Great Britain and the American Civil War Part 9

[Footnote 164: For example see Hertslet, _Map of Europe by Treaty_, Vol.

I, p. 698, for the Proclamation issued in 1813 during the Spanish-American colonial revolutions.]

[Footnote 165: Hansard, 3rd. Ser., CLXII, pp. 2077-2088.]

[Footnote 166: _Parliamentary Papers_, 1862, _Lords_, Vol. XXV, "Correspondence on Civil War in the United States." No. 35. Russell to Lyons, May 15, 1861. Another reason for Lyons' precaution was that while his French colleague, Mercier, had been instructed to support the British Proclamation, no official French Proclamation was issued until June 10, and Lyons, while he trusted Mercier, felt that this French delay needed some explanation. Mercier told Seward, unofficially, of his instructions and even left a copy of them, but at Seward's request made no official communication. Lyons, later, followed the same procedure.

This method of dealing with Seward came to be a not unusual one, though it irritated both the British and French Ministers.]

[Footnote 167: _U.S. Messages and Doc.u.ments, 1861-2_, p. 85. Adams to Seward, May 17, 1861.]

[Footnote 168: Bedford died that day.]

[Footnote 169: _U.S. Messages and Doc.u.ments, 1861-2_, pp. 90-96. Adams to Seward, May 21, 1861.]

[Footnote 170: Bernard, _The Neutrality of Great Britain during the American Civil War_, p. 161. The author cites at length despatches and doc.u.ments of the period.]

[Footnote 171: _Spectator_, May 18, 1861.]

[Footnote 172: _Spectator_, June 1, 1861.]

[Footnote 173: _Sat.u.r.day Review_, June 1, 1861.]

[Footnote 174: _U.S. Messages and Doc.u.ments, 1861-2_, p. 82.]

[Footnote 175: _Ibid._, p. 98. Adams to Seward, June 7, 1861. See also p. 96, Adams to Seward, May 31, 1861.]

[Footnote 176: Russell Papers. Lyons to Russell, June 10, 1861.]

[Footnote 177: _Ibid._, Lyons to Russell, June 14, 1861.]

[Footnote 178: F.O., Am., Vol. 766, No. 282. Lyons to Russell, June 17, 1861. Seward's account, in close agreement with that of Lyons, is in _U.S. Messages and Doc.u.ments, 1861-2_, p. 106. Seward to Adams, June 19, 1861.]

[Footnote 179: Bancroft in his _Seward_ (II, p. 183) prints a portion of an unpublished despatch of Seward to Dayton in Paris, July 1, 1861, as "his clearest and most characteristic explanation of what the att.i.tude of the government must be in regard to the action of the foreign nations that have recognized the belligerency of the 'insurgents.'"

"Neither Great Britain nor France, separately nor both together, can, by any declaration they can make, impair the sovereignty of the United States over the insurgents, nor confer upon them any public rights whatever. From first to last we have acted, and we shall continue to act, for the whole people of the United States, and to make treaties for disloyal as well as loyal citizens with foreign nations, and shall expect, when the public welfare requires it, foreign nations to respect and observe the treaties.

"We do not admit, and we never shall admit, even the fundamental statement you a.s.sume--namely, that Great Britain and France have recognized the insurgents as a belligerent party. True, you say they have so declared. We reply: Yes, but they have not declared so to us. You may rejoin: Their public declaration concludes the fact. We, nevertheless, reply: It must be not their declaration, but the fact, that concludes the fact."

[Footnote 180: The _Times_, June 3, 1861.]

[Footnote 181: _Ibid._, June 11, 1861.]

[Footnote 182: _U.S. Messages and Doc.u.ments, 1861-2_, p. 87.]

[Footnote 183: _Parliamentary Papers, 1862, Lords_, Vol. XXV.

"Correspondence on Civil War in the United States." No. 56. Lyons to Russell, June 17, 1861, reporting conference with Seward on June 15.]

[Footnote 184: _U.S. Messages and Doc.u.ments, 1861-62_, p. 104. Adams to Seward, June 14, 1861.]

[Footnote 185: Bancroft, the biographer of Seward, takes the view that the protests against the Queen's Proclamation, in regard to privateering and against interviews with the Southern commissioners were all unjustifiable. The first, he says, was based on "unsound reasoning" (II, 177). On the second he quotes with approval a letter from Russell to Edward Everett, July 12, 1861, showing the British dilemma: "Unless we meant to treat them as pirates and to hang them we could not deny them belligerent rights" (II, 178). And as to the Southern commissioners he a.s.serts that Seward, later, ceased protest and writes: "Perhaps he remembered that he himself had recently communicated, through three different intermediaries, with the Confederate commissioners to Was.h.i.+ngton, and would have met them if the President had not forbidden it." Bancroft, _Seward_, II, 179.]

[Footnote 186: Du Bose, _Yancey_, p. 606.]

[Footnote 187: _A Cycle of Adams' Letters, 1861-1865_, Vol. I, p. 11.

Adams to C.F. Adams, Jnr., June 14, 1861.]

[Footnote 188: See _ante_, p. 98. Russell's report to Lyons of this interview of June 12, lays special emphasis on Adams' complaint of haste. _Parliamentary Papers_, 1862, _Lords_, Vol. XXV, "Correspondence on Civil War in the United States," No. 52. Russell to Lyons, June 21, 1861.]

[Footnote 189: Hansard, 3rd. Ser., CLXXVII, pp. 1620-21, March 13, 1865.]

[Footnote 190: See _ante_, p. 85.]

[Footnote 191: C.F. Adams, _Charles Francis Adams_, p. 172. In preparing a larger life of his father, never printed, the son later came to a different opinion, crediting Russell with foresight in hastening the Proclamation to avoid possible embarra.s.sment with Adams on his arrival.

The quotation from the printed "Life" well summarizes, however, current American opinion.]

[Footnote 192: _U.S. Doc.u.ments_, Ser. No. 347, Doc. 183, p. 6.]

[Footnote 193: The United States Supreme Court in 1862, decided that Lincoln's blockade proclamation of April 19, 1861, was "itself official and conclusive evidence ... that a state of war existed." (Moore, Int.

Law Digest, I, p. 190.)]

[Footnote 194: _A Cycle of Adams' Letters_, I, p. 16. Henry Adams to C.F. Adams, Jnr.]

[Footnote 195: Rhodes, _History of the United States_, III, p. 420 (_note_) summarizes arguments on this point, but thinks that the Proclamation might have been delayed without harm to British interests.

This is perhaps true as a matter of historical fact, but such fact in no way alters the compulsion to quick action felt by the Ministry in the presence of probable _immediate_ fact.]

[Footnote 196: This was the later view of C.F. Adams, Jnr. He came to regard the delay in his father's journey to England as the most fortunate single incident in American foreign relations during the Civil War.]

CHAPTER IV

BRITISH SUSPICION OF SEWARD

The incidents narrated in the preceding chapter have been considered solely from the point of view of a formal American contention as to correct international practice and the British answer to that contention. In fact, however, there were intimately connected wth these formal arguments and instructions of the American Secretary of State a plan of possible militant action against Great Britain and a suspicion, in British Governmental circles, that this plan was being rapidly matured. American historians have come to stigmatize this plan as "Seward's Foreign War Panacea," and it has been examined by them in great detail, so that there is no need here to do more than state its main features. That which is new in the present treatment is the British information in regard to the plan and the resultant British suspicion of Seward's intentions.

The British public, as distinguished from the Government, deriving its knowledge of Seward from newspaper reports of his career and past utterances, might well consider him as traditionally unfriendly to Great Britain. He had, in the 'fifties, vigorously attacked the British interpretation of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and characterized Great Britain as "the most grasping and the most rapacious Power in the world"; he had long prophesied the ultimate annexation of Canada to the United States; he had not disdained, in political struggles in the State of New York, to whip up, for the sake of votes, Irish antagonism to Great Britain; and more especially and more recently he had been reported to have expressed to the Duke of Newcastle a belief that civil conflict in America could easily be avoided, or quieted, by fomenting a quarrel with England and engaging in a war against her[197]. Earlier expressions might easily be overlooked as emanating from a politician never over-careful about wounding the sensibilities of foreign nations and peoples, for he had been even more outspoken against the France of Louis Napoleon, but the Newcastle conversation stuck in the British mind as indicative of a probable animus when the politician had become the statesman responsible for foreign policy. Seward might deny, as he did, that he had ever uttered the words alleged[198], and his friend Thurlow Weed might describe the words as "badinage," in a letter to the London _Times_[199], but the "Newcastle story" continued to be matter for frequent comment both in the Press and in private circles.

British Ministers, however, would have paid little attention to Seward's speeches intended for home political consumption, or to a careless bit of social talk, had there not been suspicion of other and more serious evidences of unfriendliness. Lyons was an unusually able and well-informed Minister, and from the first he had pictured the leaders.h.i.+p of Seward in the new administration at Was.h.i.+ngton, and had himself been worried by his inability to understand what policy Seward was formulating. But, in fact, he did not see clearly what was going on in the camp of the Republican party now dominant in the North. The essential feature of the situation was that Seward, generally regarded as the man whose wisdom must guide the ill-trained Lincoln, and himself thinking this to be his destined function, early found his authority challenged by other leaders, and his policies not certain of acceptance by the President. It is necessary to review, briefly, the situation at Was.h.i.+ngton.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD (_From Lord Newton's "Life of Lord Lyons," by kind permission_)]

Lincoln was inaugurated as President on March 4. He had been elected as a Republican by a political party never before in power. Many of the leading members of this party were drawn from the older parties and had been in administrative positions in either State or National Governments, but there were no party traditions, save the lately created one of opposition to the expansion of slavery to the Territories. All was new, then, to the men now in power in the National Government, and a new and vital issue, that of secession already declared by seven Southern States, had to be met by a definite policy. The important immediate question was as to whether Lincoln had a policy, or, if not, upon whom he would depend to guide him.

In the newly-appointed Cabinet were two men who, in popular estimate, were expected to take the lead--Chase, of Ohio, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Seward, of New York, Secretary of State. Both were experienced in political matters and both stood high in the esteem of the anti-slavery element in the North, but Seward, all things considered, was regarded as the logical leading member of the Cabinet.

He had been the favoured candidate for Republican Presidential nomination in 1860, making way for Lincoln only on the theory that the latter as less Radical on anti-slavery, could be more easily elected.

Also, he now held that position which by American tradition was regarded as the highest in the Cabinet.

In fact, everyone at Was.h.i.+ngton regarded it as certain that Seward would determine the policy of the new administration. Seward's own att.i.tude is well summed up in a despatch to his Government, February 18, 1861, by Rudolph Schleiden, Minister from the Republic of Bremen. He described a conversation with Seward in regard to his relations with Lincoln:

"Seward, however, consoled himself with the clever remark, that there is no great difference between an elected president of the United States and an hereditary monarch. The latter is called to the throne through the accident of birth, the former through the chances which make his election possible. The actual direction of public affairs belongs to the leader of the ruling party, here as well as in any hereditary princ.i.p.ality.