From a photograph.
But that is by no means the end of the story of the Trent affair. The demand of Great Britain was officially communicated to Secretary of State Seward on December 19th. On December 26th Mr. Seward delivered to Lord Lyons a reply reviewing the entire case. The important points of this reply are as follows:
The American government did not authorize the act of Captain Wilkes and knew nothing about it until Captain Wilkes arrived and reported it. Captain Wilkes believed that what he had done was “a simple legal and customary belligerent proceeding to arrest and capture a neutral vessel engaged in carrying contraband of war for the use and benefit of the insurgents.” The “four persons taken from the Trent by Captain Wilkes, and their despatches, were contraband of war.” If the envoys were contraband, Captain Wilkes had a right, under the law of nations, to capture the Trent, but the contraband “has a right to a fair trial of the accusation against him.” “The neutral state that has taken him under its flag is bound to protect him, if he is not contraband, and is therefore entitled to be satisfied upon that important question.” Both the accused and the neutral state have a right to demand “a tribunal and a trial.” In the Trent case there was neither tribunal nor trial. Captain Wilkes constituted himself captor, judge, and executioner. A very great wrong had been done. For this wrong “the British Government has a right to expect the same reparation that we, as an independent State, should expect from Great Britain or any other friendly nation in a similar case.” “The four persons in question are now held in military custody at Fort Warren in the State of Massachusetts. They will be cheerfully liberated.”
The comment of Commodore Joseph Smith on Seward’s letter sums it up admirably. In a letter to Flag Officer Foote he says, “It is ingenious, gassy, too long, but able.”
It is to be observed that the letter of Mr. Seward did not contain the word regret nor any form of apology. It stated the case and argued it, and admitted that an error—“simply an inadvertency,” on the part of a naval officer—had been made, and agreed to deliver up the prisoners. Whether the Secretary should have expressed regret when he admitted the wrong, the reader can judge for himself. What Lord Russell thought about this point is not told in the documents, but what he said was that “Her Majesty’s Government have arrived at the conclusion that they (the matters in Mr. Seward’s letter) constitute the reparation which Her Majesty and the British nation had a right to expect.”
Then, in another letter, he controverted Mr. Seward’s statements that the Confederate envoys made the Trent a good prize that might have been lawfully condemned. Of course no settlement of this question was reached, but whether Lord Russell or Mr. Seward was right, may be, perhaps, decided by the reader. At this writing there is trouble between Spain and the people of Cuba. If a Cuban agent escaped from Cuba to the United States and sailed from New York in an American liner for England, would the government of the United States permit a Spanish warship to carry the Yankee liner to Spain and there have her condemned as a prize? As this question must be answered in the negative, it is impossible to resist saying that in the Trent case the British government, instead of showing a spirit hostile toward the American government, was, in spite of the time limit, forbearing.
No direct reference to the British threat of war has been made so far, nor has the policy of adding to one’s enemies, when one is already full of trouble, been mentioned. It was a question of right and wrong. If, on sober second thought, the whole American people had concluded that they were right, or if it had been manifest that it was necessary for the life of the nation to keep those Confederates, no threat of war and no attack from any nation would have taken them from Fort Warren. It is an idle speculation; but most writers on this subject are sure that if Mason and Slidell had not been liberated the British would have declared war against us and so have set up the Confederate States as an independent government. But if the writer hereof may be allowed to express an opinion, he must say that, in spite of the seven days’ limit, England was not quite ready to declare war. And it is by no means certain that if she had done so, the combination would have resulted as predicted. For the people of the United States were not in their last ditch, nor were they friendless in the world.
If one other point in this controversy be considered, the patriotic American can look upon the Trent case with unmixed pleasure. From 1783 until 1861—for seventy-eight weary years the American government had vainly striven with all the arts of diplomacy, and even with the argument of open war, to get from Great Britain a disavowal of her assumed right to search a neutral ship in time of war and take from it any persons whom one of her naval officers might decide to be British subjects—a renunciation of what the Prince Regent (afterward George IV) proclaimed at the palace of Westminster, in 1813, as the “undoubted and hitherto undisputed right of searching merchant vessels in time of war, and the impressment of British seamen when found therein.”
It was, indeed, not a very lively strife in the later years of this period, for Great Britain had abstained from exercising her “undoubted and hitherto undisputed right” as against American ships. But on November 8, 1861, an American captain, being not well informed in the causes of America’s fights for life and liberty, undertook the very act that, when done by Great Britain, led to the War of 1812. He stopped a neutral ship on the high seas and took from her men whom he declared to be American citizens, and without any form of trial haled them away to a condition that was in law, if not in fact, exactly the condition of the impressed American seamen before the War of 1812. Great Britain had often taken advantage of such an act; she had in more than 6,000 cases, of which we have official knowledge, benefited by such doings on the part of her naval officers. But she had never suffered from such an aggression as that until November 8, 1861. There is no recorded act nor official utterance of the government of Great Britain during the first seventy-eight years of the existence of the United States that can be construed as a renunciation of the right of taking British subjects from neutral ships in time of war; but when an American naval captain took an American subject from a British ship the British Prime Minister, with swift indignation, declared it “an act of violence which was an affront to the British flag and a violation of international law.” And that was not all. “The British Government could not allow such an affront to the national honour to pass without full reparation.” Indeed, the affront was so great that the British Minister was to consent, for the purpose of consideration and negotiation, “to a delay not exceeding seven days.”
The outrages perpetrated on American seamen in the old days have never been avenged; but because the British were at last willing to acknowledge in the most emphatic of official documents that the United States waged a just war in 1812, they may be forgiven.