Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States

[247] had itself already passed upon the case. Had it not said to its minister, at Washington, ‘If, at the end of that time, no answer is given, or, if any other answer is given, except that of a compliance with the demands of her Majesty's Government, your lordship is instructed to leave Washington, &c.’? To be logical, Mr. Seward should have said, ‘Our officer having made a mistake, by doing a right thing, in a wrong way, namely, by seizing contraband of war, on board a neutral ship, without sending the ship in, for adjudication, we will send the prisoners back to the Trent, if you will send the Trent into one of our ports for adjudication.’ But Mr. Seward knew better than to say any such thing, for the simple reason, that this was not the thing which was demanded of him, although he had written a lengthy despatch to prove that it was.

I was in Europe when Mr. Seward's despatch arrived there. Every one was astonished, both at the paper, and the act of humiliation performed by it. The act needed not to be humiliating. A great wrong had been done a neutral. It could be neither justified, nor palliated. A statesman, at the head of the Federal State Department, would have made haste to atone for it, before any demand for reparation could be made. To pander to a vitiated public taste, and gain a little temporary eclat, by appearing to beard the British lion, hoping that the lion would submit, in silence to the indignity, Mr. Seward committed one of those blunders which was equivalent to a great crime, since it humiliated an entire people, and put on record against them one of those damaging pages that historians cannot, if they would, forget. The following were the closing lines of this famous despatch:—

‘The four persons in question are now held in military custody, at Fort Warren, in the State of Massachusetts. They will be cheerfully liberated. Your lordship will please indicate a time, and place, for receiving them.’

When I read this paragraph, I experienced two sensations—one, of disappointment at the loss of an ally, with whose aid we would be sure to gain the independence for which we were struggling, and one, of mortification, that an American nation had been so greatly humbled, before an European Power; for though the Federal States were my