London, November 29
The law officers of the Crown3 had yesterday to give their opinion on the naval incident in the Bahama Channel.b Their records of the case consisted of the written reports of the British officers who have remained on board the Trent and of the oral testimony of Commodore Williams, who was on board the Trent as Admiralty agent, but disembarked from the steamer La Plata on November 27 at Southampton, whence he was immediately summoned by telegraph to London. The law officers of the Crown acknowledged the right of the San Jacinto to visit and search the Trent. Since Queen Victoria's proclamation of neutrality on the outbreak of the American Civil War0 expressly lists dispatches among articles of contraband,0 there could be no doubt on this point either. There remained, then, the question whether Messrs. Mason, Slidell and Co. were themselves contraband and therefore confiscable. The law officers of the Crown appear to hold this view, for they have dropped the material legal question entirely. According to the report of The Times* their opinion blames the commander of the San Jacinto{ only for an error in procedure. Instead of Messrs. Mason, Slidell and Co., he should have taken the Trent herself in tow as a prize, brought her to the nearest American port and there submitted her to the judgment of a North American prize court.[1]" This is incontestably the procedure corresponding to British and therefore to North American maritime law.
It is equally incontestable that the British frequently violated this rule during the anti-Jacobin war and proceeded in the summary fashion of the San Jacinto. However that may be, the whole conflict is reduced by this opinion of the law officers of the Crown to a technical error and consequently deprived of any immediate import. Two circumstances make it easy for the Union government to accept this point of view and therefore to afford formal satisfaction. In the first place, Captain Wilkes, the commander of the San Jacinto, could have received no direct instructions from Washington. On the voyage home from Africa to New York, he called on November 2 at Havana, which he left again on November 4, whilst his encounter with the Trent took place on the high seas on November 8. Captain Wilkes's stay of only two days in Havana did not permit any exchange of notes between him and his government. The consul of the Union(1) was the only American authority with whom he could deal. In the second place, however, he had obviously lost his head, as his failure to insist on the surrender of the dispatches proves.
The importance of the incident lies in its moral effect on the English people and in the political capital that can easily be made out of it by the British cotton friends of secession. Characteristic of the latter is the Liverpool protest meeting organised by them and previously mentioned by me.(2) The meeting took place on November 27 at three in the afternoon, in the cotton auction-rooms of the Liverpool Exchange, an hour after the alarming telegram from Southampton had arrived.
After vain attempts to press the chairmanship on Mr. Cunard, the owner of the Cunard steamships laying between Liverpool and New York, and other high trade officials, a young merchant named Spence, notorious for a work he wrote in support of the slave republic,(3) took the chair. Contrary to the rules of English meetings, he, the chairman, himself proposed the motion to
"call upon the government to assert the dignity of the British flag by requiring prompt reparation for this outrage".(4) Tremendous applause, clapping and cheers upon cheers! The main argument of the opening speaker for the slave republic was that slave ships had hitherto been protected by the American flag from the right of search claimed by Britain. And then this philanthropist launched a furious attack on the slave trade! He admitted that England had brought about the war of 1812-14 with the United States by insisting on searching Union warships for deserters from the British Navy.
"But," he continued with wonderful dialectic, "there is a difference between the right of search to recover deserters from the British Navy and the right to seize passengers, like Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell, men of the highest respectability, regardless of the fact that they were protected by the British flag!"
He played his highest trump, however, at the close of his diatribe.
"The other day," he bellowed, "while I was on the European Continent, I heard observations made as to our conduct in regard to the United States which made me blush. What is the feeling of every intelligent man upon the Continent? That we would slavishly submit to any outrage and suffer every indignity offered to us by the Government of the United States. What could I reply to this? I could only blush. But the pitcher goes so often to the well that it is broken at last. Our patience had been exercised long enough — as long as it was possible to control it. At last we have arrived at facts [!]: this is a very hard and startling fact [!] and it is the duty of every Englishman to apprise the Government of how strong and unanimous is the feeling of this great community of the outrage offered to our flag."
This senseless rigmarole was greeted with a peal of applause. Opposing voices were howled down and hissed down and stamped down. To the remark of a Mr. Campbell that the whole meeting was "irregular", the inexorable Spence replied: "So may it be, but the fact that we have met to consider is rather an irregular fact." To the proposal of a Mr. Turner to adjourn the meeting to the following day, in order that "the city of Liverpool can have its say and not a clique of cotton brokers usurp its name", cries of "Collar him, throw him out!" resounded from all sides. Unper-turbed, Mr. Turner repeated his motion, which, however, was not put to the vote, again contrary to all the rules of English meetings. Spence triumphed. But, as a matter of fact, nothing has done more to cool London's temper than the news of Mr. Spence's triumph.
Endnotes
[110] 10 Marx's article was preceded by the following editorial note: "If added proof were needed that no one would be more delighted by the Trent case erupting in a large-scale Anglo-American naval war than the Paris Cabinet, it is provided by the attitude of the official and semi-official Paris press. No sooner had the Patrie triumphantly informed its readers that the population of the Northern states was demonstrating in favour of vigorous opposition to any English demand for satisfaction, than, it was able to report no less bellicose actions from London. It writes, in particular, that a council of ministers held in London on November 30 decided to recognise the Southern states and accredit a chargé d'affaires with President Jefferson Davis, if the message Lord Lyons intended to hand to the Cabinet in Washington met with an unfavourable reception. The Patrie is not alone in doing its utmost to foment trouble. The Moniteur is acting in a similar fashion. It carries the following report from Southampton: 'It is held in Southampton that this event could have the direst consequences, which is also the view held generally. There is a great deal of sympathy for the Southern states in England, and this incident cannot fail to increase further the number of their supporters.' "So far there are no positive indications whatever as to how the French government intends to exploit the war that may arise between England and the American Union. But the Job's messages circulated from Paris at any rate prove that such a war would be most welcome to, and is indeed desired by, the Tuileries. France's attitude is a sign to the Cabinet of Saint James's and one can hardly assume that the latter is unaware of it. Significantly, too, with the exception of the Morning Post, the London press, particularly The Times, takes a very moderate and cautious stand. Our London correspondent, who is well informed about the state of Anglo-American relations, has sent us an article dated November 29 which makes the Trent case appear far less dangerous to world peace than one was bound to assume on the basis of the first dispatches from London and the statements of Morning Post and the semi-official Paris papers. To begin with, our London correspondent throws light on the verdict of the laic officers of the Crown. He denies that in forcibly arresting Messrs Mason, Slidell and Co. the San Jacinto was, in any way, acting on the instructions of the Washington Cabinet, and brings the much discussed Liverpool indignation meeting down to its true significance. But let our correspondent speak for himself. He writes:". The article was first published in English in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Civil War in the United Stales, New York, 1937, London, 1937, pp." 105-10.
[1] Marx and Engels began to contribute to the New-York Daily Tribune in 1851 (see Vol. 11, Note 2). 1861 and 1862 were the last two years of their work for the Tribune. With the outbreak of the US Civil War interest in European affairs in America declined. The Tribune cancelled its contracts with all its European correspondents except Marx, who was asked to reduce the number of his contributions from two to one a week. Between February 1861 and March 1862 the paper published ten items by Marx and one by Engels. One appeared as a leading article, nine were marked "From an Occasional Correspondent" and one was marked "From Our Own Correspondent". Marx's final break with the newspaper occurred in the spring of 1862 (see Vol. 12, Note 1 and Vol. 39, Note 4). The theme and basic content of this article were suggested to Engels by Marx, who in a letter dated January 22, 1861 (Vol. 41 of the present edition) asked Engels to write on the Schleswig-Holstein question for the NYDT. Engels wrote the article on January 23. On the following day Marx sent it to New York by the steamer Anglo-Saxon.