“Less than a year will witness the dissolution of all the armies; the ironclad navy will rest idly in our ports; taxes will immediately decrease; and new States will be coming into the Confederacy, bringing rich contributions to the relief and comfort of mankind.”
On the 10th July he says:—
“The reduction of Vicksburg, the possession of Chattanooga, and the capture of Richmond, would close the civil war with complete success. All these three enterprises are going forward. The two former will, we think, be effected within the next ten days.”
And in September he actually bites his thumb at the Emperor:—
“We have not been misled,” he says, “by any of the semblances of impartiality or of neutrality which unfriendly proceedings towards us in a perilous strife have put on. When any Government shall incline to a new and more unfriendly attitude, we shall then revise with care our existing relations towards that Power, and shall act in the emergency as becomes a people who have never yet faltered in their duty to themselves while they were endeavouring to improve the condition of the human race.”
Compared with these prophecies the ravings of Mother Shipton become respectable oracles. Yet on them was founded the entire foreign policy of the Federal Government; the complaints that foreign statesmen and other sane persons would not confide in them were incessant; and they were the lights by which American envoys were expected to steer.
These gentlemen, with more or less sense and discretion, all write in the stilted creaking style, stuck over with hard metaphors, which distinguishes the master-spirit Seward, and which appears to be the characteristic of American public compositions. They seem to have caught, and to express very honestly, not only his style but his ideas, and to represent perfectly the querulous, arrogant, exacting tone of the Secretary. It is not, probably, from a wish to do him homage that they thus accurately reflect him, but rather because it is natural to American politicians to take abroad with them that idea of the pre-eminence of their country which they have passed their lives at home in asserting, and because their habit of regarding England as the abode of a jealous aristocracy, and as being always in the wrong, places them in a position of natural antagonism to us in every case that can arise. But, granting this to be inevitable, we may consider ourselves very fortunate that America is represented among us by a gentleman in every way so entitled to respect as Mr Adams. The son of one President and the grandson of another, both of whom were elected to the chief place in the Republic at a time when something else besides obscurity and the absence of any quality which could excite the jealousy of aspiring men, was demanded for the attainment of the position which Washington had filled, the claims of Mr Adams as a public man evidently rest on other grounds than those of ordinary American politicians. We do not doubt that the expressions of goodwill and courtesy addressed to him from our Foreign Office are perfectly sincere and deserved. It is true that the tone of his correspondence with that office is often captious, and his demands are sometimes unreasonable. Without prompting from his own Government he seems often to prejudge questions of international law with a bias that blinds him to the true bearing of the question, as in the case of the Emily St Pierre, and leads him to treat as an injury the denial of concessions which are denied because impossible to be granted. But this is the traditionary character of American diplomacy: it thus expresses the spirit of the people, with the promptings of which a Minister may think himself bound to comply; and both Mr Adams and Mr Dayton, Minister to France, appear in their correspondence to discharge their duties with great zeal and fidelity, and, moreover, to display the virtue, not by any means universal among their brethren, of confining themselves to the business of their own legations.
We need not say that our remarks relate only to Mr Adams’s share in the published correspondence, and not to his later acts. The extraordinary step he took on the 9th April, in granting a permit to an English vessel enabling her to pass the blockade, is fraught with consequences too important to be dwelt on here, and, if unexplained, would force us largely to qualify our encomium.
It might be supposed that the ties between Austria and America are neither numerous nor close, and that consequently the Minister to Vienna would find but a narrow field for the display of his qualities as a diplomatist. Accordingly we find Mr Motley, in the dearth of other matter, falling back upon the grand resource of American politicians, and discussing English affairs as the most natural topic possible to engage the attention of an envoy at Vienna. From that convenient point of observation, then, he proceeds to enlighten the Washington Cabinet on the disposition and intentions of the statesmen, and organs of the press, of Great Britain; and as other ministers elsewhere imitate this course, the Government of Mr Lincoln has the advantage of seeing British policy represented, not merely in the aspect in which it is seen by Mr Adams the special photographer, but as it appears when viewed by amateurs from the various capitals of Europe.
Should a Tory Government succeed the present Cabinet, Mr Motley anticipates much trouble. Nothing, he says, can exceed the virulence with which the extreme Conservative party regard America, nor the delight with which they look forward to its extinction as a nation. The hatred to the English Radicals is, he has discovered, “the secret of the ferocity and brutality with which the ‘Times,’ the ‘Saturday Review,’ and other Tory organs of the press, have poured out their insults upon America ever since the war began.” How the journals thus classified may approve being linked together as Tory organs, we cannot say. To ourselves we, of course, see nothing personal in the general allusion, our leaning to Radicalism and Republicanism being too notorious to admit of any mistake. Subsequently Mr Motley writes a long essay about British matters, explaining the sentiments of the “venerable Premier of England” and our Foreign Minister, and criticising the speech made by Mr Gladstone at Newcastle, part of which makes him very angry, and causes him to express a hope that that statesman’s tongue may be blistered. Nor, unusual as his style of diplomatic correspondence may appear, does he stand quite alone in it.