A Straight Deal [35]
South got neither ships nor recognition, in spite of his deceitful connivance and desire; Napoleon flirted a while with Slidell, but grew cold when he saw no chance of English cooperation.
Besides John Bright and Cobden, we had other English friends of influence and celebrity: John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hughes, Goldwin Smith, Leslie Stephen, Robert Gladstone, Frederic Harrison are some of them. All from the first supported us. All from the first worked and spoke for us. The Union and Emancipation Society was founded. "Your Committee," says its final report when the war was ended, "have issued and circulated upwards of four hundred thousand books, pamphlets, and tracts... and nearly five hundred official and public meetings have been held..." The president of this Society, Mr. Potter, spent thirty thousand dollars in the cause, and at a time when times were hard and fortunes as well as cotton-spinners in distress through our blockade. Another member of the Society, Mr. Thompson, writes of one of the public meetings: "... I addressed a crowded assembly of unemployed operatives in the town of Heywood, near Manchester, and spoke to them for two hours about the Slaveholders' Rebellion. They were united and vociferous in the expression of their willingness to suffer all hardships consequent upon a want of cotton, if thereby the liberty of the victims of Southern despotism might be promoted. All honor to the half million of our working population in Lancashire, Cheshire, and elsewhere, who are bearing with heroic fortitude the privation which your war has entailed upon them!... Their sublime resignation, their self-forgetfulness, their observance of law, their whole-souled love of the cause of human freedom, their quick and clear perception of the merits of the question between the North and the South... are extorting the admiration of all classes of the community ..."
How much of all this do you ever hear from the people who remember the Alabama?
Strictly in accord with Beecher's vivid summary of the true England in our Civil War, are some passages of a letter from Mr. John Bigelow, who was at that time our Consul-General at Paris, and whose impressions, written to our Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, on February 6, 1863, are interesting to compare with what Beecher says in that letter, from which I have already given extracts.
"The anti-slavery meetings in England are having their effect upon the Government already... The Paris correspondent of the London Post also came to my house on Wednesday evening... He says... that there are about a dozen persons who by their position and influence over the organs of public opinion have produced all the bad feeling and treacherous con- duct of England towards America. They are people who, as members of the Government in times past, have been bullied by the U. S.... They are not entirely ignorant that the class who are now trying to overthrow the Government were mainly responsible for the brutality, but they think we as a nation are disposed to bully, and they are disposed to assist in any policy that may dismember and weaken us. These scars of wounded pride, however, have been carefully concealed from the public, who therefore cannot be readily made to see why, when the President has distinctly made the issue between slave labor and free labor, that England should not go with the North. He says these dozen people who rule England hate us cordially... "
There were more than a dozen, a good many more, as we know from Charles and Henry Adams. But read once again the last paragraph of Beecher's letter, and note how it corresponds with what Mr. Bigelow says about the feeling which our Government (for thirty years "in the hands or under the influence of Southern statesmen") had raised against us by its bad manners to European governments. This was the harvest sown by shirt sleeves diplomacy and reaped by Mr. Adams in 1861. Only seven years before, we had gratuitously offended four countries at once. Three of our foreign ministers (two of them from the South) had met at Ostend and
Besides John Bright and Cobden, we had other English friends of influence and celebrity: John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hughes, Goldwin Smith, Leslie Stephen, Robert Gladstone, Frederic Harrison are some of them. All from the first supported us. All from the first worked and spoke for us. The Union and Emancipation Society was founded. "Your Committee," says its final report when the war was ended, "have issued and circulated upwards of four hundred thousand books, pamphlets, and tracts... and nearly five hundred official and public meetings have been held..." The president of this Society, Mr. Potter, spent thirty thousand dollars in the cause, and at a time when times were hard and fortunes as well as cotton-spinners in distress through our blockade. Another member of the Society, Mr. Thompson, writes of one of the public meetings: "... I addressed a crowded assembly of unemployed operatives in the town of Heywood, near Manchester, and spoke to them for two hours about the Slaveholders' Rebellion. They were united and vociferous in the expression of their willingness to suffer all hardships consequent upon a want of cotton, if thereby the liberty of the victims of Southern despotism might be promoted. All honor to the half million of our working population in Lancashire, Cheshire, and elsewhere, who are bearing with heroic fortitude the privation which your war has entailed upon them!... Their sublime resignation, their self-forgetfulness, their observance of law, their whole-souled love of the cause of human freedom, their quick and clear perception of the merits of the question between the North and the South... are extorting the admiration of all classes of the community ..."
How much of all this do you ever hear from the people who remember the Alabama?
Strictly in accord with Beecher's vivid summary of the true England in our Civil War, are some passages of a letter from Mr. John Bigelow, who was at that time our Consul-General at Paris, and whose impressions, written to our Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, on February 6, 1863, are interesting to compare with what Beecher says in that letter, from which I have already given extracts.
"The anti-slavery meetings in England are having their effect upon the Government already... The Paris correspondent of the London Post also came to my house on Wednesday evening... He says... that there are about a dozen persons who by their position and influence over the organs of public opinion have produced all the bad feeling and treacherous con- duct of England towards America. They are people who, as members of the Government in times past, have been bullied by the U. S.... They are not entirely ignorant that the class who are now trying to overthrow the Government were mainly responsible for the brutality, but they think we as a nation are disposed to bully, and they are disposed to assist in any policy that may dismember and weaken us. These scars of wounded pride, however, have been carefully concealed from the public, who therefore cannot be readily made to see why, when the President has distinctly made the issue between slave labor and free labor, that England should not go with the North. He says these dozen people who rule England hate us cordially... "
There were more than a dozen, a good many more, as we know from Charles and Henry Adams. But read once again the last paragraph of Beecher's letter, and note how it corresponds with what Mr. Bigelow says about the feeling which our Government (for thirty years "in the hands or under the influence of Southern statesmen") had raised against us by its bad manners to European governments. This was the harvest sown by shirt sleeves diplomacy and reaped by Mr. Adams in 1861. Only seven years before, we had gratuitously offended four countries at once. Three of our foreign ministers (two of them from the South) had met at Ostend and