21. K. Marx. Progress of Feeling in England
London, Dec. 7, 1861
The friends of the United States on this side of the Atlantic anxiously hope that conciliatory steps will be taken by the Federal Government. They do so not from a concurrence in the frantic crowing of the British press over a war incident, which, according to the English Crown law(1)yers themselves, resolves itself into a mere error of procedure, and may be summed up in the words that there has been a breach of international law, because Capt. Wilkes, instead of taking the Trent, her cargo, her passengers, and the Commissioners,[3] did only take the Commissioners. Nor springs the anxiety of the well-wishers of the Great Republic from an apprehension lest, in the long run, it should not prove able to cope with England, although backed by the civil war; and, least of all, do they expect the United States to abdicate, even for a moment, and in a dark hour of trial, the proud position held by them in the council of nations. The motives that prompt them are of quite a different nature.
In the first instance, the business next in hand for the United States is to crush the rebellion and to restore the Union. The wish uppermost in the minds of the Slaveocracy and their Northern tools was always to plunge the United States into a war with England. The first step of England as soon as hostilities broke out would be to recognize the Southern Confederacy, and the second to terminate the blockade. Secondly, no general, if not forced, will accept battle at the time and under the conditions chosen by his enemy.
"A war with America," says The Economist, a paper deeply in Palmerston's confidence, "must always be one of the most lamentable incidents in the history of England; but if it is to happen, the present is certainly the period at which it will do us the minimum of harm, and the only moment in our joint annals at which it would confer on us an incidental and partial compensation."(2)
The very reasons accounting for the eagerness of England to seize upon any decent pretext for war at this "only moment" ought to withhold the United States from forwarding such a pretext at this "only moment." You go not to war with the aim to do your enemy "the minimum of harm, " and, even to confer upon him by the war, "an incidental and partial compensation. " The opportunity of the moment would all be on one side, on the side of your foe. Is there any great strain of reasoning wanted to prove that an internal war raging in a State is the least opportune time for entering upon a foreign war? At every other moment the mercantile classes of Great Britain would have looked upon a war against the United States with the utmost horror. Now, on the contrary, a large and influential party of the mercantile community has for months been urging on the Government to violently break the blockade, and thus provide the main branch of British industry with its raw material. The fear of a curtailment of the English export trade to the United States has lost its sting by the curtailment of that trade having already actually occurred. "They" (the Northern States), says The Economist, "are wretched customers, instead of good ones." The vast credit usually given by English commerce to the United States, principally by the acceptance of bills drawn from China and India, has been already reduced to scarcely a fifth of what it was in 1857. Last, not least, Decembrist France, bankrupt, paralyzed at home, beset with difficulty abroad, pounces upon an Anglo-American war as a real godsend, and, in order to buy English support in Europe, will strain all her power to support "Perfidious Albion" on the other side of the Atlantic. Read only the French newspapers. The pitch of indignation to which they have wrought themselves in their tender care for the "honor of England," their fierce diatribes as to the necessity on the part of England to revenge the outrage on the Union Jack, their vile denunciations of everything American, would be truly appalling, if they were not ridiculous and disgusting at the same time. Lastly, if the United States give way in this instance, they will not derogate one iota of their dignity. England has reduced her complaint to a mere error of procedure, a technical blunder of which she has made herself systematically guilty in all her maritime wars, but against which the United States have never ceased to protest, and which President Madison, in his message inaugurating the war of 1812,(3) expatiated upon as one of the most shocking breaches of international law. If the United States may be defended in paying England with her own coin, will they be accused for magnanim-ously disavowing, on the part of a single American captain,[15] acting on his own responsibility, what they always denounced as a systematic usurpation on the part of the British Navy! In point of fact, the gain of such a procedure would be all on the American side. England, on the one hand, would have acknowledged the right of the United States to capture and bring to adjudication before an American prize court every English ship employed in the service of the Confederation. On the other hand, she would, once for all, before the eyes of the whole world, have practically resigned a claim which she was not brought to desist from either in the peace of Ghent, in 1814,(4) or the transactions carried on between Lord Ashburton and Secretary Webster in 1842.[127] The question then comes to this: Do you prefer to turn the "untoward event" to your own account, or, blinded by the passions of the moment, turn it to the account of your foes at home and abroad?
Since this day week, when I sent you my last letter,(5) British consols have again lowered, the decline, compared with last Friday, amounting to 2 per cent, the present prices being 89[3]/(6) to [7]Is for money and 90 to 90 Vs for the new account on the 9th of January. This quotation corresponds to the quotation of the British consols during the first two years of the Anglo-Russian war.(7) This decline is altogether due to the warlike interpretation put upon the American papers conveyed by the last mail, to the exacerbating tone of the London press, whose moderation of two days' standing was but a feint, ordered by Palmerston, to the dispatch of troops for Canada, to the proclamation forbidding the export of arms and materials for gunpowder(8) and lastly, to the daily ostentatious statements concerning the formidable preparations for war in the docks and maritime arsenals.
Of one thing you may be sure, Palmerston wants a legal pretext for a war with the United States, but meets in the Cabinet councils with a most determinate opposition on the part of Messrs. Gladstone and Milner Gibson, and, to a less degree, of Sir Cornwall Lewis. "The noble viscount" is backed by Russell, an abject tool in his hands, and the whole Whig Coterie. If the Washington Cabinet should furnish the desired pretext, the present Cabinet will be sprung, to be supplanted by a Tory Administration. The preliminary steps for such a change of scenery have been already settled between Palmerston and Disraeli. Hence the furious war-cry of The Morning Herald and The Standard, those hungry wolves howling at the prospect of the long-missed crumbs from the public almoner.
Palmerston's designs may be shown up by calling into memory a few facts. It was he who insisted upon the proclamation, acknowledging the Secessionists as belligerents, on the morning of the 14th of May, after he had been informed by telegraph from Liverpool that Mr. Adams would arrive at London on the night of the 13th May. He, after a severe struggle with his colleagues, dispatched 3,000 men to Canada, an army ridiculous, if intended to cover a frontier of 1,500 miles, but a clever sleight-of-hand if the rebellion was to be cheered, and the Union to be irritated. He, many weeks ago, urged Bonaparte to propose a joint armed intervention "in the internecine struggle," supported that project in the Cabinet council, and failed only in carrying it by the resistance of his colleagues. He and Bonaparte then resorted to the Mexican intervention as a pis aller? That operation served two purposes, by provoking just resentment on the part of the Americans, and by simultaneously furnishing a pretext for the dispatch of a squadron, ready, as The Morning Post has it, "to perform whatever duty the hostile conduct of the Government of Washington may require us to perform in the waters of the Northern Atlantic."b At the time when that expedition was started, The Morning Post, together with The Times and the smaller fry of Palmerston's press slaves, said that it was a very fine thing, and a philanthropic thing into the bargain, because it would expose the slaveholding Confederation to two fires — the Anti-
Slavery North and the Anti-Slavery force of England and France. And what says the very same Morning Post, this curious compound of Jenkins and Rhodomonte, of plush and swash, in its to-day's issue, on occasion of Jefferson Davis's address?(9) Hearken to the Palmerston oracle:
"We must look to this intervention as one that may be in operation during a considerable period of time; and while the Northern Government is too distant to admit of its attitude entering materially into this question, the Southern Confederation, on the other hand, stretches for a great distance along the frontier of Mexico, so as to render its friendly disposition to the authors of the insurrection of no slight consequence. The Northern Government has invariably railed at our neutrality, but the Southern with statesmanship and moderation has recognized in it all that we could do for either party; and whether with a view to our transactions in Mexico, or to our relations with the Cabinet at Washington, the friendly forbearance of the Southern Confederacy is an important point in our favor. " (10)
I may remark that the Nord of December 3 — a Russian paper, and consequently a paper initiated into Palmerston's designs— insinuates that the Mexican expedition was from the first set on foot, not for its ostensible purpose, but for a war against the United States.(11)
Gen. Scott's letter had produced such a beneficent reaction in public opinion, and even on the London Stock Exchange, that the conspirators of Downing street and the Tuileries[128] found it necessary to let loose the Patrie, stating with all the airs of knowledge derived from official sources that the seizure of the Southern Commissioners from the Trent was directly authorized by the Washington Cabinet.
Karl Marx
THE CRISIS OVER THE SLAVERY ISSUE[129]
London, December 10
The United States has evidently entered a critical stage with regard to the slavery question, the question underlying the whole Civil War. General Fremont has been dismissed for declaring the slaves of rebels free.3 A directive to General Sherman, the commander of the expedition to South Carolina, was a little later published by the Washington Government, which goes further than Fremont, for it decrees that fugitive slaves even of loyal slave-owners should be welcomed and employed as workers and paid a wage, and under certain circumstances armed, and consoles the "loyal" owners with the prospect of receiving compensation later.b Colonel Cochrane has gone even further than Fremont, he demands the arming of all slaves as a military measure.0 The Secretary of War Cameron publicly approves of Cochrane's "views".d The Secretary of the Interior,6 on behalf of the government, then repudiates the Secretary of War. The Secretary of War expresses his "views" even more emphatically at a public meeting stating that he will vindicate these views in his report to Congress/ General H alleck, Fremont's successor in Missouri, and General Dix in east Virginia have driven fugitive Negroes from their military camps and forbidden them to appear in future in the vicinity of the positions held by their armies. General Wool at the same time has received the black "contraband" with open arms at Fort Monroe.[130] The old leaders of the Democratic Party, Senator Dickinson and Croswell (a former member of the so-called Democratic regency[131]), have published open letters in which they express their agreement with Cochrane and Cameron,3 and Colonel Jennison in Kansas has surpassed all his military predecessors by an address to his troops which contains the following passage:
"No temporising with rebels and those sympathising with them.... I have told General Fremont that I would not have drawn my sword had I thought that slavery would outlast this struggle. The slaves of rebels will always find protection in this camp and we will defend them to the last man and the last bullet. I want no men who are not Abolitionists^ I have no use for them and I hope that there are no such people among us, for everyone knows that slavery is the basis, the centre and the vertex of this infernal war.... Should the government disapprove of my action it can take back my patent, but in that case I shall act on my own hook even if in the beginning I can only count on six men." c
The slavery question is being solved in practice in the border slave states even now, especially in Missouri and to a lesser extent in Kentucky, etc. A large-scale dispersal of slaves is taking place. For instance 50,000 slaves have disappeared from Missouri, some of them have run away, others have been transported by the slave-owners to the more distant southern states.
It is rather strange that a most important and significant event is not mentioned in any English newspaper. On November 18, delegates from 45 North Carolina counties met on Hatteras Island, appointed a provisional government, revoked the Ordinance of Secession and proclaimed that North Carolina was returning to the Union. The counties of North Carolina represented at this convention have been called together to elect their Representatives to Congress at Washington.0
Endnotes
[15] 5 The Kansas-Nebraska Bill (An Act to Organise the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas), passed by the US Congress in May 1854 after a fierce debate, granted the white population of Kansas and Nebraska, which were being admitted to the Union, the right to permit or prohibit slavery within their boundaries. The Bill abolished the frontier line laid down by the Missouri Compromise between the free and slaveholding states (see Note 14) and allowed every state to introduce slavery, regardless of geographical position. The adoption of the Bill gave rise to an armed struggle in Kansas between the supporters and opponents of slavery (see Note 18).
[127] Ghent peace—see Note 107. In 1842, Lord Ashburton and Daniel Webster conducted talks on behalf of Britain and the United States, which ended in the signing, on August 9, of a treaty laying down the frontier between the US and Britain's possessions in America, banning the slave trade and providing for the extradition of criminals. However, it contained no stipulation entitling Britain to search US ships suspected of slave trafficking.
[7] At Magenta and Solferino the decisive battles of the 1859 Austro-Italo-French war were fought on June 4 and June 24 respectively. The Austrians were defeated on both occasions.
[128] 28 On December 6, 1861 The Times carried a letter on the Trent incident by the LIS General Winfield Scott. He urged a peaceful settlement of the conflict, saying the US wanted no war with Britain. Downing Street—the official residence of the Prime Minister of Britain.
[129] 1L'9 First published in English in: Political Affairs, New York, 1959, No. 2, pp. 17-18.
[130] 150 Black contraband was, during the US Civil War, a designation for runaway slaves seeking refuge at Northern army camps. Contrary to the instructions of the Washington administration, some Northern generals refused, even in the early months of the war, to hand such Blacks over to their former masters on the grounds that, being the property of rebels, they must be regarded as military contraband. In the autumn of 1861 there was a massive influx of fugitive slaves at Fort Monroe, Louisiana. General Wool used the able-bodied Blacks as free labourers and withheld part of their earnings to support disabled and sick Blacks.
[131] 1:51 The Democratic or Albany regency—the leading group of the Democratic Party in New York State. With its headquarters in Albany, the capital of New York State, it existed until 1854 and was the unofficial governing body of the US Democratic Party (see also Note 13).
[3] Construction of the Suez Canal was begun in 1859 and completed in 1869. The Fortress of Gae'ta, the last stronghold of Francis II, King of the Two Sicilies (the Kingdom of Naples), was seized by the Piedmont troops on February 12, 1861, as a result of which the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies became part of the united Kingdom of Italy.