The Secretary of State has written me, requesting that J. P. Hale, recently appointed Minister to Spain, should be sent out in a public ship. I have written him in reply that it cannot be done without much inconvenience and expense; that it would be better to send out a purchased steamer with cabin room than to attempt to crowd him and suite on board a man-of-war. The whole scheme is petty foolishness, an attempt on the part of Seward to ingratiate himself with the Abolitionists, whom he privately denounces and ridicules. It is one of those small meannesses which aspiring and not over-scrupulous men sometimes resort to. A shameful prostitution, waste, and wrong.
SOURCE: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the
Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, Vol. 2: April 1, 1864 — December 31, 1866,
p. 268-9
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