matter was broached to Lord Granville, who was by this time in attendance on the Queen on the Continent, he protested against the scheme with such energy as somewhat to shake Lord Palmerston's determination. Besides this, the Confederates had not pushed their successes against McClellan as the English expected; and when, on the 23d of October, the Cabinet met to consider the subject, the strong objections of Sir George Grey and the Duke of Newcastle were sufficient to prevent action; and the next month the Cabinet rejected the very proposal, coming from France, which its principal members had intended to lay before the Emperor. CHAP. III. 1862. CHAPTER IV MEDIATION DECLINED CHAP. IV. FTER the failure of his overture for joint A mediation, and after the unqualified utter ances of the United States against such measures, it might seem singular that the Emperor of the French should not have recognized the uselessness of similar attempts. Mr. Seward, after the rejection of the French overtures by England and Russia, treated the matter in a brief and dignified note to Mr. Dayton, in which he declined to discuss the subject at any length: "Such a debate upon a subject which has already lost its practical character, or which, to speak more accurately, has not attained such a character, may produce irritations and jealousies which the President desires to avoid." Yet at the risk of exciting just such irritations and jealousies the Emperor again sought to approach the Government of the United States alone, with a message which he had already been informed would have been rejected if brought by all the great powers of Europe jointly. Drouyn de l'Huys addressed a dispatch to M. Mercier, the French Minister in Washington, on the 9th of January, 1863, in which, while he refers to the little success of former overtures, he says that "the Government of the Emperor has seriously examined CHAP. IV. the objections which have been made to us when we have suggested the idea of a friendly mediation, and we have asked ourselves whether they are truly of a nature to set aside as premature every tentative to a reconciliation." He is not unaware of the repugnance of the United States to an intervention of foreign powers, nor of "the hope which," as he says, "the Federal Government has not abandoned of obtaining a solution by force of arms"; but amid all the courteous forms in which his expression is wrapped it is evident he thinks that repugnance is unreasonable and that hope fallacious. He reminded the Government of the United States of the conferences which preceded the acknowledgment of their independence by Great Britain, and continued, in a paragraph which we will give without abridgment, to set forth a proposition which was little less than that of the surrender of the national authority: "Nothing, therefore, would hinder the Government of the United States, without renouncing the advantage which it believes it can attain by the continuation of the war, from entering upon informal conferences with the Confederates of the South in case they should show themselves disposed thereto. Representatives or commissioners of the two parties could assemble at such point as it should be deemed proper to designate, and which could for this purpose be declared neutral. Reciprocal complaints would be examined into at this meeting. In place of the accusations which North and South mutually cast upon each other at this time, would be substituted an argu CHAP. IV. mentative discussion of the interests which divide them. They would seek out by means of well ordered and profound deliberations whether these interests are definitely irreconcilable; whether separation is an extreme which can no longer be avoided, or whether the memories of a common existence, whether the ties of every kind which have made of the North and of the South one sole and whole federative state, and have borne them on to so high a degree of prosperity, are not more powerful than the causes which have placed arms in the hands of the two populations. A negotiation, the object of which would be thus determinate, would not involve any of the objections raised against the diplomatic intervention of Europe, and, without giving birth to the same hopes as the intermediate conclusion of an armistice, would exercise a happy influence on the march of events." This overture of mediation was received on the 3d of February, and was answered by Mr. Seward, under the President's instructions, only three days later. It was a dark period of the war, between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. There was much in the attitude of veiled hostility of European powers to discourage and depress, but the statesmen charged with the welfare of the republic met this insidious attack,' as they met all others, 1 The Comte de Paris, in bis 66 History of the Civil War," Vol. VI., p. 78, gives the following just appreciation of the proceeding of the Emperor. After saying that Europe generally sympathized with the peace Democrats of the United States in regarding "the efforts and the perseverance of the Federal Government as the result of a culpable blindness, of a bloodthirsty obstinacy," he adds, "The Government of the Tuileries, in contempt of the sound traditions of the French monarchy, proposed to England to intervene for the purpose of bringing about a mediation. It is true that it had not the courage to pursue to the end the policy with unshaken courage and fortitude. The reply CHAP. IV. of Mr. Seward to the French overture of mediation was one of the most important state papers written during the war. He referred in the beginning to the language used by Drouyn de l'Huys in regard to the protraction of the struggle and the hopes of the Federal Government. "These passages," he says, seem to me to do unintentional injustice to the language, whether confidential or public, in which the Government has constantly spoken on the subject of the war. It certainly has had and avowed only one purpose-a determination to preserve the integrity of the country. So far from admitting any laxity of effort or betraying any despondency, the Government has, on the contrary, borne itself cheerfully in all vicissitudes, with unwavering confidence in an early and complete triumph of the national cause. Now, when we are in a manner invited by a friendly power to review the twenty-one months' history of the conflict, we find no occasion to abate that confidence. Through such an alternation of victories and defeats, as is the appointed incident of every war, the land and naval forces of the United States have steadily advanced, reclaiming from the insurgents the ports, forts, and posts which they had treacherously seized before the strife actually began, and even before it was seriously apprehended. So many of the States and districts which the insurgents included in the in which it had become engaged in Mexico. Taking its wishes for reality, it persuaded itself so completely of the imminent defeat of the North that it thought the destruction of the Union, which was an essential condition of the suc cess of its trans-Atlantic schemes, |