Diary of George Mifflin Dallas, January 8, 1861

South Carolina, it appears, adopted her Ordinance of Secession on the 19th of December, unanimously. It has been hailed with exultation in most of the Southern States. Mr. Mason rather intimates that the movement is designed to compel adequate concessions from the North, or to form a basis upon which the confederacy may be reconstructed.

The first article of Blackwood's Magazine for this month, "The Political Year," is one of much ability. Its purpose is to depreciate the present government by special attacks on Mr. Gladstone and Lord John Russell. In the concluding paragraph I find the following: “The last news from America announces that, Lord John Russell having complained of the inactivity of the American cruisers in the suppression of the slave-trade, Mr. Dallas informed his Lordship, in October last, that 'the British Foreign Office had better mind its own business.' He wound up by stating that 'the government at Washington did not require to be continually lectured as to its duty by our Foreign Secretary.' Can anything be more absurd? We have a Foreign Secretary who writes letters and gives good advice to all the world, and who, at one time, cannot get his effusions answered, at another time gets snubbed for them, yet again finds them quoted as authorizing rebellion, and always finds himself doing more harm than good." It is true, that, on the 24th of November, I read, as instructed, a despatch from General Cass, dated the 27th of October, to Lord John Russell. His Lordship did not like it; said that all Christendom had condemned the slave-trade, and he had a right to speak against it. I merely remarked that perhaps the serenity of the State Department at Washington would not be disturbed by one or two exhortations, but that his Lordship must be aware that too frequent recurrences in diplomatic correspondence to the obligations of humanity imply a neglect of them by those addressed, and cannot but be unacceptable. When I reported this matter to the Secretary of State, I added: “English statesmen generally have a complacent and irrepressible sense of superior morality, and are apt, without really meaning incivility, to be prodigal of their inculcations upon others." Here is the basis of Blackwood's remarks.

SOURCE: George Mifflin Dallas, Diary of George Mifflin Dallas, While United States Minister to Russia 1837 to 1839, and to England 1856 to 1861, Volume 3, p. 427-8

John Stuart Mill to John Lothrop Motley, October 31, 1862

ST. VERAN, 31st October 1862.

MY DEAR SIR, — Allow me to thank you most warmly for your long and interesting letter, which if it had been twice as long as it was would only have pleased me more. There are few persons that I have seen only once with whom I so much desire to keep up a communication as with you; and the importance of what I learn from you respecting matters so full of momentous consequences to the world would make such communication most valuable to me even if I did not wish for it on personal grounds. The state of affairs in America has naturally improved since you wrote, by the defeat of the enemy in Maryland and their expulsion from it, and still more by Mr. Lincoln's Anti-Slavery Proclamation, which no American, I think, can have received with more exultation than I did. It is of the highest importance, and more so because the manifest reluctance with which the President made up his mind to that decided step indicates that the progress of opinion in the country had reached the point of seeing its necessity for the effectual prosecution of the war. The adhesion of so many Governors of States, some of them originally Democrats, is a very favourable sign, and thus far the measure does not seem to have materially weakened your hold upon the border Slave States. The natural tendency will be, if the war goes on successfully, to reconcile those States to emancipating their own slaves, availing themselves of the pecuniary offers made by the Federal Government. I still feel some anxiety about the reception which will be given to the measure by Congress when it meets, and I should much like to know what are your expectations on the point. In England the proclamation has only increased the venom of those who, after taunting you so long with caring nothing for abolition, now reproach you for your abolitionism as the worst of your crimes. But you will find that, whenever any name is attached to these wretched effusions, it is always that of some deeply-dyed Tory — generally the kind of Tory to whom slavery is rather agreeable than not, or who so hate your democratic institutions that they would be sure to inveigh against you whatever you did, and are enraged at being no longer able to taunt you with being false to your own principles. It is from there also that we are now beginning to hear, what disgusts me more than all the rest, the base doctrine that it is for the interest of England that the American Republic should be broken up. Think of us as ill as you may (and we have given you abundant cause), but do not, I entreat you, think that the general English public is so base as this. Our national faults are not now of that kind, and I firmly believe that the feeling of almost all English Liberals, even those whose language has been the most objectionable, is one of sincere respect for the disruption which they think inevitable. As long as there is a Tory party in England it will rejoice at everything which injures or discredits American institutions, but the Liberal party, who are now, and are likely to remain much the strongest, are naturally your friends and allies, and will return to that position when once they see that you are not engaged in a hopeless, and therefore, as they think, an irrational and unjustifiable contest. There are writers enough here to keep up the fight and meet the malevolent comments on all your proceedings by right ones. Besides Cairns, and Dicey, and H. Martineau, and Ludlow, and Hughes, besides the Daily News, and Macmillan, and the Star, there is now the Westminster and the London Review, to which several of the best writers of the Saturday have gone over; there is Ellison of Liverpool, the author of “Slavery and Secession,” and editor of a monthly economical journal, the Exchange; and there are other writers less known who, if events go on favourably, will rapidly multiply. Here in France the state of opinion on the subject is most gratifying. All Liberal Frenchmen seem to have been with you from the first. They did not know more about the subject than the English, but their instincts were truer. By the way, what did you think of the narrative of the campaign on the Potomac in the Revue des Deux Mondes of 15th October by the Comte de Paris? It looks veracious, and is certainly intelligent, and in the general effect likely, I should think, to be very useful to the cause.

I still think you take too severe a view of the conduct of our Government. I grant that the extra-official dicta of some of the Ministry have been very unfortunate, especially that celebrated one of Lord Russell, on which I have commented not sparingly in the Westminster Review. Gladstone, too, a man of a much nobler character than Lord Russell, has said things lately which I very much regret, though they were accompanied by other things showing that he had no bad feelings towards you, and regretted their existence in others. But as a Government I do not see that their conduct is objectionable. The port of Nassau may be all that you say it is, but the United States also have the power, and have used it largely, of supplying themselves with munitions of war from our ports. If the principle of neutrality is accepted, our markets must be open to both sides alike, and the general opinion in England is (I do not say whether rightly or wrongly) that, if the course adopted is favourable to either side, it is to the United States, since the Confederates, owing to the blockade of their ports, have so much less power to take advantage of the facilities extended equally to both. What you mention about a seizure of arms by our Government must, I feel confident, have taken place during the Trent difficulty, at which time alone (and neither before nor after) has the export of arms to America been interdicted.

It is very possible that too much may have been made of Butler's proclamation, and that he was more wrong in form and phraseology than in substance. But with regard to the watchword said to have been given out by Pakenham at New Orleans, I have always hitherto taken it for a mere legend, like the exactly parallel ones which grew up under our own eyes at Paris in 1848 respecting the Socialist insurrections of June. What authority there may be for it I do not know, but, if it is true, nothing can mark more strongly the change which has taken place in the European standard of belligerent rights since the wars of the beginning of the century, for if any English commander at the present time were to do the like he never could show his face again in English society, even if he escaped being broken by a court-martial ; and I think we are entitled to blame in others what none of us, of the present generation at least, would be capable of perpetrating. You are perhaps hardly aware how little the English of the present day feel of solidarité with past generations. We do not feel ourselves at all concerned to justify our predecessors. Foreigners reproach us with having been the great enemies of neutral rights so long as we were belligerents, and with turning round and stickling for them now when we are neutrals; but the real fact is we are convinced, and have no hesitation in saying (what our Liberal party said even at the time), that our policy in that matter in the great Continental war was totally wrong.

But while I am anxious that liberal and friendly Americans should not think worse of us than we really deserve, I am deeply conscious and profoundly grieved and mortified that we deserve so ill; and are making, in consequence, so pitiful a figure before the world, with which, if we are not daily and insultingly taxed by all Europe, it is only because our enemies are glad to see us doing exactly what they expected, justifying their opinion of us, and acting in a way which they think perfectly natural, because they think it perfectly selfish.

SOURCE: Hugh S. R. Elliot, Editor, The Letters of John Stuart Mill, Volume 1, p. 263-6

Colonel Charles Russell Lowell to Josephine Shaw, June 17, 1863

Camp Brightwood, June 17, 1863.

I wonder whether I shall ever be able to repay Cousin John in any way for his many kindnesses and for the many pleasant days and evenings I have passed at Milton and Naushon. Do you know that after Chancellorsville he wrote that he had more than half a mind to come home at once to help raise a new army, and, if necessary, to take a musket himself.¹ Perhaps one of these days I may have a chance to do something to gratify him. I wonder whether my theories about self-culture, &c., would ever have been modified so much, whether I should ever have seen what a necessary failure they lead to, had it not been for this war: now I feel every day more and more that a man has no right to himself at all, that indeed he can do nothing useful unless he recognize this clearly: nothing has helped me to see this last truth more than watching Mr. Forbes, — I think he is one of the most unselfish workers I ever knew of: it is painful here to see how sadly personal motives interfere with most of our officers' usefulness. After the war, how much there will be to do, —  and how little opportunity a fellow in the field has to prepare himself for the sort of doing that will be required: it makes me quite sad sometimes; but then I think of Cousin John and remember how much he always manages to do in every direction without any previous preparation, simply by pitching in honestly and entirely, — and I reflect that the great secret of doing, after all, is in seeing what is to be done. You know I’ll not be rash; but I wish I could feel as sure of doing my duty elsewhere as I am of doing it on the field of battle, — that is so little part of an officer's and patriot's duty now.

We are still at our old camp, and with less prospect of an immediate move than there was three days ago. Did I tell you poor Ruksh had been sent to a hospital in town, — to be turned out to pasture if he lives. I am going to town to pick out a Government horse to take his place as well as maybe.

_______________

¹ The subject of this letter's just praise was Mr. John Murray Forbes. He was not “Cousin John” to Lowell, but the bond of friendship and trust was so strong between the men that, as he was Miss Shaw's kinsman, Lowell liked to take advantage of the kinship, before his marriage should entitle him to it. Mr. Forbes was at this time in England, a private citizen sent by his government on a mission of vital importance. I copy from his Reminiscences, privately printed, the same story I have heard from his own lips: —

“All through the early months of 1863 the alarm in regard to the Laird ironclads had been increasing until, one Saturday morning in March, I received a telegram from Secretary Chase of the Treasury asking me to meet him the next morning, Sunday, in New York, where Secretary Welles of the Navy would also be. I was half ill, but could not refuse, and so met the two Secretaries and W. H. Aspinwall at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, as requested. They wished Aspinwall and me to go at once to England, and see what could be done in the way of selling United States bonds, and stopping the outfit of Confederate cruisers, and especially ironclads. We agreed to go, and we were asked to draw our own instructions, which we did, making them very general in their terms, the main features being a very wide discretion and the unrestricted use of ten million of 5-20s then just being prepared for issue to the public on this side, but not yet countersigned. It was thought necessary that I should embark by the Cunard steamer of Wednesday from Boston, and that Aspinwall should follow with the bonds in a week. I returned home that night, packed up my baggage, left my business, and started, as arranged on Wednesday, the 18th of March.  . . . Aspinwall agreed to bring one of his old steamship captains as an expert, to help us in our examination of the British shipyards, then reported to be swarming with the outfitting Rebel cruisers.” Mr. Forbes went to the Barings “and suggested, as a first want, that they should put at my disposal £500,000, for which they were to have perhaps $4,000,000 of 5-20S as security.” This required consideration. Mr. Joshua Bates, of the firm, “was the best of Americans, and he was always for the strongest measures. His consultation with Mr. Baring resulted in their handing me a bank-book with £500,000 at my credit, subject to cash draft; and so, when Aspinwall arrived, a week later, our finances were all right, and he deposited the 5-20S in Baring's vaults, part as security for the money, and the rest subject to our orders.” Mr. Forbes used every effort to show the English where “their sympathy was due, and that, as neutral, it was their duty to stop the sailing of the ironclads known to be built for the Confederacy.” The Society of Friends and the Peace Society were friendly, but cold; and, bad as things were, he wrote, “Bright, Cobden, W. E. Forster, the Duke of Argyle, and a few others were with us heartily and took bold ground in our cause; but, generally speaking, the aristocracy and the trading classes were solid against us. Gladstone . . . had not found out the merits of our cause, and Lord John Russell, called a liberal member of the Cabinet, was with official insolence sneering, even in a public speech, at what he called ‘the once United States.’” Mr. Forbes worked hard to quicken the sympathies of the Society of Friends. His coming was welcomed by our brave minister, Charles Francis Adams, whose task had become indeed anxious and heavy. The work of selling the 5-20s in England and on the Continent was pushed, the purchase of the most threatening ironclads, which had been contemplated, proved impracticable. Then Mr. Adams took the final step. On the 5th of September he wrote to Lord Russell: “At this moment, when one of the ironclad vessels is on the point of departure from this kingdom on a hostile errand against the United States, it would be superfluous for me to point out to your lordship that this is war.”

The answer (Sept. 8) was: “Instructions have been issued which will prevent the departure of these two ironclad vessels from Liverpool.”

SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell, p. 258-60, 424-6

FOREIGN NEWS

HALIFAX, April 16. – The Canada from Liverpool on the evening of the 5th, and Queenstown both arrived at this port this forenoon.

The French Continental, as well as the English press, discuss the great importance of the experience gained by the engagement between the Merrimac and Monitor. It is generally ad [sic] admitted that maritime warfare has undergone a change, and that the Monitor is a solution of the question between wooden vessels and iron ones.

MADRID, April 6 – It is officially declared that the Spanish Government has most resolutely determined not to attempt to infringe on the sovereignty and independence of the Mexicans.

The Great Eastern is advertised to leave Milford for Ney York on the 6th of May.

In the House of Commons, on the 3d inst., Mr. Fitzgerald gave notice that he would soon call attention to our relations with Mexico.

Mr. Gladstone had made his financial report, and, in the course of his speech, adverted to the great drawbacks from the American crisis, which had turned out worse than was anticipated. The cotton crisis was a most serious feature to England. A blockade had of course been expected, but it proved more injurious and extended over a greater line of coast than had been anticipated, and its effect had been nearly to double the price of cotton. The loss in American trade was great; the exports having from nearly twenty-two million pounds in 1860 decreased to only five million in 1861. Trade with America, according to recent returns, was, however improving.

Mr. Layard said that the Government had received official information that a convention had been entered into between commissioners of the Allied Powers and the Government of Mexico, and it was time that the British forces had been withdrawn from Mexico, except a small force of men; that it was not the intention of the Government that they should take any part in the expedition into the interior, and they would all be brought home except about 100 who would be left there for the performance of ordinary duties. Her Majesty’s Government did not approve of all the articles of the Convention. The approved of it generally.

Mr. Osborn moved a resolution that it is expedient to suspend the construction of the proposed forts and Ship Head till the value of iron rolled gunboats for defence shall have been fully considered. He referred to the exploits of the Merrimac and Monitor, and claimed that the invention of the principle of the Monitor belonged to Capt. Coles, whose plans were long since submitted to the Admiralty and reported favorably on and then shelved.

Lord Palmerston advocated the great importance of the invention and rejoiced that it was not formed in party spirit. The question had occupied the earnest attention of the Government. He did not deny that the action between the Monitor and Merrimac had taught the lesson. But since it had done that in one direction, it had also given a warning in another, as showing what they could not do as well as what they could do. He pointed out the drawbacks of the Monitor, and what England was doing with iron ships, and said that tenders had been sent out for the construction of a ship of Capt. Cole’s principle. He questioned the expediency of entirely neglecting fortifications, and favored both forts and floating batteries.

Preparations had commenced for cutting down the Royal Sovereign, on of the finest ships in the English Navy, from a 131 screw three-decker to a 12 gun ship on Capt. Cole’s plan. The Bulwark, 9 guns, was also to be converted into an iron plated ship.

The Army and Navy Gazette observes that there is more than the usual element of uncertainty about the issue of the civil war in America, owing to the ignorance of the real capacity of the South to resist and the North to move. The Federals will have to prove, by getting to Richmond, that they have a quartermaster General’s Department, a good Commissariat and military trains.

FRANCE. – Gen Genin’s return from Rome was regarded as almost certain.

THE VERY LATEST

The Paris correspondent of the London Daily News says the difference between England and France in Mexican affairs is very ticklish. The ship Yorktown, regular packet from London to New York, has been captured on her voyage as a Confederate privateer.

COMMERCIAL

Breadstuff’s Market generally quiet and steady, except for Flour, which is still declining. Various circulars report downward and decline of 6d@1s. Range 24s@29s. Wheat quiet and steady. Read Southern 11s 4d@11s 6d; White Western 11s; Whit Southern 12s@12s 6d. – Corn Quiet. Mixed 27s 6d@28s; White 33s@34s 6d.

Provisions generally quiet and steady.

Wakefield & Co, and others, report Beef steady; Pork firm; Bacon easier; Lard heavy and declined 2d.

{Latest via Queenstown}

Breadstuffs – Flour steady. Wheat quiet and easier. Corn inactive. Provisions closing quiet and steady.

London, Saturday Evening. – Consols closed at 93 7/8@94 for money.

American Securities – the latest sales were, L. C. 43½@43¾ discount; Erie 34@34½.

Paris, Saturday Evening. The Bourse closed firm. Rentes 70f.

– Published in the Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, April 19, 1862