Adam Badeau, Grant in peace: from Appomattox to Mount McGregor, a personal memoir

[585] give? If we had answered according to the view now put forward in the United States of what our conduct should have been, we must have answered that there could be no legal impediment to their going.

Now, do consider what in all probability would have happened if we had given that answer. Many vessels would have gone to the Southern ports. Your officers would, under the orders of your Government, have stopped or seized them. Suppose any English vessel had resisted, and that your officers had fired into her and caused serious damage or killed some of her crew. That is no improbable case. What do you think would have been the state of feeling in this country? and what would have been the conduct of the Government? We must have demanded reparation for an injury to our merchants by a breach of International law, and enforced it, if necessary at the risk of war. Can one even now contemplate such a state of things without the most serious alarm? The course we did take avoided all risk of such a crisis. We acknowledged the belligerent rights of the South, and that acknowledgment enabled us to acquiesce in your blockade, and to give the immediate answer to our merchants that they were entitled to no protection if they attempted to break the blockade.

Surely, so far from our conduct having given any cause of complaint, it ought to have been accepted as the most convincing proof of our anxiety to avoid any risk of rupture with the North.

The Alabama case is more complicated, and the result of her operations on the trade of the North has not unnaturally created a strong feeling in the United States. But the conduct of our Government must be judged on the state of the case when she left Liverpool.

Your law and our law on these matters are substantially the same. Most of the recent discussions on questions of International law have been in your Courts, to which we always look as authority, from the high character of your legists and great judges. I have not the means, in the country, of referring to all the particulars of the well known case of the Santissima Trinidad, decided in your courts. Unless, however, my memory fails me, she had been employed as a vessel of war, and she left one of your ports fully manned, armed, and equipped for war, proceeded to Buenos Ayres,