 Chapter 42 Troubles in the East, Part 1 The Queen's Speech at the Opening of Parliament on January 24, 1860, mentioned, among other things, the renewal of disturbances in China. The English and French plenipotentiaries, it stated, had proceeded to the mouth of the Peihou River in order to repair to Peking, and exchange in that city the ratifications of the Treaty of Tianxin. They found their further progress opposed, and a conflict took place between the Chinese forts at the mouth of the river and the naval force by which the plenipotentiaries were escorted. The Allied forces were compelled to retire, and the Royal Speech mentioned that an expedition had been dispatched to obtain redress. The Treaty of Tianxin was that which, as was told in a former chapter, had been arranged by Lord Elgin and Baron Gaul. The treaty contained a clause providing for the exchange of the ratifications at Peking within a year from the date of the signature, which took place in June 1858. Lord Elgin returned to England, and his brother, Mr. Frederick Bruce, was appointed in March 1859, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to China. Mr. Bruce was directed to proceed by way of the Peihou, to Tianxin, and thence to Peking to exchange the ratifications of the treaty. In the instructions furnished to him, Lord Malmsbury, who was then Foreign Secretary, earnestly pressed upon the envoy the necessity of insisting on having the ratifications exchanged at Peking. Lord Malmsbury pointed out that the Chinese authorities, having the strongest objection to the presence of an envoy in Peking, would probably try to interpose all manner of delays and difficulties, and impressed upon Mr. Bruce that he was not to be put off from going to the capital. Mr. Bruce was distinctly directed to go to the mouth of the Peihou with a sufficient naval force, and was told that unless some unforeseen circumstances should interpose to make another arrangement necessary, it would be desirable that he should go to Tianxin in a British man of war. Instructions were sent out from England at the same time to Admiral Hope, the naval commander in chief in China, to provide a sufficient force to accompany Mr. Bruce to the mouth of the Peihou. The Peihou River flows from the highlands on the west into the Gulf of Petuli at the northeast corner of the Chinese dominions. The capital of the empire is about one hundred miles inland from the mouth of the Peihou. It does not stand on the river which flows past it at some distance westward, but it is connected with the river by means of a canal. The town of Tianxin stands on the Peihou near its junction with one of the many rivers that flow into it, and about forty miles from the mouth. The entrance to the Peihou was defended by the Taku forts. On June 20, 1859, Mr. Bruce and the French envoy reached the mouth of the Peihou with Admiral Hope's fleet, some nineteen vessels and all to escort them. Admiral Hope had sent a message two or three days before to Taku to announce that the English and French envoys were coming, and his boat had found the forts defended and the river staked by an armed crowd who stated that they were militia men, and said that they had no instructions as regarded the passage of the envoys, but offered to send any message to Tianxin and to bring back any answer which the authorities there might think fit to send. Admiral Hope again sent to them and requested them to remove the obstructions in the river and clear a passage for the envoys. They did not appear to have actually refused the request, but they said that they had sent a messenger to Tianxin to announce the approach of the fleet. When however the envoys reached the mouth of the river, they found the defenses further increased. Some negotiations and communications took place, and a Chinese official from Tianxin came to Mr. Bruce and endeavored to obtain some delay or compromise. Mr. Bruce became convinced that the condition of things predicted by Lord Momsbury was coming about, and that the Chinese authorities were only trying to defeat his purpose. He also imagined or discovered that there was a want of proper respect for an English envoy shown in the terms of the letter and the rank of the official by whom it was conveyed. After consultation with the French envoy, Mr. Bruce called on Admiral Hope to clear a passage for the vessels. On June 25th, the Admiral brought his gunboats close to the barriers and began to attempt their removal. The forts opened fire. The Chinese artillerymen showed unexpected skill and precision. Four of the gunboats were almost immediately disabled. All the attacking vessels got aground. Admiral Hope attempted to storm the forts. The attempt was a complete failure. About 1,000 Englishmen and 100 French went into action of whom nearly 450 were killed or wounded. Admiral Hope himself was wounded, so was the commander of the French vessel which had contributed a contingent to the storming party. An American naval captain rendered great service to the English and French in their distress. With magnanimous indiscretion, he disregarded the strict principles of international law, declared that blood was thicker than water, and that he could not look on and see Englishmen destroyed by Chinese without trying to lend them a helping hand. The attempt to force a passage of the river was given up, and the mission to Peking was over for the present. It will be easily imagined that the news created a deep sensation in England. It soon became known that although the Chinese government did not exactly accept the responsibility of what had occurred on the pay-ho, yet they bluntly and rudely refused to make any apology for the attack on our ships or to punish the officials who had ordered it. People in general made up their minds at once, that the matter could not be allowed to rest there and that the mission to Peking must be enforced. At the same time a strong feeling prevailed that the envoy, Mr. Bruce, had been imprudent and precipitated in his conduct. Lord Elegant had himself stated that we could have no right to navigate the pay-ho until after the ratification of the treaty, and however discourteous or even double-dealing the conduct of the Chinese authorities might have been, it was surely a questionable policy to insist on forcing our way to the capital by one particular route to which for any reason they objected. For this, however, it seems more just to blame Lord Momsbury than Mr. Bruce. Lord Momsbury had of course no idea of what was likely to happen, but his instructions to the English envoy read as if they were prepared with a view to that very contingency. Mr. Bruce might well have thought that they left him no alternative but to force his way. Before the whole question came to be discussed in Parliament, the Conservatives had gone out and the Liberals had come in. Lord Pomsbury's government were only responsible in a technical sort of way for what had happened, and to do them justice they only defended the proceeding in a very cold and perfunctory manner. But they could hardly condemn their predecessors whose action they had to continue and whose responsibilities they had to assume, and there did not see much use in attacking the conduct of men who were out of office and were no longer amenable to Parliamentary censure. On the other hand, it seems only fair to say that the outcry raised in England about the treacherous conduct of the Chinese at the mouth of the Peiho was unfounded and even absurd. The Chinese government showed itself as usual crafty, double-dealing, and childishly arrogant for a while, but the Chinese at the Peiho could not be accused of perfidy. They had mounted the forts, and barricaded the river openly, and even ostentatiously. The English admiral knew for days and days that the forts were armed and that the passage of the river was obstructed. A man who, when he sees you approaching his hall door, closes and bars it against you and holds a rifle pointed at your head while he parlies with you from an open window, may be a very inhospitable and discourteous person, but if when you attempt to dash in his door he fires at you with his rifle, you can hardly call him treacherous or say that you had no expectation of what was going to happen. Some of the English officers who were actually engaged in the attempt of admiral hope frankly repudiated the idea of any treachery on the part of the Chinese or any surprise on their own side. They knew perfectly well, they said, that the forts were about to resist the attempt to force away for the envoys up the river. The English and French governments determined that the men who had made the treaty of Tien Sin, Lord Elgin and Baron Gros, should be sent back to insist on its reinforcement. Sir Hope Grant was appointed to the military command of our land forces, and General Cousin de Montoban, afterwards Count Palacao, commanded the soldiers of France. We need not here enter into the military history of the expedition. The English and French made short work of the Chinese resistance. The Chinese, to do them justice, fought very bravely, as indeed they seemed to have done on all occasions when war was forced on them, but of course they had no chance whatever against such forces as those commanded by the English and French generals, the Allies captured the Taku forts, occupied Tien Sin, and marched on Peking. The Chinese government endeavored to negotiate for peace and to interpose any manner of delay diplomatic or otherwise between the Allies and their progress to the capital. Lord Elgin consented at last to enter into negotiations at Tung Chow, a walled town 10 or 12 miles nearer than Peking. The Chinese commissioners were to meet the European plenipotentiaries at Tung Chow. Lord Elgin's secretaries, Mr. Park and Mr. Locke, accompanied by some English officers, by Mr. Wolby, the correspondent of the Times, and by some members of the staff of Béron Gros, went to Tung Chow to make the necessary arrangements for an interview between the envoys and the Chinese commissioners. On their way back, they had to pass through the lines of a large Chinese force, which had occupied the ground marked out by the commissioners themselves for the use of the European Allies. Some quarrel took place between a French commissariat officer and some Tartar soldiers, and a sort of general engagement was brought on. Mr. Parks and Mr. Locke and several of their companions, French and English, were seized and dragged off to various prisons, despite the fact that they bore a flag of truce and were known to have come for the purpose of arranging a conference requested by the Chinese themselves with a view to peace. Twenty-six British subjects and twelve subjects of France were thus carried off. Mr. Parks and Mr. Locke were afterwards released after having been treated with much cruelty and indignity. Of the twenty-six British subjects thus seized, thirteen died of the horrible ill treatment they received. The thirteen who were released all bore more or less evidence physically of the usage which had been inflicted on them. Lord Elegant refused to negotiate until the prisoners had been returned and the Allied armies were actually at one of the great gates of Peking and had their guns in position to blow the gate in when the Chinese exceeded to their terms. The gate was surrendered, the Allies entered the city, and the English and French flags were hoisted side by side on the walls of Peking. It was only after entering the city that Lord Elegant learned of the murder of the captives. He then determined to inflict an exemplary and a signal punishment on the Chinese authorities. The Chinese Summer Palace, a building, or rather a park and collection of buildings of immense extent, had been plundered somewhat efficiently by the French on their march to Peking. The French Commander-in-Chief had become possessed of a magnificent diamond necklace which, according to popular rumor, was afterwards an adornment of the festivities of the Imperial Tuileries. Lord Elegant now determined that the palace should be burnt down as a means of impressing the mind of the Chinese authorities generally with some sense of the danger of treachery and foul play. What remains of the palace, such was Lord Elegant's stern notification, which appears to be the place at which several of the British captives were subjected to the grossest indignities, will be immediately leveled to the ground. This condition requires no assent on the part of his Highness, Prince Kong, the Chinese Emperor's brother and plenipotentiary, because it will be at once carried into effect by the Commander-in-Chief. Two days were occupied in the destruction of the palace. It covered an area of many miles. The Palace of Hadrianet Tivoli might have been hidden in one of its courts. Gardens, temples, small lodges, pagodas, groves, grottoes, lakes, bridges, terraces, artificial hills diversified the vast space. All the artistic treasures, all the curiosities, archaeological and other, that Chinese wealth and Chinese taste, such as it was, could bring together, had been accumulated in this magnificent pleasantce. The surrounding scenery was beautiful, the high mountains of tartary ramparted one side of the enclosure. It certainly was, says a spectator, one of the most curious, and also one of the most beautiful scenes I ever beheld. The buildings were set on fire. The whole place was given over to destruction. A monument was raised with an inscription in Chinese, setting forth that such was the reward of perfidy and cruelty. Very different opinions were held in England as to the destruction of the Imperial Palace. Too many it seemed an act of unintelligible and unpardonable vandalism. Assuredly the responsibility which Lord Elgin assumed was great. It was all the greater because the French plenipotentiary refused to share it. This was not, however, because the French envoy thought it an act of mere vandalism. The French, who had remorselessly looted the palace, who had made it a wreck before Lord Elgin converted its sight into a desert, could hardly have offered any becoming protest in the interests of art and of conciliation. The French plenipotentiary was merely of opinion that the destruction of the palace might interfere with a negotiations for peace, which he was naturally anxious to bring to a conclusion. Lord Elgin assumed a heavy responsibility in another way, in as much as he did not consider the capture of the Englishmen to have been at deliberate act of treachery on the part of the Chinese authorities. On the whole he wrote, I come to the conclusion that in the proceedings of the Chinese plenipotentiaries and Commander-in-Chief in this instance there was that mixture of stupidity, want of straightforwardness, suspicion and bluster, which characterizes so generally the conduct of affairs in this country. But I cannot believe that after the experience which Sankolin Sin, the Chinese General-in-Chief, had already had of our superiority in the field, either he or his civil colleagues could have intended to bring on a conflict in which, as the event has proved, he was sure to be worsted. Still Lord Elgin held that for the ill-treatment and murder of the men who ought never to have been touched with unfriendly hand, the Chinese authorities must be held responsible, and that even war itself must become ten times more horrible if it were not one of its essential conditions that the messengers engaged in the preliminaries of peace are to be held sacred from harm. Even this Lord Elgin was undoubtedly right. The only question was, as to his justification in adopting what seemed to be so illogical and barbarous a mode of taking vengeance. Would any breach of faith committed by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, when there was such a prince, have justified a foreign conqueror in destroying the P.D. palace? Would any act of treachery, committed by a Spanish sovereign, justify the destruction of the Alhambra? To such demands Lord Elgin would have answered that he had no other way of recording in memorable characters his condemnation of the cruelty perpetrated by the Chinese. He explained that if he did not demand the surrender of the actual perpetrators, it was because he knew full well that no difficulty would have been made about giving him a seeming satisfaction. The Chinese government would have handed over to him as many victims as he chose to ask for, or would have executed as many as he thought fit to suggest. They would have selected for vicarious punishment in all probability a crowd of mean and unfortunate wretches who had no more to do with the murders than Lord Elgin had himself, who perhaps had never heard that such murders were done, and who would possibly even go to their death without the slightest notion of the reason why they were chosen out for such a doom. That was the chief reason which determined Lord Elgin. We confess it seems to us to have some strength in it. Most of our actions in the war were unjustifiable. This was the one for which perhaps the best case could be made out by a moralist. It is somewhat singular that so many persons should have been roused to indignation by the destruction of a building who took with perfect composure the unjust invasion of a country. The Allied powers now of course had it all their own way. A convention was made by which China agreed that representatives of England and France should reside, either permanently or occasionally in Peking, according as the English and French governments might decide, and that the port of Tianxin should be open to trade and to the residents of foreign subjects. China had to pay a war indemnity, and a large sum of money as compensation to the families of the murdered prisoners and to those who had suffered injuries, and to make an apology for the attack by the garrison of the Taku forts. Thus England established her right to have an envoy in Peking whether the Chinese liked it or not. The practical result was not very great. Perhaps the most important gain to Europe was the knowledge that Peking was not by any means so large a city as we had all imagined it to be. British geographies have time out of mind taught British children that Peking was the largest city in the world. Now we learned that it was not nearly so large as several other cities, and that it was on the whole rather a crumbling and tumbledown sort of place. There is some comfort in knowing that so much blood was not spilled wholly in vain. The same year 1860 saw also the troubles in the mountain terraces of the Lebanon which likewise led to the combined intervention of England and France. The disturbances arose out of the rivalries and quarrels between two sects, the Maronites, and those whom Mr. Browning's poem describes as the Druze nation warders on the mount of the world's secret since the birth of time. In the month of May a Maronite monk was found murdered and suspicion fell upon the Druzes. Some Druzes were killed apparently in retaliation. Then there was some killings on each side. On May 28 a general attack was made by the Druzes on the Maronite villages in the neighborhood of Beirut, and some of them were burnt down. A large town under Mount Hermon was attacked by the Druzes. The Turkish commander ordered the Maronites to lay down their arms and promised that he would protect them. They did give up their arms. And the Turkish officer had the weapons removed. Then he seems to have abandoned the Maronites to their enemies. The Druzes, animated by such a spirit as might have belonged to their worshipped chief and saint Hakim, poured into the palace and massacred them all. The Turkish soldiers did not make any attempt to protect them, but even it was stated in some cases helped the Druzes in their work of butchery. In July the fanatical spirit spread to Damascus. A mob of Turkish fanatics made a general attack upon the Christian quarter and burned the greater part of it down. The consulates of France, Russia, Austria, Holland, Belgium and Greece were destroyed. Nearly 2,000 Christians were massacred in one day's work. Many of the respectable Muslim inhabitants of Damascus were most generous and brave in their attempts to save and shelter the unfortunate Christians. But the Turkish governor of Damascus, although he had a strong military force at his disposal, made no serious effort to interfere with the work of massacre. And as might be expected, his supineness was construed by the mob as an official approval of their doings, and they murdered with all the more vigour and zest. The famous Algerian chief, Abdul Qader, was then living in Damascus, and he exerted himself nobly in the defense and protection of the Christians. France had treated him when fallen and a prisoner with something like generosity, and he well repaid in this season of horror to the Christians in Damascus any debt that he may have owed to a Christian people. The news of the massacres in the Lebanon naturally created a profound sensation in England. The cause of the disturbance was not very clearly understood in the first instance, and it was generally assumed that it was a mere quarrel of religion between Christians and Mohammedans. The Maronites, being Christians, a sect of Syrian Christians, united to Rome, although preserving their own primitive discipline, the Druzes were assumed to be Muslims. Sir Urquhart gave an amusing and not altogether exaggerated description of the manner in which English public opinion is made up on Eastern questions. Conversing, he says, with a Druze of the Lebanon long before this particular outbreak, he observed to the Druze, You get up one morning and cut each other's throats, then people at Beirut or elsewhere sit down and write letters. One says the Maronites are a very virtuous and oppressed people of Christians. Another says they are served right for they are only Roman Catholics. One says the Druzes have done it all, they are savages. Another the Turks have done it all. They are ferocious, perfidious, and fanatic. Then the people in London begin to write who dwell in rooms on the housetop. This it is to be understood is Mr. Urquhart's playful way of describing the authors of newspaper articles, whom in accordance with the tradition still prevailing when he was young, he assumes to be the occupants of garrets. They say these people are very ill off, we must protect them, or we must punish them, or we must convert them. Then they all cry out, we must put down the Turkish government. After this has been written and paid for this printed, and after it is printed it is sold. Then all the nation buys it, and after it has bought it, it reads it while it is eating its breakfast. Then each man goes out and meets his friends and talks it. This is the way the people of England occupy themselves about their affairs, and they call it by a name which being translated means universal guess. They smile then at each other and say, We are great men. We know all that is doing in the world. We govern the world. Like unto us were none since Noah came out of the ark. Mr. Urquhart was a very clever, self-opinionated, and often curiously wrong-headed man. He had seen much of the East, and had a knowledge of Eastern ways and Eastern history which few Englishmen could equal. But he was under the absolute dominion of Emania with regard to Russia, which distorted all his faculties. Men who found that he could entertain as articles of faith some theories about English diplomacy and English statesmen, which seemed almost too wild for the ordinary occupant of a madhouse, might well begin to doubt whether all his knowledge of the East must necessarily help him to any better conclusions about Asia than he had formed about the political men in affairs of his own country. In the passage which has been quoted he did, however, give a very fair exposition of the confusion of idea that prevailed in England about the disturbances in Syria. He was also able to make it quite clear that whatever the Druzes were they were not Muslims. The nooks of the mountain, a well-informed writer says, are not more sequestered from the dwellings of man than the faith of the Druzes is segregated from that of Christian or Muslim. Mr. Urquhart ascribed the cause of the quarrels to the intervention of the European powers in 1840, and of course to the secret influence of Russia working through that intervention. It is probable that the intervention did help in one sense to lead to the dissensions. The great powers started in 1840 and in 1841 a variety of theories about the better government of the Lebanon, one of which was that it should have two governors, a Druze and a Maronite. This was found impracticable owing to the fact that in many parts of the Lebanon the two sects were living in inextricable companionship. The bare idea, however, was probably effectual in starting a new sort of rivalry. The port did finally grant a certain amount of administrative autonomy to the Lebanon, and having granted this under pressure it is not unlikely that they were anxious to reduce it to as little of practical value as possible. Probably the port was not unwilling to make use of any antipathy existing between Druzes and Maronites. The port was also under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that the Maronites were planning an attack upon the Druzes with the object of shaking off the Turkish yoke. It may be that Constantinople was anxious to anticipate matters and to call in the fanaticism of the Druzes to rid them of the Maronites. Certainly the manner in which the Turkish officials at first seemed to connive at the massacres might have justified any such suspicion in the mind of Europe. England and France took strong and decisive steps. They resolved upon instant intervention to restore tranquility to the Lebanon. A convention was drawn up to which all the great powers of Europe agreed and which Turkey had to accept. By the convention England and France were entrusted with the duty of restoring order. France undertook to supply the troops required in the first instance, for the requirements were to be met as the intervening powers might think fit. The intervening powers pledged themselves reciprocally not to seek for any territorial advantage or exclusive influence. England sent out Lord Dufferin to act as her commissioner and Lord Dufferin accomplished his task with as much spirit as judgment. The Turkish government to do it justice had at last shown great energy in punishing the authors and the abetters of the massacres. The sultan sent out Fuad Pasha, his minister for foreign affairs to the Lebanon. And Fuad Pasha showed no mercy to the promoters of the disturbances or even to the highly placed official of betters of them. The governor of Damascus and the commander of the Turkish troops suffered death for their part in the transactions and about 60 persons were publicly executed in the city of whom the greater number belonged to the Turkish police force. Lord Dufferin described what he actually saw in such a manner as to prove that even alarmed rumor had hardly exaggerated the horrors of the time. Lord Dufferin tells that he came to dear El-Kamar a few days after the massacre. Almost every house was burnt and the street crowded with dead bodies, some of them stripped and mutilated in every possible way. My road led through some of the streets. My horse could not even pass for the bodies were literally piled up. Most of those I examined had many wounds, and in each case the right hand was either entirely or nearly cut off. The poor wretch in default of weapons having instinctively raised his arm to parry the blow aimed at him. I saw little children of not more than four years old stretched on the ground, and old men with gray beards. The intervention was successful in restoring order and in providing for the permanent peace of Syria. It had one great recommendation. It was thorough. It was in that respect a model intervention. To intervene in the affairs of any foreign state is a task of great responsibility. The cases are few indeed in which it can be justified or even excused. But it has long been to all, seeming a principle of European statesmanship, that Turkey is a country in the government of which it is necessary for other powers to intervene from time to time. The whole of the policy of what is called the Eastern question is based on the assumption that Turkey is to be upheld by external influence, and that being thus virtually protected she is liable also to be rebuked and kept in order. Now there may be some doubt as to the propriety of intervening at all in the affairs of Turkey. But there can be no doubt that when intervention does take place it should be prompt and it should be thorough. The independence of Turkey is at an end when a conference of foreign ministers sits round a table to direct what she is to do. It is then merely a question of convenience and expediency as to the extent to which intervention shall go. Everything can be more illogical and more pernicious in its way than to say, we shall intervene just far enough to take away from the Turkish government its domestic supremacy and its responsibility. But out of consideration for its feelings or its convenience we will not intervene far enough to make it certain that what we think necessary will be promptly and efficiently done. In the case of the Syrian disturbances the intervention was conducted on a practical principle. The great powers acting on the assumption which alone could justify their interference that Turkey was not in a condition to restore order herself proceeded to do this for her in the most energetic and complete manner. The consent of Turkey was not considered necessary. The Sultan was distinctly informed that the interference would take place whether he approved of it or not. When the intervention had succeeded in thoroughly restoring order, the representatives of the great powers assembled in Constantinople unanimously agreed that a Christian governor of the Lebanon should be appointed in subordination to the Sultan, and the Sultan had of course no choice but to agree to this proposition. The French troops evacuated Syria in June 1861, and thereby much relieved the minds of many Englishmen who had long forgotten all about the domestic affairs of the Lebanon in their alarm lest the French imperial troops, having once set foot in Syria, should not easily be induced to quit the country again. This was not merely a popular and ignorant alarm. On June 26, 1861, Lord Palmerston wrote to the British ambassador at Constantinople, Sir Henry Bulwer, I am heartily glad we have got the French out of Syria and a hard job it was to do so. The arrangement made for the future government of the Lebanon, will I dare say, work sufficiently well to prevent the French from having any pretext for returning thither. In the same letter Lord Palmerston makes a characteristic allusion to the death of the Sultan of Turkey which had taken place the very day before. Abdul-Majid was a good-hearted and weak-headed man who was running two horses to the goal of perdition, his own life in that of his empire. Luckily for the empire his own life won the race. Then Palmerston adds, If the accounts we have heard of the new salten are true, we may hope that he will restore Turkey to her proper position among the powers of Europe. A day or two after Lord Woodhouse on the part of the government expressed to the House of Lords a confident hope that a new era was about to dawn upon Turkey, another new era. It would hardly be fitting to close the history of this stormy year without giving a few lines to record the peaceful end of a life which had, through its earlier parts, been one of sturt and strife. Unfortunately in his Kensington home, passed away in the late autumn of this year, Thomas Cochran, the gallant Dundonald, the hero of the Basque Roads, the volunteer who lent his genius and his courage to the cause of Brazil, of Chile and of Greece, a sort of Peter Burra of the waves, a Swiss of heaven. Lord Dundonald had been the victim of a cruel although not surely intentional injustice. He was accused, as everyone knows, of having had a share in the famous stock-jobbing frauds of 1814. He was tried, found guilty, sentenced to fine and imprisonment, expelled from the House of Commons, dismissed from the service which he had helped to make yet more illustrious than he found it, and deprived of all his public honors. He lived to see his innocence believed in as well by his enemies as by his friends. William IV reinstated him in his naval rank, and Queen Victoria had the congenial task of completing the restoration of his well-won honors. It was not, however, until many years after his death that the country fully acquitted itself of the mere money debt which it owed to Lord Dundonald and his family. Cochran was a radical in politics, and for some years sat as a colleague of Sir Francis Burdett in the representation of Westminster. He carried on in the House of Commons many a bitter argument with Mr. John Wilson Crocker, when the latter was secretary to the Admiralty. It cannot be doubted that Cochran's political views and his strenuous way of asserting them made him many enemies, and that some men were glad of the opportunity for revenge which was given by the accusation got up against him. This was an impatient spirit, little suited for the discipline of parliamentary life. His tongue was often bitter, and he was too apt to assume that a political opponent must be a person unworthy of respect. Even in his own service he was impatient of rebuke. To those under his command he was always genial and brotherly, but to those above him he was sometimes wanting in that patient submission which is an essential quality of those who would learn how to command with most success. Cochran's true place was on his quarter-deck. His opportunity came in the extreme moment of danger. Then his spirit asserted itself. His gift was that which wrenches success out of the very jaws of failure, and he saw his way most clearly when most others began to despair. In part of his later life he had been occupying himself with some inventions of his own, some submarine methods for blowing up ships, some engines which were, by their terrible destructiveness, to abridge the struggles and agonies of war. At the time of the Crimean War he offered to the government to destroy Sebastopol in a few hours by some of his plans. The proposal was examined by a committee and was not accepted. It was his death on October 30th, 1860 which recalled to the mind of the living generation the hero whose exploits had divided the admiration of their fathers with those of Nelson, of Collingwood, and of Sidney Smith. A new style of naval warfare has come up since those days and perhaps Cochran may be regarded as the last of the old sea-kings. CHAPTER 43 THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA, PART I Civil war broke out in the United States. The long-threatened had come to pass. Abraham Lincoln's election as president, brought about by the party divisions of the Southerners among themselves, seemed to the south the beginning of a new order of things in which they and their theories of government would no longer predominate. They felt that the peculiar institution on which they believed their prosperity and their pride to depend was threatened with extinction, and they preferred secession to such a result. In truth the two sets of institutions were incompatible. A system founded on slavery could not be worked much longer in combination with the political and social institutions of the northern states. The struggle was one for life or death between slavery and the principles of modern society. When things had come to this pass it is hardly worth stopping to consider what particular event it was which brought about the actual collision. If the election of Mr. Lincoln had not supplied the occasion, something else would have furnished it. Those who are acquainted with the history of the great emancipation struggle in America know very well that if the south had not seceded from the Union, some of the northern states would sooner or later have done so. Every day in the northern states saw an increase in the number of those who would rather have seceded than give further countenance to the system of slavery. It was a peculiarity of that system that it could not stand still. It could not rest content with tolerance and permission to hold what it already possessed. It must have new ground, new fields to occupy. It must get more or die. Most of the abolitionists would rather themselves secede than yield any more to slavery. We are chiefly concerned in this history with the American Civil War in so far as it affected England. It becomes part of our history by virtue of the Alabama question and the Treaty of Washington. It is important to introduce a short narrative of the events which led to the long dispute between England and the United States, a dispute which brought us more than once to the very edge of war, and which was only settled by the almost unparalleled concession of the Washington Treaty. The southern states, led by South Carolina, seceded. Their delegates assembled at Montgomery in Alabama on February 4, 1861, to agree upon a constitution. A southern confederation was formed with Mr. Jefferson Davis as its president. Mr. Davis announced the determination of the South to maintain its independence by the final abitrimen of the sword, if passion or lust of dominion should cloud the judgment or influence the ambition of the North. This announcement was made on February 18, 1861, and on March 4 following, the new president of the United States entered formerly into office. Mr. Lincoln announced that he had no intention to interfere with the institution of slavery in any state where it existed, that the law gave him no power to do so, even if he had the inclination, but that on the other hand no state could, upon its own mere motion, lawfully get out of the Union, that acts of violence against the authority of the United States must be regarded as insurrectionary or revolutionary. There was still an impression in this country and to some extent in America that an invitation was thus held out by Mr. Lincoln to the southern states to enter into peaceful negotiations with a view to a dissolution of partnership. But if there was any such intention in the mind of Mr. Lincoln or any possibility of carrying it into effect, all such contingencies were put out of the question by the impetuous action of South Carolina. This state had been the first to secede and it was the first to commit an act of war. The traveler in South Carolina, as he stands on one of the keys of Charleston and looks toward the Atlantic, sees the skyline across the harbor broken by a heavy looking solid square fort, which soon became famous in the war. This was Fort Sumter, a place built on an artificial island with walls some 60 feet high and 8 to 12 feet thick. It was in the occupation of the federal government, as of course were the defenses of all the harbors of the Union. It is perhaps not necessary to say that while each state made independently its local laws, the federal government and Congress had the charge of all business of national interest, customs duties, treaties, the Army and Navy and the coast defenses. The federal government had therefore a garrison in Fort Sumter and when there seemed a possibility of civil war they were anxious to reinforce it. A vessel which they sent for the purpose was fired at from a great island in the harbor by the excited secessionists of South Carolina and on April 12th the Confederates who had erected batteries on the mainland for the purpose began to bombard the fort. The little garrison had no means of resistance and after a harmless bombardment of two days it surrendered and Fort Sumter was in the hands of the secessionists of South Carolina. The effect of this piece of news on the mind of the North has been well and tersely described by a writer of the time. It was as if while two persons were still engaged in a peaceful discussion as to some claim of right, one suddenly brought the debate to a close by giving the other a box on the ear. There was an end to all negotiation. Thence forward only strokes could arbitrate. Four days after President Lincoln called for 75,000 men to volunteer in re-establishing the federal authority over the rebel states. President Davis immediately announced his intention to issue letters of mark. President Lincoln declared the southern ports under blockade. On May 8th, Lord John Russell announced in the House of Commons that after consulting the law officers of the crown, the government were of opinion that the southern Confederacy must be recognized as a belligerent power. On May 13th, the neutrality proclamation was issued by the government, warning all subjects of Her Majesty from enlisting on land or sea in the service of the Federals or the Confederates, supplying munitions of war, equipping vessels for pre-beteering purposes, engaging in transport service, or doing any other act calculated to afford assistance to either belligerent. This was in fact the recognition of the southern Confederacy as a belligerent power. And this was the first act on the part of England which gave offense in the north. It was regarded there as an act of unseemly and even indecent haste, as evidence of an overstrained anxiety to assist and encourage the southern rebels. This interpretation was to some extent borne out by the fact that the English government did not wait for the daily expected arrival of Mr. Adams, the new American minister, to hear what he might have to say before resolving on issuing the proclamation. Yet it is certain that the proclamation was made with no unfriendly motive. It was made at the instance of some of the most faithful friends the Northern cause had on this side of the Atlantic, conspicuous among whom in recommending it was Mr. W. E. Forster. If such a proclamation had not been issued, the English government could not have undertaken to recognize the blockade of the southern ports. If there was no bellum going on, the commerce of the world could not be expected to recognize President Lincoln's blockade of Charleston and Savannah and New Orleans. International law on the subject is quite clear. A state cannot blockade its own ports. It can only blockade the ports of an enemy. It can indeed order a closure of its own ports, but a closure of the ports would not have been so effective for the purposes of the federal government as a blockade. It would have been a matter of municipal law only. An offender against the ordinance of closure could be only dealt with lawfully in American waters. An offender against the decree of blockade could be pursued into the open sea. In any case, Mr. Lincoln's government chose the blockade. They had previously announced that the crews of Confederate priveteers would be treated as pirates, but their proclamation of the blockade compelled them to recede from that declaration. It was indeed a threat that modern humanity and the public feeling of the whole northern states would never have allowed them to carry out, and which Mr. Lincoln himself, whose temper always leaned to mercy, would never have thought of putting into effect. The proclamation of a blockade compelled the federal government to treat priveteers as belligerents. It could not but compel foreign states to admit the belligerent rights of the Southern Confederation. In England the friends of the North, or some of them at least, were anxious that the recognition should take place as quickly as possible in order that effect should be given to the President's proclamation. The English government had trouble enough afterwards to resist the importunity of those at home and abroad who thought they ought to break the blockade in the interests of European trade. They could have no excuse for recognizing it if they did not also recognize that there was a war going on which warranted it. Therefore whether the recognition of the Southern Confederates as belligerents was wise or unwise, timely or premature, it was not done in any spirit of unfriendliness to the North, or at the spiriting of any Southern partisans. It was done at the urgency of friends of the North, and in what was believed to be the interest of President Lincoln's government. It seems to us that in any case the recognition was fully justified. The proclamation began by setting forth that hostilities had unhappily begun between the government of the United States and certain states styling themselves the Confederate States of America. Before its issue Fort Sumter had been taken. Mr. Seward, the new Federal Secretary of State, had announced in a dispatch that insurgents had instituted revolution with open, flagrant, deadly war, and that the United States had accepted this civil war as an inevitable necessity. Many days before the proclamation was issued, the New York Chamber of Commerce had stated that secession had culminated in war, and the judges of the higher courts had decided that a state of war existed. Under such circumstances it seems hardly possible to contend that England was bound by any principle of law, international or other, to withhold her recognition. With the proclamation of neutrality on the part of Her Majesty's government began curiously enough, to make a long diplomatic controversy which was carried on between this country and the United States. The correspondence spreads over years. It is maintained principally by Earl Russell, Mr. Adams, American Minister to London, and Mr. Seward, American Secretary of State. The diplomatic correspondence is conducted as might be expected with unvarying courtesy and with at least the outward expression of good temper. But it deepens sometimes in tone and earnestness, so that any reader can see that it is reaching attention not likely to be long kept up. More than once it becomes evident that the states thus represented are on the verge of a serious quarrel. The impression on the part of the United States evidently is all throughout, that England is the concealed and bitter enemy of the Union, and deceasing every possible opportunity to do it harm. The first cause of dispute is the recognition of belligerent rights. Then there comes the seizure of the Confederate envoys in the Trent, which England could not permit, and which apparently the public of the United States could not forgive her for not being able to permit, and thus putting them in the wrong. Far more serious as a cause of quarrel was the career of the Alabama and her kindred vessels. The Mexican expedition was a grievance to the North, connected as it was with the supposed inclination of the English government to follow the promptings of the French Emperor and concede to the Southern Confederates their actual recognition as an independent state. It is necessary to endeavor to follow the course of public opinion in England, and ascertain if possible the meaning of its various changes. Let it be firmly stated at the outset, as a matter of justice, that it was not any feeling of sympathy with slavery which influenced so many Englishmen in their support of the South. No real evidence exists of any change in public opinion of that kind. It is true that sometimes a heated champion of the South did, when driven to bay for argument, contend, that after all perhaps slavery was not quite so bad a thing as people fancied. The Times did once venture to suggest that the scriptures contained no express interdiction of slavery, but no great stress even there was laid upon such an argument, and it might be doubted whether the opinion of any rational man on the slavery question was changed in this country by sympathy with the South. On the contrary, strange as it may seem at first, the dislike of many Englishmen to the slave system converted them first into opponents of the North, and next into partisans of the South. An impression got abroad that the Northern statesmen were not sincere in their reprobation of slavery, and that they only used the arguments and the feeling against it as a means of endeavouring to crush the South. Many Englishmen could not understand, some of them perhaps would not understand, that a Northern statesman might very well object to breaking up the Union in order to put down slavery, and might yet, when an enemy endeavour to destroy the Union, make up his mind with perfect consistency that the time had come to get rid of the slave system once for all. The statesmen of the North were not to be classed as abolitionists. Not many men in office, or likely just then to be in office, were professed opponents of slavery. Most of them regarded it as a very objectionable institution, which the Southern states had unfortunately inherited, which no one would think of introducing then if it had not been introduced before, but which nevertheless it was not worth risking a national convulsion for the sake of trying to root out at once. They would have been willing to trust to time and education, and all the civilizing processes for the gradual extinction of the system. Many of them had even known so many good and kindly Southern slave owners that they could not feel a common hatred for all the upholders of the unfortunate institution. Even like Mr. Lincoln himself would have gladly kept to the Union, even though for the present and for some time to come, Union meant the toleration of slavery in the South. CHAPTER 43 THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA, PART II TWO EXTREME PARTIES THERE WERE WHO WOULD NOT COMPROMISE, THE PLANTER FACTION OF THE SOUTH AND THE ABOLITIONISTS OF NEW INGLAND The planters were not content that their institution should be tolerated. They would have it extended and made supreme. The abolitionists took their stand on principle. Slavery was to them simply a crime, and they would have nothing to do with the accursed thing. When at last the inevitable collision came, there was nothing inconsistent or unreasonable in the position of the Northern Statesmen who said, I am opposed to all sudden changes in our Constitution, I would not have broken up the Union on the question of southern slavery. But now that the Southerners themselves have chosen to secede and to begin a civil war, I say the time has come to get done with this longstanding cause of quarrel and to decree once for all the extinction of the slave system. That came in fact, as the war went on, to be the position of Mr. Lincoln and of many other Northern Statesmen. It was the position which practical Statesmen would have been likely to take and might have been expected to take. Yet it seemed to many Englishmen to argue mere hypocrisy that a man should be intolerant of slavery when it led to secession and civil war if he had been willing to put up with it for the sake of peace. Again Englishmen insisted that the Northern Statesmen were not going into the war with an unmixed motive, as if any State ever yet went to war with one single and undiluted purpose. A good deal was heard about the manner in which the colored race were excluded from society in New York and the Northern States generally. The exclusiveness was assuredly narrow-minded and bad enough, but it is one thing to say a colored man shall not sit next to us in a theater or a church, that he shall not go to school with one's son or Mary one's daughter, and it is quite another thing to say that we have a right to scourge the colored man to death, to buy his son for a slave and sell his daughter at the auction block. A citizen of one of the Canadian provinces might strongly object to the society of the Red Indian in any form, and yet might be willing to arm against a system which would reduce the Red Indian to a condition of slavery. Not a few Englishmen condemned boldly and out of hand the whole principle of coercion in political affairs. They declared that the North had no right to put down secession, that the South had a right to secede. Yet the same men had upheld the heaven-appointed right of England to put down the rebellion in India and would have drenched, if need were, Ireland in blood rather than allow her to withdraw from a partnership into which, after all, unlike the Southern States, she had never voluntarily entered. At first, however, the feeling of Englishmen was almost unanimously in favour of the North. It was thought that the Southern States would be allowed quietly to secede, and most Englishmen did not take a great interest in the matter, or when they did, were inclined to regard the Southerners as a turbulent and troublesome set, who had better be permitted to go off with their peculiar institution and keep it all to themselves. Then however it became apparent that the secession must lead to war, then many of the same Englishmen began to put the blame on the North for making the question any cause of disturbance to the world. There was a kind of impatient feeling as if we in the world in general had no right to be troubled with these American quarrels, as if it was unfair to us that our cotton trade should be interrupted and we ourselves put to inconvenience for a dispute about secession. There clearly would have been no war and no disturbance if only the North had agreed to let the South go, and therefore people on this side of the Atlantic set themselves to find good cause for blaming the Statesmen who did not give in to anything rather than disturb the world with their obstinacy and their union. Out of this condition of feeling came the resolve to find the North in the wrong, and out of that resolve came with many the discovery that the Northern Statesmen were all hypocrites. Suddenly, as if to decide wavering minds, an event was reported which made hosts of admirers for the South in England. The Battle of Bull Run took place on July 21st, 1861, and the raw levies of the North were defeated, thrown into confusion, and in some instances driven into ignominious flight. This was not very surprising. The Southern men were infinitely better fitted for the beginning of a war than the men of the North. The Southerners had always had taste for soldiering, and had kept up their state militia systems with an energy and exactness which the businessmen of the North had neither the time nor the inclination to imitate. The Southern militia systems were splendid training schools for arms, and became the nucleus each of an excellent army when it last the war broke out. The Northern government had yielded to a popular cry, and made a premature movement on Richmond, in Virginia, now the Southern capital. It was not very surprising, therefore, that the South should have won the first battle. It was not very surprising, either, if some of the hastily raised Northern regiments of volunteers should have proved wretched soldiers, and should have yielded to the sudden influence of panic. But when the news reached England, it was received by vast numbers with exaltation and with derision at the expense of the Yankees. It had been well settled that the Yankees were hypocrites and low fellows before, but now it came out that they were mere runaways and cowards. The English people, for a brave nation, are surprisingly given to accusing their neighbors of cowardice. They have a perfect mania for discovering cowardice all over the world. Napoleon was a coward to a past generation, and French for a long time cowards. The Italians were cowards. At the time of the Schleswig-Holstein War the Germans were cowards. The Russians still are cowards. In 1861 the Yankees were the typical cowards of the earth. A very flame of enthusiasm leaped up for the brave South, which though so small in numbers had contrived with such spirit and ease to defeat the Yankees. Something of chivalry there was no doubt in the wish that the weaker side should win. But that chivalry was strongly dashed with the conviction that after all the South had the better fighters and was sure to succeed in the end. That the American Union was in some mysterious way a sort of danger to England, and that the sooner it was broken up the better. Dr. Cobden afterwards accused the English government of having dealt with the United States as if they were dealing with Brazil or some such weak and helpless state. It is important for the fair understanding and appreciation of the events that followed to remember that there was, among all the advocates of the South and England, a very general conviction that the North was sure to be defeated and broken up, and was therefore in no sense of formidable power. It is well also to bear in mind that there were only two European states which entertained this feeling and allowed it to be everywhere understood. The Southern Scheme found support, only in England and in France. In all other European countries the sympathy of people and government alike went with the North. In most places the sympathy arose from a detestation of slavery. In Russia, or at least with the Russian government, it arose from a dislike of rebellion. But the effect was the same. That assurances of friendship came from all civilized countries to the Northern states except from England and France alone. One of the latest instructions given by Kavur on his deathbed in this year was that an assurance should be sent to the federal government that Italy could give its sympathies to no movement which tended to perpetuation of slavery. The Pope, Pius IX, and Cardinal Antonelli repeatedly expressed their hopes for the success of the Northern cause. On the other hand, the Emperor of the French fully believed that the Southern cause was sure to triumph and that the Union would be broken up. He was even very willing to hasten what he assumed to be the unavoidable end. He was anxious that England should join with him in some measures to facilitate the success of the South by recognizing the government of the Southern confederation. He got up the Mexican intervention of which we shall have occasion presently to speak and which assuredly he would never have attempted if he had not been persuaded that the Union was on the eve of disruption. He was not without warning. Many eminent Frenchmen well acquainted with America urged on him the necessity of caution. His cousin, Prince Napoleon, went over to America and surveyed the condition of affairs from both points of view, talked with the leaders on both sides, visited both camps, and came back impressed with the conviction that the Southern movement for independence would be a failure. The Emperor Napoleon however held to his own views and his own schemes. He had afterwards reason to curse the day when he reckoned on the breakup of the Union and persuaded himself that there was no occasion to take account of the Northern strength. Yet in France the French people in general were on the side of the North. Only the Emperor and his government were on that of the South. In England on the other hand the vast majority of what are called the influential classes came to be heart and soul with the South. The government was certainly not so, but it can hardly be doubted that the government allowed itself sometimes to be overborn by the clamour of a West End majority and gave the North only too much reason to suspect that its defeats were welcome to those in authority in England. Lord Palmerston made some gesting allusion in a public speech to the unfortunate rapid movements of the Northern soldiers at Bull Run in that jibe was bitterly resented by many Americans. CHAPTER 43 THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA PART III At first the Northern states counted with absolute confidence upon the sympathy of England. The one reproach Englishmen had always been casting in their face was that they did not take any steps to put down slavery. Not long before this time Lord Broome at a meeting of a statistical Congress in London where the American minister happened to be present delivered a sort of lecture at him on the natural equality of the black with the white. All England had just been in a state of wild excitement about the case of the fugitive slave Anderson. An escaped slave who had taken refuge in Canada was demanded back by the United States government, at that time be it remembered still a Southern government, because in trying to escape he had killed one of those who strove to stay his flight and capture him. The idea seemed monstrous to Englishmen that any British or colonial court of law should give back as a criminal a man who had only done that which English law would warrant him in doing resisted even to slaying an attempt to make him a slave. The fugitive was not given up to the United States. The colonial courts discharged him from custody on the ground of some informality in the warrant of detention and he came to England. But the court of Queen's bench here had already issued a writ of habeas corpus to bring him before it on the ground that his detention in Toronto, even while waiting the decision of the colonial court was illegal, and if it had not so happened that he was released from custody before the writ could interfere, some very important and difficult questions in international law might have had to be decided. In this country public opinion was warmly in favour of the release of Anderson and would have gone any length to save him from being surrendered to his captors. Public opinion was expressing itself soundly and justly. It would have amounted to a recognition of slavery if an English court had consented on any ground to hand over as a criminal a man who merely resisted an attempt to drag him back into servitude. This was just before the accession of Mr. Lincoln to office. It was the common expectation of the Northern States that England would welcome the new state of things under which the demand for the return of a fugitive slave was never likely to insult them. The English government had had for years and years incessant difficulties with the government of the United States while the latter was in the hands of the South. Coloured subjects of the Queen had been seized in Charleston and carried off into slavery and it was not possible to get any redress. For years we had been listening to complaints from our governments about the arrogance and insolence of the American statesmen in office who were all more or less under the control of the South. It is easy to understand therefore how Mr. Lincoln and his friends counted on the sympathy of the English government and the English people and how surprised they were when they found English statesmen, journalists, preachers, and English society generally deriding their misfortunes and apparently wishing for the success of their foes. The surprise changed into a feeling of bitter disappointment and that gave place to an angry temper which exaggerated every symptom of ill-will, distorted every fact, and saw wrong even where there only existed an honest purpose to do right. It was while this temper was beginning to light up on both sides of the Atlantic that the unfortunate affair of the Trent occurred. The Confederate government had resolved to send envoys to Europe to arrange if possible for the recognition of the Southern states. Mr. W. L. Yancey, an extreme advocate of the doctrine of state sovereignty, had already been in Europe with this purpose and now Mr. Davis was anxious to have a regular envoy in London and another in Paris. Mr. Slidel, a prominent Southern lawyer and politician, was to represent the South at the court of the Emperor Napoleon, provided he could obtain recognition there, and Mr. James Murray Mason, the author of the Fugitive Slave Law, was to be dispatched with a similar mission to the court of Queen Victoria. The two Southern envoys escaped together from Charleston, one dark and wet October night, in a small steamer and got to Havana. There they took passage for Southampton in the English male steamer Trent. The United States loop of war, San Jacinto, happened to be returning from the African coast about the same time. Her commander, Captain Wilkes, was a somewhat hot-tempered and indiscreet officer. He was cruising about in quest of the Confederate priviteer Sumter, and while at Havana he learned that the Confederate agents with their secretaries were on the way to Europe. He determined to intercept them. Two hundred and fifty miles from Havana he awaited them in the Bahama Channel. The Trent approached. He summoned her to heave, too, and his summons being disregarded fired a shot across her boughs. And armed party was then sent on board, and the Confederate envoys were seized with their secretaries and carried his prisoners on board the San Jacinto, despite the protest of the captain of the English steamer, and from under the protection of the English flag. The prisoners were first carried to New York, and then confined in one of the forts in Boston Harbor. Now there cannot be the slightest doubt of the illegality of this proceeding on the part of Captain Wilkes. It was not long, to be sure, since England had claimed and exercised a supposed right of the same kind, but such a claim had been given up, and could not, in 1861, have been maintained by any civilized state. It was a claim which the United States Governments had especially exerted themselves to abolish. This was the view taken at once by President Lincoln, whose plain good sense served him in better stead than their special studies had served some professors of international law. We have it on the excellent authority of Dr. Draper in his history of the American Civil War, that Mr. Lincoln had once declared that the act of Captain Wilkes could not be sustained. He said, This is the very thing the British captains used to do. They claimed the right of searching American ships and carrying men out of them. That was the cause of the War of 1812. Now we cannot abandon our own principles. We shall have to give these men up and apologize for what we have done. This was, in fact, the course that the American Government had to take. Mr. Seward wrote a long letter and answer to Lord Russell's demand for the surrender of the prisoners, in which he endeavored to make out that Captain Wilkes had acted in accordance with English precedents, but stated that he had not had any authority from the American Government to take such a course, and that the Government did not consider him to have acted in accordance with the law of nations. It will be seen, Mr. Seward went on to say, That this Government cannot deny the justice of the claim presented to us in this respect upon its merits. We are asked to do to the British nation what we have always insisted all nations ought to do unto us. He announced, therefore, that the four prisoners would be cheerfully liberated. On January 1, 1862 the Confederate envoys were given up on the demand of the British Government and sailed for Europe. The question, then, it might be thought, was satisfactorily settled. Unfortunately, however, a great deal of harm had been done in the meantime. Popular clamour in the United States had entirely approved of the action of Captain Wilkes. A mass meeting held in Tammany Hall or the Cooper Institute of New York, or even in the Les Viemann Fanyal Hall of Boston, is not exactly an assembly qualified to give an authoritative decision on questions of international law. The Secretary of the Navy, however, who ought to have known better but did not, had commended the action of the Captain of the San Jacinto. A vote of thanks had been passed to Captain Wilkes in the House of Representatives, Washington, for his arrest of the traitors Slidel and Mason. Under these circumstances it is not surprising if people on this side of the ocean should have fancied that the United States were eager to sustain a great act of wrong done against us and against international law. But on the other hand, the arrest was so absolutely without justification that the English government might well have known President Lincoln's Cabinet could not sustain it. The governments of all the great European states promptly interposed their good advice, pointing out to Mr. Lincoln the impossibility of maintaining Captain Wilkes's act. The foreign envoys in Washington and the Orléans princes then in that city had given the same good advice. Lord Palmerston's government acted, however, as if an instant appeal to arms must be necessary. Lord Russell sent out to Washington a peremptory demand for the liberation of the envoys, and an apology, and insisted on an answer within seven days. Wilkes wrote once ordered out to Canada, and a proclamation was issued forbidding the export of arms and unitions of war. All this was done, although on the very day that Lord Russell was dispatching his peremptory letter to Washington, Mr. Seward was writing to London to assure Her Majesty's government that the arrest had been made without any authority from the United States government, and that the President and his advisors were then considering the proper course to take. The fact that Mr. Seward's letter had been received was, for some reason or other, not made publicly known in England at the time. And the English people were left to believe that the action of Captain Wilkes either was the action of the American government, or had that government's approval. Public feeling therefore raged and raved a good deal on both sides. American statesmen believed that the English government was making a wanton and offensive display of a force which they had good reason to know would never be needed. The English public was left under the impression that the American statesmen were only yielding to the display of force. The release of the prisoners did not seem to our people to come with a good grace. It did not seem to the American people to have been asked or accepted with a good grace. Mr. Seward might as well, perhaps, when he had made up his mind to restore the prisoners, have spared himself the trouble of what the Scotch would call a long haver, to show that if he acted as England had done he should not have given them up at all. But Mr. Seward always was a terribly eloquent dispatch writer, and he could not, we may suppose, persuade himself to forego the opportunity of issuing a dissertation. On the other hand Lord Palmerston's demeanor and language were what he would probably himself have called in homely language Bumptious, if someone else had been in question. Lord Palmerston could not deny himself the pleasure of a burst of cheap popularity and of seeming to flourish the flag of England in the face of presumptuous foes. The episode was singularly unfortunate in its effect upon the temper of the majority in England and America. From that moment there was a formidable party in England who detested the North and a formidable party in the North who detested England. End of Section 30 Section 31 of a history of our own times, Volume 3 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 44 The Cruise of the Alabama, Part 1 The cause of peace between nations lost a good friend at the close of 1861. The Prince Consort died. It is believed that the latest advice he gave on public affairs had reference to the dispute between England and the United States about the seizure of the Confederate envoys and that the advice recommended calmness and forbearance on the part of the English government. It is not to be supposed, of course, that the Prince Consort even thought of suggesting that the English government should acquiesce in what had been done or allow the wrong to remain unredressed. He knew as every reasonable man might have known that the error of the American sailor was unjustifiable and would have to be atoned for. But he probably assumed that for that very reason the atonement might be awaited without excitement and believed that it would neither be politic nor generous to make a show of compelling by force what must needs be conceded to justice. The death of the Prince Consort, lamentable in every way, was especially to be deplored at a time when influential councils tending toward forbearance in peace were much needed in England. But it may be said, with literal truth, that when the news of the Prince's death was made known its possible effect on the public affairs of England was forgotten or unthought of in the regret for the personal loss. Outside the precincts of Windsor Castle itself the event was wholly unexpected. Perhaps even within the precincts of the castle there was little expectation up to the last that such a calamity was so near. The public had only learned a few days before that the Prince was unwell. On December 8 the court's circular mentioned that he was confined to his room by a feverish cold. Then it was announced that he was suffering from fever unattended by unfavorable symptoms but likely from its symptoms to continue for some time. This latter announcement appeared in the form of a bulletin on Wednesday, December 11. About the midnight of Saturday, the fourteenth, there was some sensation and surprise created throughout London by the tolling of the great bell of St. Paul's. Not many people even suspected the import of the unusual sound. It signified the death of the Prince consort. He died at ten minutes before eleven that Saturday night in the presence of the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the Princesses Alice and Helena. The fever had become fierce and wasting on Friday and from that time it was only a descent to death. Congestion of the lungs set in, the consequence of exhaustion, the Prince fell into utter weakness and died conscious but without pain. He knew the Queen to the last. His latest look was turned to her. The Prince consort was little more than forty-two years of age when he died. He had always seemed to be in good, although not perhaps robust health, and he had led a singularly temperate life. No one in the kingdom seemed less likely to be prematurely cut off, and his death came on the whole country with the shock of an utter surprise. The regret was universal, and the deepest regret was for the wife he had loved so dearly and whom he was condemned so soon to leave behind. Every testimony has spoken to the singularly tender and sweet affection of the loving home the Queen and Prince had made for themselves. A domestic happiness rare even among the obscurest was given to them. It is one of the necessities of royal position that marriage should be seldom the union of hearts. The choice is limited by considerations which do not affect people in private life. The convenience of states has to be taken into account. The possible likings and dislikings of peoples whom perhaps the bride and bridegroom have never seen and are never destined to see. A marriage among princes is in nine cases out of ten a marriage of convenience only. Some indeed is it made as that of the Queen was, wholly out of love. Seldom is it even in love matches when the instincts of love are not deceived and the affection grows stronger with the days. Everyone knew that this had been the strange good fortune of the Queen of England. There was something poetic, romantic, in the sympathy with which so many faithful and loving hearts turned to her in her hour of unspeakable distress. She have already endeavored to do justice to the character of the Prince Consort, to show what was his intellectual constitution, what were its strong points, and what its weaknesses and limitations. It is not necessary to go over that task again. It will be enough to say that the country which had not understood him at first was beginning more and more to recognize his genuine worth. Even those who are still far from believing that his influence in politics always worked with good result are ready to admit that his influence, socially and morally, was that which must always come from the example of a pure and noble life. Of him it might fairly have been said in the classic words that from his mouth, nihil unquam insolens neque gloriosum exeit. Perhaps as we have been considering the influence of the Prince Consort on the Councils of England during the earlier part of the American Civil War, it will be appropriate to quote some sentences in which the eminent American historian already mentioned Dr. Draper speaks of him. One illustrious man there was in England, Dr. Draper says, who saw that the great interests of the future would be better subserved by a sincere friendship with America than by the transitory alliances of Europe. He recognized the bonds of race. His prudent Council strengthened the determination of the sovereign that the Trent controversy should have an honorable and peaceful solution. Had the desires of these the most exalted personages in the realm been more completely fulfilled, the administration of Lord Palmerston would not have cast a disastrous shadow on the future of the Anglo-Saxon race. Dr. Draper may be thought unjust to Lord Palmerston. He certainly is only just to the Prince Consort. After the dispute about the Trent, the feeling between England and the United States became one of distrust and almost of hostility. We cannot help thinking that the manner in which our government managed the dispute, the superfluous display of force, like a pistol thrust at the head of a disputant, whom mere argument is already bringing to reason, had a great deal to do with the growth of this bitter feeling. The controversy about the Trent was hardly over when Lord Russell and Mr. Adams were engaged in the more prolonged and far more serious controversy about the Confederate priviteers. The adventures of the Confederate cruisers began with the escape of a small schooner, the Savannah, from Charleston, in June 1861. It scoured the seas for a while as a priviteer and did some damage to the shipping of the northern states. The Sumter had a more memorable career. She was under the command of Captain Sems, who afterwards became famous, and during her time she did some little damage. The Nashville and the Petrel were also well known for a while. These were, however, but small vessels, and each had only a short run of it. The first priviteer which became really formidable to the shipping of the north was a vessel called in her earlier history the Oretto, but afterwards better known as the Florida. Within three months she had captured fifteen vessels, thirteen of these she burnt, and the other two were converted into cruisers by the Confederate government. The Florida was built in Birkenhead, nominally for the use of the Italian government. She got out of the Mersey without detention or difficulty, although the American minister had warned our government of her real purpose. From that time Great Britain became, whether an American writer calls without any exaggeration, the naval base of the Confederacy. As fast as shipbuilders could work they were preparing in British shipping-yards a priviteer navy for the Confederate government. Mr. Gladston said in a speech which was the subject of much comment that Jefferson Davis had made a navy. The statement was at all events not literally correct. The English shipbuilders made the navy. Mr. Davis only ordered it and paid for it. Only seven Confederate priviteers were really formidable to the United States, and of these five were built in British dark-yards. We are not including in the list any of the actual war vessels, the rams and iron clads, that British energy was preparing for the Confederate government. We are now speaking merely of the priviteers. Of these priviteers the most famous by far was the Alabama. It was the fortune of this vessel to be the occasion of the establishment of a new rule in the law of nations. It had nearly been her fortune to bring England and the United States into war. The Alabama was built expressly for the Confederate service in one of the dark-yards of the Mersey. She was built by the House of Laird, a firm of the greatest reputation in the shipbuilding trade, and whose former head was the representative of Birkenhead in the House of Commons. While in process of construction she was called the 290, and it was not until she was put to sea and hoisted the Confederate flag and Captain Sems, formerly Commander of the Sumter, had appeared on her deck in full Confederate uniform that she took the name of the Alabama. During her career the Alabama captured nearly seventy northern vessels. Her plan was always the same. She hoisted the British flag and thus decoyed her attended victim within her reach. Then she displayed the Confederate colors and captured her prize. Thus when there was some particular motive for making use of the captured vessels they were burnt. Sometimes the blazing wreck became the means of decoying a new victim. Some American captain saw far off in the night the flames of a burning vessel reddening the sea. He steered to her aid and when he came near enough the Alabama which was yet in the same waters had watched his coming, fired her shot across his bows, hung out her flag, and made him her prisoner. One American captain bitterly complained that the fire which seen across the waves at any other time became a summons to every seaman to hasten to the rescue must thence forward be a signal to him to hold his course and keep away from the blazing ship. The Alabama and her captain were of course much glorified in this country. In Sems was eulogized as if his exploits had been those of another Cochran or Canaris. But the Alabama did not do much fighting. She preyed on merchant vessels that could not fight. She attacked where instant surrender must be the reply to her summons. Only twice so far as we know did she engage in a fight. The first time was with the Hatteras, a small blockading ship whose broadside was so unequal to that of the Alabama that she was sunk in a quarter of an hour. The second time was with the United States ship of war, Kiersarge, whose size and armaments were about equal to her own. The fight took place off the French shore near Cherbourg, and the career of the Alabama was finished in an hour. The Confederate rover was utterly shattered and went down. Then Sems was saved by an English steamyot and brought to England to be made a hero for a while and then forgotten. The crews of the Alabama had lasted nearly two years. During this time she had contrived to drive American commerce from the seas. Her later cruising days were unprofitable, for American owners found it necessary to keep their vessels in port. All this, however, it will be said, was but the fortune of war. America had not abolished priveteering, and if the northern state suffered from so clever and daring a priveteer as Captain Sems, it was of little use their complaining of it. If they could not catch and capture the Alabama, that was their misfortune or their fault. What the United States government did complain of was something very different. They complained that the Alabama was practically an English vessel. She was built by English builders in an English dockyard. She was manned, for the most part, by an English crew. Her guns were English. Her gunners were English. Many of the latter belonged to the Royal Naval Reserve and were actually receiving pay from the English government. She sailed under the English flag, was welcomed in English harbours, and never was in or even saw Confederate port. As Mr. Forster put it very clearly and tersely, she was built by British shipbuilders and manned by a British crew. She drew prizes to destruction under a British flag, and was paid for by money borrowed from British capitalists. Mr. Adams called the attention of the government in good time to the fact that the Alabama was in course of construction in the dockyard of Missures Laird, and that she was intended for the Confederate government. And Russell asked for proofs. Mr. Adams forwarded what he considered proof enough to make out a case for the detention of the vessel pending further inquiry. The opinion of an eminent English lawyer, now Sir Robert Collier, was also sent to Lord Russell by Mr. Adams. This opinion declared that the vessel ought to be detained by the collector of customs at Liverpool, and added that it appeared difficult to make out a stronger case of infringement of the Foreign Enlistment Act, which if not enforced on this occasion is little better than a dead letter. The English government still asked for proofs. It did not seem to have occurred to our authorities that if they set a little inquiry on foot themselves they might be able to conduct it much more efficiently than a stranger like Mr. Adams could do. What Mr. Adams asked for was inquiry with a view to detention. He did not ask for the infringement of any domestic law of England. He only asked for such steps to be taken as would allow the law of England to be put in force. The argument of the correspondence on our side seemed to be that a stranger had no right to the protection of our laws until he could make out a case which would amount to the legal conviction of those against whom he asked to be protected. We cannot better summarize the correspondence than by saying it was as if Mr. Adams had forwarded affidavits alleging that there was a conspiracy to murder him, had named the persons against whom he made the charge, and asked for an inquiry in protection from the government, and the government had answered that until he could make out a case for the actual conviction of the accused it was no part of the business of our police to interfere. Let us dispose of one simple question of fact. There never was the slightest doubt on the mind of anyone about the business for which the vessel in the Birkenhead dockyard was destined. There was no attempt at concealment in the matter. Newspaper paragraphs describe the gradual construction of the Confederate cruiser as if it were a British vessel of war that Mr. Laird had in hand. There never was any question about her destination. Openly, in the face of day she was built by the Laird firm for the Confederate service. The Lairds built her as they would have built any vessel for anyone who ordered it and could pay for it. We see no particular reason for blaming them. They certainly made no mystery of the matter then or after. Whatever technical difficulties might have intervened, it is clear that no real doubt on the mind of the government had anything to do with the delays that took place. At last Lord Russell asked for the opinion of the Queen's Advocate. Time was pressing. The cruiser was nearly ready for sea. Everything seemed to be against us. The Queen's Advocate happened to be sick at the moment and there was another delay. At last he gave his opinion that the vessel ought to be detained. The opinion came just too late. The Alabama had got to sea. Her cruise of nearly two years began. She went upon her destroying course with the cheers of English sympathizers and the rapturous tirades of English newspapers glorifying her. Every misfortune that befell an American merchantman was received in this country with a roar of delight. When Mr. Bright brought on the question in the House of Commons, Mr. Laird declared that he would rather be known as the builder of a dozen alabamas than be a man who, like Mr. Bright, had set class against class, than the majority of the House applauded him to the echo. Lord Palmerston peremptorily declared that in this country we were not in the habit of altering our laws to please a foreign state. A declaration which came with becoming effect from the author of the Abortive Conspiracy Bill got up to propitiate the Emperor of the French. End of section 31.