The state department's letter to Lord Lyons scarcely justified the declaration attributed to you in your gentle rebuke to Hale that the matter was in able hands. In style it is verbose and egotistical; in argument, flimsy; and in its conception and general scope it is an abandonment of the high position we have occupied as a nation upon a great principle. We are humbled and disgraced, not by the act of the surrender of four of our own citizens, but by the manner in which it has been done, and the absence of a sound principle upon which to rest and justify it. . . . We might and should have turned the affair vastly to our credit and advantage; it has been made the means of our humiliation.2The British government received the surrender with the explanation as a sufficient reparation; but Earl Russell, with a view to exclude the inference that Mr. Seward's positions were acquiesced in, replied, Jan. 23, 1862, denying that the Confederate envoys, as diplomatic agents, or their despatches, were contraband of war; and referring to Mr. Seward's assertion as to what would have been done if the safety of the Union required it, he said that Great Britain would not have submitted to the detention ‘however flourishing might have been the insurrection in the South, and however important the persons captured might have been.’ The principle on which the transaction should have been placed has been clearly stated by Dr. Woolsey: ‘That there is no process known to international law by which a nation may extract from a neutral ship on the high sea a hostile ambassador, a traitor, or any criminal whatsoever; nor can any neutral ship be brought in for adjudication on account of having such passenger on board.’3 The immediate difficulty was disposed of, and the public anxiety was relieved; but it was very desirable that some one who
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legal, would if performed have only aggravated the illegality.1 The assertion also of the right to hold the men in case of a national exigency was a notice that our government might repeat the act at any time in its discretion.
Mr. Fish, then in private life, wrote Sumner, December 29:—
1 The Duke of Argyll, writing Sumner, Jan. 10, 1862, said that if Mr. Seward's position were adopted, the two nations would be at the point of war every week; and he stated that the English case rested on the broad principle maintained in the French despatch, ‘that a packet running bona fide from one neutral port to another neutral port cannot contain contraband of war, and that despatches or communications of any kind from one belligerent to a neutral power are not contraband, and are not liable to seizure or detention as such.’
2 Gideon Welles wrote of Mr. Seward later: ‘He was always ready, always superficial, not a profound thinker, nor with any pretensions to the scholarly culture and the attainments of Sumner.’ North American Review, July, 1887, p. 78.
3 International Law, § 199.
Cambridge, MA. Press of John Wilson and Son. 1877.
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