Mr. Adams to Mr. Seward.
Sir: On a closer examination of the contents of the parliamentary document containing the correspondence relative to the Shenandoah, than I had been able to give at the moment when I transmitted copies to you last week, I find, to my surprise, that Lord Clarendon, immediately after my conversation with him of the 20th of December last, reported by me to you partly in my despatch No. 1112, of the 21st of the same month, and partly in a confidential letter, sent to Sir Frederick Bruce, in a despatch dated the 21st of that month, instructions formally to submit to you the same proposition which he had presented to me in that conference, and which I had then suggested to him not to offer in that way. The objection to this course, as necessitating you at the outset to bring forward the obstacle presented in the impossibility of abandoning our claims, and in their absolute rejection of them, was so obvious that I saw no method of reaching any useful result excepting through an informal preliminary tentative process, absolutely committing neither party, by which some notion might be reached of the precise extent to which each was willing publicly to go in order to reach some common ground of negotiation. From a few words that dropped from his lordship in our conversation, I rather inferred that he had in his mind the possibility of making concessions of some sort from the position taken by Lord Russell, provided they should not appear derogatory to the national dignity. This was the only thing that gave me the smallest hope of making something out of his overture. But that hope appears to be entirely destroyed by the course now resorted to. The language of his letter to Sir F. Bruce clearly implies that recurrence to the past makes no part of his plan. If this be the true meaning, then the British government will have done nothing to emerge from its former awkward position, of soliciting protection for itself in certain future emergencies against the hazard of a retort of its own past policy, without conceding that it had failed in any of its own obligations heretofore. We are expected to abandon the whole ground of the justice of our complaints at the same time that we shut ourselves off from all future chance of profiting by their own policy, thus conceded to have been permissible under the existing state of international law. The public presentation of such an overture, if attended with no private explanation, would seem, therefore, only like inviting a formal reply, which would more completely than ever block up the last avenue to reconciliation.
Of course, I write without knowledge of any instructions that may have accompanied this letter to Sir Frederick Bruce. Hence, there may be something unseen by me to soften the character of this transaction. But from my point of view I am at a loss to explain the reasons for it excepting in one way. It may be that the cabinet were unwilling to meet the new Parliament without having something or other to show in qualification of the absolute and abrupt stopper put upon the whole matter by Lord Russell. That step is very generally felt to have been a mistake. It may be that this is the mode chosen by which to appear to retract it, and at the same time to throw upon us an absolute necessity of assuming the same position. It is scarcely possible to believe, after their experience of the last four years, they could imagine us not in earnest in maintaining the stand we had chosen to take, and not likely to abandon it from the force of opposition. Hence the answer to a proposition publicly made in the form chosen by Lord Clarendon could scarcely have been expected to be other than an equally formal negative. Consequently, the end sought must have been, that what odium might attach in this country to the fact of shutting off the last avenue to a settlement of existing difficulties would be shifted from them to us.
[Page 68]The idea is now started in private circles here, that, after all, the questions raised in the late controversy are not susceptible of arrangement excepting through a general conference of representatives of the maritime powers. Hence, it is not impossible that some proposition of the kind may be started from other quarters, but in the interest of this country, as the only remaining mode of disposing of the matter.
I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,
Hon. William H. Seward, Secretary of State, Washington, D. C.