Since that was written, the advocates of benevolence and the believers in human progress have been further encouraged by the “meliorations” of stone fleets, of corps of licensed plunderers, of the submersion of great tracts of cultivated land, of the devastation of half a State, of the incitement to servile insurrection, and of the rule of Benjamin F. Butler at New Orleans—illustrations of his remark, which the eminent essayist probably did not at that time expect.
In the early part of his correspondence, Mr Seward’s opinions of the policy to be pursued towards the South are much more indulgent than at a later period. “The Union,” he says, on March 22, 1861, “was formed upon popular consent, and must always practically stand on the same basis.” He says, on April 10, that Secession is “a bad enterprise,” and that the Secessionists are “a misguided portion of our fellow-citizens.” But he goes on to say that the President “would not be disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of theirs (the citizens of the Southern States), namely, that the Federal Government could not reduce the seceding States to obedience by conquest, even although he were disposed to question that proposition. But, in fact, the President willingly accepts it as true. Only an imperial or despotic government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary members of the State. This Federal republican system of ours is, of all forms of government, the very one which is most unfitted for such a labour.” And he goes on to suggest the following paternal method of bringing back the prodigal South, and providing a fatted calf for it:—
“The system has within itself adequate peaceful, conservative, and recuperative forces. Firmness on the part of the Government in maintaining and preserving the public institutions and property, and in executing the laws where authority can be exercised without waging war, combined with such measures of justice, moderation, and forbearance as will disarm reasoning opposition, will be sufficient to secure the public safety until returning reflection, concurring with the fearful experience of social evils, the inevitable fruits of faction, shall bring the recusant members cheerfully back into the family, which, after all, must prove their best and happiest, as it undeniably is their most natural, home. The constitution of the United States provides for that return by authorising Congress, on application to be made by a certain majority of the States, to assemble a national convention, in which the organic law can, if it be needful, be revised so as to remove all real obstacles to a reunion, so suitable to the habits of the people, and so eminently conducive to the common safety and welfare.”
These be brave words and high sentiments; but their value as an expression of conciliatory policy is a little diminished by the fact that, as the seceding States were then seven out of thirty-four, the concession spoken of, being dependent on the “application to be made by a certain majority of the States” (two-thirds), was an impossibility. And in fact one of the best arguments in favour of Secession is, that the constitution provides no means whereby a minority, or indeed anything but a large majority, of States can obtain a remedy for their grievances, should the interests of the remainder render them adverse.
On the 19th of June, however, a change has come over the spirit of the Secretary’s dream, leading him to retract even this visionary compromise.
“What is now seen in this country,” he tells Mr Adams, “is the occurrence, by no means peculiar, but frequent in all countries, more frequent even in Great Britain than here, of an armed insurrection engaged in attempting to overthrow the regularly constituted and established Government. There is, of course, the employment of force by the Government to suppress the insurrection, as every other Government necessarily employs force in such cases. But these incidents by no means constitute a state of war impairing the sovereignty of the Government, creating belligerent sections, and entitling foreign States to intervene or to act as neutrals between them, or in any other way to cast off their lawful obligations to the nation thus for the moment disturbed. Any other principle than this would be to resolve government everywhere into a thing of accident and caprice, and ultimately all human society into a state of perpetual war.”
Here the facts of the Union, founded on consent, and of the President’s acceptance of the dogma, together with the unfitness of the Federal system for the task of subjugation—a task proper to imperial or despotic governments—are suddenly lost sight of along with the benevolent scheme for calling on the misguided citizens to abandon their “bad enterprise,” and return within the fold of the Union; and this great, glorious, and free Government is driven to confess that its only alternative is the rude and barbarous one hitherto repudiated, of force, such as the most abject monarchy might adopt. To such complexion must even the most beneficent institutions come under the pressure of necessity. And this change of Mr Seward’s tone is contemporaneous with his observation of the sudden appearance of inflexible and enthusiastic resolve on the part of the people of the North to put down the Secession by military power.
At this time two objects are diligently prosecuted by the high-minded Seward, always on the highest grounds. The one is the task of convincing the British Government that it has fallen into a grave error in acknowledging the South as a belligerent, and warning it against receiving the “missionaries of the insurgents,” as he terms the commissioners of the Southern Confederacy. “The cause of the North,” he says, “involves the independence of nations and the right of human nature.” “We feel free to assume that it is the general conviction of men, not only here, but in all other countries, that this Federal Union affords a better system than any other that could be contrived to assure the safety, the peace, the prosperity, the welfare, and the happiness of all the States of which it is composed.” “It is a war,” he says elsewhere, “against human nature;” and again, “The wit of man fails to suggest, not merely a better political system, having the same objects as the present Union, but even any possible substitute for it.” And on the 21st July, “I cannot leave the subject without endeavouring once more, as I have so often done before, to induce the British Government to realise the conviction which I have more than once expressed in this correspondence, that the policy of the Government is one that is based on interests of the greatest importance and sentiments of the highest virtue, and therefore is in no case likely to be changed, whatever may be the varying fortunes of the war at home, or the action of foreign nations on this subject, while the policy of foreign States rests on ephemeral interests of commerce or ambition.” “Sure we are that the transaction now going on in our country involves the progress of civilisation and humanity, and equally sure that our attitude in it is right, and no less sure that our press and our statesmen are equal in ability and influence to any in Europe.”
Manifestly, to countenance any power hostile to so beneficent a system would be almost as bad as to acknowledge Satan and the rebel angels as belligerents. But lest “the cupidity and caprice of Great Britain,” to which, he says, the disunionists will appeal, should render her blind to such high considerations, he takes a lower ground with her, and delivers, May 21, 1861, the following ominous and prophetic warning:—
“Great Britain has but to wait a few months, and all her present inconveniences will cease with our own troubles. If she take a different course, she will calculate for herself the ultimate as well as the immediate consequences, and will consider what position she will hold when she shall have for ever lost the sympathies and affections of the only nation on whose sympathies and affections she has a natural claim.”