| CHAPTER XI
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| THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)
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| MINISTER ADAMS troubled himself little about what he did not
see of an enemy. His son, a nervous animal, made life a terror by
seeing too much. Minister Adams played his hand as it came, and
seldom credited his opponents with greater intelligence than his
own. Earl Russell suited him; perhaps a certain personal sympathy
united them; and indeed Henry Adams never saw Russell without
being amused by his droll likeness to John Quincy Adams. Apart
from this shadowy personal relation, no doubt the Minister was
diplomatically right; he had nothing to lose and everything to
gain by making a friend of the Foreign Secretary, and whether
Russell were true or false mattered less, because, in either
case, the American Legation could act only as though he were
false. Had the Minister known Russell's determined effort to
betray and ruin him in October, 1862, he could have scarcely used
stronger expressions than he did in 1863. Russell must have been
greatly annoyed by Sir Robert Collier's hint of collusion with
the rebel agents in the Alabama Case, but he hardened himself to
hear the same innuendo repeated in nearly every note from the
Legation. As time went on, Russell was compelled, though slowly,
to treat the American Minister as serious. He admitted nothing so
unwillingly, for the nullity or fatuity of the Washington
Government was his idee fixe; but after the failure of his last
effort for joint intervention on November 12, 1862, only one week
elapsed before he received a note from Minister Adams repeating
his charges about the Alabama, and asking in very plain language
for redress. Perhaps Russell's mind was naturally slow to
understand the force of sudden attack, or perhaps age had
affected it; this was one of the points that greatly interested a
student, but young men have a passion for regarding their elders
as senile, which was only in part warranted in this instance by
observing that Russell's generation were mostly senile from
youth. They had never got beyond 1815 Both Palmerston and Russell
were in this case. Their senility was congenital, like
Gladstone's Oxford training and High Church illusions, which
caused wild eccentricities in his judgment. Russell could not
conceive that he had misunderstood and mismanaged Minister Adams
from the start, and when after November 12 he found himself on
the defensive, with Mr Adams taking daily a stronger tone, he
showed mere confusion and helplessness.
| 1 | |
| Thus, whatever the theory, the action of diplomacy had to be
the same. Minister Adams was obliged to imply collusion between
Russell and the rebels. He could not even stop at criminal
negligence. If, by an access of courtesy, the Minister were civil
enough to admit that the escape of the Alabama had been due to
criminal negligence, he could make no such concession in regard
to the ironclad rams which the Lairds were building; for no one
could be so simple as to believe that two armored ships-of-war
could be built publicly, under the eyes of the Government, and go
to sea like the Alabama, without active and incessant collusion.
The longer Earl Russell kept on his mask of assumed ignorance,
the more violently in the end, the Minister would have to tear it
off. Whatever Mr. Adams might personally think of Earl Russell,
he must take the greatest possible diplomatic liberties with him
if this crisis were allowed to arrive.
| 2 | |
| As the spring of 1863 drew on, the vast field cleared itself
for action. A campaign more beautiful -- better suited for
training the mind of a youth eager for training -- has not often
unrolled itself for study, from the beginning, before a young man
perched in so commanding a position. Very slowly, indeed, after
two years of solitude, one began to feel the first faint flush of
new and imperial life. One was twenty-five years old, and quite
ready to assert it; some of one's friends were wearing stars on
their collars; some had won stars of a more enduring kind. At
moments one's breath came quick. One began to dream the sensation
of wielding unmeasured power. The sense came, like vertigo, for
an instant, and passed, leaving the brain a little dazed,
doubtful, shy. With an intensity more painful than that of any
Shakespearean drama, men's eyes were fastened on the armies in
the field. Little by little, at first only as a shadowy chance of
what might be, if things could be rightly done, one began to feel
that, somewhere behind the chaos in Washington power was taking
shape; that it was massed and guided as it had not been before.
Men seemed to have learned their business -- at a cost that
ruined -- and perhaps too late. A private secretary knew better
than most people how much of the new power was to be swung in
London, and almost exactly when; but the diplomatic campaign had
to wait for the military campaign to lead. The student could only
study.
| 3 | |
| Life never could know more than a single such climax. In that
form, education reached its limits. As the first great blows
began to fall, one curled up in bed in the silence of night, to
listen with incredulous hope. As the huge masses struck, one
after another, with the precision of machinery, the opposing
mass, the world shivered. Such development of power was unknown.
The magnificent resistance and the return shocks heightened the
suspense. During the July days Londoners were stupid with
unbelief. They were learning from the Yankees how to fight.
| 4 | |
| An American saw in a flash what all this meant to England, for
one's mind was working with the acceleration of the machine at
home; but Englishmen were not quick to see their blunders. One
had ample time to watch the process, and had even a little time
to gloat over the repayment of old scores. News of Vicksburg and
Gettysburg reached London one Sunday afternoon, and it happened
that Henry Adams was asked for that evening to some small
reception at the house of Monckton Milnes. He went early in order
to exchange a word or two of congratulation before the rooms
should fill, and on arriving he found only the ladies in the
drawing-room; the gentlemen were still sitting over their wine.
Presently they came in, and, as luck would have it, Delane of the
Times came first. When Milnes caught sight of his young American
friend, with a whoop of triumph he rushed to throw both arms
about his neck and kiss him on both cheeks. Men of later birth
who knew too little to realize the passions of 1863 -- backed by
those of 1813 -- and reenforced by those of 1763 -- might
conceive that such publicity embarrassed a private secretary who
came from Boston and called himself shy; but that evening, for
the first time in his life, he happened not to be thinking of
himself. He was thinking of Delane, whose eye caught his, at the
moment of Milnes's embrace. Delane probably regarded it as a
piece of Milnes's foolery; he had never heard of young Adams, and
never dreamed of his resentment at being ridiculed in the Times;
he had no suspicion of the thought floating in the mind of the
American Minister's son, for the British mind is the slowest of
all minds, as the files of the Times proved, and the capture of
Vicksburg had not yet penetrated Delane's thick cortex of fixed
ideas. Even if he had read Adams's thought, he would have felt
for it only the usual amused British contempt for all that he had
not been taught at school. It needed a whole generation for the
Times to reach Milnes's standpoint.
| 5 | |
| Had the Minister's son carried out the thought, he would surely
have sought an introduction to Delane on the spot, and assured
him that he regarded his own personal score as cleared off --
sufficiently settled, then and there -- because his father had
assumed the debt, and was going to deal with Mr. Delane himself.
"You come next!" would have been the friendly warning. For nearly
a year the private secretary had watched the board arranging
itself for the collision between the Legation and Delane who
stood behind the Palmerston Ministry. Mr. Adams had been steadily
strengthened and reenforced from Washington in view of the final
struggle. The situation had changed since the Trent Affair. The
work was efficiently done; the organization was fairly complete.
No doubt, the Legation itself was still as weakly manned and had
as poor an outfit as the Legations of Guatemala or Portugal.
Congress was always jealous of its diplomatic service, and the
Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations was not likely to
press assistance on the Minister to England. For the Legation not
an additional clerk was offered or asked. The Secretary, the
Assistant Secretary, and the private secretary did all the work
that the Minister did not do. A clerk at five dollars a week
would have done the work as well or better, but the Minister
could trust no clerk; without express authority he could admit no
one into the Legation; he strained a point already by admitting
his son. Congress and its committees were the proper judges of
what was best for the public service, and if the arrangement
seemed good to them, it was satisfactory to a private secretary
who profited by it more than they did. A great staff would have
suppressed him. The whole Legation was a sort of improvised,
volunteer service, and he was a volunteer with the rest. He was
rather better off than the rest, because he was invisible and
unknown. Better or worse, he did his work with the others, and if
the secretaries made any remarks about Congress, they made no
complaints, and knew that none would have received a moment's
attention.
| 6 | |
| If they were not satisfied with Congress, they were satisfied
with Secretary Seward. Without appropriations for the regular
service, he had done great things for its support. If the
Minister had no secretaries, he had a staff of active consuls; he
had a well-organized press; efficient legal support; and a swarm
of social allies permeating all classes. All he needed was a
victory in the field, and Secretary Stanton undertook that part
of diplomacy. Vicksburg and Gettysburg cleared the board, and, at
the end of July, 1863, Minister Adams was ready to deal with Earl
Russell or Lord Palmerston or Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Delane, or any
one else who stood in his way; and by the necessity of the case,
was obliged to deal with all of them shortly.
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| Even before the military climax at Vicksburg and Gettysburg,
the Minister had been compelled to begin his attack; but this was
history, and had nothing to do with education. The private
secretary copied the notes into his private books, and that was
all the share he had in the matter, except to talk in private.
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| No more volunteer services were needed; the volunteers were in
a manner sent to the rear; the movement was too serious for
skirmishing. All that a secretary could hope to gain from the
affair was experience and knowledge of politics. He had a chance
to measure the motive forces of men; their qualities of
character; their foresight; their tenacity of purpose.
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| In the Legation no great confidence was felt in stopping the
rams. Whatever the reason, Russell seemed immovable. Had his
efforts for intervention in September, 1862, been known to the
Legation in September, 1863 the Minister must surely have
admitted that Russell had, from the first, meant to force his
plan of intervention on his colleagues. Every separate step since
April, 1861, led to this final coercion. Although Russell's
hostile activity of 1862 was still secret -- and remained secret
for some five-and-twenty years -- his animus seemed to be made
clear by his steady refusal to stop the rebel armaments. Little
by little, Minister Adams lost hope. With loss of hope came the
raising of tone, until at last, after stripping Russell of every
rag of defence and excuse, he closed by leaving him loaded with
connivance in the rebel armaments, and ended by the famous
sentence: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your
lordship that this is war!"
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| What the Minister meant by this remark was his own affair; what
the private secretary understood by it, was a part of his
education. Had his father ordered him to draft an explanatory
paragraph to expand the idea as he grasped it, he would have
continued thus:--
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| "It would be superfluous: 1st. Because Earl Russell not only
knows it already, but has meant it from the start. 2nd Because it
is the only logical and necessary consequence of his unvarying
action. 3d. Because Mr. Adams is not pointing out to him that
'this is war,' but is pointing it out to the world, to complete
the record."
| 12 | |
| This would have been the matter-of-fact sense in which the
private secretary copied into his books the matter-of-fact
statement with which, without passion or excitement, the Minister
announced that a state of war existed. To his copying eye, as
clerk, the words, though on the extreme verge of diplomatic
propriety, merely stated a fact, without novelty, fancy, or
rhetoric. The fact had to be stated in order to make clear the
issue. The war was Russell's war--Adams only accepted it.
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| Russell's reply to this note of September 5 reached the
Legation on September 8, announcing at last to the anxious
secretaries that "instructions have been issued which will
prevent the departure of the two ironclad vessels from
Liverpool." The members of the modest Legation in Portland Place
accepted it as Grant had accepted the capitulation of Vicksburg.
The private secretary conceived that, as Secretary Stanton had
struck and crushed by superior weight the rebel left on the
Mississippi, so Secretary Seward had struck and crushed the rebel
right in England, and he never felt a doubt as to the nature of
the battle. Though Minister Adams should stay in office till he
were ninety, he would never fight another campaign of life and
death like this; and though the private secretary should covet
and attain every office in the gift of President or people, he
would never again find education to compare with the
life-and-death alternative of this two-year-and-a-half struggle
in London, as it had racked and thumb-screwed him in its shifting
phases; but its practical value as education turned on his
correctness of judgment in measuring the men and their forces. He
felt respect for Russell as for Palmerston because they
represented traditional England and an English policy,
respectable enough in itself, but which, for four generations,
every Adams had fought and exploited as the chief source of his
political fortunes. As he understood it, Russell had followed
this policy steadily, ably, even vigorously, and had brought it
to the moment of execution. Then he had met wills stronger than
his own, and, after persevering to the last possible instant, had
been beaten. Lord North and George Canning had a like experience.
This was only the idea of a boy, but, as far as he ever knew, it
was also the idea of his Government. For once, the volunteer
secretary was satisfied with his Government. Commonly the
self-respect of a secretary, private or public, depends on, and
is proportional to, the severity of his criticism, but in this
case the English campaign seemed to him as creditable to the
State Department as the Vicksburg campaign to the War Department,
and more decisive. It was well planned, well prepared, and well
executed. He could never discover a mistake in it. Possibly he
was biassed by personal interest, but his chief reason for
trusting his own judgment was that he thought himself to be one
of only half a dozen persons who knew something about it. When
others criticised Mr. Seward, he was rather indifferent to their
opinions because he thought they hardly knew what they were
talking about, and could not be taught without living over again
the London life of 1862. To him Secretary Seward seemed immensely
strong and steady in leadership; but this was no discredit to
Russell or Palmerston or Gladstone. They, too, had shown power,
patience and steadiness of purpose. They had persisted for two
years and a half in their plan for breaking up the Union, and had
yielded at last only in the jaws of war. After a long and
desperate struggle, the American Minister had trumped their best
card and won the game.
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| Again and again, in after life, he went back over the ground to
see whether he could detect error on either side. He found none.
At every stage the steps were both probable and proved. All the
more he was disconcerted that Russell should indignantly and with
growing energy, to his dying day, deny and resent the axiom of
Adams's whole contention, that from the first he meant to break
up the Union. Russell affirmed that he meant nothing of the sort;
that he had meant nothing at all; that he meant to do right; that
he did not know what he meant. Driven from one defence after
another, he pleaded at last, like Gladstone, that he had no
defence. Concealing all he could conceal -- burying in profound
secrecy his attempt to break up the Union in the autumn of 1862
-- he affirmed the louder his scrupulous good faith. What was
worse for the private secretary, to the total derision and
despair of the lifelong effort for education, as the final result
of combined practice, experience, and theory -- he proved it.
| 15 | |
| Henry Adams had, as he thought, suffered too much from Russell
to admit any plea in his favor; but he came to doubt whether this
admission really favored him. Not until long after Earl Russell's
death was the question reopened. Russell had quitted office in
1866; he died in 1878; the biography was published in 1889.
During the Alabama controversy and the Geneva Conference in 1872,
his course as Foreign Secretary had been sharply criticised, and
he had been compelled to see England pay more than L3,000,000
penalty for his errors. On the other hand, he brought forward --
or his biographer for him -- evidence tending to prove that he
was not consciously dishonest, and that he had, in spite of
appearances, acted without collusion, agreement, plan, or policy,
as far as concerned the rebels. He had stood alone, as was his
nature. Like Gladstone, he had thought himself right.
| 16 | |
| In the end, Russell entangled himself in a hopeless ball of
admissions, denials, contradictions, and resentments which led
even his old colleagues to drop his defence, as they dropped
Gladstone's; but this was not enough for the student of diplomacy
who had made a certain theory his law of life, and wanted to hold
Russell up against himself; to show that he had foresight and
persistence of which he was unaware. The effort became hopeless
when the biography in 1889 published papers which upset all that
Henry Adams had taken for diplomatic education; yet he sat down
once more, when past sixty years old, to see whether he could
unravel the skein.
| 17 | |
| Of the obstinate effort to bring about an armed intervention,
on the lines marked out by Russell's letter to Palmerston from
Gotha, 17 September, 1862, nothing could be said beyond
Gladstone's plea in excuse for his speech in pursuance of the
same effort, that it was "the most singular and palpable error,"
"the least excusable," "a mistake of incredible grossness," which
passed defence; but while Gladstone threw himself on the mercy of
the public for his speech, he attempted no excuse for Lord
Russell who led him into the "incredible grossness" of announcing
the Foreign Secretary's intent. Gladstone's offence, "singular
and palpable," was not the speech alone, but its cause -- the
policy that inspired the speech. "I weakly supposed . . . I
really, though most strangely, believed that it was an act of
friendliness." Whatever absurdity Gladstone supposed, Russell
supposed nothing of the sort. Neither he nor Palmerston "most
strangely believed" in any proposition so obviously and palpably
absurd, nor did Napoleon delude himself with philanthropy.
Gladstone, even in his confession, mixed up policy, speech,
motives, and persons, as though he were trying to confuse chiefly
himself.
| 18 | |
| There Gladstone's activity seems to have stopped. He did not
reappear in the matter of the rams. The rebel influence shrank in
1863, as far as is known, to Lord Russell alone, who wrote on
September 1 that he could not interfere in any way with those
vessels, and thereby brought on himself Mr. Adams's declaration
of war on September 5. A student held that, in this refusal, he
was merely following his policy of September, 1862, and of every
step he had taken since 1861.
| 19 | |
| The student was wrong. Russell proved that he had been feeble,
timid, mistaken, senile, but not dishonest. The evidence is
convincing. The Lairds had built these ships in reliance on the
known opinion of the law-officers that the statute did not apply,
and a jury would not convict. Minister Adams replied that, in
this case, the statute should be amended, or the ships stopped by
exercise of the political power. Bethell rejoined that this would
be a violation of neutrality; one must preserve the status quo.
Tacitly Russell connived with Laird, and, had he meant to
interfere, he was bound to warn Laird that the defect of the
statute would no longer protect him, but he allowed the builders
to go on till the ships were ready for sea. Then, on September 3,
two days before Mr. Adams's "superfluous" letter, he wrote to
Lord Palmerston begging for help; "The conduct of the gentlemen
who have contracted for the two ironclads at Birkenhead is so
very suspicious," -- he began, and this he actually wrote in good
faith and deep confidence to Lord Palmerston, his chief, calling
"the conduct" of the rebel agents "suspicious" when no one else
in Europe or America felt any suspicion about it, because the
whole question turned not on the rams, but on the technical scope
of the Foreign Enlistment Act, -- "that I have thought it
necessary to direct that they should be detained," not, of
course, under the statute, but on the ground urged by the
American Minister, of international obligation above the statute.
"The Solicitor General has been consulted and concurs in the
measure as one of policy though not of strict law. We shall thus
test the law, and, if we have to pay damages, we have satisfied
the opinion which prevails here as well as in America that that
kind of neutral hostility should not be allowed to go on without
some attempt to stop it."
| 20 | |
| For naivete that would be unusual in an unpaid attache of
Legation, this sudden leap from his own to his opponent's ground,
after two years and a half of dogged resistance, might have
roused Palmerston to inhuman scorn, but instead of derision, well
earned by Russell's old attacks on himself, Palmerston met the
appeal with wonderful loyalty. "On consulting the law officers he
found that there was no lawful ground for meddling with the
ironclads," or, in unprofessional language, that he could trust
neither his law officers nor a Liverpool jury; and therefore he
suggested buying the ships for the British Navy. As proof of
"criminal negligence" in the past, this suggestion seemed
decisive, but Russell, by this time, was floundering in other
troubles of negligence, for he had neglected to notify the
American Minister. He should have done so at once, on September
3. Instead he waited till September 4, and then merely said that
the matter was under "serious and anxious consideration." This
note did not reach the Legation till three o'clock on the
afternoon of September 5 -- after the "superfluous" declaration
of war had been sent. Thus, Lord Russell had sacrificed the
Lairds: had cost his Ministry the price of two ironclads, besides
the Alabama Claims -- say, in round numbers, twenty million
dollars -- and had put himself in the position of appearing to
yield only to a threat of war. Finally he wrote to the Admiralty
a letter which, from the American point of view, would have
sounded youthful from an Eton schoolboy: --
| 21 | |
September 14, 1863.
MY DEAR DUKE: --
| 22 | |
It is of the utmost importance and urgency that the ironclads
building at Birkenhead should not go to America to break the
blockade. They belong to Monsieur Bravay of Paris. If you will
offer to buy them on the part of the Admiralty you will get
money's worth if he accepts your offer; and if he does not, it
will be presumptive proof that they are already bought by the
Confederates. I should state that we have suggested to the
Turkish Government to buy them; but you can easily settle that
matter with the Turks. . . .
| 23 | |
| The hilarity of the secretaries in Portland Place would have
been loud had they seen this letter and realized the muddle of
difficulties into which Earl Russell had at last thrown himself
under the impulse of the American Minister; but, nevertheless,
these letters upset from top to bottom the results of the private
secretary's diplomatic education forty years after he had
supposed it complete. They made a picture different from anything
he had conceived and rendered worthless his whole painful
diplomatic experience.
| 24 | |
| To reconstruct, when past sixty, an education useful for any
practical purpose, is no practical problem, and Adams saw no use
in attacking it as only theoretical. He no longer cared whether
he understood human nature or not; he understood quite as much of
it as he wanted; but he found in the "Life of Gladstone" (II,
464) a remark several times repeated that gave him matter for
curious thought. "I always hold," said Mr. Gladstone, "that
politicians are the men whom, as a rule, it is most difficult to
comprehend"; and he added, by way of strengthening it: "For my
own part, I never have thus understood, or thought I understood,
above one or two."
| 25 | |
| Earl Russell was certainly not one of the two.
| 26 | |
| Henry Adams thought he also had understood one or two; but the
American type was more familiar. Perhaps this was the sufficient
result of his diplomatic education; it seemed to be the whole.
| 27 | |
|