The Tenth Decade of the United States

II

THE NEW OUTLOOK

THE importance of Secretary Seward’s influence in the domestic affairs of the United States during Johnson’s administration has probably been exaggerated; but it would be hard to exaggerate the importance of what he achieved and of what he initiated in his own proper field of diplomacy. His chief, occupied as he was with fierce controversies over other subjects, found, we may well suppose, but little time for foreign relations. He does not appear to have interfered with policies which were already adopted or to have initiated any new policies of his own. Seward must therefore be held responsible, to a degree somewhat unusual, for the conduct of the delicate negotiations, involving very far-reaching consequences, to which the war gave rise. It was he who first presented America to Europe in that attitude of conscious strength which the thorough establishment of our nationality at last enabled us to take. It was he who reasserted, effectively, yet without any arrogance, our traditional stand in reference to the Latin republics to the south of us. It was he who, facing westward, accomplished an expansion of our system never even meditated until his day by those who had guided our destinies, and turned our thoughts to the farther shores of the Pacific as a field for American trade and American influence.

The intervention of France in Mexico offered to Seward as good an opportunity as he ever got for the exercise of his skill in diplomacy; and his conduct of that episode exhibits his powers and his peculiar temperament as well, perhaps, as any other activity of his long career. Until the end of the war, the situation was difficult in the extreme. The question which he had constantly to consider was whether, and how far, in view of our embarrassment with the Confederacy, we should endure the contumely and the danger, the disregard of our so frequently declared policy, and the threat to our interests, which the presence of the French in Mexico, and the subversion of the native Mexican government, certainly involved. For it was perfectly apparent that the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine depended on the outcome of our civil strife. It required no undue stretching of the imagination to perceive that the future, not of Mexico alone, but of Central and of South America, would be profoundly affected if we were not soon in a position to exercise a commanding influence. “I wish,” said the Marquis de Boissy, speaking in the French Senate early in the spring of 1865, “that the American war may not end, but continue forever, even to the complete extermination of the contending parties. If the war should unfortunately come to an end, our army would be taken prisoner.” This frank expression of the French senator’s feeling indicates fairly well the relations between the United States and France throughout the latter part of the war; relations concerning which M. Drouyn de Lhuys, minister of foreign affairs, remarked to Mr. Bigelow in January, 1865, that they were “as usual, friendly, but delicate — delicate.” Seward’s task had been to accept nothing of what had been done in Mexico, to surrender none of the rights which we had claimed as the guarantor of the integrity of other American Republics, and yet to avoid a collision with France until our hands should be free. All this he accomplished by the device of treating the French invasion as if it were confined to the object originally avowed — to the enforcement, namely, of certain European claims against Mexico. He thus left in abeyance the questions which would at once be raised by a recognition of the true character of Napoleon’s enterprise. It had been hard to restrain Congress, which had more than once threatened to force the Secretary’s hand, as Grant also, by his massing of troops on the Texas frontier, seemed now bent on forcing it. Grant had actually worked out a plan by which American soldiers, Union and Confederate, were to be united in Mexico under Major-General Schofield. But Seward, by adroit flattery of Schofield himself, diverted him from the enterprise and sent him to Paris “to get his legs under Napoleon’s mahogany, and tell him he must get out of Mexico.” There was no collision, and yet, when at last our great armaments were free, we could take up the true issues involved in the setting up of Maximilian unembarrassed by any concessions or agreements made in the time of our weakness.

The intervention must be considered as the last of the long series of efforts which France has made to extend her power and her civilization to the new world. Louis Napoleon, whose whole career as the ruler of France was a series of fantastic revivals of imperial enterprises, undoubtedly designed to accomplish in Mexico and Central America what had been vainly attempted in Canada and in Louisiana two centuries before, what at the beginning of the nineteenth century Napoleon I had again for a little while meditated. In the spring of 1865, when Seward’s hands were at last free, it was not obvious that the adventure had failed. Maximilian, established in his castle-palace of Chapultepec, would have needed a greater perspicuity than accorded with his mild and amiable temper, and a wider experience in affairs, to perceive how slender and unstable were the bulwarks of his throne. He still had an army of forty thousand Frenchmen, commanded by Marshal Bazaine, and Napoleon had promised him that the Foreign Legion, numbering fifteen thousand, should not be withdrawn for six years from the date of his accession. The Republican government was overthrown, and its forces practically driven from the country. Although Juarez the president, an extraordinary representative of the Indian race, had never given up the fight, his address of January 1, 1865, issued from Chihuahua, reads almost like a confession that his cause was lost. Porfirio Diaz, hero of Puebla and of older battles, who had held out for months at Oajaca, in the south, was taken at last and brought a prisoner to the capital; in him and Juarez was the entire hope of the Republicans. Mexico was in fact freer from civil strife than she had been for years, and there were serious-minded observers who hoped that she might find in the rule of Maximilian and Carlotta, — the tall, fairhaired Hapsburg and his womanly, devoted Belgian consort, — an order and stability which neither republican nor monarchical institutions had ever yet secured.

But these hopeful signs were all on the surface. Whether one looked within or without, the insecurity of the Empire should have been plain. The only men who had really welcomed Maximilian to Mexico were the reactionaries, political and religious. It does not seem probable that these were, to begin with, more than a respectable minority of the Mexican people; and he had not held them to his cause. On the contrary, he had disappointed the old opponents of the Republic by his disposition to conciliate its adherents, who on their part had with few exceptions rejected his overtures; and he had disappointed the clerical party by refusing to restore to them the power and the possessions which they had lost through the reforms of Juarez. Before six months were passed, he had broken with the leaders of the monarchical faction, and he had broken also with Rome. He had failed, too, in his several attempts at administrative reform; his empire was as dependent on France for financial as it was for military support.

And there were signs enough already that France was wavering. The Duc de Morny, president of the Corps Législatif, and next to Napoleon himself the principal advocate and supporter of the intervention, died in March. There was a strong party in the Chambers, headed by Jules Favre, which opposed the whole Mexican scheme with an increasing bitterness. France had other foreign complications that threatened to force her to recall her troops. And now at last there were the United States, with their enormous army and navy, and their Monroe Doctrine, to reckon with.

Seward showed no undue haste to assert the control of the situation which we had gained. On the contrary, his communications to the French foreign office were uniformly mild and courteous; he generously forbore to heighten with threats the plain menace of the entire situation. American soldiers and American rifles were by this time strengthening the hands of Juarez, whose force was again rapidly increasing; and many Confederates also found their way into Mexico, some to be naturalized and to take office under Maximilian’s government, others to engage in various business enterprises. There was, moreover, a friction between Sheridan’s command and Maximilian’s forces on the Rio Grande which might, if such had been our desire, have furnished a good enough pretext for hostilities. Price, Terrell, Hindman, and Kirby Smith, Confederate general officers of high rank, and Commodore Maury, were members of the American colony at the Mexican capital. From time to time Dr. William M. Gwin, an adventurous American, sometime senator from California, where he had been the leader of the Southern party, also appeared there; he was the moving spirit in a scheme to colonize the districts of Sonora and Lower California under a grant from a former Mexican government to the Swiss house of Jecker, which grant it was now proposed to transfer to France. Of this scheme our government felt that it was bound to take cognizance, and Seward succeeded in frustrating it. But in spite of all these things he proceeded with a deliberation born of confidence toward his main object—the withdrawal of French support from the Empire. The Empire, it was plain enough, must then fall of its own weight. He meant to get the French army recalled without the use of force.

He therefore gradually strengthened the tone of the communications which he made through our minister, Mr. Bigelow, to the French Foreign Office, never abruptly or harshly announcing our ultimate purpose. In September, 1865, he sent a memorandum which calmly set forth the general attitude of the United States toward Mexico, insisting, however, on the right of the Mexican people to choose, without interference, their own form of government. In October, the tension was heightened by a most unwise decree of Maximilian which practically outlawed the adherents of the Republic — a measure which the French marshal, Bazaine, at once made good by orders to his subordinates. This violent course provoked much feeling in the United States. The Senate promptly passed a resolution denouncing it. Seward drew the attention of the French government to the decree, and by the middle of December he felt that the time was come to state, in plainer words than he had yet employed, that the long friendship between the two countries “would be brought into imminent jeopardy unless France could deem it consistent with her interest and her honor to desist from the prosecution of armed intervention in Mexico.” In the same dispatch he declared, in the most positive terms, that we would never recognize the Maximilian government. The President, in his annual message to Congress, indicated quite as clearly our attitude toward the intervention and the Empire.

Napoleon was by this time convinced of his failure. M. Drouyn de Lhuys had intimated to Mr. Bigelow, even before Seward’s dispatch of December 16, that the French government was desirous of withdrawing its troops. The inspired press of Paris, by adopting a conciliatory tone toward the United States, and a tone of depreciation toward Maximilian and his government, began now to pave the way for a change of policy. In January, 1866, M. Drouyn de Lhuys, retreating by the door which Seward had all the time held open for him, suddenly returned to the ground which his country had taken when the project of intervention was first broached in 1861. He announced his expectation of a guarantee by Mexico of the claims of France. Seward acknowledged the statement with perfect gravity, and renewed his assurances of neutrality. But the French minister’s proposal, that as a condition of the withdrawal we should recognize Maximilian’s government, was firmly rejected. When, a little later, the legislative chambers began their session, Napoleon took occasion in his speech to announce his change of policy. Early in April, our department of state was informed that the French troops would evacuate Mexico in three detachments, the last of which would sail not later than November, 1867. Subsequently, however, the withdrawal was hastened, and in March of 1867 Bazaine and his command, the last French army to set foot upon this continent, sailed from Vera Cruz.

It was not until the end of May, 1866, that Maximilian knew that his imperial backer had abandoned him. From that time, there was never any real hope for his government; but he would not at once give way to his despair. The Empress was equally resolute. Of her own motion she set forth upon a journey to Europe, where she sought in vain, first to hold Napoleon to his word, and then to secure elsewhere the help without which the Empire was lost. Napoleon, adding brutality to his breach of faith, would not even hear her with courtesy. From him she turned to Rome. Failing there also, she broke down under the strain of her anxiety and the bitterness of her disappointment. Maximilian, waiting for some news of succor, learned, instead, that his wife had lost her reason.

The young prince was for a time unmanned by his sorrow: he hesitated, and would make no final decision. Once, he was on the point of abdicating; but unwise counsel, and the appeals of men whose whole hope was in the empire, deterred him from that course. He at last resolved to throw himself on the support of the Mexican people. That recourse was hopeless, for in a few months Juarez was master of the provinces, and Diaz, who had escaped from prison, was besieging the capital.

In March, Maximilian and his followers were shut up in Querataro. Many powerful influences were at work to save him. Seward also did his best. But he himself made little effort to escape. If he had failed as an emperor, he could at least face disaster with the courage and the dignity of a right princely nature. Betrayed by the infamous Lopez, tried before a court-martial of boys, and ordered to be shot, he spent his last days in the discharge of all the obligations of friendship and courtesy. A false report of the death of Carlotta being brought to him in prison, he said simply, “One less tie to bind me to the world!” Led forth to his execution, and told to stand between two of his generals who were likewise condemned, he surrendered the place of honor to General Miramon in recognition of his courage. The rattle of the muskets marked, perhaps, the end of all monarchy in the New World; but the bitterest critic of democracy could scarcely desire a gentler figure than Maximilian’s to stand before the eyes of Americans as the last representative of aristocracy and of kingship on this continent.

The outcome was the reëstablishment in Mexico of the republican government, headed by the indefatigable Juarez, which we had recognized from the beginning to be the rightful source of authority. During the five remaining years of his presidency, Juarez went far to justify our confidence; he was constantly strengthening the foundations of order and of authority, and making plain the way for his still more competent successor. From the death of Maximilian to the present time Mexico was to know but two rulers, Juarez and Diaz; and both were exceptionally successful in their task of investing with the outward semblance of democracy a rule which is in truth absolute, though not despotic. One result of their success has been a steady growth of friendliness, and a better and better understanding, between the United States and our nearest neighbor to the southward.

The issue of intervention and the Empire was not the only matter concerning which we were in controversy with Mexico, or with France, at the end of the war. With both countries there were questions of claims and of counterclaims. Many of these had come about through the war itself; others were of longer standing. In July, 1868, an agreement with Mexico referred all the claims at issue between the two republics to a joint commission, which by successive extensions remained in existence until 1876. In settlement of our claims, which amounted to five hundred million dollars, less than four and one half millions was finally allowed. To Mexico, which claimed nearly eighty-seven millions, only one hundred and fifty thousand dollars was awarded. The negotiation with France lasted much longer. It was not until 1880 that a commission was agreed to. The awards which it made to both parties were less than two per cent of the claims.

The war had brought us into no other serious complications with Latin-American countries. Now that slavery was gone, one principal motive for concerning ourselves with the affairs of Cuba and of Central America — namely, the desire of the Southerners for more territory — was removed, and the Cuban question, for many years intermittently prominent in our diplomacy, ceased to attract attention until the discontents of the Cubans led, in 1868, to an uprising which soon began again to involve our interests and to enlist our sympathies. There was, however, a slight renewal of the discussion of an Isthmian Canal; and at one time it seemed probable that we should annex the West Indian islands of St. Thomas and St. John, which belonged to Denmark. Seward was the moving spirit in the enterprise. He had begun the negotiation in the winter of 1865 , and the next winter, on a tour of convalescence, he had visited the islands. Denmark had hesitated a year, but Seward was earnestly supported by General Raasloff, who was in a peculiar sense the representative at Washington of the Danish ministry then in office. It appears, in fact, that Raasloff’s own personal fortunes, and the fate of the ministry, of which he was a member, depended on the sale. When Congress met in December, 1867, the President sent to the Senate a treaty of purchase and annexation. But there was no demand of American public sentiment for the purchase, and a destructive earthquake, followed by a tidal wave and a hurricane, which visited the islands a little while before the treaty was sent in, seemed to Congress a convincing argument against it. Congress,moreover, probably welcomed the opportunity to inform Secretary Seward that it did not share his ardor for expansion. The House passed a sweeping resolution against the buying of more territory, and declared that if treaties of annexation were made it would not feel bound to appropriate the purchase money. The Senate was of the same mind, but Raasloff was liked at Washington, and senators were loath to reject the proposal outright. The treaty was laid on the table, and the subject was held in abeyance until a new administration came into office; and then, Raasloff being absent from Washington, the treaty was rejected. Early in 1869, another scheme of Seward’s, to buy from Santo Domingo the gulf and peninsula of Samana, widened later into a proposal to annex the entire island, was voted down by the House of Representatives.

Strained as our relations were with France and with Mexico at the end of the war, an adjustment satisfactory to us was reasonably assured from the day of Lee’s surrender. So much could not be said of our relations with Great Britain. Our differences with the mother country were too many and too debatable, public opinion on our side was too inflamed, on the other side too sluggish and ill informed, and both sides were still too lacking in good will, to permit of an easy or a quick adjustment. The mass of Americans then living had from their childhood been imbued with a tradition of enmity to England, and of friendship with France. Except the intellectual centres of the East — the old Federalist strongholds — and perhaps a certain number of Southern plantations, there were probably few American communities where the great names of earlier English history were revered, as they should be, as among our own immortals; and few where the heroworship of Napoleon Bonaparte was not common. It was still dangerous for any administration to be suspected of a foreign policy favorable to Great Britain, and such a policy was sure to be particularly unpopular in those communities, now not few, where Catholic Irish were numerous. On the other hand, there seems to be no question that a majority of the English ruling class still maintained an unfavorable, even a hostile and contemptuous, attitude toward the Republic. It is equally beyond question, however, that what are commonly called the lower classes in England, particularly the workingmen, were distinctly friendly to America, and had favored the North throughout the war. Henry Ward Beecher, who visited England in 1863, was writing, when he died, a glowing tribute to the British workingmen for their loyalty to the cause of free labor, notwithstanding the distress which they suffered from the failure of the cotton supply. “No other men of the English-speaking people,” he wrote, in the last sentence of his unfinished manuscript, “gave a testimony of the love of liberty so heroic or so pathetic as the weavers of Lancashire.” The disposition toward amity was thus in America strongest in the intellectual aristocracy, an influential, though by no means dominant, minority; while in England it was strongest in those classes which were, indeed, the most numerous, but had not the political control. Public sentiment and opinion in the two countries was an important factor; in both, but particularly in America, it had already great weight in diplomacy. Moreover, the social, intellectual, and industrial relations between the two countries were growing always closer and closer. It might, in fact, be said that the negotiations themselves owe much of their importance to the effect they had on the attitudes of the two peoples, as distinguished from their governments, toward each other.

Of the specific differences, the least important was the controversy over the ownership of the island of San Juan, in the Northwest. Neither was the old question of our rights in the fisheries of Canada and Newfoundland a matter of acute interest, save among the fishermen of New England. Under the treaty of 1854 we had been granting, in return for privileges in the fisheries, a reciprocity with Canada in certain commodities. It was found, however, that of the commodities named in the treaty of 1854, most of which were either food-stuffs or the raw material of manufactures, there were few which we sold to the Canadians in any considerable quantity, while our importations were comparatively large. It was held, therefore, that the reciprocity worked to our disadvantage, and that the disadvantage outweighed the privileges we had bought by conceding it. In March, 1866, having given the required twelve months’ notice, we brought the arrangement to an end. The whole question of the fisheries was therefore open again, and it was become more difficult than ever. For Great Britain was now entering on a course of great liberality with her North American provinces. The very next year she granted, in the new Dominion Act, an extraordinary measure of self-government to the Canadians, and at every presentation of our desire concerning the fisheries began to urge the desire of Canada for freer trade with the United States. For half a century, in fact, nearly every question of our relations with Great Britain has been complicated by the juxtaposition of Canada and the United States.

It was through Canada, too, that the more extreme of the Irish patriots, using the United States as a base, were now endeavoring to strike at the mother country. Within a few years the Fenian brotherhood had brought their association in America to a strength which aroused serious apprehensions in England and in Canada, and made, in the existing relations between ourselves and the English, a really serious threat to our peace. The society was founded in 1857. The American branch was at the end of the war organized in three hundred and sixty-four circles, covering all the states from Massachusetts to Illinois, and there were fifteen other circles in the army and navy. The total membership was probably not less than eighty thousand. By this time, however, there was a division of the members into two factions, one led by John O’Mahony, the other by William R. Roberts; it is probable that the attack on Canada was hastened in the hope that action would unite the factions. But when, in the spring of 1866, the incursions began, there was a lack of concord, and the preparation was clearly inadequate. As is always the case with secret movements, selfish and base men had joined the order for purposes of their own; and low politicians, in New York and elsewhere, had played upon the passions of the members.

The O’Mahony faction, operating from New York city and Portland, moved first against New Brunswick. Their rendezvous was Eastport, Maine, and in April five hundred men were gathered there. An iron steamer, purchased in New York, was to bring them arms, but O’Mahony, doubtless fearing interference by United States authorities, countermanded the order to set sail. Seven hundred and fifty stands of arms, sent from Portland, were, in fact, seized. Nevertheless, small parties of Fenians landed on the island of Campo Bello. But Canadian troops were promptly mobilized for resistance, United States regulars were sent to Calais, and the enterprise was soon abandoned.

Buffalo was the base of the Roberts faction, and its attempt had a somewhat more serious character. The extent of its preparation was indicated by the discovery of a thousand stands of arms at Rouse’s Point toward the close of May, and another thousand at St. Albans a little later. Both collections were seized. A convention was held at Buffalo on May 30, and two days later a body of twelve hundred to thirteen hundred men crossed the river and seized an unoccupied fort. Colonel O’Neil, a graduate of West Point, was in command. In an encounter with the Canadian militia, the invaders were worsted, and a considerable number were captured. General Grant at once went to Buffalo. The defeated Fenians, attempting to return, were intercepted by the U. S. S. Michigan, seven hundred of them were arrested, and the others were paroled. Similar measures prevented incursions front other points, and the enterprise, though several times bruited, was never again seriously attempted.

President Johnson had been prompt to urge upon United States marshals and attorneys the exercise of vigilance lest our neutrality laws be violated, and he had issued a proclamation to the people. The British government, though it was several times incited to make remonstrance to ours concerning the activity of Fenians on our soil, thought it wiser to forbear. It suggested, instead, that the two countries revise their laws of neutrality. In truth, Great Britain had no reason to complain of the way in which we enforced our laws, such as they were. On the contrary, Sir Frederick Bruce, British minister at Washington, said to Seward: “The government of the United States acted, when the moment for action came, with a vigor, a promptness, and a sincerity which call forth the warmest acknowledgments.” Nevertheless, there is no doubt that very many Americans did sympathize with the general aim of the Fenians, if not with their methods. Many of the men who were most active in the movement in England and Ireland, as well as in America, were American citizens, Union and Confederate veterans. Some of these were apprehended, and there were strong remonstrances from America at the severity of their punishment. Partly on account of the questions thus raised, partly on account of complications with other European states, the whole subject of the status and rights of Europeans naturalized in America was much discussed at this time. The outcome was a series of treaties, beginning in February, 1868, when we reached an understanding with the North German Confederation, which aimed to define in every case of doubtful citizenship, the rights and obligations both of the two countries and of such persons as might emigrate from one into another. In most of these treaties it was agreed that after living five years in America an emigrant should be considered to have renounced his allegiance to the country of his birth. By the end of 1870, the states of central Europe, Sweden, Norway, and finally Great Britain, had all made such agreements with us.

The Fenian movement did not of itself cause any break in our relations with the United Kingdom. It was of importance chiefly as an aggravation of the principal difference between the two main branches of the English-speaking people. That principal difference had arisen from the course of Great Britain, and the character of her neutrality, during the war. A brief review of the facts, familiar as they are, is necessary.

Early in May, 1861, less than a month after the attack on Sumter and President Lincoln’s call for volunteers to put down the insurrection, and less than a fortnight after his proclamation of the blockade, Queen Victoria proclaimed the neutrality of Great Britain, and thereby conceded to the Southern Confederacy the rights of a belligerent. Spain, France, and other countries of western Europe took the same course, but not quite so promptly. It has been held, and with reason, that the President’s proclamation of a blockade, and other acts of war by our own government, had in fact left the powers no other course, Thaddeus Stevens, a leader of the House of Representatives, maintained at the time that it would be wiser, instead of proclaiming a blockade, to declare the Southern ports closed. In July, Congress authorized the President to close them. But there were good reasons to doubt the effectiveness of a mere closure. It could also be argued that the queen’s proclamation was in reality of advantage to the North, since it freed the Union government of responsibility for the acts of the Confederates. In any event, it is hard to see how England or the other powers could have long delayed to take the action which they did take. Nevertheless, the promptness with which they took it provoked great resentment in America, where the feeling was that these countries, and particularly Great Britain, had been influenced by sympathy with the South or enmity to the Union. Mr. Seward and Mr. Adams, our minister to London, maintained that these proclamations, and England’s most of all, really gave life to the Confederacy. They even asserted that the insurrection would have collapsed after a few weeks but for the hope of foreign intervention which this premature recognition of belligerency encouraged, and that the British government was therefore to blame for the prolongation of the war. The too quick concession of belligerent rights to the Confederates was accordingly made a count in our arraignment. If it could be made good, it would be the principal count.

The course of the English press and the language of English public men were, however, more exasperating, and a more reasonable ground of resentment, than this particular act of the government It is difficult at this day to believe that English newspapers and English statesmen could possibly have said what in fact they did say concerning the American conflict; and it is a question whether their blind confidence in the ultimate success of the South or their coarse and ignorant abuse of the North was the more extraordinary. There were, it is true, notable exceptions among the public men. Cobden and Bright, like the whole class whom they best represented, W. E. Forster and John Stuart Mill, the Duke of Argyle and Sir George Lewis, were, for example, steadfast friends of the North. But these men did not pretend to speak for the country or for the government; and the exceptions among the newspapers were rarer. It is astonishing to read the words of Gladstone and of Earl Russell, the one declaring that the success of the Southern arms was “as certain as any event yet future and contingent can be,” and the latter that the “subjugation” of the South by the North would be a calamity to America and the world, “and especially calamitous to the negro race.” It is even more astonishing to find the Times, whose foreign service has long been so admirable, not merely confident of the overthrow of the North, but denouncing the Northern people as “insensate and degenerate,” and the war for the Union as a hateful and atrocious crime, which could not be defended before a single European society; or to find the Post gravely announcing its opinion that “if President Davis were to assume the functions of president of the United States, the population of the North would at once acknowledge his authority;” or to read in the Standard, under the date of Gettysburg and Vicksburg: “We have learned to dislike and almost to despise the North; to sympathize with, and cordially to admire, the South.” Although there was no such responsiveness of public sentiment between the two countries then as there is to-day, the effect of utterances like these, so common in the great organs of opinion and on the lips of the foremost Englishmen that they might well be taken for the voice of the nation, was very serious indeed. That there was a strong contrary sentiment — a sentiment favorable to the North and to the Union — could scarcely be apparent to Americans when a member of Parliament could say that he had never met an Englishman who did not sympathize with the South. These things, of course, could have no place in diplomacy; but they made the task of diplomacy much more difficult.

It did not help the matter that, in the first important incident of England’s neutrality, the arrest of Mason and Slidell, we ourselves had been under the necessity to admit that we were wrong. We did admit it promptly; but we barely escaped — it is said, through the personal intervention of Albert, Prince Consort, then in his last illness—a peremptory and hectoring demand for redress. That incident left us in a mood to press our case to the uttermost when it appeared that the neutrality which England had been so ready to proclaim did not prevent her from serving as a naval base for the Confederacy. Such, in truth, she was fast becoming when the graver and graver remonstrances of Mr. Adams finally made it plain that she must either change her course or fight.

The simplest explanation of her course is to say that the British government, in the maintenance of neutrality, went no farther than to enforce the letter of the existing British statute of foreign enlistments. That statute, passed in 1819, was conspicuously lacking in clearness and precision. When the Confederate agent, Bulloch, sought to ascertain if it would be possible for his government to get vessels of war built and equipped in England, he was informed that the law forbade the building, arming, and equipping, in British waters, of a ship intended to be employed in warfare against a friendly power. But it was held that merely to build a vessel for that use was not illegal. The law would not be violated unless she were both built and equipped in British waters, with the intent to use her in warfare against a friendly power. All that was necessary, therefore, in order to serve the object of the Confederacy, was that the ship and her equipment, both of which might be openly made and sold in England, should leave England separately. They might even be purchased of the same firm. Later, the United States minister brought a test case before an English court; and the decision, which was applauded by a crowded court room, practically confirmed the advice of Bulloch’s counsel. So long as the courts should interpret the law that way, and the government should hold the enforcement of the law as it stood to be the sole obligation of neutrality, there was no reason why the Confederates could not procure as many privateers and men of war as they could pay for. It is fair to keep in mind a characteristic of the English people —their extraordinary respect for the letter of their own laws — as somewhat explanatory, somewhat mitigatory, of the attitude of their government; but it is plain that the law thus interpreted was little better than no law at all. As a matter of fact, seven vessels, the Florida, the Alabama, the Shenandoah, the Georgia, the Alexandria, the Atlanta, and the Rappahannock, all either bought or built for the Confederacy in Great Britain, put to sea under the British flag, and destroyed, all told, one hundred and seventy-five United States merchant vessels, valued roughly, with their cargoes, at fifteen million dollars. It is perhaps too much to say that they alone destroyed our carrying trade, or to hold them solely responsible for the enormous decline of our merchant marine; but they were certainly the principal immediate cause of these things. The Confederates were thus enabled to inflict a material loss greater than any they could inflict by land. Still more powerful vessels were under construction in England when at last, in October, 1863, the ministry changed its policy, and the order was given to seize them.

The strongest, though not the heaviest, of our claims against Great Britain, was based on this inaction of the government up to the time of its change of policy, and on the depredations of the Confederate privateers. The heaviest claim was based on the prolongation of the war which — so Mr. Seward had urged — was due to Great Britain’s hasty recognition of the Confederates as belligerents. Great Britain, on the other hand, preferred many claims for injuries to British subjects, both in their persons and their property, which had been inflicted during the progress of the war; and there were counterclaims on our side. These questions of damages to individuals, however, though far more numerous and important than those which we had to adjust with any other country, were not otherwise different; if they had been all, we should, no doubt, have reached an agreement very soon, probably by submitting them to arbitration. But our enormous claim based on the neutrality proclamation was not for a moment seriously considered; and when our claim for reparation for the injuries inflicted by the Confederate cruisers was first advanced by Mr. Adams, Lord Russell coldly answered that her majesty’s government entirely disclaimed all responsibility for any acts of the Alabama. That position, first taken in March, 1863, was resolutely maintained until the end of the war. So late as the close of August, 1865, after two years of correspondence and negotiation, Lord Russell would go no farther than to propose a joint commission to sit on all claims arising during the war “which the two powers shall agree to refer.” Years afterwards, he spoke as if this proposal embraced the so-called Alabama claims: but at the time he made it clear that such was not his meaning.

It can scarcely be said of Secretary Seward’s conduct of this negotiation that it was comparable in wisdom and foresight to his conduct of the Maximilian episode. At the beginning, he was still possessed with the peculiar notion, which he conveyed in an extraordinary note to Lincoln, that a foreign war would save us from a civil war. His instructions to Mr. Adams,rhetorical and impassioned, were, it is well known, changed and softened by Lincoln’s own hand. Throughout, the mingled firmness and restraint of Adams was a better mood than the secretary’s. It is also probably true that Seward’s insistence on our extreme view of Great Britain’s recognition of the belligerency of the Confederates weakened his presentation of our stronger case for damages inflicted by the cruisers. But when all is said in excuse for Lord Russell’s management of his side, it can scarcely be denied, particularly in view of the final outcome, that he adhered far too narrowly to that view of the matter which a lawyer, arguing before a court of claims, would have felt bound to maintain. He took too much account of the situation at the moment, too little of future contingencies. He was curiously unmindful that England, as the foremost commercial and seafaring country in the world, had more to lose than any other country if the notion of neutrality which her own government had put in practice should continue to prevail. Even while the war lasted, the special representative of that very shipbuilding industry which had profited most by the loose construction of the law pointed out in Parliament what might happen if the parts were changed, and England were at war white the United States were neutral. Mr. Adams saw the situation clearly when, after remarking in his diary that Lord Russell’s proposal was in effect to refer the British claims and exclude ours, he added: “ We lose nothing by the passage of time; Great Britain does.” And he significantly alludes to Russia, and a war cloud on the eastern horizon.

However, either Lord Russell, who before the end of the year became prime minister, or his successor in the Foreign Office, Lord Clarendon, began soon to perceive that England had something to lose as well as to gain by leaving things as they were. In December, overtures looking to the renewal of negotiations were made to Mr. Adams both by Lord Clarendon and by Mr. W. E. Forster. But nothing was done before the next change of ministry. It would appear, however, that the American Congress had meanwhile come to see the situation as Mr. Adams saw it. In the summer of 1866, so far from following the suggestion of Lord Clarendon that the two governments coöperate in improving and strengthening their laws of neutrality, the House passed a bill repealing those provisions of our own laws which aimed particularly to prevent the fitting out of ships for belligerents. It remained to be seen whether the Conservative ministry of Lord Derby would overcome, any better than Lord Russell’s, the proverbial indisposition of Englishmen to see that they are losing. The new ministry did, in fact, during its brief term of service, bring the negotiation into a new and far more hopeful phase. Lord Stanley, Clarendon’s successor, distinctly abandoned the contention of his predecessors that existing English law, as interpreted by English courts, was the sole criterion of the obligations of neutrality. He was willing to entertain the question of responsibility for the cruisers; he was willing, it appeared, to arbitrate all the questions which had been raised, save only the question of premature recognition of belligerency. But to that claim both Seward and Mr. Adams were thoroughly committed. Their insistence upon it caused a deadlock which lasted until July, 1868, when Adams’s seven years of distinguished service in England came to an end. He was succeeded by Reverdy Johnson, of Maryland.

Johnson soon negotiated, at first with Lord Stanley and then with Lord Clarendon, who presently came into office again in the Gladstone ministry, a treaty which was signed in January, 1869, and promptly sent to the American Senate. It provided for the arbitration of all claims on both sides, save only our claim of redress for premature recognition of belligerency. This Seward had at last abandoned. The secretary was probably hoping to signalize his retirement from diplomacy and from public life with a final adjustment of the threatening differences between the two great branches of his race. But the treaty was held over until a new administration should come into power; and when Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, brought it up in committee, so far was he from treating the controversy as ended that he used these words: “We begin to-day an international debate, the greatest of our history, and, before it is finished, perhaps the greatest of all history.”

But to have brought this difficult, negotiation from the seeming deadlock in which Lord Russell had left it into such a phase that, whatever delays there still might be, an adjustment reasonably fair to both sides was, as we can now see, the probable outcome, and to have adjusted all the other controversies into which the war had brought us with the peoples of Europe and of our own hemisphere, and to have done all this without any surrender of our interests or any turning aside from our fixed policy in international affairs, — in a word, to have established for the new Union right relations with all the peoples on our Southern and on our Eastern horizons, save only the people of our own blood and language, — this was no mean record for Seward to retire on. Had he been given to sentimental comparisons, he might have found, in a notable event of the year 1866, a sort of parallel to his achievements in diplomacy. The first attempt to construct a submarine cable across the Atlantic had failed in 1858. But Cyrus W. Field, an American man of business, a member of a remarkable family, had stuck to the enterprise through many disappointments, until at last, a year after the war, it was permanently accomplished. His is the name which will always be recalled first in connection with it; but he himself was not disposed to belittle the scientific, as distinguished from the merely financial, aspect of the undertaking. It was Commodore Maury, — an exile in Mexico, — whose study of the seas had made it possible. “I furnished the money,” Field is reported to have said, “and Maury supplied the brains.” Seward wrote to Field: “Your grand achievement constitutes, I trust, an effective treaty of international neutrality and non-intervention.” The achievement, important in itself, was even more important as a demonstration of the feasibility of submarine telegraphy on the widest scale. The next year, a line connecting Florida and Cuba was laid; and in a few years all the civilized peoples were linked together with cables which stretched along the bottoms of all the seas.

But Seward’s outlook was not through Eastern windows only. Benton and Douglas being dead, there was no other of our eminent statesmen who had so long faced toward the Pacific, toward Asia, whenever his thoughts turned upon the future of the Republic. No one else had ever made so bold and sweeping a prevision of the westward progress of our civilization. At the middle of the nineteenth century Seward had dared to prophesy what at the beginning of the twentieth century, though by that time the stream of tendency was far plainer, it still sounded magniloquent to claim. In 1852, he had declared his faith that “the Pacific Ocean, its shores, its islands, and the vast regions beyond, will be the chief theatre of events in the world’s great hereafter.” And that, he argued, would mean the complete emancipation of America from European influence; it would mean an American ascendency in world politics. In his vision of the reunion of the two civilizations which parted on the Persian plain thousands of years ago, he conceived that America would find her true rôle, her sublime significance, as the guardian and the representative, in that final contact of East and West, of all that our people had brought with them,and of all that they had gained, in their long wanderings. He had for years regarded our Pacific coast rather as the point of a new departure than as a final bourne. It was not, indeed, permitted him to transplant our civilization to the islands of the Pacific or to the Asian continent, but it was he who found and used the opportunity to extend it for the first time to a portion of our own continent not contiguous to our own principal territory.

In all probability, the purchase of Russian America would not have sufficiently commended itself to public sentiment, but for the attitude of Russia, so markedly in contrast with that of England and France during our Civil War. Strange as it seems, Russia alone, of all the great powers, had been, from first to last, friendly to the North and confident of the preservation of the Union. Perhaps the czar, Alexander II, himself an emancipator, had sympathized with Lincoln; or perhaps, to the most absolute of despotisms, that aspect of the war in which the North appeared as the champion of authority and the established order was more impressive than that other aspect of it in which the freedom of a race was the principal issue. But perhaps, too, the unfriendly course of England may have been the real cause of Russia’s friendly attitude. At any rate, Russia had vetoed Louis Napoleon’s scheme of a European intervention; and in many other ways she had made plain her sympathy with the Union cause. That we on our part were not wanting in grateful recognition of her friendship appeared quite as plainly in our welcome to a Russian fleet which visited New York in September, 1863. When the admiral and his officers came to Washington, the cordiality of the Secretary of State was particularly marked. In 1866, when the life of the czar was attempted, Congress, by joint resolution, congratulated him on his escape, and a man-of-war was detailed to carry the message to St. Petersburg. These pleasant exchanges may be said to have culminated in 1871 in the visit of the czar’s brother, the Grand Duke Alexis, to the United States. When he went to Boston, the school children sang for him, to the Russian national air, some verses written by Oliver Wendell Holmes. We remembered, he was told,

Russia had failed to make her American province pay, but no doubt she was also moved by good will to the United States, and by the hope of weakening England’s power in the Pacific, when, after some negotiation, she renewed an offer, first made twenty years before, to sell the colony to us; and we were prompted by similar motives to accept it.

For it appears that an offer to sell Russian America was made to the administration of President Polk, at a time when we were, apparently, very close to war with Great Britain over our Northwestern boundary, and that it was made on the condition that we should hold to our full claim, which would have excluded Canada from any frontage on the Pacific. The scheme was revived in 1859, and by this time there was some public sentiment in the Pacific states in favor of the purchase; Senator Gwin, of California, took much interest in the enterprise. But the Civil War soon put an end to it. When the matter was again taken up in 1866, the only semblance of a public demand for the purchase still came from the Pacific coast. That winter, Baron Stoeckl, the Russian minister, went to St. Petersburg and discussed the cession with his government. Returning to Washington, he entered at once into negotiation with Seward, and terms were soon agreed upon and sent to Russia for approval. Late in the evening of March 29, 1867, Stoeckl called at Seward’s house, informed the secretary, whom he found at whist with his family, that he had the authority to make a treaty, and proposed that they begin with it on the following day. But the Senate, which was in extraordinary session, was expected soon to adjourn. “Why wait till to-morrow ?” said the secretary. “ Let us make the treaty tonight.” Before midnight the state department was open, and Seward, Stoeckl, and Senator Sumner met there to conclude the business. By four o’clock the next morning the treaty was signed. The purchase price was fixed at $7,200,000; to the sum of seven millions, once agreed to, Seward had added $200,000 in order that the province might come to us free from any claims of companies. For many years Russia had practically leased it to the Russian-American Fur Company, which had exercised the powers of government.

Next to Seward, Charles Sumner is responsible for the acquisition. If in his place as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs he had opposed the treaty, it could scarcely have been ratified. He plainly announced that he was opposed to buying or otherwise acquiring any territory without the consent of its inhabitants; but — so he wrote to John Bright, with whom he regularly corresponded —“ the question was perplexed by considerations of politics and comity and the engagements already entered into by the government.” He felt deeply our debt of gratitude to Russia, and he believed, with Seward, that the whole continent must in time be ours, — though perhaps he could not go so far as Seward once went when, at Sumner’s house, he declared, “In thirty years Mexico will be the capital of the United States.” Sumner reported the treaty favorably, spoke several hours in defense of it, and on April 9 it was ratified with but two opposing votes. Afterwards, the injunction of secrecy being removed, he with much labor of research extended his speech into a comprehensive account of Russian America which long remained the best source of information concerning it. It was he also who suggested that the name, Alaska, up to that time applied only to the peninsula which links the Aleutian Islands with the continent, be given to the whole province.

Alaska increased our area by one fifth, but it added probably less than seventy thousand to our population; and of this increase all but twenty-five hundred Russians and half-breeds were aboriginal Indians and Esquimaux. “The immense country,” to use Sumner’s words, was “without form and light, without activity and without progress.” But he had much to tell of the wealth to be found in its forests, in the furs of its land animals and of its seals, in its fisheries, in its minerals; even thus early it was suspected that there was gold along the coast. He could paint an attractive future for the vast, snowy peninsula, when freedom and law and civilization should be extended over it. But the American people set little store by their new possession; and Congress was as neglectful as the people. In October, Russia withdrew her officials and her flag, and the United States took possession; but the House of Representatives, where many opposed the purchase altogether, found the cession of interest chiefly as an opportunity to assert its old claim to a share in the treaty-making power. The bill appropriating the purchase-money declared that the consent of Congress was necessary to give the treaty effect. That preamble the Senate rejected, and it was not till the summer of 1868 that the money was paid. The bill in its final form merely set forth that the treaty could be carried into effect only by legislation to which both houses must consent. To this statement of an indubitable fact the Senate made no objection.

When, however, it came to the point of making good the treaty by an actual extension of our system into our new possession, Congress was apathetic. First as a military district, then as a department, Alaska was committed to the rule of military officers. It was, in fact, no less than seventeen years before Congress made any serious attempt to organize a civil government. The Pribyloff Islands were leased to a company with the exclusive right to take seals within the three-mile limit, and in a few years the revenue from this source alone made a handsome return on the purchase money. But the peninsula could not be developed without law. Immigrants found that there was no legal way provided to preëmpt land, or to convey property, or to collect a debt. Save in the neighborhood of the military posts, there was no protection either for property or for persons; and there is only too much evidence that contact with the soldiers and traders was demoralizing to the natives. The liquor traffic, though forbidden, was not in fact suppressed. To the Indians of Alaska we gave only the same careless wardship which we had given to our own tribes. In 1884, following a suggestion which General O. O. Howard had made nearly ten years before, Congress, still unwilling to take the time for detailed legislation for Alaska, merely extended over it the laws of the territory of Washington “so far as the same may be applicable.” There is no better instance than this of the sluggishness of our national legislature when no strong interest or widespread public sentiment stirs it to action. Those students of our government who deplore our failure to fix clearly the responsibility for the initiative in legislation, as in England it is fixed in the ministry, could scarcely find a better case to illustrate their view. It should serve equally well those who contend that our system unfits us for the right administration of colonies. Unlike England’s neglect of her American plantations, our long neglect of Alaska was neither wise nor salutary.