Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[126] especial pains to model this paper after a Riot Act: to style sovereign States “unlawful combinations;” and to “command the persons composing the combinations aforesaid, to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within twenty days.”

But something more remarkable than this grotesque anticipation of a four years war, was to emanate from the statesmanship at Washington. On the 4th of May, Mr. Seward, Secretary of State, wrote a letter of instructions to Mr. Dayton, the recently appointed minister to France, designed as a circular notice to the European courts, which, as a tissue of misrepresentation and absurdity, and an exhibition of littleness in a politician's cast of the future, is one of the most remarkable productions of the political history of the war. In this document the Federal Secretary of State urged that Mr. Dayton could not be “too decided or too explicit” in assuring the French Government that there was no idea of the dissolution of the Union; and that the existing commotion was only to be ranked among the dozen passing changes in the history of that Union. He concluded: “Tell M. Thouvenel, then, with the highest consideration and good feeling, that the thought of a dissolution of this Union, peaceably or by force, has never entered into the mind of any candid statesman here, and it is high time that it be dismissed by statesmen in Europe.” Yet at the time this was penned eight millions of Mr. Seward's countrymen had decided on a dissolution of the Union, and the gathering armies of the South were within a few miles of the Federal capital.

Meanwhile the action of the European Governments with reference to the war was thought to be indecisive, and was still the subject of a certain anxiety. The British Government and the French Emperor, although they regarded and ranked the Confederate States as belligerents, proclaimed a strict neutrality in the war, and closed their ports to the armed vessels and privateers of either of the belligerents. The British House of Commons had deemed it necessary to adjourn the discussion of American affairs by the indefinite postponement of Mr. Gregory's notice of a motion on the subject. That gentleman had sought to defend his motion for the recognition of the Southern Confederacy in a letter in the London Times, of a power and ingenuity calculated to affect public opinion, and putting the question to the people of England and of France in every possible aspect. He pointed out the reasons of his advocacy of the recognition of the new Confederate republic in several particulars: as an effectual blow at the slave trade, “mainly carried on by ships sailing from Northern ports and floated by Northern capital;” as an amelioration of the condition of slavery; as a means of peace and unrestricted commerce; as a just retaliation upon the “Morrill” tariff, the successful issue of Northern policy, against which the South had protested; and as the vindication of the right of a people to assert their independence. Mr.