Earl Russell and the Slave Power

by England) Union and Emancipation Society (Manchester

But considering, on the one hand, the peculiar and unparalleled interest in a foreign market, which England has had in American cotton; on the other, the inhuman end avowed and the treasonable means employed, by the slave oligarchy in their revolt; no foreign power could or would have blamed England, if we had gone further into the war on the side of the North.

After we had received the great official speech of March 21st, 1861, made by the Confederate Vice-President, Mr. Stephens, in which he avows slavery to be the end of the new Confederacy, the sacred cornerstone of the new edifice; let us suppose that (with the consent of Parliament) the English government had made direct alliance with the government at Washington, to enter the war as secondary, on the following terms:—“If you cannot terminate it in three months, we will aid you with 50,000 infantry, and with a fleet of 80 ships; provided only, that you engage to abolish slavery for ever in all the rebel territories.” If anything can be certain in such calculations, it is certain that, unless the fact of this alliance forced Jefferson Davis to flee for his life, (and then there would have been no war,) the war would have been finished before Michaelmas, 1861, with freedom to the slaves, and very small bloodshed. For, no Liverpool merchants would have armed the South, no capitalist would have advanced 100 dollars to it; and without arms from England, it would long ago have been subdued.

As to the international question; Lords Russell and Palmerston,—who, (to the disgust of France,) took leave in 1840 to expel Ismael Pasha from Syria at the invitation of the Sultan,—could have no difficulty on this head. (Russell was in 1840 the Premier, and Palmerston Foreign Secretary.) Nor did these same ministers even remonstrate, when the Emperor Nicolas lent 200,000 men to Austria in 1849, in order to crush the freedom of Hungary, after Hungary had won her victory over Austria. Lord Palmerston then volunteered to say in Parliament, that Hungary was a nation fighting for its rights. Those were actually treaty-rights. Hungary had a national history as old as England. It was a cause of freedom, of free religion, and of hereditary law. The mass of the nobility and the church were as warm in the cause as the meanest gipsy, peasant, and Jew. England had actually mediated in 1710 the peace between Hungary and Austria, as between independent belligerents; which peace Austria broke in 1848 by treachery and massacre. Yet Lord John Russell refused to pronounce Hungary “belligerent,” and thereby hindered the Sultan from acknowledging her as such; which stopped Hungary from getting arms, and caused her overthrow. When he went so far in 1848 in the interest of Austria, who had called in Russian aid against the Hungarian nation, insurgent in a just cause; the same Russell cannot have imagined any international objection to England aiding the Government of Washington against a strictly traitorous conspiracy, organized in the worst of causes, inhuman and detestable.

Nevertheless, (what pre-eminently condemns English policy,) the idea of England aiding the North in this war was never even mooted as among things possible or imaginable. Contingent English interference was among all public men, assumed to mean, interference on the side of the South! The certainty, that we must at last help them, was urged among the Southern conspirators as a grand argument for secession; and if the English ministry had intended to lure them on, to the utmost possible bloodshed of North and South, it could not have conducted itself more skilfully.

The English campaign opened, by Earl Russell proclaiming the South “belligerent” when she had not a ship on the seas, and excluding the war-ships of the North from our harbours: at the same time the London press gave tongue with very few exceptions in favour of Disunion as the great desideratum of America, and its inevitable destiny. The two daily papers which peculiarly have been regarded as under Lord Palmerston’s inspiration, (the Morning Post and the Times,) were not only no exception, but might seem to have been conducted by Southern agents; whose cue it was, to vilify the North by slander and disparagement cunningly tempered to English prejudices and English credulity. The tone then assumed has changed little to this day; and at a very early time gave immense encouragement to the South, with proportionate exasperation to the North, whose enemies and dangers it multiplied.

About the same time, Mr. Massey, a nominee of the Government, spoke at Salford a speech intensely hostile to the North, utterly ignoring the treason of the South and its execrable objects, and aiming to stir up the working men to desire hostilities against the North. It is not possible to blame Earl Russell primarily, but we must blame the Cabinet collectively and him as the second personage in it, for this speech. For inevitably the public, both here and across the Atlantic, understood it to be a ministerial effort to excite a war spirit against the North; and though it utterly failed with the working men, it must be counted among the causes which have made the ministerial press so pertinaciously hostile to the cause of freedom.

In 1856 at the Congress of Paris the allies who were making peace proposed in the cause of humanity to forbid Privateering. The powers there present renounced it in their own name, and undertook to endeavour to obtain a renunciation of it from all other maritime powers. They were successful with the smaller states; but not so with the great American Union. Mr. Marcy, in the name of the President, said that as they had a vast mercantile navy and no great war fleet, they could not renounce the right of defending their merchants by private war vessels, unless England would join in assuring safety to merchant vessels on the high seas in spite of war; in that case, but only in that case could he adopt the clause of the Congress. Earl Russell, who was already in his present post, accepted this reply as a refusal. But no sooner was Mr. Lincoln in power, than Mr. Seward sent to Earl Russell an unconditional acceptance of this clause for the extinction of privateering; not that Mr. Seward agreed with the English Government in thinking privateering inhuman, but because it would expose the unarmed Northern merchantmen to the attack of stray ships, while the South was unable to build a fleet that should meet the Northern ships of war. To the exceeding surprise of the American Ambassador, Earl Russell replied that the right of privateering must be reserved for the South, but Mr. Lincoln was free to renounce it for the North. He assigned as his final and decisive reason, that, as he had already declared the South “belligerent,” he could not help reserving its right of privateering. He builds wrong upon wrong. What had been an inhuman practice, while it was believed to be the strength of the Union, is suddenly patronized as a right of rebels, (who are not yet recognised as a nation,) as soon as it becomes a cruel danger to the innocent merchants of the Union, with whom we are in beneficial commerce! Will this lessen the opinion of the South, that we are a set of hypocritical Pharisees?

In consequence, when an English built privateer, which has been sold to Jefferson Davis for Southern paper, takes refuge from a Northern war ship in any harbour, in any part of the world, belonging to England,—the Northerner is warned off by our authorities. On one occasion, Lord Palmerston sent two ships of war expressly to watch the Federal vessel Tuscarora off Southampton; and see to it, that when the privateer Nashville escaped, the Tuscarora did not pursue without giving her twelve hours’ start. What more could we do, if we held it a right of these privateers to plunder and burn at sea (as they do, against all international precedent) the merchantmen of the Northerners, without even the adjudication of a prize court? Worst of all, the English port of Nassau is a permanent rendezvous for steamers watching to break the blockade. All this is, according to Earl Russell himself, merely a logical deduction from his having (most gratuitously) declared the South belligerent. And then it is pretended by our press, that “belligerence” is a “mere matter of fact,” which we cannot help acknowledging! These steamers from Nassau, by the arms and ammunition they have brought to the South, have alone sustained for eight months past the “fratricidal war” about which our Southern sympathisers whimper. English policy alone has lent vitality to the war.

In the summer of 1861 Earl Russell publicly gave utterance to his celebrated sentence, that the North is fighting for empire, the South for independence. England now understands what the “independence” means. Mr. Forster, M.P. interpreted it well,—freedom of robbery, rape, murder, and lynch-law. The “empire” for which the Union fights, is simply its own country, vital to its national existence, not a distinct adjunct, such as to England is Canada, against which Earl Russell made war “for empire” in 1838. His words had the effect of proclaiming, that in his opinion the cause of the South was a righteous one; and the inference was, that he would be glad to aid it, whenever he could.

In the same summer a large reinforcement was sent to Canada; and the Times at once explained, that this was intended to strengthen the province against the North in certain contingencies. It was inevitable for South and North alike to infer, that the English ministry was on the look-out for an opportunity of striking a blow in favour of the South, and therefore wished first to make Canada safe. For none but a madman could imagine that President Lincoln in that crisis would volunteer to attack England. Thus the South was still further lured on to believe that we should help her at last.