John L. Motley to Mary Lothrop Motley, February 17, 1863

Vienna, February 17, 1863.

My Dearest Little Mary: I hope that you will accept this note from me as the family contribution for to-day.

I assure you, when you know Vienna as well as we do, you will agree that to screw out a letter once a week is a Kunststück to be proud of. I can't very well write to you, as I write to the State Department, about the movements in Montenegro, the Polish insurrection, or the Prussian-French treaty of commerce, although I dare say these things would amuse you about as much as they do the people at Washington just now, where they have so much other fish to fry. To-day is the last day of the carnival, which we celebrate by remaining calmly within doors in the bosom of our respected family. The great ball at Prince Schwarzenberg's took place last Sunday, so that we were obliged respectfully but firmly to decline. Soon begins the season of “salons.” Now, if there is one thing more distasteful to me than a ball, it is a salon. Of course I don't object to young people liking to dance, and the few balls in the great houses here are as magnificent festivals as could be got up anywhere, and Lily had always plenty of partners and danced to her heart's content, notwithstanding that nearly all the nice youths of the French and English embassies have been transplanted to other realms. But I think that no reasonable being ought to like a salon. There are three topics — the Opera, the Prater, the Burg Theater; when these are exhausted, you are floored. Conversazioni where the one thing that does not exist is conversation are not the most cheerful of institutions.

The truth is that our hostile friends the English spoil me for other society. There is nothing like London or England in the social line on the Continent. The Duke of Argyll writes to me pretty constantly, and remains a believer in the justice of our cause, although rather desponding as to the issue; and Mr. John Stuart Mill, who corresponds with me regularly and is as enthusiastic as I am, tells me that the number of men who agree with him in wishing us success is daily increasing. Among others he mentioned our old friend the distinguished Dr. Whewell, Master of Trinity (with whom we stayed three days at Cambridge when I received my degree there), who, he says, is positively rude to those who talk against the North. He won't allow the “Times” to come into the house. Well, I hope the recent and remarkable demonstrations in England will convince the true lovers of union and liberty in America where our true strength lies, and who our true lovers are.

We have given four diplomatic dinners. The last was five days ago. Sixteen guests, beginning with Count Rechberg and the Prince and Princess Callimaki (Turkish ambassador), and ending with a French and Belgian attache or two. The French and English ambassadors and secretaries dined with us the week before. I think we shall give no more at present, unless we have a smaller one, to which we shall invite the Rothschild of the period, as we have had several good dinners at his house. I am very glad that you are to dine with Mrs. Amory to meet General McClellan. We feel very grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Amory and S—— for their kindness to you. Pray never forget to give all our loves to them. Did Mrs. Amory ever get a letter I wrote her? Its date was May 12. Pray remember us most kindly to Mr. and Mrs. Ritchie. I am so glad that you have been seeing so much of them lately. It is impossible for you not to be fond of them when you know them. Give my love also to Miss “Pussie,” and to my Nahant contemporary, who I hope continues on the rampage as delightfully as ever. You will tell us, of course, what impression General McClellan makes upon you. Personally there seems much that is agreeable, almost fascinating, about him. I only saw him for a single moment, but was much impressed by his manner. I wish it had been his destiny to lead our armies to victory, for I don't see that we have any better man. But no one man will ever end this war except he be an abolitionist heart and soul, and a man of military genius besides.

Things have gone a million miles beyond compromise. Pray tell me what you learn of Hooker.

We all join in kindest love to you, my darling, and to your grandmama and grandpapa, and all at home.

Your ever-affectionate

P. G.

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition, Volume 2, p. 314-6

John Stuart Mill to John L. Motley, January 26, 1863

Blackheath Park, Kent,

January 26, 1863.

Dear Sir: You may imagine better than I can tell you how much your letter interested me. I am obliged to you for the information respecting the first settlers in New England. I did not know that there were so many people of family among them, though I knew there were some. And I was quite aware that the place which the refuse went to was Virginia — all the popular literature of the century following shows that colony to have been the one regarded as the Botany Bay of that time. But my argument did not turn upon this, nor was I thinking of race and blood, but of habits and principles. New England, as I understand it, was essentially a middle-class colony; the Puritans, in the higher classes, who took part in its foundation, were persons whose sympathies went in a different channel from that of class or rank. The Southern colonies, on the contrary, were founded upon aristocratic principles, several of them by aristocratic men as such, and we know that the greatest of them, Virginia, retained aristocratic institutions till Jefferson succeeded in abolishing them.

Concerning the Alabama, most people of sense in this country, I believe, are reserving their opinion until they hear what the government has to say for itself. My own first impression was that the government was not bound, nor even permitted, by international rules to prevent the equipment of such a vessel, provided it allows exactly similar liberty to the other combatant. But it is plain that notion was wrong, since the government has shown by issuing an order, which arrived too late, that it considered itself bound to stop the Alabama. What explanation it can give of the delay will be shown when Parliament meets; and what it ought to do now in consequence of its previous default, a person must be better acquainted than I am with international law to be able to judge. But I expect to have a tolerably decided opinion on the subject after it has been discussed.

I write you in much better spirits than I have been in since I saw you. In the first place, things are now going in a more encouraging manner in the West. Murfreesboro is an important as well as a glorious achievement, and from the general aspect of things I feel great confidence that you will take Vicksburg and cut off Arkansas and Texas, which then, by your naval superiority, will soon be yours. Then I exult in (what from observation of the politics of that State I was quite prepared for, though not for the unanimity with which it has been done) the passing over of Missouri from slavery to freedom — a fact which ought to cover with shame, if they were capable of it, the wretched creatures who treated Mr. Lincoln's second proclamation as waste paper, and who described the son of John Quincy Adams as laughing in his sleeve when he professed to care for the freedom of the negro. But I am now also in very good heart about the progress of opinion here. When I returned I already found things better than I expected. Friends of mine, who are heartily with your cause, who are much in society, and who speak in the gloomiest terms of what the general feeling was a twelvemonth ago, already thought that a change had commenced; and I heard every now and then that some person of intellect and influence, whom I did not know before to be with you, was with you very decidedly.

You must have read one of the most powerful and most thorough pieces of writing in your defense which has yet appeared, under the signature “Anglo-Saxon,” in the “Daily News.” That letter is by Goldwin Smith, and though it is not signed with his name, he is willing (as I am authorized to say) that it should be known. Again, Dr. Whewell, one from whom I should not have expected so much, feels, I am told, so strongly on your side that people complain of his being rude to them on the subject, and he will not suffer the “Times” to be in his house. These, you may say, are but individual cases. But a decided movement in your favor has begun among the public since it has been evident that your government is really in earnest about getting rid of slavery. I have always said that it was ignorance, not ill will, which made the majority of the English public go wrong about this great matter. Difficult as it may well be for you to comprehend it, the English public were so ignorant of all the antecedents of the quarrel that they really believed what they were told, that slavery was not the ground, scarcely even the pretext, of the war. But now, when the public acts of your government have shown that at last it aims at entire slave-emancipation, that your victory means this, and your failure means the extinction of all present hope of it, many feel very differently. When you entered decidedly into this course, your detractors abused you more violently for doing it than they had before for not doing it, and the “Times” and “Saturday Review” began favoring us with the very arguments, almost in the very language, which we used to hear from the West Indian slaveholders to prove slavery perfectly consistent with the Bible and with Christianity. This was too much — it overshot the mark.

The antislavery feeling is now thoroughly raising itself. Liverpool has led the way by a splendid meeting, of which the “Times” suppressed all mention. But you must have seen a report of this meeting; you must have seen how Spence did his utmost, and how he was met; and that the object was not merely a single demonstration, but the appointment of a committee to organize an action on the public mind. There are none like the Liverpool people for making an organization of that sort succeed, if once they put their hands to it. The day when I read this, I read in the same day's newspaper two speeches by cabinet ministers: one by Milner Gibson, as thoroughly and openly with you as was consistent with the position of a cabinet minister; the other by the Duke of Argyll, a simple antislavery speech, denouncing the pro-slavery declaration of the Southern bishops; but his delivery of such a speech at that time and place had but one meaning. I do not know if you have seen Cairnes's lecture, or whether you are aware that it has been taken up and largely circulated by religious societies and is in its fourth edition. A new and enlarged edition of his great book is on the point of publication, and will, I have no doubt, be very widely read and powerfully influential.

Foreigners ought not to regard the “Times” as representing the British nation. Of course a paper which is so largely read and bought and so much thought of as the “Times” is must have a certain amount of suitability to the people that buy it. But the line it takes on any particular question is much more a matter of accident than is supposed. It is sometimes better than the public, and sometimes worse. It was better on the Competitive Examinations and on the Revised Educational Code, in each case owing to the accidental position of a particular man who happened to write in it — both which men I could name to you. I am just as fully persuaded as if I could name the man that the attitude it has long held respecting slavery, and now on the American question, is equally owing to the accidental interests or sympathies of some one person connected with the paper. The “Saturday Review,” again, is understood to be the property of the bitterest Tory enemy America has — Beresford Hope.

Unfortunately, these papers, through the influence they obtain in other ways, and in the case of the “Times” very much in consequence of the prevailing notion that it speaks the opinions of all England, are able to exercise great power in perverting the opinions of England whenever the public is sufficiently ignorant of facts to be misled. That, whenever engaged in a wrong line, writers like those of the “Times” go from bad to worse, and at last stick at nothing in the way of perverse and even dishonest misrepresentation, is but natural to party writers everywhere; natural to those who go on day after day working themselves up to write strongly in a matter to which they have committed themselves and breathing an atmosphere inflamed by themselves; natural, moreover, to demagogism both here and in America, and natural, above all, to anonymous demagogism, which, risking no personal infamy by any amount of tergiversation, never minds to what lengths it goes, because it can always creep out in time and turn round at the very moment when the tide turns.

Among the many lessons which have been impressed on me by what is now going on, one is a strong sense of the solidarite (to borrow a word for which our language has no short equivalent) of the whole of a nation with every one of its members, for it is painfully apparent that your country and mine habitually judge of one another from their worst specimens. You say that if England were like Cairnes and me there would be no alienation; and neither would there if Americans were like you. But I need not use soft words to you, who, I am sure, detest these things as much as I do. The low tricks and fulsome mob flattery of your public men and the bullying tone and pettifogging practice of your different cabinets (Southern men chiefly, I am aware) toward foreigners have deeply disgusted a number of our very best people, and all the more so because it is the likeness of what we may be coming to ourselves. You must admit, too, that the present crisis, while it has called forth a heroism and constancy in your people which cannot be too much admired, and to which even your enemies in this country do justice, has also exhibited on the same scale of magnitude all the defects of your state of society — the incompetency and mismanagement arising from the fatal belief of your public that anybody is fit for anything, and the gigantic pecuniary corruption which seems universally acknowledged to have taken place, and, indeed, without it one cannot conceive how you can have got through the enormous sums you have spent.

All this, and what seems to most of us entire financial recklessness (though, for myself, I do not pretend to see how you could have done anything else in the way of finance), are telling against you here, you can hardly imagine how much. But all this may be, and I have great hopes that it will be, wiped out by the conduct which you have it in your power to adopt as a nation. If you persevere until you have subdued the South, or at all events all west of the Mississippi; if, having done this, you set free the slaves, with compensation to loyal owners, and (according to the advice of Mr. Paterson, in his admirable speech at Liverpool) settle the freed slaves as free proprietors on the unoccupied land; if you pay honestly the interest on your own national debt, and take measures for redeeming it, including the debt without interest which is constituted by your inconvertible paper currency — if you do these things, the United States will stand very far higher in the general opinion of England than they have stood at any time since the War of Independence. If, in addition to this, you have men among you of a caliber to use the high spirit which this struggle has raised, and the grave reflections to which it gives rise, as means of moving public opinion in favor of correcting what is bad and of strengthening what is weak in your institutions and modes of feeling and thought, the war will prove to have been a permanent blessing to your country such as we never dared hope for, and a source of inestimable improvement in the prospects of the human race in other ways besides the great one of extinguishing slavery.

If you are really going to do these things you need not mind being misunderstood — you can afford to wait.

Believe me, dear sir,

Yours very truly,

J. S. Mill.

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition, Volume 2, p. 307-14

John Stuart Mill to John L. Motley, October 31, 1862

Saint-Virain, Avignon,

October 31, 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 only seen 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 materially improved since you wrote by the defeat of the enemy in Maryland and their expulsion from it, and still more by Mr. Lincoln's antislavery 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 favorable sign; and thus far the measure does not seem to have very 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 as to the reception to be given to the measure by Congress when it meets, and I should much like to know what are your expectations on that 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 the 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 these 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 is most objectionable, is one of sincere regret for the disruption which they think inevitable. As long as there is a Tory party in England, it will rejoice at anything 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 Cairnes and Dicey and Harriet Martineau and Ludlow and Hughes, besides the “Daily News” and “Macmillan” and the “Star,” there are now the “Westminster” and the “London Review,” to which several of the best writers have now 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 favorably, 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 October 15, by the Comte de Paris? It looks veracious, and is certainly intelligent, and in 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 ministers have been very unfortunate. 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 once 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 favorable 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. Then, again, if the Tuscarora was ordered away, the Sumter was so, too. 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, 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 has more wrong in phraseology than substance. But with regard to the watchword said to have been given 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 eyes in Paris, in 1848, respecting the socialist insurrection 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 could never show his face 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 reproved us with having been the great enemies of neutral rights so long as we were belligerents, and for 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.

If you kindly favor me with another letter here, it is desirable that it should arrive before the end of November. After that time my address will be Blackheath Park, Kent.

I am, my dear sir,

Very truly yours,

J. S. Mill.

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition, Volume 2, p. 286

John Stuart Mill to John L. Motley, September 17, 1862

Saint-Virain, Avignon,

September 17, 1862.

My Dear Sir: I value the permission you gave me to correspond with you much too highly not to avail myself of it thus early, although I have very little to say that will be new, and at the same time interesting, to one whose thoughts are engrossed as yours must be. If you see “Macmillan's Magazine,” which has from the beginning been steadily on the right side in American affairs, you must have remarked the “Notes of a Journey in America,” which have been in the course of publication for some months, ending with a general summing up in the September number. This last paper especially appears to me excellent, and likely to do much good in England. The whole series has been reprinted in a volume, with the name of the writer, Mr. Edward Dicey, author of a recent book on Italy and Rome. You will probably see the “Westminster Review” of next month, which will contain an article of mine on the American question, apropos of Mr. Cairnes’s book. It is hastily written, and slight, for such a subject, but “every little helps,” as the nursery proverb says. I am not at all uneasy about public opinion here, if only the North is successful. The great number of well-meaning people and sincere enemies of slavery, who have been led into disapproving of your resistance to the South when carried to the length of war, have been chiefly influenced by thinking the reconquest of the South impossible. If you prove it to be possible, if you bring the slave States under your power, if you make use of that power to reconstitute Southern society on the basis of freedom, and if finally you wind up the financial results without breaking faith with any of the national creditors (among whom must be reckoned the holders of depreciated currency), you will have all our public with you, except the Tories, who will be mortified that what they absurdly think an example of the failure of democracy should be exchanged for a splendid example of its success. If you come well and honorably through one of the severest trials which a nation has ever undergone, the whole futurity of mankind will assume a brighter aspect. If not, it will for some time to come be very much darkened.

I have read lately two writings of Northern Americans on the subject of England, which show a very liberal appreciation of the misdirection of English opinion and feeling respecting the contest. One is Mr. Thurlow Weed's letter, which was published in the newspapers, and in which those just and generous allowances are made for us which many of us have not made for you. The other is the Rev. Dr. Thompson's “England during our War,” reprinted from the “New Englander,” which is even over-indulgent to our people, but too severe on our government. I believe that our government has felt more rightly all through than a majority of the public.

We shall be at this address until the end of November; afterward at Blackheath Park, Kent. I need hardly say that if your occupations would allow of your writing to me it would not only give me great pleasure, but would make me better able to be of use to a cause which I have as much at heart as even yourself.

I am, my dear sir,

Very truly yours,

J. S. Mill.

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition, Volume 2, p. 281-3

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. to John L. Motley, March 8, 1862

Boston, March 8, 1862.

My Dear Motley: I have been debating with myself whether to wait for further news from Nashville, the Burnside expedition, Savannah, or somewhere, before writing you, and came to the conclusion that I will begin this February 24, and keep my letter along a few days, adding whatever may turn up, with a reflection thereupon. Your last letter, as I told you, was of great interest in itself, and for the extracts it contained from the letters of your correspondents. I lent it to your father and your brother Edward, and a few days ago to William Amory, at his particular request. Calling on old Mr. Quincy two days ago, we talked of you. He desired me most expressly and repeatedly to send his regards and respects. I think I am pretty near the words, but they were very cordial and distinguishing ones, certainly. He takes the greatest interest in your prosperity and fame, and you know that the greatest of men have not many nonagenarian admirers. It is nine weeks, I think, since Mr. Quincy fell and fractured the neck of the thigh-bone, and he has been on his back ever since. But he is cheerful, ready to live or die; considers his later years as an appendix to the opus of his life, that he has had more than he bargained for when he accepted life.

As you might suppose it would be at ninety, though he greatly rejoices at our extraordinary successes of late, he does not think we are “out of the woods,” as he has it, yet. A defeat, he thinks, would take down our spirits as rapidly as they were raised. “But I am an old man,” he says, “and, to be sure, an old man cannot help seeing the uncertainties and difficulties which the excitable public overlooks in its exaltation.”

Never was such ecstasy, such delirium of excitement, as last Monday, a week ago to-day, when we got the news from Fort Donelson. Why, — to give you an instance from my own experience, — when I, a grave college professor, went into my lecture-room, the class, which had first got the news a little before, began clapping and clapping louder and louder, then cheering, until I had to give in myself, and flourishing my wand in the air, joined with the boys in their rousing hurrahs, after which I went on with my lecture as usual. The almost universal feeling is that the rebellion is knocked on the head; that it may kick hard, even rise and stagger a few paces, but that its os frontis is beaten in.

The last new thing is the President's message, looking to gradual compensated emancipation. I don't know how it will be received here, but the effect will be good abroad. John Stuart Mill's article in “Fraser” has delighted people here more than anything for a good while. I suppose his readers to be the best class of Englishmen.

Yours always,

O. W. H.

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition, Volume 2, p. 246-8

John L. Motley to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., February 16, 1862

Legation of the United States of America, Vienna,

February 26, 1862.

My Dear Holmes: You are the most generous and delightful of correspondents and friends. I have two long and most interesting letters of yours to acknowledge, the first of 7th January, the second of 3d February. They are exactly the kind of letters which I most value. I want running commentaries on men and events produced on such a mind as yours by the rapidly developing history of our country at its most momentous crisis. I take great pleasure in reading your prophecies, and intend to be just as free in hazarding my own, for, as you so well say, our mortal life is but a string of guesses at the future, and no one but an idiot would be discouraged at finding himself sometimes far out in his calculations. If I find you signally right in any of your predictions, be sure that I will congratulate and applaud. If you make mistakes, you shall never hear of them again, and I promise to forget them. Let me ask the same indulgence from you in return. This is what makes letter-writing a comfort and journalism dangerous. For this reason, especially as I am now in an official position, I have the greatest horror lest any of my crudities should get into print. I have also to acknowledge the receipt of a few lines to Wendell. They gave me very great pleasure. I am delighted to hear of his entire recovery, and I suppose you do not object, so much as he does, to his being detained for a time from camp by recruiting service. I shall watch his career with deep interest. Just now we are intensely anxious about the Burnside expedition, of which, as you know, my nephew Lewis Stackpole is one. He is almost like my son. I feel very proud of his fine intellectual and manly qualities, and although it is a sore trial to his mother to part with him, yet I am sure that she would in future days have regretted his enrolment in the “stay-at-home rangers.”

That put me in mind to acknowledge the receipt of “Songs in Many Keys.” It lies on our drawing-room table, and is constantly in our hands. I cannot tell you how much pleasure I derived from it. Many of the newer pieces I already know by heart, and admire them as much as you know I have always done their predecessors. The “Ballad” is in a new vein for you, and is, I think, most successful. If I might venture to mention the separate poems by name which most please me, I should certainly begin with “Iris, her Book,” “Under the Violets,” “The Voiceless,” which are full of tenderness and music. Then the clarion ring of the verses for the centennial celebration of Burns has an immense charm for me, and so the trumpet tones of “The Voice of the Loyal North”; but I should go on a long time if I tried to express my honest and hearty admiration for the volume as fully as it deserves. I thank you most sincerely for it, and I assure you that you increase in fullness and power and artistic finish without losing any of your youthful freshness of imagination. I am glad that the emperor had the sense to appreciate your “Vive la France.” I agree with him that it is plein d'inspiration and exceedingly happy. I admire it the more because for the moment it communicated to me the illusion under the spell of which you wrote it. For of course France hates us as much as England does, and Louis Napoleon is capable of playing us a trick at any moment.

I am obliged to reason like a cosmopolite. The English have a right to hate America if they instinctively feel that the existence of a great, powerful, prosperous, democratic republic is a standing menace to the tenure of their own privileges. I think the instinct false, however, to a certain extent. Physical, historical, and geographical conditions make our democratic commonwealth a possibility, while they are nearly all wanting in England. I do not think the power or glory or prosperity of the English monarchy any menace to our institutions. I think it an unlucky and unreasoning perverseness which has led the English aristocracy to fear our advance in national importance. I do not mean that, on the whole, the government has behaved ill to us. Especially international dealings with us have been courteous and conciliatory. I like personally English ways, English character, Englishmen and Englishwomen. It is a great empire in arts and arms, and their hospitalities are very pleasant. Nevertheless, I love my own country never so much as at this moment. Never did I feel so strong a faith in her destiny as now. Of John Bright we have already spoken, and of the daily and noble battle waged for us by the “Daily News” (which I hope you read); and now how must we all rejoice at the magnificent essay in “Fraser's Magazine” by the acknowledged chief of English thinkers, John Stuart Mill!

It is awful to reflect that the crisis of our fate is so rapidly approaching. The ides of March will be upon us before this letter reaches you. We have got to squash the rebellion soon, or be squashed forever as a nation — aut fer, aut feri. I do not pretend to judge military plans or the capacity of generals; but, as you suggest, perhaps I can take a more just view of the whole picture of this eventful struggle at this great distance than do those absolutely acting and suffering in the scene. Nor can I resist the desire to prophesy any more than you do, knowing that I may prove utterly mistaken. I say, then, our great danger comes from foreign interference. What will prevent that? Our utterly defeating the Confederates in some great and conclusive battle, or our possession of the cotton ports and opening them to European trade, or a most unequivocal policy of slave-emancipation. Any one of these three conditions would stave off recognition by foreign powers until we had ourselves abandoned the attempt to reduce the South to obedience.

The last measure is to my mind the most important. The South has, by going to war with the United States government, thrust into our hands against our will the invincible weapon which constitutional reasons have hitherto forbidden us to employ. At the same time, it has given us the power to remedy a great wrong to four millions of the human race, in which we have hitherto been obliged to acquiesce. We are threatened with national annihilation, and defied to use the only means of national preservation. The question is distinctly proposed to us, Shall slavery die, or the great Republic? It is most astounding to me that there can be two opinions in the free States as to the answer. If we do fall, we deserve our fate. At the beginning of the contest, constitutional scruples might be respectable. But now we are fighting to subjugate the South, that is, slavery. We are fighting for the Union. Who wishes to destroy the Union? The slaveholders. Nobody else. Are we to spend $1,200,000,000 and raise 600,000 soldiers in order to protect slavery?

It really does seem to me too simple for argument. I am anxiously waiting for the coming Columbus who will set this egg of ours on end by smashing in the slavery end. We shall be rolling about in every direction until that is done. I do not know that it is to be done by proclamation—rather, perhaps, by facts. Well, I console myself by thinking that the people, the American people at least, is about as wise collectively as less numerous collections of individuals, and that the people has really decreed emancipation and is only puzzling how to carry it into effect. After all, it seems to be a law of Providence that progress should be by a spiral movement, so that when we seem most tortuous we may perhaps be going ahead. I am firm in the faith that slavery is now wriggling itself to death. With slavery in its primitive vigor I should think the restored Union neither possible nor desirable. Do not understand me as not taking fully into account all the strategical considerations against premature governmental utterances on this great subject.

But are there any trustworthy friends of the Union among the slaveholders? Should we lose many Kentuckians and Virginians who are now with us if we boldly confiscated the slaves of all rebels? And a confiscation of property which has legs and so confiscates itself at command is not only a legal, but would prove a very practical, measure in time of war. In brief, the time is fast approaching, I think, when “Thorough” should be written on all our banners. Slavery will never accept a subordinate position. The great Republic and slavery cannot both survive. We have been defied to mortal combat, and yet we hesitate to strike. These are my poor thoughts on this great subject. Perhaps you will think them crude.

I was much struck with what you quote from Mr. Conway, that if emancipation was proclaimed on the Upper Mississippi it would be known to the negroes of Louisiana in advance of the telegraph. And if once the blacks had leave to run, how many whites would have to stay at home to guard their dissolving property?

You have had enough of my maunderings. But before I conclude them, may I ask you to give all our kindest regards to Lowell, and to express our admiration for the “Yankee Idyl”? I am afraid of using too extravagant language if I say all I think about it. Was there ever anything more stinging, more concentrated, more vigorous, more just? He has condensed into those few pages the essence of a hundred diplomatic papers and historical disquisitions and Fourth of July orations. I have very pleasant relations with all the “J. B.'s”¹ here. They are all friendly and well disposed to the North. I speak of the embassy, which, with the ambassador and ambassadress, numbers eight or ten souls, some of them very intellectual ones.

Shall I say anything of Austria? What can I say that would interest you? That is the reason why I hate to write. All my thoughts are in America. Do you care to know about the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian (if L. N.² has his way)? He is next brother to the emperor; but although I have had the honor of private audience of many archdukes here, this one is a resident of Triest. He is about thirty; has an adventurous disposition, some imagination, a turn for poetry; has voyaged a good deal about the world in the Austrian ship of war, for in one respect he much resembles that unfortunate but anonymous ancestor of his, the King of Bohemia, with the seven castles, who, according to Corporal Trim, had such a passion for navigation and sea affairs, “with never a seaport in all his dominions.” But now the present King of Bohemia has got the sway of Triest, and Ferdinand Maximilian has been resident there, and is Lord High Admiral and chief of the Marine Department. He has been much in Spain and also in South America. I have read some travels — “Reise Skizzen” — of his, printed, not published. They are not without talent, and he ever and anon relieves his prose jog-trot by breaking into a canter of poetry. He adores bullfights, rather regrets the Inquisition, and considers the Duke of Alva everything noble and chivalrous and the most abused of men. It would do your heart good to hear his invocations to that deeply injured shade, his denunciations of the ignorant and vulgar Protestants who have defamed him. “Du armer Alva! weil du dem Willen deines Herren unerschütterlich treu warst, weil die fest bestimmten Grundsätze der Regierung,” etc., etc., etc. You can imagine the rest. (N. B. Let me observe that the D. R. was not published until long after the “Reise Skizzen” were written.)

Dear me, I wish I could get back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries! If once we had the “rebels licked, Jeff Davis hanged, and all,” I might shunt myself back to my old rails. But alas! the events of the nineteenth century are too engrossing. If Lowell cares to read this letter, will you allow me to make it over to him jointly, as Captain Cuttle says? I wished to write to him, but I am afraid only you would tolerate my writing so much when I have nothing to say. If he would ever send me a line I should be infinitely obliged, and would quickly respond. We read “The Washers of the Shroud” with fervent admiration. Always remember me most sincerely to the club, one and all. It touches me nearly when you assure me that I am not forgotten by them. To-morrow is Saturday, and last of the month.³ We are going to dine with our Spanish colleague.⁴ But the first bumper of the don's champagne I shall drain to the health of the Parker House friends. Mary and Lily join me in kindest regards to you and all yours; and I am, as always,

Sincerely your friend,

J. L. M.

_______________

¹ Cf. “Jonathan to John,” in “The Biglow Papers.”

² Louis Napoleon.

³ The club dinner took place on that day.

⁴ M. de la Torre Ayllon.

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition, Volume 2, p. 239-46

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