CHAPTER XVI

THE EUROPEAN MENACE

While the Southern army indulged in its siesta after its victory, and seemed to wait for the war to come to an end of its own accord, the North was stirred by that event into more strenuous activity. Fresh levies were called for, and volunteers by scores of thousands eagerly responded to the call. New energy was brought to bear upon the fortification of Washington, so that the capital city might never again be in such danger of hostile conquest as it had been on that fateful twenty-first day of July, and for a dangerously considerable time afterwards.

Multitudes of the fugitives from the Manassas battle never returned to their duty. In many cases their term of service expired about that time, so that they could not be brought back by virtue of any law, civil or military. In other cases it was not thought worth while to drag back into the service men whose demoralization was too complete to admit of the hope that they might ever again be made effective soldiers. But their places were promptly taken by eager, patriotic young men, and General McClellan, with that rare capacity for organizing which was the distinguishing characteristic of his genius, molded the raw levies with almost incredible rapidity into effective regiments and brigades, a task in which, as has already been shown, the Confederates mightily aided him.

But in the meanwhile, the victory of the Confederates very seriously threatened the Federal cause with a new and terrible danger--namely, the danger of the recognition of the Southern Confederacy as an independent power. Great European nations under the lead of France and England had already recognized the claim of the Southern armies to belligerent rights. That was a measure of humanity and civilization so obviously proper and necessary that while it temporarily angered the North, and was construed there as an unfriendly act, it was presently and of necessity accepted by the Federal Government which, in its turn, made an informal but none the less effective recognition of belligerent rights on the part of the Southern armies. Without such recognition it would have been impossible to carry on the war upon anything like civilized lines. Without it no prisoner could have been exchanged, no flag of truce could have been recognized, no cartels could have been agreed upon, no safe-conducts could have been respected--in short, without such Federal recognition of belligerent rights on the part of the Southerners the struggle must have speedily degenerated into a savage contest. All prisoners in that case would have been at the mercy of their captors to do with as they pleased. There would have been no possible opportunity for negotiation or for the interchange of any of those amenities, by means of which the horrors of war are so greatly mitigated to individuals. There could have been no paroles. On both sides the prisoners would have been in the position of captives to a savage foe, responsible in no way to civilization.

The recognition of Southern belligerency was so obviously a necessity of civilization that the Federal commanders had already assumed it, quite as a matter of course, from the beginning, and they had daily acted upon it. But the people, uninstructed as they were in military law, deeply resented England's act in recognizing it. They regarded that act as scarcely less hostile than would have been the formal recognition of the Southern Confederacy as an independent nation.

After the battle of Manassas there was very serious danger of even such a recognition as that. The South eagerly hoped for it and the North greatly feared its coming.

At that time England, France and Germany were looking with very jealous suspicion upon the rising glory of the American Republic. Their monarchs feared the influence of Democratic doctrines supported by such an object lesson as the prosperity and phenomenal growth of the American nation afforded. The tradesmen and manufacturers of those countries, equally with their statesmen, dimly but apprehensively foresaw what has since in our later time come to pass. They foresaw the conquest of the world's markets by American industry. To break up this American Union meant for them a release from these dangers, political, commercial and industrial.

Moreover, the United States Government was at that time just entering upon a new and extreme policy of protective tariff exclusion which threatened very serious detriment to the trade of the manufacturing countries of Europe. The South, being an agricultural country with scarcely any manufacturing interests, stood for the utmost possible freedom of trade. Very naturally, the manufacturing and commercial nations of Europe looked with more or less favor upon a revolution in this country, which promised to give them not only an equal commercial chance but a sentimental advantage also in the Southern markets in competition with the New England fabricators of goods, wares and merchandise.

From the very beginning, the South had looked to such impulses and interests as these as an offset to Northern superiority in numbers and resources. The South hoped from the beginning for foreign intervention. It was confidently believed that if any European nation should formally recognize the Southern Confederacy's independence, the United States would treat that recognition as equivalent to an open declaration of war. In such an event the recognizing nation must of course send its fleets to raise the blockade of Southern ports, and possibly also its battalions to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Virginians and Carolinians and Mississippians on hard fought battle fields.

The Confederate victory at Manassas, by reason of its completeness and still more by reason of its spectacular accompaniments, gave peculiar force to all these arguments in favor of that European recognition of Southern independence which must have threatened the final disruption of the American Union, the breaking down of the most dangerous trade rival of those countries, the opening of the South to absolute free trade, with a distinct preference for English, French and German over "Yankee" goods, and the political weakening of that growing impulse to republicanism which resided in the glory and greatness of the American Republic. To dissolve and destroy the Union would have been once and for all time to make an end of the most potent influence that ever existed on earth in behalf of a "world without kings, and a people supreme."

When the battle of Manassas was done, and McDowell's army had fled in panic as a disorganized mob into Washington, and was manifestly prepared to flee farther if it should be pressed with vigor, as every foreign observer expected that it would be, there was every inducement and every excuse for the recognition of the Southern Confederacy by European nations, and for their demand that the still ineffective blockade should be raised as an unjustifiable interference with international commerce. Such action on the part of France and England would undoubtedly have precipitated war between those countries and the United States, and in that war, knowing as we do the relations then existing between European nations, Austria, Italy and Prussia would very probably have joined. What the consequences would have been each reader must judge for himself, but at the very least it may be said with entire safety that such a circumstance would have added very greatly to the embarrassment of the United States Government, and to the chances of ultimate success on the part of the South.

The pretender who sat at that time upon the fraud-buttressed throne of France and called himself "Napoleon III" was ready and eager for such interference. But he dared not undertake it single handed. He sought the alliance and aid of England, and without doubt he would have secured both but for one fact. Whatever policies an English government may favor, there is always behind that government, as its master, the sentiment of the British people, and that sentiment was at that time unalterably and implacably hostile to human slavery.

It was the misfortune of the South that its contention for its own right of self-government was inseparably linked in the minds of men abroad with the cause of human bondage, against which British public sentiment revolted.

Great Britain is not a republic in our sense of the word, but under all its forms of monarchy, and with all its embarrassments of aristocratic privilege, its people actually and absolutely rule.

Its people strongly sympathized with the Southern claim of a right of autonomy. They still more strongly sympathized with themselves in their desire to cripple their greatest and most threatening commercial and industrial rival, and to get all the cotton they needed for their mills. They wanted the war to end quickly. They wanted the Southern ports opened to their ships, and the Southern cotton to be accessible again for their use. They wanted the American Union broken up. They wanted to trade with the Southern States upon equal terms or with a positive advantage over their New England competitors. But even for such sake they were unwilling to lend the power of Great Britain to the perpetuation of human slavery anywhere upon earth.

There was the fatal miscalculation of the Southerners. They reckoned with British trade interests, with British and other European political prejudice, but they did not sufficiently reckon with that British hostility to slavery which--whatever the political or trade considerations might be--would not consent to any action on the part of a British government which should even seem to make Great Britain responsible for the perpetuation of human slavery anywhere.

Thus the British government was restrained by the all-dominating British sentiment from interfering, and France did not venture to interfere alone or even with the probability of Austrian or Prussian support.

There was Russia to be reckoned with, also, and as later official publications show, the Czar not only set his face against intervention in behalf of the South, but at one critical time actually sent his fleets to American waters to menace any and every power that might assume to interpose to the detriment of the United States.

At the time, however, the Manassas victory gave great and well-justified occasion for the fear at the North that Great Britain and France, backed by the other western European powers, might be persuaded to interpose in behalf of the Confederates. For a time, therefore, the outlook for the Union was a very gloomy one, but the youth of the country continued to enlist by tens and scores of thousands, and in spite of the hostility of a political party strongly opposed to the administration and to the war itself, Mr. Lincoln's government went on with its preparations for prosecuting the war with vigor, to its predestined end.