“I was very much gratified in reading your very able, temperate, and forcible speech on the Trent affair.”
Then, in a second letter, the same judicial authority wrote:—
“It is the very best discussion of the whole subject that I have seen.”
Hon. Francis Brockholst Cutting, former Representative in Congress from New York, and a leader of the bar, wrote from New York:—
“Your speech on Maritime Rights has given me very great satisfaction. It was worthy of your reputation, and equal to the occasion. The argument was particularly gratifying to me, because, from the outset, I had looked at the case from the American point of view, and had expressed myself accordingly.”
Hon. R. J. Meigs, of Tennessee, for a long time eminent at the bar and in juridical study, wrote from New York:—
“One word more. I thank you for your speech upon the Trent affair. It vindicates the honor of our baited and abused country. It will be a well-remembered document in the diplomacy of the world, settling as it does forever the immunity of neutrals from the insulting pretension of the right to seize persons on their ships merely upon the ground that they owe allegiance to the belligerent. It effectually extracts that poisonous fang from the jaws of Leviathan.”
Hon. David Roberts, lawyer, and author of a “Treatise on Admiralty and Prize,” wrote from Salem:—
“I deem it your best effort, settling, what to me was from the first the embarrassing element in the Wilkes question, a true American definition of ‘despatches.’