Mr. Seward to Mr. Adams.
Sir: I have received and have read with deep interest your despatch of the 14th of July, No. 744, which relates to the closing debate on the resolution of censure of the ministry, and the new movement of Mr. Lindsay for recognition of the insurgents, and the announcement that the session of Parliament will come to an end to-day.
Popular sympathies with Denmark, and what I willingly believe are partisan prejudices against the United States, seem to have been the chief supports of the resolution, while prudential regard to the ultimate attitude of the United States and other countries, the future of which is manifest to all observers, seem to have saved the government. No public interest requires, and propriety forbids, an examination on my part of the purely European questions which entered into the debate. I wish it could be as well understood in Great Britain as it is here, that there is no more any necessity for disturbance, or fear of disturbance of the peace between Great Britain and the United States than there is any advantage to accrue to Great Britain from an uncertainty upon that point. The United States are unhappily engaged in a civil war, which, on the side of the government, is an involuntary, yet an inevitable and eminently moral contest. Though this is an unusual occurrence in our experience, yet civil war is not exceptional in the general experience of nations. This civil war is exclusively our own affair; and if the government and people of Great Britain had treated it as such from the first, as rigorously as they habitually treat civil war in the case of other nations, no ill feeling would have been engendered. During the latter part of the year 1863, the government of Great Britain manifested a decided determination not only to avoid intervention, but also to prevent unlawful naval intervention by British subjects. This manifestation produced a very happy effect in the United States. Congress assembled on the 7th of December, and did not adjourn until the 4th of July. The Senate confirmed a treaty which I had negotiated with Lord Lyons, and during all that long session not one expression of anger or discontent towards Great Britain was uttered at the Capitol. On the other hand, Parliament assembled in February, and the civil war was habitually brought up for debate in terms which indicated, or seemed to indicate, a pretension and a disposition on the part of Great Britain to intervene, if not forcibly, yet by diplomacy, in our civil war, if not unaided, at least with the support of one or more European allies. Questions arising in the course of the war, and affecting the rights of Great Britain or British subjects, have been invariably brought before Parliament and the British people in combination with denunciations of the war itself, and propositions of intervention in favor of the insurgents. While the ministry have not concurred in this course of proceeding, they have often seemed to leave it doubtful whether they could successfully resist what was generally considered to be a natural proclivity to intervention. Impossible as it seems to be for the British public to comprehend the real character and the actual progress of the war, there is one fact on which they are never left in uncertainty, namely, that [Page 228] all foreign pretensions of intervention, or even of mediation, are deemed in the United States not only officious, but alarming. Consequently our means adopted for suppressing the insurrection take on at every stage another and special character—preparations on the largest possible scale to resist foreign aggression. We should not be either true Americans or true republicans if we were not even more unanimous in this policy than we are in overcoming insurgents, who, though now enemies, nevertheless are, and always must be, our countrymen and fellow-citizens. It is thus that it has happened that though, when the British Parliament assembled, it found amicable dispositions prevailing be- . tween the governments of the two countries, yet when that body adjourned a necessity seemed to have arisen for guarding against a possible change of these relations. We read that British subjects, whose ecclesiastical and political rank and position are supposed, to lend importance to their proceedings, and who have notoriously and officiously aided and abetted the insurrection, formally appealed to the prime minister, at the close of the parliamentary struggle, to -commit the British government to some form of joint or several intervention in the United States, and that this application was promptly refused. In that refusal her Majesty’s government have done, in regard to this country, only what this government, ever since the war began, has done in regard to Great Britain. She has had her domestic discontents, less grave indeed than our own, in the British islands, and in British American provinces, in India, and in New Zealand. She has had controversies of a serious nature in China, and especially in Jupan, and diplomatic conflicts with the European powers. The government of the United States has not sought to increase these discontents, and exasperate these conflicts; on the contrary,whenever it could not lawfully or properly favor British interests, this government has been silent; and whenever it could lawfully and properly favor them, it has given them generous and cheerful support. There is now ground for believing that the traitorous insurgents have abandoned their hopes of obtaining a naval force in European ports adequate to raise our blockade, and are, therefore, leaving the British coast and the British shores. If this fact shall prove to be true, the ministry will be sensibly relieved of an embarrassment which unnecessary and precipitate toleration at the beginning of the war rendered unavoidable. If the government shall now find themselves able, as we have no doubt they are well disposed, to induce the British nation to leave the struggle in the United States to the exclusive care of the people of the United States, the peace between the two countries may be regarded as perpetual, and out of such a peace feelings of amity and friendship must come, which will be unquestionably more useful than any merely political convention that could be contracted between the parties.
I am, sir, your obedient servant,
Charles F. Adams, Esq., &c., &c., &c.