John M. Forbes to Nassau W. Senior, December 20, 1861

Boston, 20 December, 1861.

Nothing from you lately. You will be glad to hear that our people here are within the control of the government in regard to the difficulty with England, and unless the demands are made in such a spirit and manner as to make it seem that war is intended sooner or later, we can tide over the present trouble. If our government or people are made to feel that the Trent affair is merely a pretext, and that after making disagreeable concessions there, we shall only be called upon the sooner to "eat dirt" in some other case, we shall of course fight at first, coûte qu’il coûte.

This I do not anticipate, but I hope you statesmen will look ahead beyond the immediate horizon and try to treat this case so that it shall not further embitter the feelings of the two nations, and thus lay the foundations of a future war, whether of tariffs or cannon!

It will be unfortunate, for instance, if you make stringent demands for reparation of a wrong which to our common people, and to the common sense of the world, will in so large a matter between nations look like a technical or legal quibble.

You cannot convince our people that you are justified in humiliating us in this our extremity upon the ground that our frigate exercised an admitted right in a wrong manner, the wrong growing out of a generous motive toward your ship or your nation.

I know it is an important principle that no naval officer should take the office of a judge, and I shall be glad to see our officers and yours put upon their responsibility to conform, in manner and in substance both, to the Law of Nations, — but you ought not to push the legal advantage, if you have one, too far, where the substantial equity will seem to be with us! If you do, it will be considered like striking us while we are down, and will be remembered and resented long after this generation has passed away.

One cannot yet fairly judge how far our government and people may be pushed in the way of concession. If we do give way much beyond what seems to us fair, you may put it down to our inveterate earnestness to whip our domestic enemy.

I hope and believe we shall get over this near danger of collision with you, but I want to see the future guarded too.

If, for instance, you propose to leave the whole question to arbitration of parties as nearly disinterested as the case admits of, I think it will be received as an earnest of a better state of feeling. The king of Italy and the Czar, though opposed to republican institutions, would, I think, be accepted as fair referees, of course after proper argument being heard from your jurists and ours.

On the other hand, to insist upon your own interpretation of the international law, or upon referring it solely to Louis Napoleon, will, even if we concede it, leave a sting that will rankle for half a century! It will confirm all our worst fears that your rulers are ready to catch at any pretext, and risk any amount of suffering to your own people if they can only thus make sure of the failure of republican institutions. The prevailing opinion is that such is the disposition of your government, and I daily hear men of property and of general worldly prudence advocate the necessity of absolute resistance to any demand for concession. They reason that it would break down the spirit of our people and create internal divisions to a degree that is worse than foreign war! Their policy would be to let the foreign demands intensify our efforts against the rebels, and the moment it is ascertained that actual war will result, let loose the blacks, cut the dikes which confine the Mississippi, and deluge New Orleans and the whole of the flat country on its banks; an easy task!

A spark may thus ignite all the elements of war, while public opinion is so nearly balanced that it is only to-day that one can speak for! To-day peace is probable — to-morrow it may be impossible.

SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 260-3

John M. Forbes to Nassau W. Senior, December 10, 1861

Boston, December 10,1861.

My Dear Me. Senior, — I have yours of the 20th ulto. I shall read with much interest your article upon the nature of our government, and am glad you came to the same conclusion which everybody here long since arrived at except Calhoun and his gang of conspirators.

I don't blame Lord Russell for being puzzled at any question which you say has two sides to it; but I do blame him for jumping at his conclusions in such hot haste that he could not await the arrival of our new minister, whose explanation might have given him some light.

You don't blame the doctor (Medico) when, called to a serious case, he happens to take the dark view of it, and sentences the patient to “dissolution;” but you do think him a blunderer if he hastens to tell the victim that he has only to make his arrangements for his funeral!

Louis Napoleon, by quietly holding back his opinions and then uttering them covered up with sugared words, puts himself, with the masses of our people, where England was a few months since, our natural ally! Of course it is an enormous humbug, and thinking men are not gulled by it, but none the less [the situation] operates to inflame the old animosities that had grown out of two wars and that had been just forgotten.

Another thing must not be forgotten. The French press has not the chance, even when it has the will, to do the mischief that yours and ours has. We hardly read anything from the French papers; they still less read American papers, and this makes the grand difference between our situation as relating to the two countries.

You read our New York “Herald” edited by a renegade Scotchman . . . and you take it for the representative of American journalism! The “Herald” is really the organ of the seceders, it was so openly until after Sumter surrendered; and only came over nominally to the Northern side under the terrors of mob law. It has since served its masters still better by sowing the seeds of dissension between us and England.

We, with perhaps equal blindness, permit the “Times” and half a dozen other papers to stand for “England.” I look for a grand paper duello upon the Trent question, and shall be relieved if it goes no further. Should the questions assume a warlike aspect, we shall only be driven the sooner to our last desperate resort, emancipation. We are now only divided into two parties at the North, viz.: those who would use the negro when we can see no other way of conquering; and secondly, those who would use the negro at once, wherever he can be used to strengthen us or weaken the enemy! The logic of events has been from day to day settling this question, and if our talking men in Congress can only be patient or self-denying in the outpouring of patriotic words, we shall go on fast enough. . . .

You cannot believe we shall subjugate ten millions of people. Nor I; but classify these ten millions and all is changed. At least two are avowed loyalists in the border States; four more are blacks ready to help us when we will let them; three more are poor whites whose interests are clearly with us and against their would-be masters. How long will it be before the avowals of their masters, aided by the suffering of the war, will open their eyes?

This leaves one million, of all ages and sexes, who, through owning slaves and connection with slaveholders, may think they have a class interest in the success of the rebellion. This class we can crush out— or what will be left of them after the war debt of the rebels reaches its proper value — whenever we can divide the four million of poor whites, by an operation upon their eyes!

But if I underrate the difficulty, the necessity for doing it now is all the greater! If hard now, how much harder will it be after we shall have, as you desire, permitted them to separate. Now they have no manufactures, no foreign alliances, no warlike stores except what they stole from us, and these rapidly diminishing. They have missed their first spring in which lies the strength of a conspiracy; while our cold Anglo-Saxon blood is just getting roused from the lethargy of a long peace and of overmuch prosperity. We are just ready to begin to fight. We all feel that what is now a war between the people and a small class would, after a separation, become a war of sections. As for peace, nobody believes it possible; a truce we might have, to give them time to gather breath! It is only a question between war to the end now and a chronic state of war with two standing armies, two navies, two corps of diplomatists seeking alliances in every court in Europe, to end in another death struggle. There is no peace for us, unless we either conquer the arrogant slave-owner classes who have so long ruled us and bullied you, or permit them by a compromise to continue and extend their combination with our baser class and to drag us into a grand slave empire which shall absorb the West Indies and Mexico and Central America.

A bold stand at the polls by the North in 1850 would have given us the victory peacefully; now we must fight for it, or yield to the basest faction that ever ruled a country. Better a ten years' war than this; but it will not be a long war.

The conspirators counted upon an early success in arms and a division of the North. Foiled in this, their only hope is in foreign intervention. I have no doubt what you tell me is true of Louis Napoleon, still less that he secretly gave the rebels hopes of aid, nor that they have construed your course to favor them. Had you squarely taken the same ground that we did towards your Canadian rebels, this hope would have been extinguished; and now, if you want cotton, if you want trade, if you want to pave the way to a real alliance with the only free nation besides yourselves on the globe, you ought to help us in all legitimate ways. You should encourage our loan, you should sharpen your police to detect the outfit of hostile vessels, you should hold the Nashville strictly accountable for her acts of pillage and destruction, giving her the experience of a long trial in your courts, if only to discourage other pirates from being their own judges of what property they may appropriate.

Do this and the war will be short. Four months ago an offer from you to do what we should have readily done when your Indian empire was threatened, had it seemed necessary or proper, would have ended the war before this, — namely, to throw open to us for purchase your armories and your ironclad shipyards. We might not have accepted the offer, but it would have destroyed the rebels' last hope. I don't complain of your not doing it, but simply indicate what for the sake of both countries I wish might have been your policy!

As for the Sault Ste. Marie, the pine lands must wait for the prairie farmers to build again; but the developments in our mineral lands are said to be magnificent, and to promise results next summer.

Very truly yours,

J. M. Forbes.

SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 253-7

Nassau W. Senior to John M. Forbes, November 20, 1861

13 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, November 20,1861.

My Dear Mr. Forbes, — I am going to republish my articles in Reviews; they will form about four volumes. Among them is one, called “European and American State Confederacies,” in which I consider whether the American Union be a national union, or a confederation, whether allegiance be due to the State, or to the Union, and I decide that it is a national union, and consequently that secession is rebellion and treason. Pray look at the article: you will find it in the number for January, 1846. But I admit that the question is one of difficulty, and that there are great authorities on each side. If my opinion on this legal question be wrong, if the Union be a mere treaty like the German Bund, every American owes allegiance to his own State, and if that State secede, he would be guilty of rebellion and treason if he did not secede too. Now Lord Russell did not feel competent to decide this difficult legal question — and I think that he could not decide it. Yet it is for not deciding it at once, and declaring the seceders rebels, that you have been abusing him and us for three months. I think that on consideration you will feel that the most certain means of destroying our sympathy with the North, and turning it towards the South, were your threats that as soon as you had settled the affair with the South you would turn on us and punish us, by war, for our want of sympathy.

One thing has tended much to embitter us, your different treatment of France and of us. The conduct of the two governments has been identical, but you have been as civil to France as you have been rude to us. Now I happen to know that the French feeling is with the South. They say that the New Orleans people are their brethren. They are all friends of slavery, and I have peculiar reasons for believing that Louis Napoleon proposed to our government to join him in breaking the blockade. You know that I have access to accurate sources of intelligence, and you may believe this. My only wish, from the time that the enormous armies and the military success of the South showed (at least it so seemed to me) that you might beat, but could not conquer her, has been for the termination of the contest, and as I think that loans to either party would tend to prolong it, I own that I hope that none will be made.

We hear little from the South, but the little which we do hear leads us to think that you are mistaken in believing that there is a strong Union party there. They seem to be as determined as you are.

Can you tell me anything of our Sault Ste. Marie prospects? I suppose that the war adjourns all sales.

Ever yours,

N. W. Senior.

SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 251-2

John M. Forbes to Nassau W. Senior, September 30, 1861

Naushon Island, September 30,1861.

Dear Mr. Senior, — Your note from the Chateau de Tocqueville reached me a few days since. It must have been a most agreeable reunion there.

We here feel more and more each day the miracle of M. de Tocqueville's prophetic vision of our history. It seems almost like clairvoyance! Our Channing's prevoyance of the results of our Texas land thefts is almost as strange. Such men of genius may well be called seers.

I am sorry that you still class me with the crowd who always seek to forget their own sins in abusing their neighbors. The fact is, all my prepossessions were in favor of England, and I had watched with the greatest satisfaction the subsidence of the old animosities, growing out of the two wars, and the growth of that good fooling which ought to animate the two nations who are, or might be, the bulwark of free institutions against the despotisms of the Old World.

When we cast off the nightmare despotism, which had so long ruled us, the slave oligarchy, which sympathized with Russia because of serfdom, and dismissed your minister to show their homage to the Czar, and which refused you a limited right of search, because it favored the slave trade; in fine, when at last we placed ourselves right on the question of slavery, which has always been a reproach from you to us, I thought the entente cordiale was complete. I did not look for material aid nor want it, but only such forbearance of countenance towards our Sepoys" as would help to discourage them, and would bring our two nations still more into harmony.

Perhaps I feel the disappointment more bitterly than the mob does, because my hope and prejudices were strongly for a warm English alliance— now, I fear, deferred another twenty years. Your "Times " I expected nothing better from than we have had in its cold sneers at the breaking of our bubble of democracy, but from your ministry I did look for something better than a proclamation of strict neutrality, putting us upon precisely the same footing with our “Sepoys,” forbidding either party to bring prizes into your ports, prohibiting your subjects aiding either; and this, too, issued just as our new minister was arriving, thus giving him no opportunity to confer upon mutual interests; for I contend that it is our mutual interests that have been endangered, not ours alone.

I beg your Sepoys’ pardon for naming them with ours. They at least had foreign conquerors, and a hated religion to conspire against, and yet we watched your Indian battles with a brother's eye, and canonized your Havelocks, Hodsons, and other martyrs, as if they had been our own. Even our press, loose as it is, uttered no sound of exultation at what seemed at one time to be the downfall of your Indian empire.

Had your Sepoys brought a prize into our California ports, we should have known only the British owner, and restored her. Once more I beg your Sepoys' pardon. They were not guilty of the deep crime against their nationality and the principles of government which marks our more barbarous rebels!

One word about the Morrill tariff. It is a labored, clumsy production, and it will fall by its own weight. Some of its blunders have been partially corrected; but you mistake the intention of those who passed it, or at least of the majority of them.

Its aim was to substitute the steadiness of specific duties for the vibrating, cheating system of ad valorem. Certain high duties were doubtless smuggled in under guise of specifics, and the extreme difficulty of so framing our specific duties that our poorer classes shall not pay the same duties, per yard or per pound, on their cheap cloth or tea, will probably cause a repeal of the tariff. Yet I think British experience and opinion favor the principle of specific rather than ad valorem duties. One tends to cheat the people who buy the poorest qualities, the other tends to enormous frauds against government and profits by false swearing, and encourages the use of poor, showy goods, as against the more substantial ones which come in under specifics.

You are a little more encouraging as to results than you were, but I still think you do not properly appreciate the fact that we are not fighting to subjugate the South, but to put down a small class who have conspired against the people, and who are a thousand times worse enemies of the mass of the people at the South than the North.

The only pinch is our finances. Cannot you help us upon the text of the cutting within, if you find that sound? Our moneyed men continue to take their tone very much from England, and confident views of financial success coming from your side have great weight. . . .

Very truly yours,

J. M. Forbes.

SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 247-50

Nassau W. Senior to John M. Forbes, August 20, 1861

CHATEÂU DE TOCQUEVILLE, August 20, 1861.

My Dear Mr. Forbes,—I write from a place in which your name is often mentioned, and always with great gratitude. Madame de Tocqueville, after an illness of thirteen or fourteen years, is better than I have seen her since 1848. The first use that she has made of returning strength has been to unite a little party of her old friends, — the Beaumonts, Ampere, and ourselves, — and we are passing charming mornings in walking and driving, and evenings in talking and hearing Ampere read Moliere, — which is better than most acting.

I find the general opinion in France and in England as to your affairs identical.

It is a general conviction that the secession is one of the wildest and wickedest acts that has ever been committed; that you will beat the seceders, but that you will not so far conquer them as to make them your subjects, or even portions of your federation; that having humiliated and punished them you will dictate your own terms on which you will allow them to go; that those terms will probably be that you will keep New Orleans and Western Virginia; that you will deprive them of any right to territories, and probably prohibit their having a slave trade. As you are fond of tariffs and have not yet found out that they do more harm to the nation that makes them than to the nation against which they are directed, we suppose that you will enact against them a hostile tariff.

We all bitterly deplore the defeat at Bull's Run, believing that it will prolong the war.

We also think that our conduct to you has been perfectly right, and that your complaints of it are the childish folly of a democracy which has never met with a check before, and like other spoilt children beats the chair over which it has fallen. You will not agree with me, I know, for even your good sense has not saved you altogether from participating in the unreasonableness of those about you.

The state of this country is painful. France is a witch, who has sold herself to the devil, on the condition that he shall give power to hurt others. L. N.'s offer to her was made to our Saviour, when Satan, having shown him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof, said, “All this will I give thee if thou wilt worship me.”

The indignation, shame, and depression of the higher and educated classes is indescribable.

We intend to wander over the east and south of France, and return to England in the beginning of October. Kindest regards.

Ever yours,

N. W. Senior.

SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 245-7