"These people speak our language, use our prayers, read our books, are ruled by our laws, dress themselves in our image, are warm with our blood. They have all our virtues; and their vices are our own too, loudly as we call out against them. They are our sons and our daughters, the source of our greatest pride, and as we grow old they should be the staff of our age. Such a war as we should now wage with the States would be an unloosing of hell upon all that is best upon the world's surface[496]."
The expressions of men like Browning and Trollope may not indeed, be regarded as typical of either governmental or general public reactions. Much more exactly and with more authority as representing that thoughtful opinion of which Adams wrote were the conclusions of John Stuart Mill. In an article in Fraser's Magazine, February, 1862, making a strong plea for the North, he summarized British feeling about the Trent:
"We had indeed, been wronged. We had suffered an indignity, and something more than an indignity, which, not to have resented, would have been to invite a constant succession of insults and injuries from the same and from every other quarter. We could have acted no otherwise than we have done; yet it is impossible to think, without something like a shudder, from what we have escaped. We, the emancipators of the slave--who have wearied every Court and Government in Europe and America with our protests and remonstrances, until we goaded them into at least ostensibly co-operating with us to prevent the enslaving of the negro ... we should have lent a hand to setting up, in one of the most commanding positions of the world, a powerful republic, devoted not only to slavery, but to pro-slavery propagandism...."
No such protestations of relief over escape from a possible alliance with the South were made officially by the Government, or in a debate upon the Trent, February 6, when Parliament reassembled. In the Lords the Earl of Shelburne thought that America should have made a frank and open apology. The Earl of Derby twitted the United States with having yielded to force alone, but said the time "had not yet come" for recognizing the Confederacy. Lord Dufferin expressed great friendship for America and declared that Englishmen ought to make themselves better informed of the real merits of the Civil War. Earl Granville, speaking for the Government, laid stress upon the difficulties at home of the Washington administration in pacifying public opinion and asserted a personal belief that strict neutrality was England's best policy, "although circumstances may arise which may call for a different course." On the same day in the Commons the debate was of a like general tenor to that in the Lords, but Disraeli differed from his chief (Derby) in that he thought America had been placed in a very difficult position in which she had acted very honourably. Palmerston took much credit for the energetic military preparations, but stated "from that position of strict neutrality, it is not our intention to depart "--an important declaration if taken, as apparently it was not, as fixing a policy. In substance all speakers, whether Whig or Tory, praised the Government's stand, and expressed gratification with the peaceful outcome[497].
A further debate on the Trent was precipitated by Bright on February 17, in connection with the estimates to cover the cost of the military contingents sent to Canada. He asserted that England by generously trusting to American honour, might have won her lasting friendship, and it is worthy of note that for the first time in any speech made by him in Parliament, Bright declared that the war was one for the abolition of slavery. Palmerston in reply made no comment on the matter of slavery, but energetically defended the military preparations as a necessary precaution. Bright's speech was probably intended for American consumption with the purpose of easing American ill-will, by showing that even in Parliament there were those who disapproved of that show of force to which America so much objected. He foresaw that this would long be the basis of American bitterness. But Palmerston was undoubtedly correct in characterizing Bright's opinion as a "solitary one." And looked at from a distance of time it would seem that a British Government, impressed as it was with a sense of Seward's unfriendliness, which had not prepared for war when making so strong a demand for reparation, would have merited the heaviest condemnation. If Mill was right in stating that the demand for reparation was a necessity, then so also were the military preparations.
Upon the Government the Trent acted to bring to a head and make more clear the British relation to the Civil War in America. By November, 1861, the policy of strict neutrality adopted in May, had begun to be weakened for various reasons already recited--weakened not to the point of any Cabinet member's advocacy of change, but in a restlessness at the slow development of a solution in America. Russell was beginning to think, at least, of recognition of the Confederacy. This was clear to Lyons who, though against such recognition, had understood the drift, if Schleiden is to be trusted, of Ministerial opinion. Schleiden reported on December 31 that Lyons had expressed to him much pleasure at the peaceful conclusion of the Trent affair, and had added, "England will be too generous not to postpone the recognition of the independence of the South as long as possible after this experience[498]." But the Trent operated like a thunder-storm to clear the atmosphere. It brought out plainly the practical difficulties and dangers, at least as regards Canada, of a war with America; it resulted in a weakening of the conviction that Seward was unfriendly; it produced from the British public an even greater expression of relief, when the incident was closed, than of anger when it occurred; and it created in a section of that public a fixed belief, shared by at least one member of the Cabinet, that the issue in America was that of slavery, in support of which England could not possibly take a stand.
This did not mean that the British Government, nor any large section of the public, believed the North could conquer the South. But it did indicate a renewed vigour for the policy of neutrality and a determination not to get into war with America. Adams wrote to Seward, "I am inclined to believe that the happening of the affair of the Trent just when it did, with just the issue that it had, was rather opportune than otherwise[499]." Hotze, the confidential agent of the Confederacy in London, stated, "the Trent affair has done us incalculable injury," Russell is now "an avowed enemy of our nationality[500]." Hotze was over-gloomy, but Russell himself declared to Lyons: "At all events I am heart and soul a neutral ... what a fuss we have had about these two men[501]."
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