These were the public official orders to Lord Lyons; but in order to set forth accurately the condition of affairs, it is necessary to quote from a letter of private instructions in which, as it now appears, Lord Russell, while determined to enforce the British demand for reparation, was anxious “to mitigate the effect of their peremptory demand.” He said:
“The despatches which were agreed to at the Cabinet yesterday, and which I have signed this morning, impose upon you a disagreeable task. My wish would be that at your first interview with Mr. Seward you should not take my despatch with you, but should prepare him for it, and ask him to settle with the President and the Cabinet what course they would propose.
“The next time you should bring my despatch and read it to him fully.
“If he asks what will be the consequence of his refusing compliance, I think you should say that you wish to leave him and the President quite free to take their own course, and that you desire to abstain from anything like menace.”
Although, as said, the patriotic Americans, as a whole, were greatly excited and incensed, there were many of them who did not share in these feelings, and among these were Secretary of State Seward. To set forth the reasons for this opposition to the opinions of their countrymen more forcibly, the following incident of the history of the Revolutionary War shall be told:
It appears that when that war was at its height “the colonial government despatched as ambassador to Holland, then a neutral power, Henry Laurens, a former President in the Congress of the country, vested with power to secure from that Government a recognition of the United Colonies as an independent nation—to conclude a treaty, and to negotiate a loan. In 1780 he left Charleston, on board the brigantine Adriana, bound to Martinique. From thence he took passage in a Dutch packet, the Mercury, for Holland, and thus was on board a neutral vessel, sailing between neutral ports.
“When three days out from Martinique, the Mercury was overhauled by the British frigate Vestal, Mr. Laurens, with his secretary, was forcibly removed from on board the Mercury; his papers were seized; they were taken in the Vestal to St. Johns, Newfoundland, and thence, by an order of the British admiralty, he, with his secretary, was taken to England, and he was committed, as a prisoner, to the Tower of London, on a charge of high treason. The British reverse at Yorktown soon changed the character of his confinement to that of a prisoner of war, and he was, not long thereafter, released, in exchange for Lieutenant-general Lord Cornwallis.”
The quotation is from Upton’s “Maritime Warfare and Prize.” No one familiar with this work will accuse Mr. Upton of lack of patriotism. The fact is that the case of Laurens, from a legal point of view, was precisely the case of Mason and Slidell. If the British were wrong in taking the American from a Dutch ship and treating him as a criminal in 1780, the Americans were wrong in taking the Confederate envoys from the British ship in 1861 and treating them as criminals.
William H. Seward.