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TRENT

Wednesday morning, at 10 A. M., adding, "I shall CHAP. II. then be ready." It is probably true, as he afterwards wrote,1 that the whole framing of his dispatch was left to his own ingenuity and judgment, and that neither the President nor any member of the Cabinet had arrived at any final determination. The private diary of Attorney-General Bates supplies us some additional details: "Cabinet council at 10 A. M., December 25, to consider the relations with England on Lord Lyons's demand of the surrender of Mason and Slidell; a long and interesting session, lasting till 2 P. M. The instructions of the British minister to Lord Lyons were read. . . There was read a draft of answer by the Secretary of State."

The President's experimental draft quoted above was not read; there is no mention of either the reading or the points it raised. The whole discussion appears to have been confined to Seward's paper. There was some desultory talk, a general comparing of rumors and outside information, a reading of the few letters which had been received from Europe. Mr. Sumner, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, was invited in, and read letters he had received from John Bright and Richard Cobden, Liberal members of the British Parliament and devoted friends of the Union.

1"The consideration of the Trent case was crowded out by pressing domestic affairs until Christmas Day. It was considered on my presentation of it on the 25th and 26th of December. The Government, when it took the subject up, had no idea of the grounds upon which it would

explain its action, nor did it
believe that it would concede
the case. Yet it was heartily
unanimous in the actual result
after two days' examination, and
in favor of the release. Remem-
ber that in a council like ours
there are some strong wills to be
reconciled."

1861.

Seward to Weed, Jan. 22, 1862. T.

W. Barnes, "Memoir of Thurlow Weed." Vol. II., p. 409.

CHAP. II. During the session also there was handed in and read the dispatch just received from his Government by M. Mercier, the French minister, and which, in substance, took the English view of the matter. The diary continues:

Mr. Seward's draft of letter to Lord Lyons was submitted by him, and examined and criticized by us with apparently perfect candor and frankness. All of us were impressed with the magnitude of the subject, and believed that upon our decision depended the dearest interest, probably the existence, of the nation. I, waiving the question of legal right,― upon which all Europe is against us, and also many of our own best jurists,- urged the necessity of the case; that to go to war with England now is to abandon all hope of suppressing the rebellion, as we have not the possession of the land, nor any support of the people of the South. The maritime superiority of Britain would sweep us from all the Southern waters. Our trade would be utterly ruined, and our treasury bankrupt; in short, that we must not have war with England.

There was great reluctance on the part of some of the members of the Cabinet- and even the President himself -to acknowledge these obvious truths; but all yielded to, and unanimously concurred in, Mr. Seward's letter to Lord Lyons, after some verbal and formal amendments. The main fear, I believe, was the displeasure of our own people - lest they should accuse us of timidly truckling Diary. MS. to the power of England.1

Bates,

The published extracts from the diary of Secretary Chase give, somewhat fully, his opinion on the occasion:

Mr. Chase thought it certainly was not too much to expect of a friendly nation, and especially of a nation of the same blood, religion, and characteristic civilization

1 For permission to examine the authors are indebted to the and quote from the manuscript courtesy of his son, Richard diary of Attorney-General Bates, Bates.

as our own, that in consideration of the great rights she would overlook the little wrong; nor could he then persuade himself that, were all the circumstances known to the English Government as to ours, the surrender of the rebel commissioners would be insisted upon. The Secretary asserted that the technical right was undoubtedly with England. . . Were the circumstances reversed, our Government would, Mr. Chase thought, accept the explanation, and let England keep her rebels; and he could not divest himself of the belief that, were the case fairly understood, the British Government would do likewise. "But," continued Secretary Chase, "we cannot afford delays. While the matter hangs in uncertainty the public mind will remain disquieted, our commerce will suffer serious harm, our action against the rebels must be greatly hindered, and the restoration of our prosperity - largely identified with that of all nations-must be delayed. Better, then, to make now the sacrifice of feeling involved in the surrender of these rebels, than even avoid it by the delays which explanations must occasion. I give my adhesion, therefore, to the conclusion at which the Secretary of State has arrived. It is gall and wormwood to Rather than consent to the liberation of these men, I would sacrifice everything I possess. But I am consoled by the reflection that, while nothing but severest retribution is due to them, the surrender under existing circumstances is but simply doing right-simply proving faithful to our own ideas and traditions under strong temptations to violate them- simply giving to England and the world the most signal proof that the American nation will not under any circumstances, for the sake of inflicting just punishment on rebels, commit even a technical wrong against neutrals."

me.

In these two recorded opinions are reflected the substantial tone and temper of the Cabinet discussion, which ended, as both Mr. Bates and Mr. Seward have stated, in a unanimous concurrence in the letter of reply as drawn up by the Secretary of State. That long and remarkably able docu

СНАР. ІІ.

R. B. War

den, "Life pp. 393, 394.

of Chase,"

CHAP. II.

ment must be read in full, both to understand the wide range of the subject which he treated and the clearness and force of his language and argument. It constitutes one of his chief literary triumphs. There is room here only to indicate the conclusions arrived at in his examination. First, he held that the four persons seized and their dispatches were contraband of war; second, that Captain Wilkes had a right by the law of nations to detain and search the Trent; third, that he exercised the right in a lawful and proper manner; fourth, that he had a right to capture the contraband found. The real issue of the case centered in the fifth question: "Did Captain Wilkes exercise the right of capturing the contraband in conformity with the law of nations?" Reciting the deficiency of recognized rules on this point, Mr. Seward held that only by taking the vessel before a prize court could the existence of contraband be lawfully established; and that Captain Wilkes having released the vessel from capture, the necessary judicial examination was prevented, and the capture left unfinished or abandoned.

Mr. Seward's dispatch continued:

I trust that I have shown to the satisfaction of the British Government, by a very simple and natural statement of the facts and analysis of the law applicable to them, that this Government has neither meditated, nor practised, nor approved any deliberate wrong in the transaction to which they have called its attention, and, on the contrary, that what has happened has been simply an inadvertency, consisting in a departure by the naval officer, free from any wrongful motive, from a rule uncertainly established, and probably by the several parties concerned either imperfectly understood or entirely unknown. For this error the British Government has a right to expect the same reparation that we, as an inde

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CHAP. II.

pendent State, should expect from Great Britain or from any other friendly nation in a similar case. If I decide this case in favor of my own Government I must disavow its most cherished principles, and reverse and forever abandon its essential policy. The country cannot afford the sacrifice. If I maintain those principles and adhere to that policy, I must surrender the case itself. . . The four persons in question are now held in military Seward to custody at Fort Warren, in the State of Massachusetts. Dec. 26,1861. They will be cheerfully liberated.

With the formal delivery of Mason and Slidell and their secretaries to the custody of the British minister, the diplomatic incident was completed on the part of the United States. Lord Russell, on his part, while announcing that her Majesty's Government differed from Mr. Seward in some of the conclusions at which he had arrived,' nevertheless

1 In a dispatch to Lord Lyons of Jan. 23, 1862, in which he discussed the questions at some length, Lord Russell held: first, that Mason and Slidell and their supposed dispatches, under the circumstances of their seizure, were not contraband; secondly, that the bringing of the Trent before a prize court, though it would alter the character, would not diminish the offense against the law of nations. It is somewhat interesting to read in this connection the following passage in the recently published "Life of Lord John Russell," by Spencer Walpole, which states that the advice given by the law officers of the British Crown was in almost exact conformity with the positions taken by Mr. Seward:

"The Confederate States appointed two gentlemen, Messrs. Mason and Slidell, to proceed to Europe, accredited to the English

and French Governments respec-
tively. These gentlemen em-
barked at Charleston on the
Nashville, succeeded in running
the blockade, and landed in Cuba.
It was correctly assumed that
they would embark at Havana
on the Trent, a West Indian mail
steamer, and travel in her to
Europe; it was believed that the
Government of the United States
had issued orders for intercepting
the Trent and for capturing the
envoys; and it was noticed that
a Federal man-of-war had arrived
at Falmouth, and after coaling
had proceeded to Southampton.
Lord Russell laid these facts be-
fore the law officers; and was
advised that a United States
man-of-war, falling in with a
British mail steamer, would have
the right to board her, open her
mail bags, examine their contents,
and, if the steamer should prove
liable to confiscation for carrying

Lyons,

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