Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Message of the President to the First Session Thirty-ninth Congress, Part I
Mr. Adams to Mr. Seward
Sir: I now have the honor to transmit to you a copy of my note to Lord Russell, in reply to his of the 30th of August, which I have already mentioned as in preparation. It is longer than I had intended to make it, but I hope it may serve to close the controversy on this side. I beg to observe that nearly all of the historical portion, which most conduced to prolixity, was of his lordship’s making,
I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,
Hon. William H. Seward, Secretary of State, Washington, D. C.
Mr. Adams to Lord Russell
My Lord: I have the honor to receive your note of the 30th of last month in reply to mine of the 20th of May last.
It gives me great satisfaction to he the medium of communicating to my government the very friendly assurances of your lordship; I cannot entertain a doubt that they will be fully appreciated.
In respect to the reference which you have done me the honor to make to me, as having at no time entertained a doubt of the intentions of her Majesty’s ministers to maintain amicable relations with my government during the late severe struggle in my country, I am happy to believe that your lordship has not essentially misunderstood my sentiments. At the same time that I cheerfully confirm such declarations as may have been made by me on that subject in the correspondence I have heretofore had the honor to hold with your lordship, I trust I may be permitted to claim, on behalf of my own government, the credit of intentions to the full as amicable. Indeed, without the presence of these elements on both sides, I should have despaired of the possibility of the passage of the two nations in safety through the difficulties presented to them from within as well as from without.
. But whilst I am prompt to respond to your lordship in the sense attributed to me, I pray permission to guard myself against an inference that might by possibility be drawn from a portion of your language, prejudicial to my maintenance of the course which my government has seen fit to take in regard to the events which have given rise to the present discussion. Whilst doing the fullest justice to the intentions of her Majesty’s ministers, I feel equally bound to preclude the supposition that I have ever been satisfied with the measure in which, on too many occasions, they have contented themselves with carrying these intentions into practice. Inasmuch as the relations between nations, not less than between individuals, must depend upon the mode in which they fulfil their obligations towards each other, rather than upon their motives, the questions which have grown out of the events of the late war appear to lose little of their gravity from any reciprocal disavowal, however complete, of ill-will on the part of the respective governments.
I am happy to concur with your lordship in the opinion that this appears to be a favorable moment for a calm and candid examination of these questions. Were it not for this consideration I should abstain from further discussion and content myself with simply transmitting to my government the conclusion to which her Majesty’s ministers have arrived, as communicated to me towards the close of your lordship’s note. But entertaining, as I do, a strong impression that in the matter now at issue is involved a question of international [Page 555] comity, based upon grave principles of morals of universal application, the decision of which is likely to have a very wide bearing upon the future relations of all civilized nations, and especially those most frequenting the high seas, I feel myself under the necessity of placing upon record the views of it held by the government which I have the honor to represent, at least to the extent to which the period of my service at this post has enabled me to do them but feeble justice.
In the note which I had the honor to address to your lordship on the 20th of May last, when recapitulating in the form of propositions the argument which made the basis of certain reclamations upon her Majesty’s government, I submitted first of all, “That the act of recognition by her Majesty’s government of insurgents as belligerents on the high seas before they had a single vessel afloat was precipitate and unprecedented.”
To this affirmation I understand your lordship now to reply by candidly admitting the truth of at least onehalf of it. In pleading, in justification, that the insurrection which caused it was unprecedented, you certainly concede that the recognition was so likewise. It may then hereafter be assumed as a fact beyond dispute that no similar act was ever done by one nation towards another with which it was in amity.
With regard to the other term which I took the liberty to use—the word “precipitate”—I beg leave to call your lordship’s attention to the ground upon which you proceed to justify the act of recognition. You are pleased to observe that it “followed and did not precede our own declaration of the intended blockade of six or seven considerable ports, and the declaration of an intention on the part of the confederates to issue letters of marque.”
Now I pray you particularly to note that if this be the whole case made, your lordship has gone the length of conceding that her Majesty’s government actually adopted this most grave proceeding without the evidence in its possession of any fact whatever upon which to rest it. The statement is simply that a declaration of intentions to act had been made by the respective parties preparing for a struggle.
Hence, I feel constrained respectfully to submit it to your lordship whether in the history of civilized nations there can be found a single instance in which a step of such importance was ever taken by one friendly government in regard to another upon a mere presumption of what was going to be done—an assumption of certain acts contemplated, but not performed ? It would appear to be the part of calm statesmanship, in cases which cannot fail deeply to affect the interests of a friendly nation, to postpone acting at least until something shall have been actually done to require it. In this instance there was no certainty, at the time when her Majesty’s government acted, that either of those declarations of intention would be fulfilled.
The result proves that one of them, in point of fact, never was executed. Neither is it at all beyond the possibility of belief that the other would have been equally left incomplete but for this very action of her Majesty’s government, which precluded all chance of avoiding to have recourse to it. The actual blockade, then, so far from being a cause, became actually an inevitable consequence of its policy. With the reluctance of my government to resort to that measure, and the causes which overcame it, your lordship must have been too fully acquainted at the time to render it necessary for me to dwell upon this matter further.
As a still stronger proof of the precipitate nature of that declaration, if any were needed, I pray permission only to refer to your published letter to Lord Lyons, written on the very May the announcement of the step taken by the government was made by yourself in the House of Commons—the 6th of May, 1861. In that letter your lordship freely admits that, by reason of the interruption of the communication between New York and Washington, you had not then any information of the precise measures actually taken, down to that moment, by either of the parties in the struggle “which appeared to have commenced.”
Yet, in spite of these circumstances which deprived her Majesty’s government of all accurate knowledge of the facts, and notwithstanding that there was no apparent cause in any event that had occurred, urgently demanding an immediate decision, it was determined to adopt this step at this time; a step which, however intended, could not, just at the beginning of an undertaking to sap by violence the established authority of a friendly power, fail to have an influence injurious to the maintenance of that authority and favorable to its overthrow. Considering the nature of the friendly intentions which your lordship is pleased to take credit for, and in which I fully believe, the very best excuse which I can imagine for this proceeding is that it was precipitate.
I should be sorry to be led to the natural inference that would follow my admitting it to have been done with deliberate premeditation. I therefore must respectfully persist, notwithstanding your lordship’s reluctance, in the opinion that I have not failed to give it the epithet which most fittingly belongs to it.
But your lordship, in your note, is pleased to justify this extraordinary “unprecedented and precipitate” step on another ground. This is the “magnitude” of the appearance of the insurrection. This certainly corresponds with my impression of the reasoning which you assigned to me in the first conversation which I had the honor to hold with you after my arrival in this country, the 18th of May, 1861. This view is now amplified in the form of the propositions Nos. 1 and 2 with which your lordship has now favored me.
1st. “That the history of modern nations affords no example of an insurrection against a central government so widely extended, so immediate ir* its operation, so well and so long [Page 556] prepared, so soon and so completely furnished with the machinery of civil government—a national representation—generals and officers of high military reputation, armies fully equipped, and fortifications recently in possession of the established government.”
2d. “That intelligence reached her Majesty’s government in the spring of 1861 that seven combined States had declared in favor of this insurrection; that three more States, including the great and powerful State of Virginia, were preparing to join them; that these States commanded upward of 3,000 miles of sea-coast; that they comprised more than 5,000,000 of people, exclusive of the negro slaves; that the president of the insurgent government had proclaimed his intention of issuing letters of marque and reprisal; that the President of the United States, on the other hand, had proclaimed his intention to establish a blockade of all the ports of the southern States; and that, in these circumstances, the commander of her Majesty’s naval forces on the North American station earnestly solicited instructions for his guidance.”
In response to this, may I be permitted to beg your attention to the fact that, with, perhaps, the exception of the gross number of the people engaged, I do think myself able to furnish an example of an insurrection in every particular corresponding to your description, which has occurred within the last century. I do not doubt that my affusion will at once be understood by your lordship without another word.
Yet, notwithstanding all the points of identity in that case, I cannot find that her Majesty’s government was met at the outset in 1774 with any announcement by a foreign power in amity with Great Britain of a necessity immediately to recognize the insurgents as a bellige-rent power, because of the magnitude of the struggle or for any other cause; neither is there the smallest ground for believing that it would have tolerated the proceeding for one moment if it had been.
Her Majesty’s government at once resorted, without scruple or hesitation, to every right ordinarily exercised by a belligerent in a war with a strong power, and was met with a degree of resistance more effective and enduring than any manifested in the late struggle That resistance, too, was carried out on the ocean, where alone the interests of distant neutral States are liable to be seriously affected by the domestic strife of any nation, in a manner far more extensive than the late insurgents, by their unaided efforts, ever could have attempted. Yet a length of time elapsed before any foreign power, however much inclined, ventured to find in this state of things any reason for considering the people waging such a war as a belligerent power. It furthermore is certain, that if at any time the smallest indication of a leaning that way manifested itself in any of the commercial powers, it was immediately noted by the British government for remonstrance and reclamation.
Your lordship has been pleased to review the conduct of France in this emergency and endeavor to set aside the parallel which I attempted in my note, on the ground that that country was animated by a policy decidedly hostile to Great Britain. The fact is doubtless so. But it so happens tnat this only bears with the more force in my favor on the present argument Had France, being inclined to injure Great Britam, decided to recognize the insurgents as a belligerent, it would, according to the doctrine now avowed by her Majesty’s government, have been doing no more than was absolutely necessary, and altogether justifiable. Why did it not take this step at once? Unhappily for the example, Great Britain, at the outset, insisted upon considering her as a friendly power, and called upon her solemnly to desist from any attempt whatever to recognize the presence of the insurgent force. In proof of this I beg permission to quote a brief extract from a historical writer well known to have drawn his statements from official sources. Mr. Adolphus says, that in April, 1775—that is, one year after the outbreak of the insurrection—” The friendly disposition of the French government towards Great Britain had been unequivocally demonstrated; and the expectation that succor would be afforded to the Americans was suppressed by an edict prohibiting all intercourse with them,”
It thus appears that no idea was, at that early period, entertained by the British authorities of any unfriendly disposition on the part of France. So far from being inclined, as your lordship supposes it might have been, to give such aid to the insurrection, which since 1774 had been developing its great proportions, by any recognition of it as a belligerent, the French sovereign, frankly responded to an appeal made by Great Britain, by interdicting his people from all relations whatever with the Americans. In other words, the example shows that on both sides there was not the remotest conception that a recognition of insurgents as a belligerent immediately upon the breaking out of the insurrection could be considered as a justifiable act on the part of a friendly power.
This brings me to the point at which I am compelled to question the soundness of the proposition upon which your lordship appears to proceed, to wit, that the action of foreign countries in reference to an insurrection that may take place against the established government of a friendly power is to be regulated by a consideration of the magnitude of the numbers that are engaged in the struggle. To my mind there is a difficulty in finding a foundation in sound principle for drawing such a distinction. If I may be permitted to express my own impression, it is that this action of foreign governments, if presumed to be really friendly, is rather to be based upon something like the same rule which they, whether representing large or small communities, would desire to be applied to themselves when in similar circumstances.
The true criterion by which to be guided appears to be rather framed by patient observation [Page 557] of the probabilities of the issue. This can rarely be foreseen at the outset. It is not dependent on the mere accident of numbers. The force which lately overturned the government at Naples did not seem adequate to the object, yet it was accomplished, nevertheless, and foreign nations consequently recognized the result. On the other hand, the numerical force enlisted in the insurrection in the United States seemed large, but time has shown that there never was a moment whilst it lasted that it had a chance of success against the resolute perseverance of far stronger antagonist. For à foreign nation to have recognized in advance the handful of followers under the lead of General Garibaldi as a belligerent power would have been everywhere regarded as a violation of comity to the sovereign then ruling at Naples, and interfering to uphold an otherwise desperate undertaking; yet the new kingdom of Italy was the offspring of this enterprise. On the other hand, the attempt in advance to assume the unlikelihood that the legitimate authorities in the United States would sustain themselves, purely because of the magnitude of the forces levied against them, and to make this reason a basis for an unprecedented and precipitate” act investing them with the rights of a belligerent all over the world, has ended only in furnishing a historical precedent, against the authority of which I cannot but feel it to be for the peace and harmony of civilized nations for all later times most earnestly to protest.
If I am correct in this view, then the conclusion which I find true international comity to prompt is this: Whenever an insurrection against the established government of a country takes place, the duty of governments under obligations to maintain peace and friendship with it appears to be, at first, to abstain carefully from any step that may have the smallest influence in affecting the result. Whenever facts occur of which it is necessary to take notice, either because they involve a necessity of protecting personal interests at home, or avoiding an implication in the struggle, then it appears to be just and right to provide for the emergency by specific measures, precisely to the extent that may be required, but no further. It is then facts alone, and not appearances or presumptions, that justify action. But even these are not to be dealt with further than the occasion demands—a rigid neutrality in whatever may be done is, of course, understood. If after the lapse of a reasonable period there be little prospect of a termination of the struggle, especially if this be carried on upon the ocean, a recognition of the parties as belligerents appears to be justifiable, and at that time, so far as I can ascertain, such a step has never in fact been objected to. Lastly, when the evidence sustains a belief that the established government has utterly lost the power of control over the resistance made without probability of recovery, it is competent for any friendly government to recognize the insurgent force as an independent power, without giving just cause for offence.
Such appears to me to have been the course rigidly adhered to by the government which I have the honor to represent in the long struggle that took place between Spain and her colonies in South America. On which side of it the sympathies of the people were, cannot admit of a doubt. Yet the respective dates which your lordship has been kind enough to search out, and record in your note, sufficiently establish the fact how carefully all precipitation was avoided in judging of the issue in regard to the mother country. I may, perhaps, be permitted to observe that the action of her Majesty’s government in the same cases furnishes even stronger precedents to confirm the soundness of my views. Its recognition of belligerency in these instances cannot be considered as suitably described by either term “unprecedented” or “precipitate.”
I have dwelt at some length upon this original point of difference between the two countries, because it has ever seemed to me the fruitful parent of all the subsequent difficulties, the nurse of a very large share of ill feeling which I cannot deny now prevails among my countrymen. How much stress has been laid upon it by my government, and how ably Mr. Seward, to whom your lordship has kindly paid so grateful a compliment, has heretofore applied, what you justly term, “his remarkable powers of mind” to it, I am sure I need not remind you. In my note of the 20th of May I endeavored to arrange in a logical sequence of distinct propositions the effects which followed this as the first step, and which have led to the reclamations I have been constrained by my instructions to present. I do not propose at this time to dwell upon them further. I will only venture to excuse the earnestness with which I venture to give expression to my views, under the plea of my belief that upon a correct decision in this controversy may depend the security which the commerce of belligerents will hereafter enjoy on the high seas, against the hazard of being swept from them through the acts of nations professing to be neutral and bound to be friendly.
For if it be once fairly established as a principle of the international code that a neutral power is the sole judge of the degree to which it has done its duty, under a code of its own making for the prevention of gross and flagrant outrages, initiated in its own ports by the agents of one belligerent in co-operation with numbers of its own subjects, and perpetrated upon the commerce of the other on the high seas; if it be conceded that the neutral, upon reclamation made for the injuries thus done by reason of the manifest inefficacy of its means of repression, which it has at all times the power to improve at will, can deliberately decline to respond to any such appeal, fall back upon the little that it has attempted as an excuse, and thenceforward claim with justice to be released from the inevitable consequences that must ensue from its inaction, then it must surely follow that the only competition between neutral powers hereafter will be, not which shall do the most, but which shall do the least to fulfil its obligations of interdiction of the industry and enterprise of its people in promoting the conflicts [Page 558] that take place between belligerents on thè ocean If this be once recognized as good law, through the authority which the powerful influence of her Majesty’s government can attach to it, I dare not venture to foresee how much reluctance there may be on the part of the people whom I have the honor to represent to accept and act upon it. Hitherto a want of eagerness on the part of the most adventurous and least scrupulous portion of them to promote enterprises on behalf of any belligerent that promised personal advantage cannot be charged upon them. The references made by your lordship to the cases of Spain and Portugal must have convinced you of this truth. The prospect of impunity in such enterprises is all that is needed. Further than this, I might only venture to suggest to your lordship to consider which of the nations of the world presents on every sea around the globe the most tempting prizes in an event, no friend would more deplore than myself, of its being again, as it has so often been heretofore, doomed to be afflicted by the calamities of a war.
It does so happen, however, that no doctrine of this kind has yet been accepted as legiti mate by the government which I represent.
On the contrary, it has ever assumed the painful and difficult task of responding to the just appeals of foreign friendly nations for protection against such enterprises. Whenever representations have been made by their agents, measures have been promptly taken to enforce the laws; and when the issue proved the inefficiency of the existing statutes, the duty of further legislation has been promptly recognized. This appears to me to constitute the full obligation of a neutral. Singularly enough this course was taken in at least three instances on the representations made by authority of her Majesty’s government. I allude to the first law passed in 1794 in consequence of the complaints and at the special instance of Mr. Hammond, and to another in 1797. Your lordship appears to me but partially to state what was done when you dwell only on the compensation actually made for the cases in which there had been a failure to act. These laws were enacted to provide a better preventive process in all future cases, mainly for the protection of British commerce.
The third example was the law of 1838, which was the remedy applied to excesses committed on the boundary of the British provinces in Canada by persons in the United States when the existing statutes were found not effective to restrain or punish.
Thus it was, too, in the case of Portugal, to which your lordship is pleased once more to call my attention. And here I must ask permission to restate my view of the matter, which seems to have failed to be fully considered by your lordship. I certainly understood you to introduce the case into the correspondence as going to show this: that the government of the United States had set a precedent of disavowing further responsibility in cases of reclamations for injuries committed on the high seas by outfits made in despite of them in their ports against the commerce of Portugal, which the existing law had proved on trial ineffective to prevent or punish. This is the precise position which I understood her Majesty’s government to assume. Hence the value of the example as a personal argument in the present instance.
In opposition to this view, it has been my purpose, by appealing to the facts in the case, to show that the government had at once recognized the validity of the remonstrances of Portugal by first resorting to the laws already provided to meet the case by appeal to the courts, and next by promptly responding to the later demands of the same nation for more effectual modes of restraint than those which experience had shown to be ineffectual. To meet this demand a new law more particularly addressed to the object of prevention had been enacted, the efficacy of which proved so considerable as actually to elicit from the remonstrating party-repeated expressions of his satisfaction with it. It does not appear that any further security was ever asked than this. The governmen had done everything that could be reasonably required. It was, therefore, discharged from responsibility.
There were, indeed, subsequent cases of wrongful outfits and captures of which your lordship has taken note. But in reply to the remonstrances that followed, the answer was prompt that they no longer raised questions that called for the interposition of the executive department. Its whole duty had been performed. The true remedy was now open by an appeal to the courts. The language of Mr. Adams, in his reply to M. Correa de Serra, a portion of which only I perceive has been introduced in your lordship’s note, goes directly to this point, I pray permission to supply it in the following extract:
“The government of the United States has neither countenanced nor permitted any violation of that neutrality by their citizens. They have by various and successive acts of legislation manifested their constant earnestness to fulfil their duties towards all the parties to that war; they have repressed every intended violation of them which has been brought before their courts, and substantiated by testimony conformable to principles recognized by all tribunals of similar jurisdiction.
Your lordship, in reading this passage, could hardly have failedlto feel the force of the successive affirmations of fact which form the grounds of the plea that all the obligations imposed upon a neutral power in such cases had been fulfilled.
The fact in the case, was that M. Correa de Serra in his representations had begun to change his grounds of complaint, and direct his charges against the administration of justice in the courts. This was a position obviously untenable. Much and sorely as I have felt at times the little chance that the United States has stood of receiving impartialjustice in her Majesty’s courts, I have never received from my government any instructions which did not fully recognize the impropriety of raising a question in regard to their decisions. This makes no part whatever [Page 559] of the grounds upon which I am instructed to make reclamations. The question has never been as to what the judicial tribunals have done or failed to do. It turns exclusively upon the duties of a neutral government to perform its obligations to a friendly power by a prompt and energetic policy of repression of flagrant wrongs through existing means, and in the event of a failure of those means by the adoption of others, which it was entirely within its power to supply, if so disposed. The responsibility entailed upon her Majesty’s government in the present instance has always seemed to me to grow out of the feebleness of its measures of prevention at the outset, and its deliberate refusal to obtain an enlargement of its powers after existing remedies had proved unavailing.
With respect to that portion of your lordship’s note which appears to defend the existing legislation as having really proved adequate, I beg leave only to remark that it is sufficiently answered by the fact that you proceed to specify in proof of it only those cases in which her Majesty’s government is admitted to have taken a responsibility of action beyond the law. Whilst I have always been ready to bear testimony to the eminent utility of the action for which your lordship appears to have assumed a grave responsibility, I am at a loss to perceive how this diminishes the force of the reasoning which would seek from the legitimate protection of the law of the land that performance of obligation which appears now to depend only on the courage of the minister to transcend its limits.
And here I must pray permission to dwell a moment upon one passage of your lordship’s note which has excited a strong sense of surprise, not to say astonishment. In order that I may by no possibility be guilty of any misconstruction of the meaning of the language, I take the liberty, with your permission, to transfer the very words. They are these:
“You say, indeed, that the government of the United States altered the law at the request of the Portuguese minister.
“But you forget that the law thus altered was the law of 1794, and that the law of 1818, then adopted was in fact, so far as it was considered applicable to the circumstances and institutions of this country, the model of our foreign enlistment act of 1819.
“Surely, then, it is not enough to say that your government, at the request of Portugal, induced Congress to provide a new and more stringent law for the purpose of preventing depredations, if Great Britain has already such a law. Had the law of the United. States of 1818 not been already in its main provisions adopted by our legislature, you might reasonably have asked us to make a new law, but surely we are not bound to go on making new laws ad infinitum because new occasions arise.”
If I do not rightly comprehend the sense of your lordship, I pray to be corrected, when I assume it to be, that an argument drawn from the precedent of the course of my government in enacting a new law to meet the remonstrance of the Portuguese minister has no force in supporting the representation I make in the present instance, because these very provisions of American legislation have been already long since substantially adopted by Great Britain in the enlistment act, the very act which is now complained of as ineffective. In other words, your lordship appears to take it for granted that Great Britain, having already passed a law as stringent and effective as that of the United States, is, therefore, justified in declining any proposal to go on amending it.
If this be in verity your position, I must pray your pardon if I hazard the remark, in reply, that you cannot have given to the respective statutes in question the benefit of that careful collation which the occasion would seem to require. If you had done so, you must have noticed that in point of fact they are materially unlike. The British law is, as your lordship states, a reenactment of that of the United States, but it does not adopt all of “its main provisions,” as you seem to suppose. Singularly enough, it entirely omits those very same sections which were originally enacted in 1817, as a temporary law on the complaint of the Portuguese minister, and were made permanent in that of 1818. It is in these very sections that our experience has shown us to reside the best preventive force in the whole law. I do not doubt, as I had the honor to remark in my former note, that if they had been also incorporated into the British statute, a large portion of the undertakings of which my government so justly complains would have never been commenced; or, if commenced, would never have been executed. Surely it was not from any fault of the United States that these effective provisions of their own law failed to find a place in the corresponding legislation of Great Britain. But the occasion having arisen when the absence of some similar security was felt by my government to be productive of the most injurious effects, I cannot but think that it was not so unreasonable, as your lordship appears to assume, that it should hope to see a willingness in that of Great Britain to make the reciprocal legislation still more complete. In that hope it was destined to be utterly disappointed. Her Majesty’s government decided not to act. Of that decision it is no part of my duty to complain. The responsibility for the injuries done to citizens of the United States by the subjects of a friendly nation, by reason of this refusal to respond, surely cannot be made to rest with them. It appears, therefore, necessarily to attach to the party making the refusal.
But if the example thus set by her Majesty’s government should come to be generally adopted, and the principles of neutrality upon which it rests be recognized as a part of the code of international law, then it is not difficult to foresee the probable consequence. A new era in the relations of neutrals to belligerents on the high seas will open. Neutral ports in that event will before long become the true centres from which the most effective and dangerous [Page 560] enterprises against the commerce of belligerents may be contrived, fitted ont and executed. The existing restrictions upon the exploit of daring adventurers will rapidly become obsolete, and no new ones will be adopted. Ships, men, and money will always be at hand for the service of any power sufficiently strong to hold forth a probability of repayment in any form, or adroit enough to secure a share of the popular sympathy in its undertakings. New Floridas, Alabamas, Shenandoahs, will appear on every sea. If such be the recognized law, I will not undertake to affirm that the country which I have the honor to represent would not in the end be as able to accommodate itself to the new circumstances as Great Britain. Whilst I cannot but think that every moderate statesman would deprecate such a change, which could hardly fail to increase the hazard of lamentable complications among the great maritime powers, I cannot see an escape from it, if a nation itself possessing a marine so numerous and extensively dispersed decides to lead the way.
Entertaining these views, it appears scarcely necessary for me to follow your lordship further in the examination of details of former precedents either in English or American history. I am happily relieved from any such necessity by learning the conclusions to which her Majesty’s government have arrived. Understanding it to decline the proposal of arbitration which I had the honor, under instructions, to present, in any form, for reasons assigned by your lordship, I nevertheless am happy to be informed that “her Majesty’s government are ready to consent to the appointment of a commission, to which shall be referred all claims arising during the late civil war, which the two powers shall agree to refer to the commissioners.”
I have taken measures to make known, at the earliest moment, this proposal to my government, and shall ask permission to await the return of instructions before giving a reply.
Disclaiming all authority to express in advance any opinion on the part of my government, I pray at the same time your lordship’s attention to a single circumstance, which, without a previous agreement upon the great principles of international law involved in this controversy, may raise a difficulty in the way of accepting the proposal. At a first glance it would appear as if it were in substance identically the same with that long ago made by the Portuguese government to that of the United States. The essence of the answer returned in that case happens to have lately passed under your eye, since it is found incorporated in your lordship’s note. I trust I cannot be suspected of a desire to imply that in taking this step her Majesty’s government could have sought to appear either, as proposing, on the one hand, a measure which it foresaw must be declined, or, on the other, one which, if accepted, could be so accepted only at the risk of a charge of disavowing the views of constitutional or international law entertained by my government in former times. It may indeed be that in this view I may, after explanation, find that I have misconceived the nature of your lordship’s proposal, or the view which my government will take of it, in which case I pray you to excuse the suggestion, and consider it as made without authority, and solely in the hope of eliciting such explanation.
I take great satisfaction in concluding this note by cordially responding to your lordship’s request “to join with her Majesty’s government in rejoicing that the war has ended without any rupture between two nations which ought to be connected by the closest bonds of amity.”
I likewise receive with great pleasure your lordship’s assurances that the efforts by which the government and Congress of my country have shaken off slavery “have the warmest sympathies of the people of these kingdoms.”
If from painful observation in a service extended through four years I cannot, in candor, yield an entire assent to this statement, as applied to a large and too influential a portion of her Majesty’s subjects; if it has been my misfortune to observe, in the process of so wonderful a revolution, a degree of coldness and apathy prevailing in many quarters from which my countrymen had every right to expect warm and earnest sympathy; if throughout this great trial, the severity of which few, if not well versed in the nature of our institutions, could fully comprehend, the voice or encouragement from this side of the water has too often emitted a doubtful sound, I vet indulge the hope that the result arrived at will ultimately correct the hasty and harsh judgments that flowed from lack of faith and of confidence in our fidelity to a righteous cause. Of the friendly disposition in this regard of the members of her Majesty’s government, and especially of your lordship, I have never permitted myself to doubt; and yet, in the midst of the gravest of our difficulties, I cannot forget that even your lordship was pleased, in an official published despatch, to visit with the severity of your but too weighty censure the greatest political measure of the late lamented President—. that which, in fact, opened the only practicable way to the final attainment of the glorious end. Under such circumstances I pray you not to be surprised if I am compelled not to disguise the belief that with my government, as among my countrymen at large, there is still left a strong sense of injured feeling, which only time and the hopes of a better understanding in future, held out by the conciliatory strain in your lordship’s note, are likely to correct.
Recognizing most fully the justice and propriety of the joint policy marked out in your coneluding sentence,
I have the honor to be, with the highest consideration, my lord, your most obedient, humble servant,
Right Honorable Earl Russell, &c.,&c.,&c.