A Straight Deal Part 4

The boundary of Maine was found to be undefined to the extent of 12,000 square miles. Both Maine and New Brunswick claimed this, of course.

Maine took her coat off to fight, so did New Brunswick. Now, we backed Maine, and voted supplies and men to her. Not so England. More soberly, she said, "Let us arbitrate." We agreed, it was done. By the umpire Maine was awarded more than half what she claimed. And then we disputed the umpire's decision on the ground he hadn't given us the whole thing!

Does not this remind you of some of our baseball bad manners? It was settled later, and we got, differently located, about the original award.

Did you learn in school about "fifty-four forty, or fight"? We were ready to take off our coat again. Or at least, that was the platform in 1844 on which President Polk was elected. At that time, what lay between the north line of California and the south line of Alaska, which then belonged to Russia, was called Oregon. We said it was ours. England disputed this. Each nation based its t.i.tle on discovery. It wasn't really far from an even claim. So Polk was elected, which apparently meant war; his words were bellicose. We bl.u.s.tered rudely. Feeling ran high in England; but she didn't take off her coat. Her amba.s.sador, Pakenham, stiff at first, unbent later. Under sundry missionary impulses, more Americans than British had recently settled along the Columbia River and in the Willamette Valley. People from Missouri followed. You may read of our impatient violence in Professor Dunning's book, The British Empire and the United States. Indeed, this volume tells at length everything I am telling you briefly about these boundary disputes. The settlers wished to be under our Government. Virtually upon their preference the matter was finally adjusted. England met us with a compromise, advantageous to us and reasonable for herself. Thus, again, was her conduct moderate and pacific. If you think that this was through fear of us, I can only leave you to our western blow-hards of 1845, or to your anti-British complex. What I see in it, is another sign of that fundamental sense of kinship, that persisting unwillingness to have a real sc.r.a.p with us, that stares plainly out of our whole first century--the same feeling which prevented so many English from enlisting against us in the Revolution that George III was obliged to get Hessians.

Nicaragua comes next. There again they were quite angry with us on top, but controlled in the end by the persisting disposition of kinship. They had land in Nicaragua with the idea of an Isthmian Ca.n.a.l. This we did not like. They thought we should mind our own business. But they agreed with us in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty that both should build and run the ca.n.a.l. Vagueness about territory near by raised further trouble, and there we were in the right. England yielded. The years went on and we grew, until the time came when we decided that if there was to be any ca.n.a.l, no one but ourselves should have it. We asked to be let off the old treaty. England let us off, stipulating the ca.n.a.l should be unfortified, and an "open door" to all. Our representative agreed to this, much to our displeasure. Indeed, I do not think he should have agreed to it. Did England hold us to it? All this happened in the lifetime of many of us, and we know that she did not hold us to it. She gave us what we asked, and she did so because she felt its justice, and that it in no way menaced her with injury. All this began in 1850 and ended, as we know, in the time of Roosevelt.

About 1887 our seal-fishing in the Behring Sea brought on an acute situation. Into the many and intricate details of this, I need not go; you can find them in any good encyclopedia, and also in Harper's Magazine for April, 1891, and in other places. Our fishing clashed with Canada's. We a.s.sumed jurisdiction over the whole of the sea, which is a third as big as the Mediterranean, on the quite fantastic ground that it was an inland sea. Ignoring the law that n.o.body has jurisdiction outside the three-mile limit from their sh.o.r.es, we seized Canadian vessels sixty miles from land. In fact, we did virtually what we had gone to war with England for doing in 1812. But England did not go to war. She asked for arbitration. Throughout this, our tone was raw and indiscreet, while hers was conspicuously the opposite; we had done an unwarrantable and high-handed thing; our claim that Behring Sea was an "inclosed" sea was abandoned; the arbitration went against us, and we paid damages for the Canadian vessels.

In 1895, in the course of a century's dispute over the boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana, Venezuela took prisoner some British subjects, and asked us to protect her from the consequences. Richard Olney, Grover Cleveland's Secretary of State, informed Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of England, that "in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, the United States must insist on arbitration"--that is, of the disputed boundary. It was an abrupt extension of the Monroe Doctrine. It was dictating to England the manner in which she should settle a difference with another country. Salisbury declined. On December 17th Cleveland announced to England that the Monroe Doctrine applied to every stage of our national Life, and that as Great Britain had for many years refused to submit the dispute to impartial arbitration, nothing remained to us but to accept the situation. Moreover, if the disputed territory was found to belong to Venezuela, it would be the duty of the United States to resist, by every means in its power, the aggressions of Great Britain. This was, in effect, an ultimatum. The stock market went to pieces. In general American opinion, war was coming. The situation was indeed grave. First, we owed the Monroe Doctrine's very existence to English backing. Second, the Doctrine itself had been a declaration against autocracy in the shape of the Holy Alliance, and England was not autocracy. Lastly, as a nation, Venezuela seldom conducted herself or her government on the steady plan of democracy. England was exasperated.

And yet England yielded. It took a little time, but arbitration settled it in the end--at about the same time that we flatly declined to arbitrate our quarrel with Spain. History will not acquit us of groundless meddling and arrogance in this matter, while England comes out of it having again shown in the end both forbearance and good manners. Before another Venezuelan incident in 1902, I take up a burning dispute of 1903.

As Oregon had formerly been, so Alaska had later become, a grave source of friction between England and ourselves. Canada claimed boundaries in Alaska which we disputed. This had smouldered along through a number of years until the discovery of gold in the Klondike region fanned it to a somewhat menacing flame. In this instance, history is as unlikely to approve the conduct of the Canadians as to approve our bad manners towards them upon many other occasions. The matter came to a head in Roosevelt's first administration. You will find it all in the Life of John Hay by William R. Thayer, Volume II. A commission to settle the matter had dawdled and failed. Roosevelt was tired of delays.

Commissioners again were appointed, three Americans, two Canadians, and Alverstone, Lord Chief Justice, to represent England. To his friend Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, about to sail for an English holiday, Roosevelt wrote a private letter privately to be shown to Mr. Balfour, Mr. Chamberlain, and certain other Englishmen of mark. He said: "The claim of the Canadians for access to deep water along any part of the Alaskan coast is just exactly as indefensible as if they should now suddenly claim the Island of Nantucket." Canada had objected to our Commissioners as being not "impartial jurists of repute." As to this, Roosevelt's letter to Holmes ran on: "I believe that no three men in the United States could be found who would be more anxious than our own delegates to do justice to the British claim on all points where there is even a color of right on the British side. But the objection raised by certain British authorities to Lodge, Root, and Turner, especially to Lodge and Root, was that they had committed themselves on the general proposition. No man in public life in any position of prominence could have possibly avoided committing himself on the proposition, any more than Mr. Chamberlain could avoid committing himself on the ownership of the Orkneys if some Scandinavian country suddenly claimed them. If this embodied other points to which there was legitimate doubt, I believe Mr.

Chamberlain would act fairly and squarely in deciding the matter; but if he appointed a commission to settle up all these questions, I certainly should not expect him to appoint three men, if he could find them, who believed that as to the Orkneys the question was an open one. I wish to make one last effort to bring about an agreement through the Com-mission.... But if there is a disagreement... I shall take a position which will prevent any possibility of arbitration hereafter;...

will render it necessary for Congress to give me the authority to run the line as we claim it, by our own people, without any further regard to the att.i.tude of England and Canada. If I paid attention to mere abstract rights, that is the position I ought to take anyhow. I have not taken it because I wish to exhaust every effort to have the affair settled peacefully and with due regard to England's honor."

That is the way to do these things: not by a peremptory public letter, like Olney's to Salisbury, which enrages a whole people and makes temperate action doubly difficult, but thus, by a private letter to the proper persons, very plain, very unmistakable, but which remains private, a sufficient word to the wise, and not a red rag to the mob.

"To have the affair settled peacefully and with due regard to England's honor." Thus Roosevelt. England desired no war with us this time, any more than at the other time. The Commission went to work, and, after investigating the facts, decided in our favor.

Our list of boundary episodes finished, I must touch upon the affair with the Kaiser regarding Venezuela's debts. She owed money to Germany, Italy, and England. The Kaiser got the ear of the Tory government under Salisbury, and between the three countries a secret pact was made to repay themselves. Venezuela is not seldom reluctant to settle her obligations, and she was slow upon this occasion. It was the Kaiser's chance--he had been trying it already at other points--to slide into a foothold over here under the camouflage of collecting from Venezuela her just debt to him. So with warships he and his allies established what he called a pacific blockade on Venezuelan ports.

I must skip the comedy that now went on in Washington (you will find it on pages 287-288 of Mr. Thayer's John Hay, Volume II) and come at once to Mr. Roosevelt's final word to the Kaiser, that if there was not an offer to arbitrate within forty-eight hours, Admiral Dewey would sail for Venezuela. In thirty-six hours arbitration was agreed to. England withdrew from her share in the secret pact. Had she wanted war with us, her fleet and the Kaiser's could have outmatched our own. She did not; and the Kaiser had still very clearly and sorely in remembrance what choice she had made between standing with him and standing with us a few years before this, upon an occasion that was also connected with Admiral Dewey. This I shall fully consider after summarizing those international episodes of our Civil War wherein England was concerned.

This completes my list of minor troubles with England that we have had since Canning suggested our Monroe Doctrine in 1823. Minor troubles, I call them, because they are all smaller than those during our Civil War.

The full record of each is an open page of history for you to read at leisure in any good library. You will find that the anti-English complex has its influence sometimes in the pages of our historians, but Professor Dunning is free from it. You will find, whatever transitory gusts of anger, jealousy, hostility, or petulance may have swept over the English people in their relations with us, these gusts end in a calm; and this calm is due to the common-sense of the race. It revealed itself in the treaty at the close of our Revolution, and it has been the ultimate controlling factor in English dealings with us ever since. And now I reach the last of my large historic matters, the Civil War, and our war with Spain.

Chapter XII: On the Ragged Edge

On November 6, 1860, Lincoln, nominee of the Republican party, which was opposed to the extension of slavery, was elected President of the United States. Forty-one days later, the legislature of South Carolina, determined to perpetuate slavery, met at Columbia, but, on account of a local epidemic, moved to Charleston. There, about noon, December 20th, it unanimously declared "that the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved." Soon other slave states followed this lead, and among them all, during those final months of Buchanan's presidency, preparedness went on, unchecked by the half-feeble, half-treacherous Federal Government. Lincoln, in his inaugural address, March 4, 1861, declared that he had no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the inst.i.tution of slavery in the states where it existed. To the seceded slave states he said: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not a.s.sail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You can have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government; while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it." This changed nothing in the slave states. It was not enough for them that slavery could keep on where it was. To spread it where it was not, had been their aim for a very long while. The next day, March 5th, Lincoln had letters from Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. Major Anderson was besieged there by the batteries of secession, was being starved out, might hold on a month longer, needed help. Through staggering complications and embarra.s.sments, which were presently to be outstaggered by worse ones, Lincoln by the end of March saw his path clear. "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not mine, is the momentous issue of civil war." The clew to the path had been in those words from the first.

The flag of the Union, the little island of loyalty amid the waters of secession, was covered by the Charleston batteries. "Batteries ready to open Wednesday or Thursday. What instructions?" Thus, on April 1st, General Beauregard, at Charleston, telegraphed to Jefferson Davis. They had all been hoping that Lincoln would give Fort Sumter to them and so save their having to take it. Not at all. The President of the United States was not going to give away property of the United States.

Instead, the Governor of South Caro-lina received a polite message that an attempt would be made to supply Fort Sumter with food only, and that if this were not interfered with, no arms or ammunition should be sent there without further notice, or in case the fort were attacked.

Lincoln was leaning backwards, you might say, in his patient effort to conciliate. And accordingly our transports sailed from New York for Charleston with instructions to supply Sumter with food alone, unless they should be opposed in attempting to carry out their errand. This did not suit Jefferson Davis at all; and, to cut it short, at half-past four, on the morning of April 12, 1861, there arose into the air from the mortar battery near old Fort Johnson, on the south side of the harbor, a bomb-sh.e.l.l, which curved high and slow through the dawn, and fell upon Fort Sumter, thus starting four years of civil war. One week later the Union proclaimed a blockade on the ports of Slave Land.

Bear each and all of these facts in mind, I beg, bear them in mind well, for in the light of them you can see England clearly, and will have no trouble in following the different threads of her conduct towards us during this struggle. What she did then gave to our ancient grudge against her the reddest coat of fresh paint which it had received yet--the reddest and the most enduring since George III.

England ran true to form. It is very interesting to mark this; very interesting to watch in her government and her people the persistent and conflicting currents of sympathy and antipathy boil up again, just as they had boiled in 1776. It is equally interesting to watch our ancient grudge at work, causing us to remember and hug all the ill will she bore us, all the harm she did us, and to forget all the good. Roughly comparing 1776 with 1861, it was once more the Tories, the aristocrats, the Lord Norths, who hoped for our overthrow, while the people of England, with certain liberal leaders in Parliament, stood our friends.

Just as Pitt and Burke had spoken for us in our Revolution, so Bright and Cobden befriended us now. The parallel ceases when you come to the Sovereign. Queen Victoria declined to support or recognize Slave Land.

She stopped the Government and aristocratic England from forcing war upon us, she prevented the French Emperor, Napoleon III, from recognizing the Southern Confederacy. We shall come to this in its turn.

Our Civil War set up in England a huge vibration, subjected England to a searching test of herself. Nothing describes this better than a letter of Henry Ward Beecher's, written during the War, after his return from addressing the people of England.

"My own feelings and judgment underwent a great change while I was in England... I was chilled and shocked at the coldness towards the North which I everywhere met, and the sympathetic prejudices in favor of the South. And yet everybody was alike condemning slavery and praising liberty!"

How could England do this, how with the same breath blow cold and hot, how be against the North that was fighting the extension of slavery and yet be against slavery too? Confusing at the time, it is clear to-day.

Imbedded in Lincoln's first inaugural address lies the clew: he said, "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the inst.i.tution of slavery where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. Those who elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations, and had never recanted them." Thus Lincoln, March 4, 1861.

Six weeks later, when we went-to war, we went, not "to interfere with the inst.i.tution of slavery," but (again in Lincoln's words) "to preserve, protect, and defend" the Union. This was our slogan, this our fight, this was repeated again and again by our soldiers and civilians, by our public men and our private citizens. Can you see the position of those Englishmen who condemned slavery and praised liberty? We ourselves said we were not out to abolish slavery, we disclaimed any such object, by our own words we cut the ground away from them.

Not until September 22d of 1862, to take effect upon January 1, 1863, did Lincoln proclaim emanc.i.p.ation--thus doing what he had said twenty-two months before "I believe I have no lawful right to do."

That interim of anguish and meditation had cleared his sight. Slowly he had felt his way, slowly he had come to perceive that the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery were so tightly wrapped together as to merge and be one and the same thing. But even had he known this from the start, known that the North's bottom cause, the ending of slavery, rested on moral ground, and that moral ground outweighs and must forever outweigh whatever of legal argument may be on the other side, he could have done nothing. "I believe I have no lawful right." There were thousands in the North who also thus believed. It was only an extremist minority who disregarded the Const.i.tution's acquiescence in slavery and wanted emanc.i.p.ation proclaimed at once. Had Lincoln proclaimed it, the North would have split in pieces, the South would have won, the Union would have perished, and slavery would have remained. Lincoln had to wait until the season of anguish and meditation had unblinded thousands besides himself, and thus had placed behind him enough of the North to struggle on to that saving of the Union and that freeing of the slave which was consummated more than two years later by Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox.

But it was during that interim of anguish and meditation that England did us most of the harm which our memories vaguely but violently treasure. Until the Emanc.i.p.ation, we gave our English friends no public, official grounds for their sympathy, and consequently their influence over our English enemies was hampered. Instantly after January 1, 1863, that sympathy became the deciding voice. Our enemies could no longer say to it, "but Lincoln says himself that he doesn't intend to abolish slavery."

Here are examples of what occurred: To William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist, an English sympathizer wrote that three thousand men of Manchester had met there and adopted by acclamation an enthusiastic message to Lincoln. These men said that they would rather remain unemployed for twenty years than get cotton from the South at the expense of the slave. A month later Cobden writes to Charles Sumner: "I know nothing in my political experience so striking, an a display of spontaneous public action, as that of the vast gathering at Exeter Hall (in London), when, without one attraction in the form of a popular orator, the vast building, its minor rooms and pa.s.sages, and the streets adjoining, were crowded with an enthusiastic audience. That meeting has had a powerful effect on our newspapers and politicians. It has closed the mouths of those who have been advocating the side of the South. And I now write to a.s.sure you that any unfriendly act on the part of our Government--no matter which of our aristocratic parties is in power--towards your cause is not to be apprehended. If an attempt were made by the Government in any way to commit us to the South, a spirit would be instantly aroused which would drive that Government from power."

I lay emphasis at this point upon these instances (many more could be given) because it has been the habit of most Americans to say that England stopped being hostile to the North as soon as the North began to win. In January, 1863, the North had not visibly begun to win. It had suffered almost unvaried defeat so far; and the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, where the tide turned at last our way, were still six months ahead. It was from January 1, 1863, when Lincoln planted our cause firmly and openly on abolition ground, that the undercurrent of British sympathy surged to the top. The true wonder is, that this undercurrent should have been so strong all along, that those English sympathizers somehow in their hearts should have known what we were fighting for more clearly than we had been able to see it; ourselves.

The key to this is given in Beecher's letter--it is nowhere better given--and to it I must now return.

"I soon perceived that my first error was in supposing that Great Britain was an impartial spectator. In fact, she was morally an actor in the conflict. Such were the antagonistic influences at work in her own midst, and the division of parties, that, in judging American affairs she could not help lending sanction to one or the other side of her own internal conflicts. England was not, then, a judge, sitting calmly on the bench to decide without bias; the case brought before her was her own, in principle, and in interest. In taking sides with the North, the common people of Great Britain and the laboring cla.s.s took sides with themselves in their struggle for reformation; while the wealthy and the privileged cla.s.ses found a reason in their own political parties and philosophies why they should not be too eager for the legitimate government and nation of the United States.

"All cla.s.ses who, at home, were seeking the elevation and political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the common people, were with us. All who studied the preservation of the state in its present unequal distribution of political privileges, sided with that section in America that were doing the same thing.

"We ought not to be surprised nor angry that men should maintain aristocratic doctrines which they believe in fully as sincerely, and more consistently, than we, or many amongst us do, in democratic doctrines.

"We of all people ought to understand how a government can be cold or semi-hostile, while the people are friendly with us. For thirty years the American Government, in the hands, or under the influence of Southern statesmen, has been in a threatening att.i.tude to Europe, and actually in disgraceful conflict with all the weak neighboring Powers.

Texas, Mexico, Central Generics, and Cuba are witnesses. Yet the great body of our people in the Middle and Northern States are strongly opposed to all such tendencies."

It was in a very brief visit that Beecher managed to see England as she was: a remarkable letter for its insight, and more remarkable still for its moderation, when you consider that it was written in the midst of our Civil War, while loyal Americans were not only enraged with England, but wounded to the quick as well. When a man can do this--can have pa.s.sionate convictions in pa.s.sionate times, and yet keep his judgment unclouded, wise, and calm, he serves his country well.

I can remember the rage and the wound. In that atmosphere I began my existence. My childhood was steeped in it. In our house the London Punch was stopped, because of its hostile ridicule. I grew to boyhood hearing from my elders how England had for years taunted us with our tolerance of slavery while we boasted of being the Land of the Free--and then, when we arose to abolish slavery, how she "jack-knived" and gave aid and comfort to the slave power when it had its fingers upon our throat. Many of that generation of my elders never wholly got over the rage and the wound. They hated all England for the sake of less than half England.

They counted their enemies but never their friends. There's nothing unnatural about this, nothing rare. On the contrary, it's the usual, natural, unjust thing that human nature does in times of agony. It's the Henry Ward Beechers that are rare. In times of agony the average man and woman see nothing but their agony. When I look over some of the letters that I received from England in 1915--letters from strangers evoked by a book called The Pentecost of Calamity, wherein I had published my conviction that the cause of England was righteous, the cause of Germany hideous, and our own persistent neutrality unworthy--I'm glad I lost my temper only once, and replied caustically only once. How dreadful (wrote one of my correspondents) must it be to belong to a nation that was behaving like mine! I retorted (I'm sorry for it now) that I could all the more readily comprehend English feeling about our neutrality, because I had known what we had felt when Gladstone spoke at Newcastle and when England let the Alabama loose upon us in 1862. Where was the good in replying at all? Silence is almost always the best reply in these cases. Next came a letter from another English stranger, in which the writer announced having just read The Pentecost of Calamity. Not a word of friendliness for what I had said about the righteousness of England's cause or my expressed unhappiness over the course which our Government had taken--nothing but scorn for us all and the hope that we should reap our deserts when Germany defeated England and invaded us.

Well? What of it? Here was a stricken person, writing in stress, in a land of desolation, mourning for the dead already, waiting for the next who should die, a poor, unstrung average person, who had not long before read that remark of our President's made on the morrow of the Lusitania: that there is such a thing as being too proud to fight; had read during the ensuing weeks those notes wherein we stood committed by our Chief Magistrate to a verbal slinking away and sitting down under it. Can you wonder? If the mere memory of those days of our humiliation stabs me even now, I need no one to tell me (though I have been told) what England, what France, felt about us then, what it must have been like for Americans who were in England and France at that time. No: the average person in great trouble cannot rise above the trouble and survey the truth and be just. In English eyes our Government--and therefore all of us--failed in 1914--1915--1916--failed again and again--insulted the cause of humanity when we said through our President in 1916, the third summer of the war, that we were not concerned with either the causes or the aims of that conflict. How could they remember Hoover, or Robert Bacon, or Leonard Wood, or Theodore Roosevelt then, any more than we could remember John Bright, or Richard Cobden, or the Manchester men in the days when the Alabama was sinking the merchant vessels of the Union?

We remembered Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston in the British Government, and their fellow aristocrats in British society; we remembered the aristocratic British press--The Times notably, because the most powerful--these are what we saw, felt, and remembered, because they were not with us, and were able to hurt us in the days when our friends were not yet able to help us. They made welcome the Southerners who came over in the interests of the South, they listened to the Southern propaganda. Why? Because the South was the American version of their aristocratic creed. To those who came over in the interests of the North and of the Union they turned a cold shoulder, because they represented Democracy; moreover, a Dis-United States would prove in commerce a less formidable compet.i.tor. To Captain Bullock, the able and energetic Southerner who put through in England the building and launching of those Confederate cruisers which sank our ships and destroyed our merchant marine, and to Mason and Slidell, the doors of dukes opened pleasantly; Beecher and our other emissaries mostly had to dine beneath uncoroneted roofs.

In the pages of Henry Adams, and of Charles Francis Adams his brother, you can read of what they, as young men, encountered in London, and what they saw their father have to put up with there, both from English society and the English Government. Their father was our new minister to England, appointed by Lincoln. He arrived just after our Civil War had begun. I have heard his sons talk about it familiarly, and it is all to be found in their writings.

n.o.body knows how to be disagreeable quite so well as the English gentleman, except the English lady. They can do it with the nicety of a medicine dropper. They can administer the precise quantum suff. in every case. In the society of English gentlemen and ladies Mr. Adams by his official position was obliged to move. They left him out as much as they could, but, being the American Minister, he couldn't be left out altogether. At their dinners and functions he had to hear open expressions of joy at the news of Southern victories, he had to receive slights both veiled and unveiled, and all this he had to bear with equanimity. Sometimes he did leave the room; but with dignity and discretion. A false step, a "break," might have led to a request for his recall. He knew that his constant presence, close to the English Government, was vital to our cause. Russell and Palmerston were by turns insolent and shifty, and once on the very brink of recognizing the Southern Confederacy as an independent nation. Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a speech at Newcastle, virtually did recognize it. You will be proud of Mr. Adams if you read how he bore himself and fulfilled his appallingly delicate and difficult mission. He was an American who knew how to behave himself, and he behaved himself all the time; while the English had a way of turning their behavior on and off, like the hot water. Mr. Adams was no admirer of "shirt-sleeves" diplomacy. His diplomacy wore a coat. Our experiments in "shirt-sleeves" diplomacy fail to show that it accomplishes anything which diplomacy decently dressed would not accomplish more satisfactorily. Upon Mr. Adams fell some consequences of previous American crudities, of which I shall speak later.

Lincoln had declared a blockade on Southern ports before Mr. Adams arrived in London. Upon his arrival he found England had proclaimed her neutrality and recognized the belligerency of the South. This dismayed Mr. Adams and excited the whole North, because feeling ran too high to perceive this first act on England's part to be really favorable to us; she could not recognize our blockade, which stopped her getting Southern cotton, unless she recognized that the South was in a state of war with us. Looked at quietly, this act of England's helped us and hurt herself, for it deprived her of cotton.

It was not with this, but with the reception and treatment of Mr. Adams that the true hostility began. Slights to him were slaps at us, sympathy with the South was an active moral injury to our cause, even if it was mostly an undertone, politically. Then all of a sudden, something that we did ourselves changed the undertone to a loud overtone, and we just grazed England's declaring war on us. Had she done so, then indeed it had been all up with us. This incident is the comic going-back on our own doctrine of 1812, to which I have alluded above.

On November 8, 1861, Captain Charles Wilkes of the American steam sloop San Jacinto, fired a shot across the bow of the British vessel Trent, stopped her on the high seas, and took four pa.s.sengers off her, and brought them prisoners to Fort Warren, in Boston harbor. Mason and Slidell are the two we remember, Confederate envoys to France and Great Britain. Over this the whole North burst into glorious joy. Our Secretary of the Navy wrote to Wilkes his congratulations, Congress voted its thanks to him, governors and judges laureled him with oratory at banquets, he was feasted with meat and drink all over the place, and, though his years were sixty-three, ardent females probably rushed forth from throngs and kissed him with the purest intentions: heroes have no age. But presently the Trent arrived in England, and the British lion was aroused. We had violated international law, and insulted the British flag. Palmerston wrote us a letter--or Russell, I forget which wrote it--a letter that would have left us no choice but to fight. But Queen Victoria had to sign it before it went. "My lord," she said, "you must know that I will agree to no paper that means war with the United States." So this didn't go, but another in its stead, pretty stiff, naturally, yet still possible for us to swallow. Some didn't want to swallow even this; but Lincoln, humorous and wise, said, "Gentlemen, one war at a time;" and so we made due rest.i.tution, and Messrs. Mason and Slidell went their way to France and England, free to bring about action against us there if they could manage it. Captain Wilkes must have been a good fellow. His picture suggests this. England, in her English heart, really liked what he had done, it was in its gallant flagrancy so remarkably like her own doings--though she couldn't, naturally, permit such a performance to pa.s.s; and a few years afterwards, for his services in the cause of exploration, her Royal Geographical Society gave him a gold medal! Yes; the whole thing is comic--to-day; for us, to-day, the point of it is, that the English Queen saved us from a war with England.

Within a year, something happened that was not comic. Lord John Russell, though warned and warned, let the Alabama slip away to sea, where she proceeded to send our merchant ships to the bottom, until the Kearsarge sent her herself to the bottom. She had been built at Liverpool in the face of an English law which no quibbling could disguise to anybody except to Lord John Russell and to those who, like him, leaned to the South. Ten years later, this leaning cost England fifteen million dollars in damages.

Let us now listen to what our British friends were saying in those years before Lincoln issued his Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation. His blockade had brought immediate and heavy distress upon many English workmen and their families. That had been April 19, 1861. By September, five sixths of the Lancashire cotton-spinners were out of work, or working half time. Their starvation and that of their wives and children could be stemmed by charity alone. I have talked with people who saw those thousands in their suffering. Yet those thousands bore it. They somehow looked through Lincoln's express disavowal of any intention to interfere with slavery, and saw that at bottom our war was indeed against slavery, that slavery was behind the Southern camouflage about independence, and behind the Northern slogan about preserving the Union. They saw and they stuck. "Rarely," writes Charles Francis Adams, "in the history of mankind, has there been a more creditable exhibition of human sympathy."

France was likewise damaged by our blockade; and Napoleon III would have liked to recognize the South. He established, through Maximilian, an empire in Mexico, behind which lay hostility to our Democracy. He wished us defeat; but he was afraid to move without England, to whom he made a succession of indirect approaches. These nearly came to something towards the close of 1862. It was on October 7th that Gladstone spoke at Newcastle about Jefferson Davis having made a nation. Yet, after all, England didn't budge, and thus held Napoleon back. From France in the end the South got neither ships nor recognition, in spite of his deceitful connivance and desire; Napoleon flirted a while with Slidell, but grew cold when he saw no chance of English cooperation.

Besides John Bright and Cobden, we had other English friends of influence and celebrity: John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hughes, Goldwin Smith, Leslie Stephen, Robert Gladstone, Frederic Harrison are some of them.

All from the first supported us. All from the first worked and spoke for us. The Union and Emanc.i.p.ation Society was founded. "Your Committee,"

says its final report when the war was ended, "have issued and circulated upwards of four hundred thousand books, pamphlets, and tracts... and nearly five hundred official and public meetings have been held..." The president of this Society, Mr. Potter, spent thirty thousand dollars in the cause, and at a time when times were hard and fortunes as well as cotton-spinners in distress through our blockade.

Another member of the Society, Mr. Thompson, writes of one of the public meetings: "... I addressed a crowded a.s.sembly of unemployed operatives in the town of Heywood, near Manchester, and spoke to them for two hours about the Slaveholders' Rebellion. They were united and vociferous in the expression of their willingness to suffer all hardships consequent upon a want of cotton, if thereby the liberty of the victims of Southern despotism might be promoted. All honor to the half million of our working population in Lancashire, Cheshire, and elsewhere, who are bearing with heroic fort.i.tude the privation which your war has entailed upon them!... Their sublime resignation, their self-forgetfulness, their observance of law, their whole-souled love of the cause of human freedom, their quick and clear perception of the merits of the question between the North and the South... are extorting the admiration of all cla.s.ses of the community ..."

How much of all this do you ever hear from the people who remember the Alabama?