of Union and Secession continued in their customary labors. So far as Slidell was concerned the last months of his mission paralleled the first. Agreeable but fruitless sessions with the Emperor's ministers occupied his time without result. For Napoleon, though never failing to express good will, was less disposed than ever to act without Great Britain. And across the Channel, the government of Palmerston would scarcely attempt in 1865 an intervention deemed unwise in 1861. The war had run its course. Its diplomacy in last analysis was determined on the battlefield.

LAW AND ECONOMIC FORCES UNDERLYING DIPLOMACY

The war which in its major diplomatic outlines has been thus briefly sketched gave rise to many questions of interest to international law. What, for example, should be done with mail on captured blockade runners? A case might have been made for seizing and opening it. But Seward preferred to forward it rather than to irritate other governments. The blockade was a fruitful source of complications. Attempts to close by stone obstructions the Charleston harbor evoked from Earl Russell the strongest protests. He denounced the plan as cruel and a plot against the trade of nations. To which Seward with dignity replied that two channels remained open, guarded only by the fleet of the United States, and that he desired an end of European exaggerations on the subject.

The treatment of foreigners within the areas occupied by Union armies created numerous embarrassments. The question was most acute at New Orleans, where many Frenchmen approved the Southern cause and where General Butler's rigorous methods provoked widespread indignation. The transfer of Butler from this strategic post revealed the influence of the State Department.30

But we were far more sinned against than sinning. The use of Nassau and Bermuda as military bases and ware

30 Constitutional aspects of the Lincoln administration and the Civil War are covered in James G. Randall's Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (New York, 1926).

houses for the Confederacy proved irritating. More serious was the building of Confederate cruisers, the Florida in 1862, the Alabama in the same year, and others before the war had ended. The damage inflicted by these commerce raiders was enormous. Charles Francis Adams made each separate capture the subject of a separate remonstrance till Earl Russell grew heartily tired of the whole issue. The minister thus kept before Great Britain a grievance for which our government eventually obtained a reparation.

Indignation against England was directed equally toward Canada by an incident in October, 1864, when Canada refused to surrender a band of desperadoes who after an attempt to burn St. Albans, in Vermont, then fled across the border. Seward wished them extradited as ordinary criminals. Canada retained them as belligerents, and accorded similar protection to various gangs which operated on lake steamers. In this she set a most unfortunate precedent, for nothing in the circumstances entitled the offenders to military status.

But

Our grievances against France have been already noted. Seward minimized them in an effort to keep peace. the Mexican expedition called forth a protest from our House of Representatives the news of which in Paris threatened war till Seward explained that recognition of the government of Maximilian rested solely with the President and was quite outside the sphere of Congress. Its recommendations would be heard respectfully, but the President would decide on his own responsibility. In due season he would notify the French of any change in policy. With soft words he turned aside the wrath the Representatives had roused.

Mention has been frequently made of the dependence of diplomacy upon military strategy. The most brilliant efforts of Confederate diplomacy were thwarted by reverses on the battlefield. A similar if not equal dependence was involved in economic forces. Undoubtedly the might of Cotton was fighting for the South. Planters even dreamed that cotton would prove King. Its influence in world markets was expected to force Europe's intervention and thus save the

Confederate cause. Less widely emphasized, but perhaps of equal potency, however, was the counter-weight of wheat. Europe needed Northern exports quite as much as Southern. To recognize the South and thus precipitate a war with the Federal Union was to deliver the European economic system from the evils that it knew to others that it knew not of. Thus transatlantic attitude toward the American Civil War was cognizant of more than battles and diplomatic wiles. It weighed the rival economic systems where Cotton was found wanting, and Wheat at last proved King.

31

In the field of labor also, economic forces yielded political and diplomatic consequences. The workers in both France and England as wage slaves felt a community of interest with chattel slaves in North America. Emancipation of the latter seemed to European labor a net gain to the cause of plain men everywhere. Thus an economic solidarity built up a body of opinion more numerous in England than it was elsewhere, which the Government of Lord Palmerston, however friendly to the South, could not openly defy.

In a somewhat larger interpretation of the period than the purely economic, Mr. Brooks Adams, a son of the great minister to England, takes the view that his father's struggles were but one aspect of a universal conflict between aristocracy and democracy. Slaveocracy was privilege. When privilege in North America was endangered, privilege elsewhere felt a shock. There was community of interest between the English country gentleman and the Virginia planter, whereas the high born Englishman had slight regard for Yankee tradesmen. Our diplomatic effort overseas was designed to appeal so strongly to common men that the aristocrats who ruled them would not dare to violate their deeper sentiments. In this respect the "Emancipation Proclamation" was a mighty engine of diplomacy.

32

Other aspects of the Civil War diplomacy might with

31 Cf. Adams, Charles Francis, Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity, (Oxford, 1913).

32 Adams, Brooks, "Charles Francis Adams, An American Statesman. The Seizure of the Laird Rams." Boston, 1912. From the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society," for December, 1911.

propriety be emphasized. But briefly one may say that the diplomacy of the Lincoln Administration was primarily an adaptation of the nation's foreign policy to conditions of the war. There were other interests, it is true, particularly in the Orient where our relations happily begun by earlier Presidents, were maintained by Seward with extraordinary ability. The choice, for example, of Anson Burlingame as minister to China was singularly wise. But its fruits matured in what would have been Lincoln's second term and their consideration may be postponed to a chapter where Seward's Eastern policies are viewed as a nucleus of American expansion rather than a minor incident in a struggle for self-preservation.

For it is in this latter aspect that the diplomacy of the Civil War must inevitably be judged. The Union was saved, and the credit for so tremendous an achievement belongs no less to diplomats than generals. The foreign intervention which failed so fortunately to materialize was a greater menace than any army Lee commanded. And this negative result deserves an equal recognition with more positive achievements of the war. Seward and his brilliant lieutenants, and over them the steadfast Lincoln preserved the Union in as real a sense as Stanton and his generals.

T

CHAPTER XVII

DIPLOMACY LEADS RECONSTRUCTION

HE diplomacy of the Civil War did not end at Appomattox. Reconstruction was not solely a domestic

matter. Reparations from Great Britain for her various breaches of neutrality, and expulsion of the French from Mexico, with a corresponding reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, were diplomatic legacies of the War of Secession. Reconstruction was more efficient in diplomacy, in fact, than in domestic legislation. This was mainly due, no doubt, to Johnson's continuity of policy from Lincoln, whereas in legislative matters, the heat of party passion took slight account of reason.

The new President was fortunate, indeed, in Seward's loyalty. Distracted by the quarrel between President and party, Seward chose the path of most resistance and remained in office. His fame as Secretary largely rests, in fact, on diplomacy in Reconstruction. For expansion is more dramatic than conservation. A vigorous policy in the Orient, the purchase of Alaska, negotiations for the Danish Islands in the West Indies, treaties with the states of Latin-America, are more tangible achievements than the preservation of a status quo. The fame of Seward rests, indeed, on positive as well as negative foundations.

While Executive and Congress were clearing away the débris of the war, Seward undertook the liquidation of its foreign problems. The damage claims against Great Britain were of course a major object. But while Lord Russell remained at the Foreign Office, nothing was accomplished beyond registering repeated protests. Against Napoleon, Confederate surrender permitted more aggressive action. Stern insistence succeeded to mild protests. Napoleon must withdraw from Mexico or face the wrath of conquering armies.