now) that I could all the more readily comprehend English feeling about our neutrality, because I had known what we had felt when Gladstone spoke at Newcastle and when England let the Alabama loose upon us in 1862. Where was the good in replying at all? Silence is almost always the best reply in these cases. Next came a letter from another English stranger, in which the writer announced having just read The Pentecost of Calamity. Not a word of friendliness for what I had said about the righteousness of England’s cause or my expressed unhappiness over the course which our Government had taken—
nothing but scorn for us all and the hope that we should reap our deserts when Germany defeated England and invaded us. Well? What of it? Here was a stricken person, writing in stress, in a land of desolation, mourning for the dead already, waiting for the next who should die, a poor, unstrung average person, who had not long before read that remark of our President’s made on the morrow of the Lusitania: that there is such a thing as being too proud to fight; had read during the ensuing weeks those notes wherein we stood committed by our Chief Magistrate to a verbal slinking away and sitting down under it. Can you wonder? If the mere memory of those days of our humiliation stabs me even now, I need no one to tell me (though I have been told) what England, what France, felt about us then, what it must have been like for Americans who were in England and France at that time. No: the average person in great trouble cannot rise above the trouble and survey the truth and be just. In English eyes our Government—and therefore all of us—failed in 1914—
1915—1916—failed again and again—insulted the cause of humanity when we said through our President in 1916, the third summer of the war, that we were not concerned with either the causes or the aims of that conflict. How could they remember Hoover, or Robert Bacon, or Leonard Wood, or Theodore Roosevelt then, any more than we could remember John Bright, or Richard Cobden, or the Manchester men in the days when the Alabama was sinking the merchant vessels of the Union?
We remembered Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston in the British Government, and their fellow aristocrats in British society; we remembered the aristocratic British press—The Times notably, because the most powerful— these are what we saw, felt, and remembered, because they were not with us, and were able to hurt us in the days when our friends were not yet able to help us. They made welcome the Southerners who came over in the interests of the South, they listened to the Southern propaganda. Why? Because the South was the American version of their aristocratic creed. To those who came over in the interests of the North and of the Union they turned a cold shoulder, because they represented Democracy; moreover, a Dis-United States would prove in commerce a less formidable competitor. To Captain Bullock, the able and energetic Southerner who put through in England the building and launching of those Confederate cruisers which sank our ships and destroyed our merchant marine, and to Mason and Slidell, the doors of dukes opened pleasantly; Beecher and our other emissaries mostly had to dine beneath uncoroneted roofs.
In the pages of Henry Adams, and of Charles Francis Adams his brother, you can read of what they, as young men, encountered in London, and what they saw their father have to put up with there, both from English society and the English Government. Their father was our new minister to England, appointed by Lincoln. He arrived just after our Civil War had begun. I have heard his sons talk about it familiarly, and it is all to be found in their writings.
Nobody knows how to be disagreeable quite so well as the English gentleman, except the English lady. They can do it with the nicety of a medicine dropper. They can administer the precise quantum suff. in every case. In the society of English gentlemen and ladies Mr. Adams by his official position was obliged to move. They left him out as much as they could, but, being the American Minister, he couldn’t be left out altogether. At their dinners and functions he had to hear open expressions of joy at the news of Southern victories, he had to receive slights both veiled and unveiled, and all this he had to bear with equanimity. Sometimes he did leave the room; but with dignity and discretion. A false step, a “break,” might have led to a request for his recall. He knew that his constant presence, close to the English Government, was vital to our cause. Russell and Palmerston were by turns insolent and shifty, and once on the very brink of recognizing the Southern Confederacy as an independent nation. Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a speech at Newcastle, virtually did recognize it. You will be proud of Mr. Adams if you read how he bore himself and fulfilled his appallingly delicate and difficult mission. He was an American who knew how to behave himself, and he behaved himself all the time; while the English had a way of turning their behavior on and off, like the hot water. Mr. Adams was no admirer of “shirt-sleeves” diplomacy. His diplomacy wore a coat. Our experiments in “shirt-sleeves” diplomacy fail to show that it accomplishes anything which diplomacy decently dressed would not accomplish more satisfactorily. Upon Mr. Adams fell some consequences of previous American crudities, of which I shall speak later.
Lincoln had declared a blockade on Southern ports before Mr. Adams arrived in London. Upon his arrival he found England had proclaimed her neutrality and recognized the belligerency of the South. This dismayed Mr. Adams and excited the whole North, because feeling ran too high to perceive this first act on England’s part to be really favorable to us; she could not recognize our blockade, which stopped her getting Southern cotton, unless she recognized that the South was in a state of war with us. Looked at quietly, this act of England’s helped us and hurt herself, for it deprived her of cotton.
It was not with this, but with the reception and treatment of Mr. Adams that the true hostility began. Slights to him were slaps at us, sympathy with the South was an active moral injury to our cause, even if it was mostly an undertone, politically. Then all of a sudden, something that we did ourselves changed the undertone to a loud overtone, and we just grazed England’s declaring war on us. Had she done so, then indeed it had been all up with us. This incident is the comic going-back on our own doctrine of 1812, to which I have alluded above.
On November 8, 1861, Captain Charles Wilkes of the American steam sloop San Jacinto, fired a shot across the bow of the British vessel Trent, stopped her on the high seas, and took four passengers off her, and brought them prisoners to Fort Warren, in Boston harbor. Mason and Slidell are the two we remember, Confederate envoys to France and Great Britain. Over this the whole North burst into glorious joy. Our Secretary of the Navy wrote to Wilkes his congratulations, Congress voted its thanks to him, governors and judges laureled him with oratory at banquets, he was feasted with meat and drink all over the place, and, though his years were sixty-three, ardent females probably rushed forth from throngs and kissed him with the purest intentions: heroes have no age. But presently the Trent arrived in England, and the British lion was aroused. We had violated international law, and insulted the British flag. Palmerston wrote us a letter—or Russell, I forget which wrote it—
a letter that would have left us no choice but to fight. But Queen Victoria had to sign it before it went. “My lord,” she said, “you must know that I will agree to no paper that means war with the United States.” So this didn’t go, but another in its stead, pretty stiff, naturally, yet still possible for us to swallow. Some didn’t want to swallow even this; but Lincoln, humorous and wise, said, “Gentlemen, one war at a time;” and so we made due restitution, and Messrs. Mason and Slidell went their way to France and England, free to bring about action against us there if they could manage it. Captain Wilkes must have been a good fellow. His picture suggests this. England, in her English heart, really liked what he had done, it was in its gallant flagrancy so remarkably like her own doings— though she couldn’t, naturally, permit such a performance to pass; and a few years afterwards, for his services in the cause of exploration, her Royal Geographical Society gave him a gold medal! Yes; the whole thing is comic— to-day; for us, to-day, the point of it is, that the English Queen saved us from a war with England.
Within a year, something happened that was not comic. Lord John Russell, though warned and warned, let the Alabama slip away to sea, where she proceeded to send our merchant ships to the bottom, until the Kearsarge sent her herself to the bottom. She had been built at Liverpool in the face of an English law which no quibbling could disguise to anybody except to Lord John Russell and to those who, like him, leaned to the South. Ten years later, this leaning cost England fifteen million dollars in damages.
