He was to pass by the question as to whether the blockade must be respected in case it should not be maintained by a competent force, and was to state that the "blockade is now, and will continue to be, so maintained, and therefore we expect it to be respected."
As to recognition of the Confederacy, either by publishing an acknowledgment of its sovereignty,
or officially receiving its representatives, he was to inform the earl that "no one of these proceedings will pass unquestioned." Also, he might suggest that "a concession of belligerent rights is liable to be construed as a recognition" of the Confederate States. Recognition, he was to say, could be based only on the assumption that these States were a self-sustaining power. But now, after long forbearance, the United States having set their forces in motion to suppress the insurrection, "the true character of the pretended new state is at once revealed. It is seen to be a power existing in pronunciamento only. It has never won a field. It has obtained no forts that were not virtually betrayed into its hands or seized in breach of trust. It commands not a single port on the coast, nor any highway out from its pretended capital by land. Under these circumstances, Great Britain is called upon to intervene, and give it body and independence by resisting our measures of suppression. British recognition would be British intervention to create within our own territory a hostile state by overthrowing this republic itself." In Mr. Seward's draft a menacing sentence followed these words, but Mr. Lincoln drew his pen through it.
Mr. Adams was to say that the treatment of insurgent privateers was "a question exclusively our own," and that we intended to treat them as pirates.[[169]] If Great Britain should recognize them
as lawful belligerents and give them shelter, "the laws of nations afford an adequate and proper remedy;"—"and we shall avail ourselves of it," added Mr. Seward; but again Mr. Lincoln's prudent pen went through these words of provocation.
Finally Mr. Adams was instructed to offer the adhesion of the United States to the famous Declaration of the Congress of Paris, of 1856, which concerned sundry matters of neutrality.
The letter ended with two paragraphs of that patriotic rodomontade which seems eminently adapted to domestic consumption in the United States, but which, if it ever came beneath the eye of the British minister, probably produced an effect very different from that which was aimed at. Mr. Lincoln had the good taste to write on the margin: "Drop all from this line to the end;" but later he was induced to permit the nonsense to stand, since it was really harmless.
The amendments made by the President in point of quantity were trifling, but in respect of importance were very great. All that he did was here and there to change or to omit a phrase, which established no position, but which in the strained state of feeling might have had serious results. The condition calls to mind the description of the summit of the Alleghany Ridge, where the impulses given by almost imperceptible inequalities
in the surface of the rock have for their ultimate result the dispatching of mighty rivers either through the Atlantic slope to the ocean, or down the Mississippi valley to the Gulf of Mexico. A few adjectives, two or three ever so little sentences, in this dispatch, might have led to peace or to war; and peace or war with England almost surely meant, respectively, Union or Disunion in the United States. In fact, no more important state paper was issued by Mr. Seward. It established our relations with Great Britain, and by consequence also with France and with the rest of Europe, during the whole period of the civil war. Its positions, moderate in themselves, and resolutely laid down, were never materially departed from. The English minister did not afterward give either official or unofficial audiences to accredited rebel emissaries; the blockade was maintained by a force so competent that the British government acquiesced in it; no recognition of the Confederacy was ever made, either in the ways prohibited or in any way whatsoever; it is true that bitter controversies arose concerning Confederate privateers, and to some extent England failed to meet our position in this matter; but it was rather the application of our rule than the rule itself which was in dispute; and she afterward, under the Geneva award, made full payment for her derelictions. The behavior and the proposal of terms, which constituted a practical exclusion of the United States from the benefits of the
Treaty of Paris, certainly involved something of indignity; but in this the country had no actual rights; and to speak frankly, since she had refused to come in when invited, she could hardly complain of an inhospitable reception when, under the influence of immediate and stringent self-interest, her diplomatists saw fit to change their course. So, on the whole, it is not to be denied that delicate and novel business in the untried department of foreign diplomacy was managed with great skill, under trying circumstances. A few months later, in his message to Congress, at the beginning of December, 1861, the President referred to our foreign relations in the following paragraphs:—