Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

While, from its State Department, the Confederacy was denounced as an insurrection soon to be suppressed, and the cruisers regularly commissioned by the Confederate States were called ‘pirates,’ diplomatic demands were made upon Great Britain to prevent the so-called ‘pirates’ from violating international law, as if it applied to pirates. Appeals to that government were also made to prevent the sale of the materials of war to the Confederacy, and thus indirectly to aid the United States in performing what, according to the representation, was a police duty, to suppress a combination of some evil-disposed persons —gallantly claiming that they, armed cap-a-pie, should meet their adversary in the list, he to be without helmet, shield, or lance.

To one who from youth to age had seen, with exultant pride, the flag of his country as it unfolded, disclosing to view the stripes recordant of the original size of the family of states, and the constellation which told of that family's growth, it could but be deeply mortifying to witness such paltry exhibition of deception and unmanliness in the representatives of a government around which fond memories still lingered, despite the perversion of which it was the subject.

If this attempt on the part of the United States to deny the existence of war after having, by proclamation of blockade, compelled all nations to take notice that war did exist, and to claim that munitions should not be sold to a country because there were some disorderly people in it, had been all, the attempt would have been ludicrously absurd, and the contradiction too bald to require refutation; this would have been but half of the story. Subsequently the United States government claimed reclamation from Great Britain for damage inflicted by vessels which had been built in her ports, and which had elswhere been armed and equipped for purposes of war. International law recognizes the right of a neutral to sell an unarmed vessel, without reference to the use to which the purchaser might subsequently apply it. The United States government had certainly not practiced under a different rule, but had gone even further than this—so much further as to transgress the prohibition against armed vessels.

It has already been stated that the government of the United States, at the commencement of the war, sought to contract for the construction of iron-plated vessels in the ports of England, which were to be delivered fully armed and equipped to her. To this it may be added that her armies were recruited from almost all the countries of Europe, down almost to