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and there covers some six pages. Not one word of this dispatch, from beginning to end, speaks of recognition being rendered necessary by the President's proclamation of blockade. On the contrary, the representation then made by Lord Russell is summed up in the following sentence (p. 92),

"A necessity seemed to exist [as Lord Russell urged] to define the course of the government in regard to the participation of the subjects of Great Britain in the impending conflict. Their conclusion had been that, as a question merely of fact, a war existed."

Earl Russell himself furnishes a report of this same interview to Lord Lyons, to be found in the Parliamentary Blue Book for 1862 ("N. America, No. 1," p. 34). His own version, thus afforded, contains nothing at all at variance with Mr. Adams's account, but, on the contrary, fully corroborates it in important particulars. Thus, in a paragraph relating to full recognition of rebel independence, which Mr. Adams seemed to feel apprehensive of as the next step, Earl Russell reports himself as using the following language; - quite upsetting any theory of a state of constructive belligerency :

"I said that we had taken no step except that of declaring ourselves neutral and allowing to the Southern States a belligerent character; that the size and population of the seceding States were so considerable that we could not deny them that character."

Some allusion, to be sure, is made in both reports to the American blockade, but only to the point to inquire how complete the American government proposed to make it.

Now I beg to ask, if it is within the bounds of possibility, that, if the proclamation of neutrality had been based upon the President's proclamation of blockade (as Earl Russell says it was, quoting the Lord Chancellor), no allusion should have been made to it by the Foreign Secretary in this interview? Here was Mr. Adams, seeking an immediate interview and demanding with suppressed sensibility, if not with uncontrolled excitability, what was the meaning of this piece of unexpected and unwelcome conduct

of England toward his government? And here, on the other hand, was the Foreign Secretary, fresh from the Cabinet council and from contact with the Lord Chancellor and his legal associates, undertaking to explain the reasons of so grave and unfriendly a step on the part of his government, in the least offensive and yet most simple. Is it in human nature, if he could have replied to Mr. "It is all the fault of your President's proclamation; it is an unavoidable necessity forced on us by him,” — that he would not have surely done so?

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It is very noticeable, in the same connection, that Earl Russell, when called upon to vindicate the issuing of the proclamation of neutrality on an emergency similar to that created by Mr. Adams's first official interview, and as late as September 25th, 1863, namely, in his Blairgowrie speech in reply to Mr. Sumner's address at the Cooper Institute in New York, September 10th, 1863, omits all allusion to the proclamation of blockade as one of the justifying motives for the declaration of British neutrality. Mr. Sumner had insisted, with great vehemence and power, that the declaration of neutrality or of " equality" between the National Government and "the Rebel slave-mongers," was not only "an insult to the National Government," but "a moral absurdity, offensive to reason and all those precedents which make the glory of the British name." And he had proceeded to charge upon it such bitter and momentous consequences, that one would suppose that no possible stimulant could have been wanting to induce the Foreign Secretary to revive all the justifications which memory could conjure up to palliate the measure of "investing" the rebels "with all the rights and prerogatives of a belligerent." What had Earl Russell to say in reply?

This was his justification, according to the report of his speech in the London Times of September 28th:

"Our course on the subject [of Neutrality] has been attacked and blamed in the bitterest terms, — blamed sometimes by the Federals and sometimes by the Confederates. The first offence was felt by the Federals. They said we had no right to grant, so far as we were concerned, to the Confederates the rights of belligerents. Well, now, gentlemen, that question of the rights of belligerents is a question of fact. I put it to you whether, with 5,000,000 people-5,000,000, I mean, of free men, declaring themselves in their several

States collectively an independent State, we could pass over that as a petty rebellion? Our Admirals asked whether the ships they met bearing the Confederate flag should be treated as pirates or no. If we had treated them as pirates we should have been taking part in that contest. (Cheers.) It was impossible to look on the uprising of a community of five millions of people as a mere petty insurrection (Hear, hear), or as not having the rights which at all times are given to those who by their numbers and importance, or by the extent of territory they possess, are entitled to these rights. (Cheers). Well, it was said we ought not to have done that because they were a community of slaveholders, &c."

So that at this juncture, again, there is no word about a blockade; but the old position of "a question of fact," and "a great community of rebel subjects." Truly, if Lord Campbell had survived to hear his noble friend make this utterance, he must have wondered at the notice taken of his own (supposed?) advice, that the proclamation of blockade had left but one course to pursue! 1

But the case against Earl Russell, founded upon contemporaneous evidence furnished by himself, by no means stops with his speech in Parliament of the 6th of May, announcing the government's decision, nor with the respective accounts of his first interview with Mr. Adams. Unfortunately for the Foreign Secretary, on the very day on which he announced in the House of Commons the Ministerial determination to recognize the rebels as belligerents, he indited two despatches, printed in the Parliamentary Blue Book for 1862, "North America, No. 3," in which he confidentially makes known to the English ambassadors at Paris and at Washington the motives which actuated the Home Government in coming to their decision. In that to Lord Cowley (p. 1), he says,

"The accounts which have reached them from some of Her Majesty's consuls, coupled with what has appeared in the public prints, are sufficient to show that a civil war has broken out among the States which lately composed the American Union. Other nations have therefore to consider the light in which with reference to that war they are to regard the confederacy into which the Southern States have united themselves; and it appears to Her Majesty's government that, looking at all the circumstances of the case,

1 I would notice, in passing, how defective must have been the Foreign Secretary's memory of dates on this occasion, in coupling despatches from the English Admirals

they cannot hesitate to admit that such confederacy is entitled to be considered as a belligerent, and, as such, invested with all the rights and prerogatives of a belligerent."

And, more pointedly still, in that to Lord Lyons, he writes (p. 2), as follows, 1

1

[LORD J. RUSSELL TO LORD LYONS.]

"Foreign Office, May 6, 1861.

"MY LORD, — Her Majesty's government are disappointed in not having received from you by the mail which has just arrived, any report of the state of affairs and of the prospects of the several parties, with reference to the issue of the struggle which appears unfortunately to have commenced between them; but the interruption of the communication between Washington and New York sufficiently explains the non-arrival of New York despatches.

"The account, however, which Her Majesty's consuls at different ports were enabled to forward by the packet coincide in showing that whatever may be the final result of what cannot now be designated otherwise than as the civil war which has broken out between the several States of the late Union, for the present at least those States have separated into distinct confed eracies, and as such are carrying on war against each other.

"The question for neutral nations to consider is, what is the character of the war; and whether it should be regarded as a war carried on between parties severally in a position to wage war, and to claim the rights and to perform the obligations attaching to belligerents?

"Her Majesty's government consider that that question can only be answered in the affirmative. If the government of the northern portion of the late Union possesses the advantages inherent in long-established governments, the government of the southern portion has nevertheless duly constituted itself and carries on in a regular form the administration of the civil government of the States of which it is composed.

asking for instructions how to treat Confederate cruisers, with a period prior to May 6th, when the Secretary himself had not yet received his official copy of the President's proclamation, and when Lord Lyons in the despatch enclosing it, of the date of April 22d (the same, received May 10th, about which Historicus makes so great a demonstration), only speaks of his (Lord Lyons') losing no time in communicating the proclamation to Admiral Milne. It is hard to see how Admiral Milne's answer to this communication could have got the start of Lord Lyons' despatch, unless the Admiral happened to be ashore at Halifax, and then it would be at most a single Admiral, and not "Admirals," who had asked for instructions.

1 I give this despatch entire, believing that it will constitute hereafter a memorable document in the history of the American civil struggle. See further comments on it

hereafter, p.40 19

"Her Majesty's government, therefore, without assuming to pronounce upon the merits of the question on which the respective parties are at issue, can do no less than accept the facts presented to them. They deeply deplore the disruption of a confederacy with which they have at all times sought to cultivate the most friendly relations; they view with the greatest apprehension and concern the misery and desolation in which that disruption threatens to involve the provinces now arrayed in arms against each other; but they feel that they cannot question the right of the Southern States to claim to be recognized as a belligerent, and, as such, invested with all the rights and prerogatives of a belligerent.

“I think it right to give your Lordship this timely notice of the view taken by Her Majesty's government of the present state of affairs in North America, and Her Majesty's government do not wish you to make any mystery of that view.

"I shall send your Lordship by an early opportunity such further information on these matters as may be required for your guidance; at present I have only to add that no expression of regret that you may employ at the present disastrous state of affairs will too strongly declare the feelings with which Her Majesty's government contemplate all the evils which cannot fail to result from it.

"I am, &c.,

"J. RUSSELL."

These grave utterances have never before been reprinted in the United States, that I am aware of. The despatches from which they are taken well deserve the attention of the American reader as tending to show (in judicial phraseology) — I will not go so far as to say as absolutely proving that it was England, and not France, which took the initiative in recognizing the belligerency of the Confederates. As a matter of fact, England, as is well known, issued her proclamation of neutrality a month earlier than the French Emperor, his. But I would ask any reader, English or American, if there is anything here which sounds like "interfering with neutral commerce" by an American blockade, as spoken of by Earl Russell in his late apology for the motives for recognition, or anything that sounds like the opinion quoted by him on the part of the Lord Chancellor, "that there was no course but one to pursue, namely, to regard the blockade on the part of the United States as the exercise of a belligerent right?" On the contrary, is there not matter enough here to have disturbed the conscience of Lord Russell when he read such a sentence as that reported in Mr. Bright's speech, in the Times of March 14 ?

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