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 have the honor to transmit a copy of a note addressed by me to Lord Russell on the 21st instant, in conformity with the instructions contained in your despatches Nos. 1539, 1541, and 1551.
The delay has been occasioned by the time taken in copying the voluminous papers which accompanied No. 1539. Had I not supposed that you considered it important to make them all a part of the record, I should have made selections much reducing the number.
I likewise transmit a copy of his lordship’s note acknowledging the reception [Page 624] of mine. I presume that this is the last official act I shall draw out from him in his present post.
I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,
Hon. William H. Seward, Secretary of State, Washington, D. C.
[Enclosures.]
1. Mr. Adams to Lord Russell, October 21, 1865.
2. Lord Russell to Mr. Adams, October 25, 1865.
Mr. Adams to Earl Russell
My Lord: Under instructions from my government, I have the honor to submit to your consideration copies of certain papers, marked A, relative to the destruction of the whaling bark William C. Nye by the vessel known under the name of the Shenandoah.
I am further directed to state that, in view of the origin, equipment, and manning of that vessel, my government claims to look to that of Great Britain for indemnification for this and other losses that have been occasioned by her depredations.
In order that the facts attending this particular case may be more fully laid before you, I pray your lordship’s attention to the series of papers marked B, herewith transmitted, which relate to a very material portion of this vessel’s career.
In the statement of this case I shall endeavor to confine myself to a recapitulation of the principal facts. To this end, it will be necessary for me to recall your attention to certain portions of the correspondence which I have heretofore had the honor to hold with your lordship.
In the letter which I was directed to address to your lordship on the 5th of September, 1864, when I was under the painful necessity of remonstrating against the conduct of the commander of the yacht Deerhound, in rescuing from the hands of the victor in the strife many of the crew of the Alabama, I received orders to submit to your consideration four propositions, two of which were in the following words:
“3. That the continuance of these persons to receive from any British authorities or subjects any pecuniary assistance or supplies, or the regular payment of wages, for the purpose of more effectually carrying on hostile operations from this kingdom as a base, is a grievance against which it is my duty to remonstrate, and for which to ask a remedy in their conviction and punishment.
“4. The occasion has been thought to warrant a direction to me to ask with earnestness of her Majesty’s government that it should adopt such measures as may be effective to prevent the preparation, equipment, and outfit of any further naval expedition from British shores to make war against the United States.”
To these propositions your lordship was pleased to reply, on the 26th of September, by stating that the rescue of those people from the sea and from their captor was regarded by you as a praiseworthy act of humanity, and that, after their escape into this kingdom as a refuge, any attempt to restore them would be viewed by you only as a violation of hospitality. No action whatever, so far as I have had an opportunity of knowing, has followed upon either of these requests.
On the 10th of November following, I took the liberty of calling your lordship’s attention to the fact that these refugees, who had been enjoying the hospitality of a neutral kingdom, were in reality persons, most of them British subjects, originally enlisted within this kingdom for an unlawful purpose, actually still engaged in the same business, and held together with a view of making a part of another enterprise of the same sort with that of the Alabama, conceived and executed in all its parts by agents of the rebels residing all the time, under the protection of her Majesty’s neutral territory, at Liverpool.
The result, as displayed in the papers now submitted, shows conclusively that the “refuge” spoken of by your lordship has been turned into a den of robbers, and that the humanity so freely commended has, in its consequences, been productive of widespread suffering to many industrious and innocent men.
On the 18th of November, 1864,I had the honor to transmit to your lordship certain evidence which went to show that on the 8th of October preceding a steamer had been despatched, under the British flag, from London, called the Sea King, with a view to meet another steamer called the Laurel, likewise bearing that flag, despatched from Liverpool on the 9th of the same month, at some point near the island of Madeira. These vessels were [Page 625] at the time of sailing equipped and manned by British subjects: yet they were sent out with arms, munitions of war, supplies, officers and enlisted men, for the purpose of initiating a hostile enterprise to the people of the United States, with whom Great Britain was at the time under solemn obligations to preserve the peace.
It further appears that, on or about the 18th of the same month, these vessels met at the place agreed upon, and there the British commander of the Sea King made a private transfer of the vessel to a person of whom he then declared to the crew his knowledge that he was about to embark on an expedition of the kind described. Thus knowing its nature, he nevertheless went on to urge these seamen, being British subjects themselves, to enlist as members of it.
It is also clear that a transfer then took place from the British bark Laurel of the arms of every kind with which she was laden for this same object; and, lastly, of a number of persons, some calling themselves officers, who had been brought from Liverpool expressly to take part in the enterprise. Of these last a considerable portion consisted of the very same persons, many of them British subjects, who had been rescued from the waves by British intervention at the moment when they had surrendered from the sinking Alabama, the previous history of which is but too well known to your lordship.
Thus equipped, fitted out, and armed, from Great Britain, the successor to the destroyed corsair, now assuming the name of the Shenandoah, though in no other respect changing its British character, addressed itself at once to the work for which it had been intended. At no time in her later career has she ever reached a port of the country which her commander has pretended to represent. At no instant has she earned any national characteristic other than that with which she started from Great Britain. She has thus far roamed over the ocean, receiving her sole protection against the consequences of the most piratical acts from the gift of a nominal title which Great Britain first bestowed upon her contrivers, and then recognized as legitimating their successful fraud.
I am not unmindful of the grounds which have been heretofore assigned by your lordship as releasing her Majesty’s government from responsibility for the flagrant conduct of this vessel. It is urged that there is no power to prevent vessels bearing the semblance of merchant ships from leaving the ports of this kingdom, and meeting each other at some place on the ocean, far beyond her Majesty’s jurisdiction, for the execution of a purpose like that now in question. The parties to it violate no law of the land, provided they commit no offence against the neutrality of the kingdom within its territorial limits. While I cannot myself quite appreciate the force of this reasoning, so far as it may be applicable to absolve one nation from its international obligations with another merely on account of the skill of its subjects in evading the local law, I am, at the same time, not indisposed to underrate the difficulties which the best intentioned government may, in performing its duty, experience from that cause. Its will may certainly be sometimes baffled by the arts of desperate and profligate adventurers. Did the merit of this case depend upon the mere fact of the escape of the vessel from a British port, by eluding the vigilance of the authorities, it might perhaps be considered as not entailing upon her Majesty’s government so heavy a responsibility. There are other circumstances connected with that event which aggravate its nature. One of the most grave appears to be the fact that, after the escape had occurred and the nefarious project had been consummated, her Majesty’s government nevertheless, instead of taking prompt measures to denounce the transaction thus completed in defiance of its authority and refusing to give it the smallest countenance in any British port, deliberately proceeded to accept the result as legitimate, and to direct that this vessel, so constituted, should be from that moment entitled to all the privileges which an honest belligerent might claim, or any vessel of the United States would enjoy.
The consequences of what I cannot but regard as this most unfortunate construction of international law, by which success in committing the fraud was made the only test to purge it of its offensive nature, have been manifested in the manner in which the Shenandoah was received wherever it went in the British dependencies.
The supplies there obtained, under one pretence and another, particularly in the remote ports of Australia, have enabled this vessel to keep the seas and continue her depredations, long after she has been stripped of the last shadow of the character with which her Majesty’s government voluntarily chose to invest her at the outset.
It is impossible to read the papers which have been forwarded to my government from the consul at Melbourne, copies of which are submitted with this note, without feeling that in no instance on record have similar concessions been made to a vessel of such a fraudulent origin, or such offensive partiality been manifested towards it by a portion of a nation professing to style itself neutral. In consenting to receive this vessel, after the facts of its illegal origin and outfit had been satisfactorily established, I cannot resist the conviction that her Majesty’s government assumed a responsibility for all the damage which it has done, and which, down to the latest accounts, it was still doing, to the peaceful commerce of the United States on the ocean.
I pray permission to call your lordship’s attention to still another of the circumstances which appear to me among the most grave belonging to this case. This enterprise seems to have been the last of the series conceived, planned, and executed exclusively within the limits of this kingdom. It emanated from persons established here since the beginning of the war [Page 626] as agents of the rebel authorities, who have been more effectively employed in the direction and superintendence of hostile operations than if they had been situated in Richmond itself. In other words, so far as the naval branch of warfare is concerned, the real bureau was fixed at Liverpool and not in the United States. The vessels were constructed or purchased; the seamen enlisted; the armament obtained; the supplies of every kind procured; the cruises projected, and the officers and men regularly paid here; in other words, all the war made on the ocean has been made from England as the starting point.
I have had the honor to furnish, from time to time, to your lordship, evidence of the most conclusive character touching most of these points, and I have even designated the chief individuals to whom the supreme direction of the operations had been intrusted. I fail to be able to recall in history a case of more flagrant and systematic abuse of the neutrality of a country by a belligerent kept up for an equal length of time. But what I cannot but think still more remarkable, is that, notwithstanding the fact of the frequent representations and remonstrances made by myself, under the instructions of my government, so far as I have been permitted to learn, not a single effort was ever made by her Majesty’s government, either to prevent or to punish the persons known to be engaged in this most extraordinary violation of the law of the land. Prosecutions have been instituted, indeed, against a few persons who were alleged to have been acting in contravention of the provisions of the enlistment act. Mr. Rumble, after escaping from justice by the leniency of a jury, received a decided censure from the government. Captain Corbett, the officer commanding the Sea King, though prosecuted, appears never to have been brought to trial. But all these and a few minor cases were exclusively those of British subjects, who appear to have been acting merely as instruments of a power above their heads.
Not a single individual directly connected with the rebellion and sent here to conduct the operations has ever been molested in any manner. It cannot, therefore, be at all a matter of surprise, when the main spring of the various naval enterprises, the director of the Alabancias, Floridas, Georgias, and Shenandoahs, was left wholly undisturbed, that it has been impossible to put a stop to the damage which has ensued to the people of the United States from the ravage and depredation committed upon them by the operations carried on from this kingdom. At the very time when the fortunate encounter of the Alabama by the United States steamer Kearsarge terminated in the destruction of one of these corsairs, the offspring of the violated law of this land, and when the people of the United States were congratulating themselves that one great cause of irritation between the two countries was at last laid to rest, it now appears, that the directing power to which I alluded at once turned its attention to a husbanding of the seamen saved by a trick from the hands of the victor, with a view to the immediate production of a successor to the same work. The evidence which I now have the honor to submit shows that many of the crew saved from the Alabama have been from the beginning, and still continue to be, a part of the crew of the Shenandoah.
Neither does it appear from anything within my knowledge that the smallest attention was ever paid by her Majesty’s government to the representations which I had the honor to submit at the time touching the probability of precisely such an operation.
That the principal person engaged in the direction of this bureau was an officer by the name of J. D. Bullock, expressly despatched from Richmond for the purpose of organizing it, is a fact to which I had the honor to call your lordship’s attention in many different forms during the progress of the struggle. Yet, in spite of all this evidence, Mr. Bullock appears to have been permitted to conduct his operations, and especially to shape the outfit and the entire cruise of the Shenandoah, without the smallest interference from any official quarters.
It may, however, be objected that whatever may have been the nature of my remonstrances, no sufficient evidence was presented of the official character and proceedings of Mr. Bullock to sustain the initiation of any prosecution against him in the courts; to which I am pained to be constrained to reply that my government has reason to believe that her Majesty’s government has in one instance considered that evidence sufficient to sustain it in recognizing the authority of Mr. Bullock over the commander of the Shenandoah, so far as to stop its career, in consenting to furnish the medium by which to transmit his orders to that vessel. The power to prevent certainly implies the previous existence of a power to control. I beg permission to express the hope that inasmuch as the papers in which this fact appears have not come into the hands of my government by direct communication from your lordship, I may presume them not to be genuine.
Should the fact be otherwise, however, whilst readily conceding that the motive for such a proceeding may have been substantially of the most friendly nature in accelerating the termination of the ravage committed by that vessel, I do not at the same time feel at liberty longer to disguise from your lordship the sense of extreme surprise which the knowledge of it has caused, not less on account of the singular recognition thus incidentally made of the authority of one so long since pointed out as the principal offender against the neutrality of this kingdom, and enjoying a degree of impunity difficult to be understood, than of the fact that her Majesty’s government appears to have determined thus to act without deigning any friendly signification of its purpose to the party most directly interested in the decision.
Since the preceding was written I have had the honor to receive unofficially from your lordship the gratifying intelligence that her Majesty’s government have decided to send orders to [Page 627] detain the Shenandoah if she comes into any of her Majesty’s ports, and to capture her if she be found on the high seas. I have taken great pleasure in transmitting this to my government; at the same time I trust I may be pardoned if I am compelled to remark that had her Majesty’s government felt it to be consistent with its views to adopt this course at the time when it adopted that upon which it has been my painful duty to animadvert, it would have most materially contributed to allay the irritation in my own country, inseparable from the later outrages committed by that vessel.
Having thus acquitted myself of the unpleasant duty with which I have been charged, I pray your lordship to accept the assurances of my highest consideration, with which I have the honor to be, my lord, your lordship’s most obedient servant,
Right Hon. Earl Russell, &c.,&c.,&c.
[Enclosures.]
Copies of all the papers transmitted with Mr. Seward’s Nos. 1539, of 7th September, and 1541, of the 11th of September, 1865, to Mr. Adams.
Earl Russell to Mr. Adams
Sir: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 21st instant, and its enclosures, respecting the Shenandoah; and I have to state to you that your representations shall be duly considered by her Majesty’s government.
I have the honor to be, with the highest consideration, sir, your most obedient, humble servant,
Charles Francis Adams, Esq., &c.,&c.,&c.