Part 3

Mr. Sumner had been with the President and his Cabinet the day before, to read important letters just received from Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright; but he did not know the conclusion on the question. The few words in reply to Mr. Hale were in the spirit of peace, and as such were warmly welcomed by the public. The sympathy they awakened attests the prevailing interest. A leading citizen of Providence wrote: “Very many thanks for your mild rebuke of our friend Senator Hale, when he mounted the war-horse.” Another in Boston adopted the same vein: “For your wise words, after the war speech of Mr. Hale, you have my thanks, and the thanks of thousands who will never express to you their feelings. I know you will exert your great influence on the side of peace, and I rejoice that you have so much moral power in this matter.” Rev. George C. Beckwith, Corresponding Secretary of the American Peace Society, had promptly declared his trust: “It is a matter of special congratulation, that the helm of our Foreign Relations, so far as the Senate is concerned, is held at this juncture in hands so worthy of our confidence. We trust that you and your Committee will have all the wisdom and other qualities needed to meet the case now before us just as it ought to be.” A friend holding high office in Massachusetts augured new strength for Mr. Sumner in the battle with Slavery: “Your decisive speech,” he wrote, “will do much to raise you in the estimation of those who were alarmed by your Emancipation doctrines, and who begin to see that you are right in that, as well as other things.”

The confidence reposed had its responsibilities increased by his position as Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, and, when the surrender was announced, Mr. Sumner felt it a duty to do what he could in reconciling the people to his conclusion, especially as he was satisfied that the original taking of the Rebels could not be justified without adopting most obnoxious British precedents. Besides, reform in Maritime Law seemed to be involved in the discussion, and he was not without hope of contributing to this important result. Therefore he made an early occasion to address the Senate on the subject.

In his speech Mr. Sumner brought into strong relief the early and long continued pretension of England to enter our ships and take our sailors without trial of any kind, as Captain Wilkes had entered the Trent and taken the Rebel agents. In presenting this point, he was determined not only by the London press, which adopted the original American objection to any such entry and taking, but also by the unpublished opinions of the law advisers of the Crown, which he had before him in manuscript.

The capture of the Rebels was known in London on the evening of 27th November. But some time before, on an intimation that such an attempt might be made, the British Government had asked the opinion of the law officers on the questions involved in such an act. An answer was returned, bearing date 12th November, which was signed by the Queen’s Advocate-General, the Attorney-General, and the Solicitor-General. In this opinion it was stated: “The United States ship of war may put a prize crew on board the West India steamer and carry her off to a port of the United States for adjudication by a Prize Court there; _but she would have no right to remove Messrs. Mason and Slidell and carry them off as prisoners, leaving the ship to pursue her voyage_.” This opinion was supposed to have greater value because it was given sixteen days before anything on the subject had appeared in the London press. Afterwards the case of the Trent was submitted to these law officers, and on the 28th of November they gave another opinion in accordance with the former, where they say: “From on board a merchant ship of a neutral power, pursuing a lawful and innocent voyage, _certain individuals have been taken by force. They were not apparently officers in the military or naval service of the Confederate Government._” They conclude that Her Majesty’s Government “will be justified in requiring reparation for the international wrong which has been on this occasion committed.” In conformity with this opinion, Earl Russell, in his letter demanding the surrender, treated it simply as a forcible taking of “certain individuals” from an innocent British vessel at sea by an American ship of war, all of which had been too often done by British ships of war with innocent American vessels at sea.

It will be observed that Earl Russell uses the most general language, without specification; but the contemporaneous press dwelt on the single point taken by the law officers. One of these is quoted in Mr. Sumner’s speech.

In France, the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ wrote, as if instructed from Downing Street:--

“England _confines herself_ to denying that an officer can erect himself into a judge in such a cause, the decision of which should belong only to a Court of Admiralty. Captain Wilkes, _substituting himself arbitrarily for the judicial authority_, alone competent to give a legal character to his prize, England can see in the act which he committed on the Trent only an act of violence, an outrage perpetrated against the British flag.”[24]

This single point found sudden favor in England. Nassau W. Senior, the eminent economist, in close relations with the British Cabinet, wrote to Mr. Sumner, under date of December 10: “We think that Captain Wilkes _could not make himself judge in his own cause_; that the utmost he could have done legally would have been to take the Trent into an Admiralty Court.” Here the able Englishman simply echoes the early and constant doctrine of our country; but others among his countrymen did the same.

The intimate relations of Mr. Sumner with Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, already existing, were quickened during this anxious period, when these eminent English statesmen wrote constantly, full of friendship for our country and anxious always for peace. The perfect freedom of these communications may be judged by a passage in a letter of Mr. Cobden.

“I write to you, of course, in confidence; and I write to you what I would not write to any other American,--nay, what it would be perhaps improper for any other Englishman than myself to utter to any other American but yourself. But we are, I think, both more of Christians and cosmopolitans than British or Yankee.”

Intervening time and death have removed the seal of confidence, opening what passed between them to the observation of history.

Mr. Cobden occupied himself especially to obtain important reforms in International Law on the ocean. This was part of his scheme for disarmament; and here Mr. Sumner was a fellow-laborer. He was anxious that the attention suddenly directed to Maritime Rights should redound to the good of the Human Family. His programme was given in a letter dated December 5, and read by Mr. Sumner to President Lincoln and his Cabinet, while considering the British demand, on the forenoon of Christmas day. Mr. Cobden begins by quoting from the public letter of General Scott, then at Paris.

“I am sure that the President and people of the United States would be but too happy to let these men go free, unnatural and unpardonable as their offences have been, if by it they could emancipate the commerce of the world. Greatly as it would be to our disadvantage, at this present crisis, to surrender any of these maritime privileges of belligerents which are sanctioned by the Laws of Nations, I feel that I take no responsibility in saying that the United States will be faithful to their traditional policy upon this subject, and to the spirit of their political institutions.”

He then proceeds:--

“If I were in the position of your Government, I would act upon it, and thus, by a great strategic movement, turn the flank of the European powers, _especially of the governing classes of England_. I would propose to let Mason and Slidell go, and stipulate, at the same time, for a complete abandonment of the old code of Maritime Law as upheld by England and the European powers. I would propose that private property at sea should be exempt from capture by armed Government ships. On this condition I would give in my adhesion to the abolition of privateering. I would propose that neutral merchant vessels, in time of war, as in time of peace, should be exempt from search, visitation, or detention, by armed Government vessels, when on the ocean or high seas,--I mean when beyond that distance from the shore which removes them from the jurisdiction of any maritime state. I would propose to abolish blockades of purely commercial ports, excepting for articles contraband of war.”

To these just and magnificent reforms Mr. Cobden returns in other letters, dwelling on the abolition of blockades, but pressing upon our country the duty of advancing all, and, in the ardor of appeal, exclaiming, “Take high ground with Europe for a complete sweep of the old maritime code, and then take your own time to deal with the Slave States,” and concluding another letter with the words, “Recollect how immensely you would gain in moral power by leading all Europe in the path of civilization. You owe it to yourselves and us.”

This correspondence reveals the anxiety of good Englishmen, and also the various reports by which the public mind was perplexed. In one letter Mr. Cobden writes: “Everybody tells me that war is inevitable; and yet I do not believe in war.” In another he mentions “an impression in high quarters that Mr. Seward wishes to quarrel with this country,” which he characterizes as “absurd enough.” In another he alludes to the joint resolution of thanks to Captain Wilkes, adopted by the House of Representatives, as “viewed here by our alarmist journals as almost a declaration of war”; and, after mentioning that “grave men, holding the highest post in your cultivated State of Massachusetts, compliment Captain Wilkes for having given an affront to the British lion,” he says, with point, “It makes it very hard for Bright and me to contend against the British-lion party in this country.”

Even in this peculiar atmosphere his clearness of perception did not fail, and Mr. Cobden saw the mistake of principle or policy involved in the “impressment” of the Rebel agents. In the postscript of a letter dated November 27, the very day when the taking was first known in London, he wrote: “We are rather unprepared to find you exercising in a strained manner the right of search, _inasmuch as you have been supposed to be always the opponents of the practice_.”

In the same vein his eloquent colleague, Mr. Bright, wrote, under date of December 5: “Our law officers are agreed and strong in their opinion of the illegality of the seizure of the commissioners; _but I cannot make out how or where it exceeds the course taken by English ships of war before the War of 1812_. But all the people here, of course, accept their opinion as conclusive on the law of the case.”

Thus directly from the opinions of the law officers, and also from various testimony, including the press, is it apparent that the special objection of England was founded on the forcible taking of “certain individuals” from a British vessel.

Naturally, therefore, Mr. Sumner planted himself on the early American postulate, constantly maintained by us and constantly denied by England. In the able note already cited Mr. Dana sums up the result.

“This celebrated case can be considered as having settled but one principle, and that had substantially ceased to be a disputed question: viz., that a public ship, though of a nation at war, cannot take persons out of a neutral vessel at sea, whatever may be the claim of her Government on those persons.”[25]

Mr. Seward was, therefore, right, when, in his communication to Lord Lyons, he announced the settlement of the case “upon principles confessedly American.”[26] In similar spirit, Prince Gortschakoff, in behalf of the Russian Cabinet, congratulated our Republic upon “remaining faithful to the political principles which she has always maintained, even when those principles were turned against her, and abstaining from invoking in her turn the benefit of doctrines which she has always repudiated.”[27] And Baron Ricasoli, speaking for the Italian Cabinet, would not believe that the Government at Washington “desired to change its character all at once, and become the champion of theories which history has shown to be calamitous, and which public opinion has condemned forever.”[28]

* * * * *

The correspondence “in relation to the recent removal of certain citizens of the United States from the British mail-steamer Trent,” including the letter of Earl Russell and the reply of Mr. Seward, and also the letter of M. Thouvenel, Minister of Foreign Affairs in France, was communicated to the Senate January 6, 1862. Its reference to the Committee on Foreign Relations was, on motion of Mr. Sumner, made the special order for January 9th, at one o’clock, when he made his speech.

January 7th, two days before Mr. Sumner’s speech, the subject was discussed in the House of Representatives, and strong speeches were made against the surrender. Mr. Vallandigham, of Ohio, a leading Democrat, said:--

“I avail myself of this, the earliest opportunity yet presented, to express my utter and strong condemnation, as one of the Representatives of the people, of the act of the Administration surrendering Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell to the British Government.… In six days after the imperious and peremptory demand of Great Britain they were abjectly surrendered, upon the mere rumor of the approach of a hostile fleet; and thus, Sir, for the first time in our national history, have we strutted insolently into a quarrel without right and then basely crept out of it without honor; and thus, too, for the first time, has the American eagle been made to cower before the British lion.”[29]

Then again the same Democratic Proslavery orator said:--

“I would prefer a war with England to the humiliation which we have tamely submitted to; and I venture the assertion that such a war would have called into the field five hundred thousand men who are not now there, and never will be without it, and have developed an energy and power in the United States which no country has exhibited in modern times, except France, in her great struggle in 1793.”[30]

In equal opposition to the British demand, Mr. B. F. Thomas, of Massachusetts, an able lawyer, said:--

“The surrender is made, the thing done. In the presence of great duties we have no time for the luxury of grief. Complaint of the Government would be useless, if not groundless. It was too much to ask of it to take another war on its hands.… But we are not called upon, Mr. Speaker, to say that the demand was manly or just. It was unmanly and unjust. It was a demand which, in view of her history, of the rights she had always claimed and used as a belligerent power, of the principles which her greatest of jurists, Lord Stowell, had imbedded in the Law of Nations, England was fairly estopped to make.… When the matter is more carefully weighed, it will be seen and felt that no wrong was done to England,--that there was no wrong in the forbearance to exercise an extreme right,--no insult, for none was intended,--that our feeling, if any, leaned to virtue’s side, was a relaxation of the iron rigor of law from motives of humanity and Christian courtesy,--that, on the other hand, England has done to us a great wrong, in availing herself of our moment of weakness to make a demand, which, accompanied as it was by the ‘pomp and circumstance of war,’ was insolent in spirit and thoroughly unjust.… But the loss will ultimately be hers. She is treasuring up to herself wrath against the day of wrath. She has excited in the hearts of this people a deep and bitter sense of wrong, of injury inflicted at a moment when we could not respond. It is night with us now; but through the watches of the night, even, we shall be girding ourselves to strike the blow of righteous retribution.”[31]

In similar spirit, Mr. Wright, of Pennsylvania, said:--

“Let England take them; if she has a mind to fête and toast them, let her do it,--it is none of our business; if England desires to make lions of Confederate Rebels, it is a mere matter of taste. If they have to be surrendered, then let them be surrendered under a protest, while we shall remember hereafter that there is a matter to be cancelled between the British Government and the United States of North America.”[32]

These utterances show elements in the atmosphere when Mr. Sumner spoke. With many there was grief mingled with indignation, while others who accepted the result felt a new burden added to the war. Something was needed as a rally.

SPEECH.

MR. PRESIDENT,--Every principle of International Law, when justly and authoritatively settled, is a safeguard of peace and a landmark of civilization. It constitutes part of that code which is the supreme law, above all municipal laws, binding the whole Commonwealth of Nations. Such a settlement may be by a general Congress of Nations, as at Munster, Vienna, or Paris; or it may be through the general accord of treaties; or it may be by a precedent established under such conspicuous circumstances, with all nations as assenting witnesses, that it becomes at once a commanding rule of international conduct. Especially is this the case, if disturbing pretensions, long maintained to the detriment of civilization, are practically renounced. Without congress or treaty, such a precedent is now established.

Surely it ought to be considered and understood in its true character. Undertaking to explain it, I shall speak for myself alone; but I shall speak frankly, according to the wise freedom of public debate, and the plain teachings of history on the question involved, trusting sincerely that what I utter may contribute something to elevate the honest patriotism of the country, and perhaps to secure that tranquil judgment under which this precedent will be the herald, if not the guardian, of international harmony.

* * * * *

Two old men and two younger associates, recently taken from the British mail packet Trent, on the high seas, by order of Captain Wilkes of the United States Navy, and afterwards detained in custody at Fort Warren, are liberated and placed at the disposition of the British Government. This is at the instance of that Government, made on the assumption that the original capture was an act of violence constituting an affront to the British flag, and a violation of International Law. This is a simple outline of the facts. To appreciate the value of the precedent, other matters must be brought into view.

These two old men were citizens of the United States, and for many years Senators. Arrogant, audacious, persistent, perfidious,--one was author of the Fugitive Slave Bill, and the other was chief author of the filibustering system which has disgraced our national name and disturbed our national peace. Occupying places of trust and power in the service of the country, they conspired against it, and at last the secret traitors and conspirators became open rebels. The present Rebellion, surpassing in proportions and in wickedness any rebellion in history, was from the beginning quickened and promoted by their untiring energies. That country to which they owed love, honor, and obedience, they betrayed and gave over to violence and outrage. Treason, conspiracy, and rebellion, each in succession, acted through them. The incalculable expenditures now tasking the national resources,--the untold derangement of affairs, not only at home, but abroad,--the levy of armies without example,--the devastation of extended spaces of territory,--the plunder of peaceful ships on the ocean, and the slaughter of fellow-citizens on the murderous battle-field,--such are some of the consequences proceeding directly from them.

To carry forward still further the gigantic crime of which they were so large a part, these two old men, with their two younger associates, stole from Charleston on board a Rebel steamer, and, under cover of darkness and storm, running the surrounding blockade and avoiding the national cruisers, succeeded in reaching the neutral island of Cuba, where, with open display and the knowledge of the British consul, they embarked on board the British mail packet Trent, bound for St. Thomas, whence they were to embark for England, in which kingdom one of them was to play the part of Ambassador of the Rebellion, while the other was to play the same part in France. The original treason, conspiracy, and rebellion, of which they were so heinously guilty, were all continued on this voyage, which became a prolongation of the original crime, destined to still further excess through their ambassadorial pretensions, which it was hoped would array two great nations against the United States, and enlist them openly in support of an accursed Slaveholding Rebellion. While on their way, the pretended ambassadors were arrested by Captain Wilkes, of the United States steamer San Jacinto, an accomplished officer, already well known by scientific explorations, who on this occasion acted without instructions from his Government. If in this arrest he forgot for a moment the fixed policy of the Republic, which has been from the beginning like a frontlet between the eyes, and transcended the Law of Nations, as the United States have always declared it, his apology will be found in the patriotic impulse by which he was inspired, and the British examples he could not forget. They were the enemies of his country, embodying in themselves the triple essence of worst enmity,--treason, conspiracy, and rebellion; and they bore a professed ambassadorial character, which, as he supposed, according to high British authority, rendered them liable to be stopped, while, as American citizens, they were liable to seizure by the National Government in strict conformity with long continued British practice. If, in the ardor of an honest nature, Captain Wilkes erred, he might well say,--

“Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man. The expedition of my violent love Outran the pauser reason.… … Who could refrain, That had a heart to love, and in that heart Courage to make his love known?”