preacher, for any fire-eating expression about him. But for the square and straightly opened eyes and habitually closed mouth, firm as iron, no one would suspect Mr. Davis of both the civil and military leader of a great national movement.
Mr. Ruffin is a gentleman of wealth and social position, rather than of either political or military knowledge or influence. He is more favorably known as an agriculturalist than as a public man. Agriculture he has studied, politics have been an impulse, and no man feels the impulse more strongly, more honestly or more disinterestedly.
Mr. Ruffin wears his hair very long, and as it is perfectly white, it gives him an appearance of great age, which neither his quick, nervous movements, his hale frame, his clear, bright eye, nor his strong, unbroken voice bear out. We have heard and seen the statement that Mr. Ruffin was seventy-eight. We take it that he wants twelve good years of having arrived at that age.
Mr. Ruffin had conceded to him the honor of firing the first gun at Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina ; so that, if Lincoln wants a “traitor,” he is “one of ’em” sure enough. He is something like our good friend and Irishman, Captain Berry, the pioneer Captain of the Steamship line between New York and Charleston, and lately commander of the Columbia, of which he was part owner. Berry had made the remark that he would sooner be hung in Charleston than die a natural death in New York. He hoisted the Palmetto flag in New York harbor, but on account of his great popularity, and therefore money value with Southern passengers, he was not interfered with. With the crisis came Spofford, Tileson & Co., his agents in New York deserted him, refused to protect him, put an abolitionist who had been run out of Charleston, in command of his ship. Capt. Berry is a grey-headed man, but his friends, to save his life, had to force him off his own deck in New York. Can we ever resume intercourse with such a people? We are now ready to let the sword drop from our grasp we are willing to make treaties of amity and commerce, but can we ever feel as friends towards communities who have made threats against us that would have brought a blush even to the bronzed cheek of Attila and his Huns.
But to return to Mr. Ruffin : When, a good while ago, we heard him talk, we thought he was an excited man, an enthusiast. Now, the people of North Carolina are all of one mind, less from what has actually happened, than from the spirit which has been evinced at the North. It has been perfectly diabolical. It is so now. We can never be one people. The British in the Revolution never burned any cities. New York through her press and her orators speaks familiarly of burning Baltimore, wiping out New Orleans, annihilating Charleston and simply destroying Wilmington. Can we be one with such people?
Wilmington Journal, Wilmington, NC