On the evening of the 19th Mr. Spence wrote to D'Erlanger of its success in Liverpool:—
"All goes well here. The cotton trade take it up with strong interest, and it will come out for large sums. I applied very early for £20,000, and thought I should have been first, but found P—-- was before me, with his £100,000. You will have a lot of applications in London from the storgs,—that is, those who join to sell at the premium. Here we have no class of that kind, and our applicants, as in Manchester, being more bona fide, will, as a rule, take a day or two to digest its merits. The market closed here at 4-1/4,—quite high enough for the first day."
On the next day, the 20th, Mr. Spence writes:—
"We shall very much exceed a million here, I think, by noon to-morrow. The political effect will be enormous. It is the recognition of the South by the intelligence of Europe."
On the 21st, congratulations were received by D'Erlanger from Slidell, who was in London.
"Allow me to congratulate you," said he, "on your magnific success. Apart from the direct advantages of the affair, it cannot fail to give great prestige to your house."
"The Emperor himself, through the medium of his Chef de Cabinet," wrote D'Erlanger to Memminger, "complimented us upon the great success; a proof with what interest the operation had been received by all friends of the South."
Notwithstanding the "intelligence of Europe" had rushed to secure it, bankers of respectability—men who prized honor and integrity above pounds and pence—stood aloof, for they remembered that Mr. Jefferson Davis, President of the slaveholding Confederacy, was a repudiator. No allegation against him had been made through the press, but the Times came to the rescue before the attack. On the 19th, the day on which the loan was issued, Mr. Sampson, editor of the city article, said:—
"Those among the English people who are still suffering from Mississippi repudiation will perhaps view with wonder and regret the negotiation of a loan for a government of which Mr. Jefferson Davis, by whom that repudiation was defended in his place in Congress, is the head. But the Southern Confederacy includes Virginia, Georgia, and other honorable States, and it is by the prospect of what the Confederacy will do as a whole that people will make their calculation. The reasoning that would exclude the South from a loan on account of the conduct of Mississippi, would apply equally to the North, since the North embraces Michigan. It would also have applied to the United States loans negotiated while Mississippi was a State of the Union, and especially while Mr. Jefferson Davis was an influential member of the Federal government, and regarded with high favor by all the Northern population, by whom the remarks of the Times on his financial views were then declared to be nothing but the outpourings of British rancor."[104]
Turning to the Times of July 13th, of 1849, we find a letter written by Jeff Davis, copied from the Washington Union, in which the repudiator says:—