for expressions of sympathy from many quarters in England; but in the English newspapers which they read and the reports of Americans in England they found evidence of nothing but dislike. There soon came evidence, as it seemed to the whole North, of actually hostile action on the part of the British Government. It issued a Proclamation enjoining neutrality upon British subjects. This was a matter of course on the outbreak of what was nothing less than war; but Northerners thought that at least some courteous explanation should first have been made to their Government, and there were other matters which they misinterpreted as signs of an agreement of England with France to go further and open diplomatic relations with the Confederate Government. Thus alike in the most prejudiced and in the most enlightened quarters in the North there arose an irritation which an Englishman must see to have been natural but can hardly think to have been warranted by the real facts.

Here came in the one clearly known and most certainly happy intervention of Lincoln's in foreign affairs. Early in May Seward brought to him the draft of a vehement despatch, telling the British Government peremptorily what the United States would not stand, and framed in a manner which must have frustrated any attempt by Adams in London to establish good relations with Lord John Russell. That draft now exists with the alterations made in Lincoln's own hand. With a few touches, some of them very minute, made with the skill of a master of language and of a life-long peacemaker, he changed the draft into a firm but entirely courteous despatch. In particular, instead of requiring Adams, as Seward would have done, to read the whole despatch to Russell and leave him with a copy of it, he left it to the man on the spot to convey its sense in what manner he judged best. Probably, as has been claimed for him, his few penstrokes made peaceful relations easy when Seward's despatch would have made them almost impossible; certainly a study of this document will prove both his strange, untutored diplo

matic skill and the general soundness of his view of foreign affairs.

Now, however, followed a graver crisis in which his action requires some discussion. Messrs. Mason and Slidell were sent by the Confederate Government as their emissaries to England and France. They got to Havana and there took ship again on the British steamer, Trent. A watchful Northern sea captain overhauled the Trent, took Mason and Slidell off her, and let her go. If he had taken the course, far more inconvenient to the Trent, of bringing her into a Northern harbour, where a Northern Prize Court might have adjudged these gentlemen to be bearers of enemy despatches, he would have been within the law. As it was he violated well-established usage, and no one has questioned the right and even the duty of the British Government to demand the release of the prisoners. This they did in a note of which the expression was made milder by the wish of the Queen (conveyed in almost the last letter of the Prince Consort), but which required compliance within a fortnight. Meanwhile Secretary Welles had approved the sea captain's action. The North was jubilant at the capture, the more so because Mason and Slidell were Southern statesmen of the lower type and held to be specially obnoxious; and the House of Representatives, to make matters worse, voted its approval of what had been done. Lincoln, on the very day when the news of the capture came, had seen and said privately that on the principles which America had itself upheld in the past the prisoners would have to be given up with an apology. But there is evidence that he now wavered, and that, bent as he was on maintaining a united North, he was still too distrustful of his own better judgment as against that of the public. At this very time he was already on other points in painful conflict with many friends. In any case he submitted to Seward a draft despatch making the ill-judged proposal of arbitration. He gave way to Seward, but at the Cabinet meeting on Christmas Eve, at which Seward submitted a despatch yielding to the

British demand, it is reported that Lincoln, as well as Chase and others, was at first reluctant to agree, and that it was Bates and Seward that persuaded the Cabinet to a just and necessary surrender.

This was the last time that there was serious friction in the actual intercourse of the two Governments. The lapse of Great Britain in allowing the famous Alabama to sail was due to delay and misadventure (" week-ends " or the like) in the proceedings of subordinate officials, and was never defended, and the numerous minor controversies that arose, as well as the standing disagreement as to the law of blockade never reached the point of danger. For all this great credit was due to Lord Lyons and to C. F. Adams, and to Seward also, when he had a little sobered down, but it might seem as if the credit commonly given to Lincoln by Americans rested on little but the single happy performance with the earlier despatch which has been mentioned. Adams and Lyons were not aware of his beneficent influencethe papers of the latter contain little reference to him beyond a kindly record of a trivial conversation, at the end of which, as the Ambassador was going for a holiday to England, the President said, "Tell the English people I mean them no harm." Yet it is evident that Lincoln's supporters in America, the writer of the Biglow Papers, for instance, ascribed to him a wise, restraining power in the Trent dispute. What is more, Lincoln later claimed this for himself. Two or three years later, in one of the confidences with which he often startled men who were but slight acquaintances, but who generally turned out worthy of confidence, he exclaimed with emphatic self-satisfaction: "Seward knows that I am his master," and recalled with satisfaction how he had forced Seward to yield to England in the Trent affair. It would have been entirely unlike him to claim praise when it was wholly undue to him; we find him, for example, writing to Fox, of the Navy Department, about "a a blunder which was probably in part mine, and certainly was not yours"; so that a puzzling question arises here. It is quite possible that Lincoln,

who did not press his proposal of arbitration, really manœuvred Seward and the Cabinet into full acceptance of the British demands by making them see the consequences of any other action. It is also, however, likely enough that, being, as he was, interested in arbitration generally, he was too inexperienced to see the inappropriateness of the proposal in this case. If so, we may none the less credit him with having forced Seward to work for peace and friendly relations with Great Britain, and made that minister the agent, more skilful than himself, of a peaceful resolution which in its origin was his own.

5. The Great Questions of Domestic Policy.

The larger questions of civil policy which arose out of the fact of the war, and which weighed heavily on Lincoln before the end of 1861, can be related with less intricate detail if the fundamental point of difficulty is made clear.

Upon July 4 Congress met. In an able Message which was a skilful but simple appeal not only to Congress, but to the "plain people," the President set forth the nature of the struggle as he conceived it, putting perhaps in its most powerful form the contention that the Union was indissoluble, and declaring that the "experiment" of "our popular government would have failed once for all if it did not prove that "when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets." He recounted the steps which he had taken since the bombardment of Fort Sumter, some of which might be held to exceed his constitutional authority as indeed they did, saying he would have been false to his trust if for fear of such illegality he had let the whole Constitution perish, and asking that, if necessary, Congress should ratify them. He appealed to Congress now to do its part, and especially he appealed for such prompt and adequate provision of money and men as would enable the war to be speedily brought to a close.

Congress, with but a few dissentient voices, chiefly from the border States, approved all that he had done, and voted the supplies that he had asked. Then, by a resolution of both Houses, it defined the object of the war; the war was not for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or of "overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions" of the Southern States; it was solely "to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired."

In this resolution may be found the clue to the supreme political problem with which, side by side with the conduct of the war, Lincoln was called upon to grapple unceasingly for the rest of his life. That problem lay in the inevitable change, as the war dragged on, of the political object involved in it. The North as yet was not making war upon the institutions of Southern States, in other words upon slavery, and it would have been wrong to do so. It was simply asserting the supremacy of law by putting down what every man in the North regarded as rebellion. That rebellion, it seemed likely, would completely subside after a decisive defeat or two of the Southern forces. The law and the Union would then have been restored as before. A great victory would in fact have been won over slavery, for the policy of restricting its further spread would have prevailed, but the constitutional right of each Southern State to retain slavery within its borders, was not to be denied by those who were fighting, as they claimed, for the Constitution.

Such at first was the position taken up by an unanimous Congress. It was obviously in accord with those political principles of Lincoln which have been examined in a former chapter. More than that, it was the position which, as he thought, his official duty as President imposed on him. It is exceedingly difficult for any Englishman to follow his course as the political situation developed. He was neither a dictator, nor an English Prime Minister. He was first and foremost an elected officer with powers and duties prescribed by