Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 2.

1 See page 259, volume I.

2 We have already observed the “precipitate and unprecedented” proceedings, as Mr. Adams termed it, of the British Government, and the leaders of public opinion in England, in allowing to the insurgents the privileges of belligerents. [Chapter XXIV., volume I.] In Parliament and out of it, no favorable occasion was omitted, by many leading men, to speak not only disparagingly, but often very offensively, of the Government and people of the Republic. The enemies of free institutions and supporters of privileged classes acted upon the old maxim of political craft, “Divide and Govern,” and they exerted all their powers to widen the breach between the people of the Free and Slave-labor States. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, the author, who had received the honors of knighthood, which allied him to the aristocratic class in Great Britain, appeared among the willing prophets of evil for the Republic. He declared in an address before an Agricultural Society, on the 25th of September, 1861, that he had “long foreseen and foretold to be inevitable” a dissolution of the American Union; and then again, mounting the Delphic stool, he solemnly said: “I venture to predict that the younger men here present will live to see not two, but at least four, and probably more than four, separate and sovereign Commonwealths arising out of those populations which a year ago united their legislature under one President, and carried their merchandise under one flag.” He rejoiced in the prospect that so gladdened his vision, and said: “I believe that such separation will be attended with happy results to the safety of Europe, and the development of American civilization.” The desire for such separation was evidently engendered in the speaker's mind by an unpleasant horoscope of the future of the Great Republic. “If it could have been possible,” he said, “that, as population and wealth increased, all the vast continent of America, with her mighty seaboard, and the fleets which her increasing ambition as well as her extending commerce would have formed and armed, could have remained under one form of government, in which the executive has little or no control over a populace exceedingly adventurous and excitable, why, then, America would have hung over Europe like a gathering and destructive thunder-cloud. No single kingdom in Europe could have been strong enough to maintain itself against a nation that had once consolidated the gigantic resources of a quarter of the globe.”

A little later, Earl Russell, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, in an afterdinner speech at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, declared that the struggle in America was “on the one side for empire, and on the other for power,” and not for the great principles of human liberty, and for the life of the Republic, for which the Government was really contending. A little later still, the Earl of Shrewsbury, speaking with hope for his class, at the old city of Worcester, said that he saw in America the trial of Democracy, and its failure. He believed the dissolution of the Union to be inevitable, and that men there before him would live to “see an aristocracy established in America.” In the same hour, Sir John Pakington, formerly a cabinet minister, and then a member of Parliament, told the same hearers, that, “from President Lincoln, downward, there was not a man in America who would venture to tell them that he really thought it possible that by the force of circumstances the North could hope to compel the South to again join them in constituting the United States.” Sir John Bowring, an eminent English scholar, in a kindly letter to an American friend in England, expressed his solemn conviction of the utter separation of the States, and intimated that the Government lacked the sympathy of Englishmen because it had not “shown any disposition to put down slavery.” Overlooking the fact that the fathers of the Republic fought for the establishment of liberty for all, and that the conspirators were fighting for the establishment of the slavery of the many for the benefit of the few. he made a comparison, and said, “It does not appear to me that you are justified in calling the Southerners rebels. Our statesmen of the time of George III. called Washington and Franklin by that name.” Lord Stanley, who had traveled in the United States a dozen years before, and better understood American affairs, said, in a speech early in November, that a Southern Confederacy would be established. “He did not think it reasonable to blame the Federal Governiment for declining to give up half their territory without striking a blow in its defense;” but the real difficulty in this case, in his mind, was involved in the question, “If they conquer the Southern States, what will they do with them when they have got them?” He pictured to himself the need of the establishment of a powerful military government to keep them in subjection. He wisely recommended great caution in judging of American affairs.

Mr. Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a speech at Edinburgh, in January, 1862, expressed there the opinion that the National Government could never succeed in putting down the Rebellion, and if it should, he said, it “would only be the preface and introduction of political difficulties far greater than even the military difficulties of the war itself.” This speech was delivered just after the surrender of Mason and Slidell to the British Government; and Mr. Gladstone, evidently unmindful of the true greatness of fixed principles of action as inseparable from mere worldly interests, was ungenerous enough to make that display of honor. honesty, and consistency on the part of our National Government an occasion for disparaging that Government and the people, by charging them with instability of purpose, if not cowardice. He tauntingly said: “Let us look back to the moment when the Prince of Wales appeared in the United States of America, and when men by the thousand, by tens of thousands, and by hundreds of thousands, trooped together from all parts to give him welcome as enthusiastic, and as obviously proceeding from the depths of the heart, as if those vast countries had still been a portion of the dominions of our Queen. Let us look to the fact that they are of necessity a people subject to quick and violent action of opinion, and liable to great public excitement, intensely agreed on the subject of the war in which they were engaged, until aroused to a high pitch of expectation by hearing that one of their vessels of war had laid hold on the Commissioners of the Southern States, whom they regarded simply as rebels. Let us look to the fact that in the midst of that exultation, and in a country where the principles of popular government and democracy are carried to extremes — that even, however, in this struggle of life and death, as they think it to be — that even while ebullitions were taking place all over the country of joy and exultation at this capture — that even there this popular and democratic Government has, under a demand of a foreign Power, written these words, for they are the closing words in the dispatch of Mr. Seward: ‘ The four Commissioners will be cheerfully liberated.’ ”