took occasion to intimate to Lord John Russell that "he must not infer from my not having entered into discussion of the merits of the question, that I gave any assent to the position taken by him about the right of a government to close its own ports, when held by forcible possession of persons resisting its authority. On the contrary, I desired to reserve for my government the treatment of it as an open question whenever it should take any practical shape. In the mean time I had every reason to believe that it was the design of the President to persevere in the blockade," etc. His lordship declared in Parliament, however, that he considered the law of Congress "as merely giving a discretionary power. But if carried into practice, he construed it as putting an end to the blockade." Under these threats our government tamely submitted. The law of Congress was not carried into effect, our diplomacy was meek and yielding, and under British menace the blockade of our own ports, by our own ships, was continued.

On the 2d of September the Secretary of State, with some trepidation, informed the Minister that "no change of policy in regard to the blockade has been adopted"-a timid intimation of acquiescence in an insult and injury, to appease British arrogance; her ministry believing and asserting that an effective blockade of our extensive coast was impossible, but that in no other way than by blockade could commerce be interdicted. Our government did not order the ports to be closed but under the hint given by the English dictum to New Granada, it abstained from exercising the national authority within that part of the

territory of the United States that was in insurrection, and was passive and submissive. In all this time, while treating the Confederates as belligerents, and their organization as a quasi government, the Secretary of State, with strange inconsistency, denounced their cruisers as pirates.

Not until the 11th of April, 1865, after Richmond had fallen, and only three days before the assassination of President Lincoln, was a proclamation issued, in pursuance of the Act of Congress of the 13th of July, 1861, to close the ports of the Southern States. Until the war had virtually ceased, the law of Congress was not enforced. The British mandate to New Granada was submissively acquiesced in and obsequiously observed by the United States. Our ports were not closed, but blockaded, which eventuated, as was intended, in establishing throughout the war the English ports of Nassau, Bermuda, and Halifax as entrepots for illicit traffic with the rebels and resorts for rebel cruisers, to harass and destroy our commerce. It opened the English ports throughout the world to the Alabama, and rovers of her class, which swept our merchant ships from the ocean for the benefit of England.

On the subject of a blockade of our own ports by our own vessels, Mr. Seward had undoubtedly, for good or for evil, influence with the President, which outweighed a majority of the Cabinet and Congress. The subject was new to him when his decision was given, and the blockade being made effective by the navy, he did not care to re-open a disturbing question, though his views became modified, and ultimately the

ports were closed, notwithstanding the English dictum to New Granada.

The management of our foreign affairs, and the maintenance of our rights against the pretensions and menaces of the arrogant ministry of England, thus commenced, was continued, until intelligent Englishmen themselves were surprised if not disgusted with our subserviency. After the shameful renunciation of our right to send into the courts, mails from captured vessels—a right recognized and established by the usage of nations, and made a duty by our own statutes-an eminent English publicist, Sir Vernon Harcourt amazed at our submissive and pusillanimous diplomacy, warned his government against proceeding too far in its demands, "for," said he; "what we have most to fear is not that Americans will yield too little but that we shall accept too much." A humiliating commentary on our diplomacy, by an English writer of no mean ability.

THE efforts of the secessionists to bring about a dissolution of the Union on the pretext that slavery in the states was in danger, in consequence of the success of the Republicans in 1860, and that new guarantees were required to protect the institution, had the effect of increasing the anti-slavery feeling in the free states. Until the attempts to secede from the Union and throw the country into dissevered sections, the fundamental law was strictly observed and adhered to throughout the whole North, and the right of each state to regulate its own affairs, its industrial pursuits, its domestic institu

tions, the condition of its people in the matter of servitude, of debtor and creditor, including imprisonment for debt, and punishment for criminal offences was respected. The serious agitation of the slavery question had its origin in fact with the nullifiers. After their defeat, as a party on the tariff issue and the futile claim of intolerable burdens by reason of high duties on imposts, which they had striven to make a political party test, the South Carolina politicians changed their tactics and professed to be greatly alarmed by the petitions of the Quakers and a few fanatics as extreme as the nullifiers themselves, and vastly inferior in numbers and talents, who-regardless of constitutional obligations and limitations, asked for the abolition of slavery by the general government.

So pronounced and universal was the sentiment of the North against this feeble sect, that politicians and public men denounced their doctrines and were careful to be in no way committed to, or connected with them. Abolition was as unpopular with both the great parties of the North as the South, but it pleased the Nullifiers to make indiscriminate war upon the free states and to classify the whole North as abolitionists inimical to the South and southern institutions. Disclaimers and disavowals were of no avail with the men who had a party purpose to accomplish by these deliberate misrepresentations. On the abstract question of slavery there was but one sentiment throughout the free states; but this sentiment, for it was a sentiment-could not overcome the deep and sacred regard for constitutional obligations. On no political subject was there more unity, than that the rights of the states should be respected and observed

on the question of slavery. But the Nullifiers started to be aggressive, and with a determination to be the ascendant party in the government or to subvert it. The means resorted to for uniting the South irrespective of parties on this local question were, by creating alarm in the slave states-stating the free states were aggressive—warning the slave owners that their property was in jeopardy-demanding new guarantees for its security-promoting sectional animosity and some of them requiring a dual executive.

Mr. Seward who, according to Mr. Adams, had in 1824 made "a deliberate claim of a right in the federal government to emancipate slaves by legislation," abandoned in the winter of 1861, this original position and proposed an amendment to the constitution guaranteeing the perpetuation of slavery so far as the general government was concerned by prohibiting Congress through all time and under all circumstances from exercising "any power to abolish or interfere in any state with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to service or labor by the laws of said state." Politicians of the Jefferson school, less practical, in the judgment of Mr. Adams, than Mr. Seward (for Jefferson never admitted "a right in the federal government to emancipate slaves,"), were averse to this extraordinary proposition which was presented as a peace-offering and a compromise by one who, according to the "Memorial Address" ought to have been made President instead of Mr. Lincoln.

When at length, after more than twenty years of declamation, agitation, persistent aggression and deliberate misrepresentation, the country became involved