The Great Conspiracy and England's Neutrality (Part Three of Four) January, 1862

THE GREAT CONSPIRACY, and England's Neutrality. (Part Three of Four)

An Address delivered at Mount Kisco, New York, on the Fourth of July, 1861, the Eighty-Sixth Anniversary of American Independence. 

Source: Pacific Commercial Advertiser. Honolulu: January 23, 1862.

By John Jay, Esq. 

[Continued from our last]

ENGLAND'S NEUTRALITY

In this crisis of our national history it is natural that we should regard with interest the view taken of our course by the great powers of Europe, and especially by that country, with which, as colonies, we were so long connected, and which, despite the two wars that have been waged between us, we are accustomed to remember as our mother-land. Mingled with our Dutch and Huguenot ancestry, a very large proportion of the older families of America trace their descent from England, and many who do not are yet connected with her by no common ties. For myself, I may say that I have always entertained for her people an hereditary feeling of attachment, from the fact that my Huguenot ancestors, when they fled from Rochelle after the revocation by Louis XIV of the Edict of Nantz, found upon her soil a welcome and a home: and that one of them volunteering for King William against James II, shed his blood for English freedom at the Battle of the Boyne, that great era in English history, ending, as we hope forever her civil wars, from which dates the establishment on a firm basis, of the unity, the strength and the world-wide dominion of the British Empire. Such memories, and doubtless, my countrymen, you have many such, descend from father to son undimmed by national revolutions. They inspire sentiments of affection and kinship, that like family heir-looms gather new value from the lapse of time, and instead of fading as years and centuries roll by, seem the more sacred and imperishable from the thought of the generations by whom they have been cherished and who have each in turn added a link to the chain of association.

The recent visit of the Prince of Wales, coming to us as the representative of the British nation, characterized, as it was, by the most graceful courtesy and cordiality on his part, and by the heartiest welcome upon ours, with the single exception of the rude treatment he met at Richmond—now the head-quarters of the rebels—had accomplished what no diplomacy could have effected. It seemed to have blotted out the last lingering remnant of ill-feeling, and left on this side the Atlantic at least, the belief that henceforth there was a firm alliance between England and America, not based on treaty stipulations, but upon that heartfelt cordiality which springs from mutual regard, and from a common devotion to the great principles of right which belong to the institutions of both countries and which their example is recommending to the world; nor should we overlook the belief cherished by many thoughtful men that if in the distant future England should be set upon by the despotisms of Europe, and should require the aid of her American daughter to save her from annihilation, that aid would be promptly, effectively and cordially given.

It is with profound regret that we have seen that friendly feeling suddenly converted into one of intense and bitter disappointment by the conduct and tone of the English government and the ill-judged comments of the English press.

The election of Mr. Lincoln for the first time entitled to the control of the federal government, a party with whose political principles the English people were supposed to sympathize. By a scheme of treachery unparalleled in baseness, a few of the defeated faction holding office in the Cabinet, in Congress, in the army and in the navy, conspired together to betray the forts arsenals and other property of the government into the hands of their confederates, with the view of destroying the Union, and erecting upon its ruins a Southern confederacy, of which slavery is to be the grand permanent and distinguishing characteristic. They accomplish the seizure of the public property without difficulty, for they themselves were entrusted with its guardianship, and they proceed to develop the great conspiracy and organize the rebel government, while the loyal citizens of the United States are helplessly compelled to await the inauguration of the new president. The 4th of March arrives at last, Mr. Lincoln takes the oath to maintain the Constitution and the laws, and when in obedience to that oath he orders the rebels to disperse, and calls upon the country for assistance, the loyal states, as one man, prepare to crush the conspiracy and restore the integrity and the honor of the nation. Neither from England nor from any foreign power have we asked or would we accept assistance in regulating our own household, but from England, of all the states of the world, we thought we had a right to expect a ready sympathy, and that moral support which is given by the countenance of a great nation.

The Southern rebels also counted upon the support of England, on the simple ground that her interest in cotton would incline her to their side, but we although well aware of the demoralizing effect of interest upon national principle's, still believed it impossible that the British government could consent from pecuniary motives to look with complacency on the progress of a rebellion whose only strength was gained by treachery, and which was avowedly prosecuted for the maintenance of a system which England herself had taught the world to regard with abhorence. In thus believing, we were confirmed by the tone of the English press when the insurrection first began, one of the ablest representatives of which indignantly declared in substance that Manchester and Birmingham would be the first to reject as an insult, the idea that they were to be moved from their position by pecuniary appeals, and that if any British cabinet should sacrifice the anti-slavery principles of the nation to the question of cotton, England would lose, and deservedly lose, her place at the council table of Europe.

The exclamation of Lord John Russell in reply to a question as to the position of England, "For God's sake let us keep out of it," was followed by what is termed a proclamation of neutrality in which British subjects are forbidden to render assistance to either the United States on the one hand, or the states calling themselves the Confederate States on the other, both of which parties are recognized by the proclamation as "belligerents."

The British government is accustomed to preserve an attitude of neutrality towards contending nations, but it would seem that neutrality does not so far interfere with the sympathies and freedom of its subjects as to compel it to issue proclamations against Irishmen enlisting with Francis Joseph, or Englishmen fighting or Victor Emanuel and Garibaldi.

EFFECT OF THE PROCLAMATION.

The proclamation in this case is so warmly eulogized by the British press as precisely the proclamation demanded by the crisis, they profess such profound astonishment that the American people are not satisfied with it, and rate so severely Mr. Cassius M. Clay for expressing with western bluntness his frank surprise, that I will dwell for a moment on what seems to be its meaning and effect.

What has the proclamation effected? How did we stand before it was issued, and how do we stand now?

In the case of the United States, the laws of England and its treaty stipulations with our government already forbade its subjects from engaging in a conspiracy to overthrow our institutions. The proclamation, therefore, in forbidding English subjects to fight in the service of the rebels against the United States, simply declared the law as it was already understood; while in forbidding Englishmen to fight for the United States against the rebels, it intervened to change the existing practice, to revive the almost obsolete act of Geo. III forbidding English subjects from engaging in foreign service without the royal consent, which had slumbered in regard to Austria and Italy, for the purpose of forbidding Englishmen from assisting to maintain in the United States constitutional order against conspiracy and rebellion, and the cause of freedom against chattel slavery.

The first effect of the proclamation, therefore, was to change the position in which England and Englishmen stood to the United States, to the disadvantage of the latter. Before the proclamation, for an Englishman to serve the United States government in maintaining its integrity was regarded honorable; after the proclamation such service became a crime. The proclamation makes it an offense now for an Englishman to fight for the government at Washington as great as it was for Englishmen before the proclamation to fight for the rebels of Moutgomery. It thus, in a moral view, lowered the American government to the level of the rebel confederacy, and in the next place, it proceeded, in an international view, to place the rebel confederacy on a par with the American government by recognizing them, not as rebels and insurgents to be dealt with by our government as our Constitution and laws should determine, but as a belligerent power, to be classed with the United States (of which they were but a rebellious fraction ) and equally entitled with the United States to the rights of belligerents under the law of nations.

No ingenuity can blind us to these facts :—Before the proclamation, to support our government was an honorable office for the subjects of Great Britain, and the rebels were insurgents with no rights save under the American Constitution. After the proclamation for an Englishman to serve the United States is a crime and the rebels are elevated into a belligerent power—and this intervention of England, depriving us of a support which her practice permitted, and giving the rebels a status and right they did not possess, we are coolly told is neutrality. Dr. Johnson in his famous letter gave us a sketch of a Chesterfieldean patron seeing a man struggling for life in the water, and when he reached ground encumbering him with help. Lord John has taught us the meaning of 'British neutrality towards a nation supposed to be in like condition. Let us trust that the English people will not endorse the definition.

What would England have said to such a proclamation of neutrality from us in her domestic troubles in Canada, in Ireland or in India? What would the English people have thought of a state paper from Washington, declaring it the sovereign will of the people of the United States to remain perfectly neutral in the contest being waged in Hindostan between the British government on the one side and the Mogul dynasty on the other, and forbidding American citizens to enter the service of either of the said belligerents. What would they have thought of the American president intimating with cold etiquette that it was a matter of profound indifference to this government which of the belligerents should be victorious, the king of Oude and Nana Sahib, or Lord Canning and the immortal Havelock. Or is it that the British have become so enamored of rebellion, aye and of treachery too among their sepoys, that they thus court our great mogul and his fellow traitors of Montgomery?

This queen's proclamation strikes not simply at the moral position of our government, but according to the English press, it strikes also at our right to execute our own laws against piracy; and we are told by the London Times that if we venture to hang under these laws, a pirate who is licensed to plunder and murder by Jefferson Davis's letters of marque, now endorsed by the sovereigns of England and France, it will be regarded as an outrage by the civilized world; and this gentle intimation comes to us from a nation who are hardly recovered from the effects of of a rebellion, to end which, without staying to ask the opinion of the world, they blew their rebels from the guns.

It was intimated that the British cabinet were puzzled how to act in regard to the United States on the one hand, and her rebel conspirators on the other, and that after a careful search for precedents, one was found in the royal proclamation touching the war between Greece and Turkey, and that on that was based the proclamation which has so displeased and wounded the American people.

AMERICAN NEUTRALITY IN CANADA

It could not have escaped the Cabinet in their search for precedents, for we know with what thoroughness such searches are made, that a very similar state of  things existed but a few years since between Great Britain and the United States, when the in- tegrity and honor of the British Empire were assailed by her Canadian colonists, and she had occasion to learn what in the opinion of the United States constitutes the duties of neutrality towards a friendly nation. Unsuccessful rebellions are soon forgotten, and perhaps many Englishmen may be surprised on being told that the Canadian rebellion was so deeply seated and so widely spread, as seriously to threaten the crown with the loss of the Canadas. Mr. Leader declared in Parliament that all the English government could do, would be to subjugate and hold the principal cities, leaving the country occupied by rebels. The number of British troops under Sir John Colbourne was only 20,000, while the rebels are said to have had 14,000 at Montreal, 4000 at Napiersville, and thousands more in arms in different parts of the Canadas, fierce with indignation at the murder of a party of patriots by Indians in the employ of the British government.

In November '37 two battles were fought between the British and the rebels, the one at St. Dennis, and the other at St. Charles which was taken from a force of three thousand Canadians of whom two hundred were killed, and thirty wounded.

In December, Mackenzie, the head rebel, who seems to have been the prototype of Davis, organized a provisional government, and assuming the right to dispose of "ten millions of acres of land, fair and fertile," took possession of Montgomery House near Toronto, with a band of insurgents, and sent a demand to Sir Francis B. Head to dissolve the provincial parliament, and to leave Toronto within fifteen days.

Then came Lord Gosford's proclamation at Quebec, declaring martial law, and denouncing the conspiracy and rebellion, and on the 8th of January 1838 came the first proclamation from President Van Buren. After reciting the efforts made by him and by the governors of New York and Vermont to prevent interference on the part of our citizens in the contest unfortunately commenced in the British provinces, and notwithstanding the presence of the civil officers of the United States who by his direction, had visited the scenes of commotion, arms and amunition have been procured by the insurgents, in the United States, the proclamation proceeded:-

"Now, therefore, to the end that the authority of the laws may be maintained and the faith of treaties observed, I, Martin Van Buren, do most earnestly exhort all citizens of the United States who have violated their duties to return peaceably to their respective homes, and I hereby warn them that any persons who shall compromise the neutrality of this government by interfering in an unlawful manner with the affairs of the neighboring British provinces will render themselves liable to arrest and punishment under the laws of the United States," &c, &c.

At the request of Lord Durham, Mr. Van Buren had directed our commanding officer on Lake Ontario to co-operate in any measures which might be suggested by Lord Durham for rooting out the band of pirates who had their quarters among "the thousand isles," without the slightest regard to the official proclamation of their chief, Mr. William Johnson, holding a commission from the patriot government, that the patriots would carefully respect neutral waters and the rights of all citizens of the United States.

On the 21st November, 1838, president Van Buren issued a second proclamation, calling upon the misguided and deluded persons to abandon projects dangerous to their own country, fatal to those whom they profess a desire to relieve, impracticable of execution without foreign aid, which they cannot rationally expect to obtain, and giving rise to imputations, however unfounded, against the honor and good faith of their own government.

The proclamation further called upon " every officer, civil and military, and upon every citizen, by the veneration due by all freemen to the laws which they have assisted to enact for their own government, by his regard for the honor and good faith of his country, by his love of honor and respect for that sacred code of laws by which national intercourse is regulated, to use every power to arrest for trial and punishment every offender against the laws providing for the performance of our obligations to the other powers of the world."

On the 4th of December, 1838, the president, in his message to Congress, declared, "If an insurrection existed in Canada the amicable disposition of the United States, as well as their duty to themselves, would lead them to maintain a strict neutrality, and to restrain its citizens from all violation of the laws which have been passed for its enforcement. But the government recognizes a still higher obligation to repress all attempts on the part of its citizens to disturb the peace of a country where order prevails or has been re-established."

Such was the neutrality on the part of the United States towards Great Britain. It recognized the rebels of Canada not as belligerents, but as insurgents, and it enforced its neutrality not by forbidding its citizens to assist Great Britain to maintain its authority against the insurgents, but by forbidding them to interfere in an unlawful manner with the affairs of the Provinces.

It needs no intimate knowledge of international law, no study of Grotius, or Puffendorf, or Vattel, or Wheaton, no definitions of the rights of belligerents and privateers from the Consolatodel Mare, from Lampredi, Galiani, Moser or Hiibner, to enable us to appreciate the wide difference between the neutrality we practiced towards England and her rebels, and that which England has inaugurated against us; and no refinement of reasoning, nor subtle glosses indulged in by the English press, have at all blinded the American people to the unfriendly character of this royal proclamation.

The recognition of the independence of the Southern Confederacy is a matter in the discretion of England, and of all foreign nations. When this independence is established as a matter of fact we expect it to be recognized, but England does not so recognize it. She recognizes the confederacy as simply struggling for independence as were the insurgents in Canada, and pending the struggle she volunteers under professions of neutrality to ignore our constitutional right to subdue them, and to recognize their rebellion as lawful war. Bound to us by treaty stipulations, she elevates them to an equality of position as regards belligerent rights under the law of nations. She places their usurped government, based on treachery and slavery, on a par with that founded by Washington and his associates on the broad consent of the American people. She introduces Jefferson Davis and his confederates to a limited extent into the family of nations, endorses the licenses given by them to pirates whose brutal cupidity is stimulated by bribes of blood money—twenty dollars for every murdered American! and transforms them into letters of marque which the ships of all nations are bound to recognize, respect and obey.

Had she treated them as insurgents they would have had no other rights on the sea than had Bill Johnson, the pirate of the St. Lawrence. Having proclaimed them belligerents she has given them a commission not simply to capture American property in American vessels, but to capture on the high seas American property on board of whatever vessel it may be found, and to carry the neutral vessel and cargo into a belligerent port for further examination. She recognizes the right of the men who have robbed our treasury, betrayed our forts and filched our navy yards and arsenals to establish prize courts to decide upon the lawfulness of captures made by their commissioned cruisers, and brought into court for adjudication, and the title to be given by Davis's courts is to be held valid by the law of nations.

This is what the proclamation of neutrality really means. This is the neutrality which England has inaugurated and which France has adopted; and those two great powers who recently declared in the Congress at Paris that privateering is and shall remain abolished,—by royal and imperial proclamation have countersigned letters of marque for the destruction of American ships, and which threaten with spoliation the commerce of the world. The aim and effect of the British proclamation seems to us so clearly unfriendly and injurious, that it is hardly worth while to note the discourtesy of adopting such a policy, and giving it a definite and irreversible shape in advance of the arrival of Mr. Adams, without allowing us the opportunity to offer a word of explanation or remonstrance. Mr. Adams reached Liverpool the 13th of May.—The next day the proclamation was printed in London.

The United States by their neutrality broke the back of the Canadian rebellion, dashed the hopes cherished by the rebels of effective American sympathy, in good faith assisted the British government in maintaining its authority, and restoring order, and thus materially diminished the cost of treasure and of life at which alone their subjection could have been accomplished.

The British government by their neutrality have made our task far more difficult, apart from the injury we may anticipate from the fleet of privateers whose letters are so respectably countersigned. But we learn from this proclamation one lesson, that will be perhaps worth all that it shall cost us: we learn the treatment we may expect, if we fail to maintain our national integrity and the honor of our flag.

If a mere supposition that the rebels of Montgomery are likely to be successful, can in a moment dash from the memory of the English government all recollection of past friendship, and induce her in our moment of trial to condescend to a course so different from that we hud pursued towards her: what treatment may we not expect from her, and from every other European cabinet, if we ourselves by our conduct admit that we are powerless at home. How will we be treated abroad, if we yield to the threats of a fraction of our own population? What will be our standing among nations if, consenting to separation, we lose nearly half of our territory, and two-thirds of our Atlantic seaboard, and descend to the position of a third rate power? Or what respect will be paid us, if to maintain our territory we compromise with rebellion? If we yield at the cannon's mouth, what the people have deliberately refused at the polls, if we teach the world by such an example that we may be bullied with success, and that when we resist on principle unreasonable demands, it is only necessary to humble our flag, and to threaten Washington, to induce us ignominously to submit?

Let us discard all reliance upon other help than that of God, a right cause and a strong arm, and let us recognize the stubborn fact that "the government or nation that fails to protect itself against foes, whether foreign or domestic, deserves to crush ingloriously."

THE RIGHT SYMPATHIES OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.

Before leaving the question of England's neutrality, I think we should distinguish between the hasty action of the British cabinet and the deliberate conviction of the British people.

That the heart of that great nation is sound, and that as soon as they understand the motives and manner of this rebellion as you understand them, they will appreciate our position, approve our resolution and wish us God speed in our great work of restoring the federal union to its integrity and its great original principles of freedom, I cannot, I will not doubt.

Already their cabinet has partially atoned for the first proclamation by an order that will prevent the privateers of Davis from entering British ports, and both the government and the people must soon recognize the fact that we have the ability and the will, to crush this rebellion and maintain our integrity, however long the struggle, however great the cost: and that we no more recognize the right of England nor of Europe to dictate to us in this matter, than England would have recognized our right to interfere between her and Nana Sahib. The material interests based on cotton must yield to the national and moral duties that to-day devolve upon the American people, in determining, perhaps for untold ages, the destiny of the American continent.

The English people will see that our resolve to crush the conspiracy for the establishment of a slave empire, is not based on any evanescent burst of enthusiasm, but on the most sober calculations of honor, duty, safety and economy: and that it is the true interest of England, her pecuniary her political and her moral interest that the war should be as brief as possible, that the rebels may no longer be deluded into the belief that any true Englishman who understands the history and the object of their rebellion can regard it with other feelings, than those naturally aroused by a policy of fraud treachery and oppression.

That the restoration of the integrity of our union is to be accomplished without a vast expenditure of treasure, and perhaps of blood, no one anticipates. We all know something of the cost of European wars, but we know also our own resources and the immense stake for which we will be fighting. Our fathers fought for seven years for our national freedom, and the spirit abroad throughout our land indicates that their sons if necessary, will fight seven years more to save it from destruction and disgrace. Whether the debt incurred for its preservation shall be hundreds or thousands of millions it will be a sacred legacy to future generations. A debt of five hundred millions, as remarked by an English journalist, would leave this nation less severely taxed than any nation of Europe.

OUR COUNTRY ONE.

If any man supposes that this republic can be advantageously sundered into two, let him cast his eye upon the map and endeavour to find a natural line to separate the two confederacies. The geographical formation of our country indicates that it is one: nature has provided no boundary line between the North and the South: no river like the Mississippi, no mountain chain like the Alleghanies, or the Rocky mountains, running from the West to the Atlantic, and forming an Alpine boundary to divide the sections. On the contrary, the father of waters stretches out his great arms to the East and to the West bearing on his bosom to the gulf, the generous products of the valleys which they fertilize, and carrying back in their place the cotton, rice and sugar of our Southern borders, and imports from foreign climes. The Mississippi, source and channel of prosperity to North and South alike in every mile of its progress: on the West to Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana; on the East to Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, proclaims to the citizens of the immense region which it waters through thousands of miles, in extent, from North to South, and East to West, that our country is one and indivisible.

Our duty to the South forbids our acquiescence in this rebellion, for it would reverse the American policy for the last half century, and reconsign to foreign invasion, to anarchy and ruin, the immense territories which we have rescued from European sway, and united as parts of our great nation.

Look back to the olden time and see what the Southern country would again become. Trace the history of Florida from the days of Charles V., from the adventures of De Leon and De Soto, the persecution of protestants from France, and the retaliation on the murderous Spaniards ; the capture of St. Augustine by Sir Francis Drake, the buccaneering inroads of the English, the transfer of Florida to the British crown; its partial settlement from Italy and Greece, the privateering exploits in our revolution, the capture of Baton Rouge and Pensacola, until its pur- chase by our government in 1819.

Remember that the Spaniards navigated the Gulf of Mexico for two centuries, without discovering that it was the outlet of the great river of the North, a fact which perhaps induces the Southern confederates to imagine that we also may be persuaded to forget its existence. Look at Louisiana from the days of Law and the Mississippi bubble to its cession to Spain in 1762, and its retrocession to France in 1800, when we hastened to buy it from the first consul, and you will find nothing in Florida, in Louisiana, nor indeed in Texas, to indicate even the first beginning of the prosperity which has been so rapidly developed under the fostering protection of the federal government.

[To be concluded next week]