REBEL BELLIGERENCY, AND OUR RIGHT TO COMPLAIN OF IT. BY GEORGE BEMIS. BOSTON: PUBLISHED BY A. WILLIAMS & CO. No. 100 WASHINGTON STREET. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by GEORGE BEMIS, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts. PREFACE. THE following pamphlet, I am free to acknowledge, is both controversial and American: - controversial, so far as it seeks to meet and answer the new position set up by Earl Russell, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, on behalf of his Ministry, and by Earl Russell's juridical champion, " Historicus," of the London Times, that the recognition of the American rebels as a belligerent Power was a necessity and not a choice; and American, so far as it looks at this new plea in avoidance from an American point of view. Yet the writer cherishes a hope that his readers will find in the following pages something besides controversy and Americanism. He trusts that his labors will help throw light for the purposes of permanent history upon one of the great questions of public law of the ninetenth century, namely, whether the action of the two great Western Powers of Europe in so speedily raising the Confederate secessionists to the rank of a belligerent power, thereby, perhaps, warming into life and helping to walk alone the most gigantic and immoral sedition in history, and inaugurating the bloodiest and most cruel civil war since the was either a friendly or a justifiable measure; friendly, considering that it was apparently set in motion by one of the great heads of the English liberal party, a party whose antecedents were all in favor of popular rights, and committed without a reserve to uncompromising hostility against negro slavery, and seconded on the Southern side of the British channel by that France which had stood god Christian era, (iii) father to American liberties, and without whose aid Americans may freely admit that they would never have been independent unless after a long lapse of intermediate years, or justifiable, because as an international precedent, when can civil rebellion ever be justly counteracted and crushed out, if not in such a case as that of this American contest? An assault, as the second greatest leader in the rebellion himself characterized it, upon "the best and freest government, that the sun of heaven ever shone upon." In my attempted elucidation of this great historic question, I am well aware to how easy a refutation I expose myself (if I am wrong), when I venture to call in question Earl Russell's statement, that the law-advisers of the Crown in recommending the issue of the Queen's proclamation of neutrality, and so the recognition of Confederate belligerency, grounded themselves upon the American proclamation of blockade as an overruling necessity which left no choice for British action. If the Crown lawyers really gave such advice and the Foreign Secretary is not mistaken in his recollection, nothing will be easier than to produce their written opinion, if, in the judgment of the British Cabinet, its own reputation for candor seems sufficiently` involved to require it. Even then, however, I feel confident that my positions will hold good in three particulars : (1.) That the Crown lawyers, in any advice given prior to May 6th 1861, gave an opinion upon an unofficial and probably imperfect copy of President Lincoln's proclamation ; (2.) That if they made the American blockade an important element in their opinion, it was only in the sense that it entitled not required Her Majesty's Government to proclaim neutrality and belligerency ; and, (3.) That they never advised that a manifesto of a future blockade, not then enforced or known to be enforced, and which while directed against insurgent subjects, was so far municipal and un-international that it professed to treat as pirates those rebellious subjects and all others found guilty of any adoption of Jefferson Davis's letters of marque and reprisal, - required the neutral power of Great Britain to |