1. It would be a violation of our neutrality in the war to agree with France and England that American citizens who served on board Russian privateers should be punished as pirates. To prevent this, Russia should become a party to the treaty, which, under existing circumstances, was impossible.
2. Our treaties only embraced a person of either nation who should take commissions as privateers, and did not extend to the crew. Sailors were a thoughtless race, and it would be cruel and unjust to punish them as pirates for taking such service, when they often might do it from want and necessity.
3. The British law claims all who are born as British subjects to be British subjects forever. We naturalize them and protect them as American citizens. If the treaty were concluded, and a British cruiser should capture a Russian privateer with a naturalized Irishman on board, what would be the consequence? The British law could not punish him as an American citizen under the treaty, because it would regard him as a British subject. It might hang him for high treason; and such an event would produce a collision between the two countries. The old and dangerous question would then be presented in one of its worst aspects.
4. Whilst such a treaty might be justly executed by such nations as Great Britain and the United States, would it be just, wise or humane to agree that their sailors who took service on board a privateer should be summarily tried and executed as pirates by several powers which could be named?
5. Cui bono should Great Britain make such a treaty with France during the existing war. If no neutral power should enter into it with them, it could have no effect during its continuance.
6. The time may possibly come when Great Britain, in a war with the despotisms of Europe, might find it to be exceedingly to her interest to employ American sailors on board her privateers, and such a treaty would render this impossible. Why should she unnecessarily bind her hands?
7. The objections of the United States to enter into entangling alliances with European nations.
8. By the law of nations, as expounded both in British and American courts, a commission to a privateer, regularly issued by a belligerent nation, protects both the captain and the crew from punishment as pirates. Would the different commercial nations of the earth be willing to change this law as you propose, especially in regard to the crew? Would it be proper to do so in regard to the latter?
After I had stated these objections at some length on Friday, the 17th of March, Lord Clarendon observed that when some of them were stated the day before, they had struck him with so much force after reflection, that he had come to the office from the House of Lords at night and written them down and sent them to Sir James Graham. In his own opinion the treaty ought not to be concluded, and if the cabinet came to this conclusion the affair should drop, and I agreed I would not write to the Department on the subject. If otherwise, and the treaty should be presented to the Government of the United States, then I was to report our conversation.
In the conversation Lord Clarendon said they were more solicitous to be on good terms with the United States than any other nation, and that the project had not yet been communicated even to France.