Mr. Seward to Mr. Adams.
Sir: I have your despatch of the 16th of July, (No. 452,) which informs me of Mr. Roebuck’s withdrawal of his motion for a recognition of the insurgents on the 13th instant. A careful observation of events as they were transpiring in Great Britain had prepared us for this result.
The concurrence of many important incidents entitles us to regard the present hour as a crisis of our civil war. The campaign in Virginia, Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana, although it had been well matured, and was prosecuted with great assiduity and unsurpassed heroism, was, nevertheless, attended, until recently, by discouraging delays, reverses, and disasters. The insurgents had gotten up with much skill and energy a loan abroad, based on an assumption of their eventual success, which seemed to promise them an available and durable credit in the European market. This achievement enabled them to employ, without stint, many artificers of Great Britain, and some other countries, in furnishing all the materials and machinery of land and naval warfare, while they threatened to constrain the world’s manufactures into an advocacy of their sovereignty and independence. Successes like these procured for them political agencies in France and Great Britain, which, repressing the national sentiments of those countries, and stifling even their sympathies with the cause of progress and humanity in Europe as well as in America, made it seem for a time, at least, probable that the two powers, which are the most dominating and, therefore, the most interested in the stability of this nation with its free government and liberal institutions, would combine to overthrow, devastate and destroy whatever of government, commerce, and culture had been created on this continent. The conspiracy against our country, which thus flourished apparently unchecked in so many of the slave States, and which had effected such startling combinations in Europe, borrowed aid which cannot be condemned or deplored too much from interests in the loyal States that counselled the obtaining of peace, indolence, personal exemptions and partisan advantages at the imminent hazard, if not at the certain cost, of even a dissolution of the Union, and a surrender as well of the liberties of the country as of its hitherto supposed well assured and beneficent destiny. This concurrence of signs, favorable to the success of the insurrection, raised the hopes of its authors to a stage of presumption. They broke and trampled upon the cartels of military exchanges, defied and despised well-prepared assaults, set on foot invasions of the loyal States, and demanded passage and admission for a representative, on equivocal pretences, at Washington. Such audacity is of itself, for a season, and in favorable circumstances, no contemptible element of political force.
But the imposing fabric of insurgent expectations has been suddenly shattered. The campaigns, so long unsuccessful, have culminated in victories which, as a whole, are as demonstrative and fruitful as, perhaps, ever attended any combination of military and naval movements when the theatre was a continent. The basis has fallen out of their fiscal system. Their pretended securities sell at the rate of nine cents on the dollar at home, where, at last, their value abroad must always be ascertained. The insurgents must hereafter base their claims on foreign nations for material and capital—not, as heretofore, upon promises of speculative profit, but upon the charity of contributors. France and Great Britain, relieved of artificial and exaggerated importunities, will have abundant leisure to consider the morality and justice of recognition, as well as the possible dangers and evils which may attend the attempt to renew European domination on a continent that, with very opposite ideas of government and social sentiments, is rapidly advancing to an equality in population, wealth and [Page 373] power with Europe itself. It begins to be seen that, although, like every other country, the United States are not exempt from faction, yet, the people need only to see and to realize any new national danger, and time to measure the amount of sacrifices required, to avert it. When they have done this, the last sacrifices are as cheerfully made as the first. Arrogance, menace, and military severity on the part of the insurgents have given place to spasmodic demands for new and final levies of men and money, now discovered to be essential for mere self-defence.
What is the instruction of this crisis? I do not forget that war, especially civil war, is capricious. I know very well that the rainbow, which appears when the clouds have parted, is not always a sure sign that even worse tempests are not gathering in the political skies. Nevertheless we must act upon such indications as Providence is pleased to favor us with, always applying to them the test of experience. One of the instructions of experience is, that, usually, a short and convulsive life is appointed to factions, while nations, like individuals, though obliged to encounter many successive and fearful dangers, are yet created to endure and fulfil great ends. So we regard the present stage of this contest as reassuring us of the ultimate deliverance of the country, and the salvation, in their full extent, of its territory and its free institutions.
At the moment, however, when we are accepting this satisfactory view, we find that we are drifting, notwithstanding our most earnest and vigorous resistance, towards a war with Great Britain. Our commerce on the high seas is perishing under the devastation of ships of war that are sent out for that purpose from British coasts, by British subjects, and we hear of new corsairs and more formidable armaments of that kind, designed even to dislodge us from the military occupation of insurgent ports and to burn and destroy our principal cities, and these armaments, it is represented to us by imposing British authorities, the government of Great Britain is not authorized by the laws of the realm to restrain. It cannot be deemed offensive to say that at any period of our history when we were not suffering from intestine war, these injuries would not have been borne. At least it is true that they were not attempted until we were seen to have fallen upon the calamities of civil war. Great Britain might ask herself whether, if a similar opportunity for such hostilities should offer, she would consent to bear like assaults upon her commerce and her sovereignty. I know no one point of political calculation more certain than this, that just what the people of Great Britain would do, under defined circumstances, in self-defence, that is what, under the same circumstances, the people in whose name I am writing must and will do in their own defence.
I would, if properly I could, shut out from consideration another element which enters into the case. Great Britain has at no time intimated that, even with the co-operation of France, she would adopt or sanction a war or a hostile policy against the United States. Her government has on apt occasions indicated a very different and much more just disposition. We respect the government and the people of Great Britain for her persistence in these indications. Nevertheless we have the personal authority of the Emperor of the French for the fact that he has announced to Great Britain that he is willing to follow, if Great Britain will decide to lead the way, in recognizing the insurgents. To give such a recognition, under the circumstances, would be to them a demonstration more potential than a fleet or an army, while it would authoritatively sanction the piratical enterprises of British subjects, which, even when disavowed by Great Britain, are proving intolerable to the United States. At the same time it is to be observed that Great Britain as well as France has been explicitly informed by the United States that a recognition of the insurgents would necessarily be deemed by them an unfriendly proceeding. Virtually, therefore, France invites Great Britain to an alliance offensive and injurious to the United States. Judging with the light which falls upon our position, such an alliance [Page 374] would be morally wrong; for of what crime against both or either of these two nations, or against any nation, are the United States accused? What unatoned wrong have they done which France and Great Britain are entitled by the law of nations to redress? The United States have fallen, not without forty years of protracted resistance, into a state of civil war which is an inconvenience to other maritime and commercial powers. Has either Great Britain, or France, or any other nation, sinned less against the peace of the world than the United States? If ever a nation could plead successfully the irrepressibility of the elements of a civil strife, it is the United States on this occasion. World-planted and cherished African slavery here has audaciously risen up to overthrow a government, the most equal and just that has ever been established among men, and to erect a new one exclusively upon the basis of human bondage. The United States refuse to be destroyed or divided by such an agency for such a purpose. It is not easy, on this side of the Atlantic, to conceive how such a civil war can be looked upon with favor, or even with indifference, in Europe. We have, nevertheless, accepted the fact that Great Britain and France do regard this insurrection with favor on the demand of the statesmen and the presses which seem most to engage the confidence of the people in those countries. France now requires us to go one step further and to accept the fact that Great Britain and herself ought to vote for the admission of the insurgents into the family of nations. The ground upon which the Emperor favors that extraordinary proceeding is, that it is expected that it would tend to bring our unhappy civil war to a close. His Imperial Majesty sems, to me, to have widely misconstrued the character of the American people. They are a brave and a jealous people; they have made it their chief duty, throughout a whole century, to achieve a national independence, and acquire a continental influence, just like that which France and Great Britain have respectively won through the conflicts of eight centuries. The people of the United States undoubtedly desire peace, but they would neither accept a peace that the proposed combination would offer them, nor acquiesce in it if it were possible to force it upon them. European powers can dictate peace, even to Asiatic communities, only by subjugating them, and yet they have been undergoing the process of moral decline since the era of Alexander. American society, on the contrary, is in the full vigor of youth; it is too enlightened not to resist extirpation or aggression by foreign powers. I forbear from pressing the consideration that such a proceeding to enforce peace, in the United States, would be immoral, or the consideration that acceptance of a peace thus compelled would be suicidal. Those who should be prepared for an attempt either to subjugate the United States by force or to divide and separate them by foreign influence, could not be expected to apprehend the sensibilities and the sentiments which prevail among the people whom it is proposed in that extraordinary way to pacify.
Certainly, however, it behooves all the parties concerned to consider what probably will be the consequences to themselves if the intemperate action of British subjects and the inducements of French alliance shall bring on a war between Great Britain and France and the United States. Suppose it to result in the success of the allies. I have already said that no peace accepted at their hands could endure. Are the allies strong enough to garrison the American continent? Will they ever be prepared to guarantee the new slave State, and to hold its ambition for territory and its cupidity for slaves within bounds? And what are the bounds to be prescribed? Shall that new slave State be allowed to extend slavery and dominion only throughout the present territory of the United States, or are the anomalous and hateful institutions to be restored in Mexico and throughout Spanish America, including the West India islands? It has required a term of fifty years and the co-operating power of the United States to arrest the African slave trade. How do the supposed allies now expect to prevent its renewal when the United States shall have relapsed into accompliceship [Page 375] with that dreadful traffic? Or is the arrested work of Christianizing Africa, through the missionary enginery of the Middle Passage, to be renewed and carried on to its consummation under the auspices of the supposed allies ?
Prudent states, even though strong in mutual alliance, must, nevertheless, always take into consideration all the chances of success and failure. Let us suppose, then, that the allies shall not succeed in their enterprise, and that the United States shall come unharmed out of the contest. Would there be nothing to apprehend from the temper of a people who had been, as it would then seem, wantonly brought into national conflict on no other pretext than their unwillingness to surrender up their sovereignty and independence? Is there any possession or any interest of France or of Great Britain, domestic or colonial, that would be the better assured to its lawful sovereign after such a war, than it has been heretofore assured, through the justice and forbearance of the United States, so long as they had consituted a nation?
There is, moreover, a moral opinion that pervades the world, and when it is excited it works marvellous things in the policy of peoples and states. The universal revolution towards popular forms of government received, from the war in which that system was inaugurated here, an impulse which long continued to force it forward, through unheard of convulsions in Europe, and which impelled it into triumphant success throughout this continent. Those who contemplate an alliance by European monarchical states against the United States may be reasonably expected to consider how long and how far the aggressive governments are likely to be willingly supplied with men and the materials for a war that will be deemed to be waged for the suppression of popular institutions.
Alliances may, indeed, be made by monarchs and statesmen; but, after all, they must depend for support and continuance upon the allied peoples and nations themselves. France and Great Britain are now equals. Alliance between a weak state and a strong one has sometimes been preserved through several generations when the states were separate and remote; but I think there has been no case in which a voluntary alliance has permanently held two equal independent states through a long war without producing in one or in both of them changes that, had they been foreseen, would have been sufficient, by way of warning, to prevent the formation of the alliance. The statesmen of France and of Great Britain, if the project of an alliance were indeed seriously entertained, could not, I think, begin too soon to study how the expenses and the losses, and the profits and benefits, which must attend or follow it, shall be equitably allotted between the two countries.
I have thus surveyed not only our domestic situation, but also the entire position of our relations with the chief maritime powers, not because it is seriously apprehended here that either alone or in alliance with France, Great Britain is now about to adopt the injurious and unfriendly measure which the Emperor of France has indicated, but because the survey furnishes a basis for the renewal, under the President’s instructions, of a suggestion which has for some time been held in abeyance—namely, that all the misunderstandings which have arisen between, the United States and Great Britain, including those which now seem to be causing the two countries to be drifting towards a conflict which must be calamitous, are due to the premature recognition of the insurgents as a belligerent power, and that two years of experience have confirmed the wisdom and the justice of the protest that this government made against that extraordinary proceeding. The insurrection, notwithstanding the incalculable benefits it has received from that most unfortunate measure, has, nevertheless, languished from the very beginning, and has now descended so low that manifestly it would perish at once, if it were left like the late insurrection in India, like the insurrection which a few years ago occurred in Canada, like the chronic insurrections in Spanish America, or even like the insurrection now raging in Poland, to stand [Page 376] by means of its own strength, not as a recognized belligerent, but as a domestic party, aiming to revolutionize the government that it refuses to obey. I know how difficult it would be for the government of Great Britain all at once to reverse the policy of which we have never ceased to complain, even though it might be conceded that that policy had been unnecessarily adopted. But every new demand that is made upon that government for toleration of designs hostile to the United States relates back to the premature recognition of the insurgents as a belligerent, and strains to convert it into not merely a recognition of their sovereignty, but into actual war against the United States. Recurring to the sentiments which the President expressed in the beginning of these unhappy troubles, I am authorized to tender to Great Britain assurances of the desire of the United States for the removal of every cause of alienation, and for the re-establishment of the relations between them on the foundations of common interests and of affections and sympathies which, if left unopposed, would hold them together in the bonds of enduring friendship. We invite her to weigh these advantages against the promised benefits of any hostile alliance that she can form against us. We are yet friends, though that friendship has been severely tried. If we must become enemies, the responsibility of that unhappy and fearful event will rest on her Majesty’s government and the people of Great Britain.
It is not intended that you shall formally communicate the contents of this paper to Earl Russell, but that you will use its suggestions and arguments in your own discretion if circumstances shall seem to you to require or to favor the introduction of the serious topics which I have thus discussed.
I am, sir, your obedient servant,
Charles Francis Adams, Esq., &c., &c., &c.