suffered little more than annoyance and anxiety, ending the year with more men and more money and more resources of every kind than it began with. That this was understood by many Confederate statesmen and generals was not known until all was over, nor that they were also aware that their hold upon their servile colored population was all the while relaxing. There could not possibly have been any result of the Civil War which would not have left the institution of slavery in a dying condition, if not dead; but this truth had not become plain to the minds of men in the Spring of 1862.

The great events of Mr. Lincoln's first year as President had not all occurred upon the land. One Summer day he had been called upon by a gentleman named C. S. Bushnell, who wished to show him a model and plans of a remarkable new sea monster. It was a revolving gun tower, mounted upon a lowlying armored hull, over which ordinary waves might dash at will. It had been said to look like a cheese-box on a raft. Mr. Lincoln said that he knew little about ships of war, but he knew something about flat boats, and added that this boat was flat enough. He quickly understood its merits, however, obtained the appointment of a naval board for its examination, and was instrumental in securing for the agent of the inventor a contract for the construction of one of the new "monitors" for trial.

She was completed and equipped just in time for a trial which no prophet had dreamed of. During the same months the busy Confederates at

Richmond had taken the strong hull of an old United States cruiser, and had turned it into a powerful ram, armored heavily with sloping shields of railway iron. They called it the Virginia, dropping its old name of Merrimac. On March 8th, 1862, it steamed out into Hampton Roads, and the United States warships lying there found themselves powerless to harm it or to resist its destructive attacks. They went down before it, and the days of the old wooden navies of all the earth were numbered. The news of the great disaster in Hampton Roads sent a thrill of dismay throughout the North. There was, apparently, nothing to prevent the Virginia from steaming up the Potomac to destroy Washington City, or into the harbor of New York or Boston upon a similar errand. A black night followed, and the next day the Virginia came out again from a sort of rest that it had taken and proposed to continue the work it had so terribly begun. It was met by the Monitor, just arrived, and the duel between them which followed became the most famous and important sea-fight in modern naval history. The message sent out to the country and the world at the close of it was that something better than the Virginia must be constructed before any fleet or harbor of the Union need be imperilled. Mr. Lincoln is said to have remarked that he was very glad that he had given the Monitor a lift." He might well be, for without his aid she would not have kept that strange appointment for a trial in Hampton Roads.

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The other great naval event did not include any

fighting, but it was of unsurpassed importance. The Confederate Government entertained high hope of the aid, open or secret, which it was to obtain from European powers jealous of the United States. The attitude of the English ruling classes, with her commercial rivalry, seemed to encourage the hope in her case, while France, her ally, or, rather, Napoleon, master of France, held a position in Mexico which was believed to make him a ready assailant of the Republic upholding the Monroe doctrine.

Southern emissaries, private and official, had worked busily in Europe before the Sumter gun was fired, but they had accomplished nothing definite, and so in the Autumn of 1861 two of the most distinguished chiefs of the Confederacy were sent out as commissioners, with ample powers to represent and advocate the cause of the proposed new American nationality, and to obtain assistance for it, or, at least, its formal recognition. Mr. Mason, of Virginia, and Mr. Slidell, of Louisiana, had been members of the Senate of the United States, and the terms for which they had been elected to that body had not yet expired. They managed, late in October, to make a perilous voyage from Charleston, S. C., to Havana, Cuba. Here they were received cordially, and obtained a passage to St. Thomas in the British mail steamer Trent early in November. They supposed themselves beyond interference, but their movements had been well watched, and on November 8th, the Trent was stopped at sea by the United States cruiser San Jacinto, Captain Charles Wilkes commanding. In

spite of the stormy protests of the British officers, and of the commissioners themselves, the latter were forced to change their quarters to the cabin of the San Jacinto. They were not black men, but they had been captured as "contraband of war," and the weak spot in the legality of the action of Captain Wilkes was afterward declared to be that he neglected to carry the Trent before a regular court for adjudication as a prize taken in the act of carrying contraband matters. No harm was done to persons or property. The San Jacinto steamed away to Boston, where she arrived on November 24th, to deliver her two human prizes to the keepers of Fort Warren. The North rang with praises of Captain Wilkes. Congress gave him a vote of thanks; he was the hero of the hour, but President Lincoln and his counsellors were sorely puzzled as to what they were to do with the pair of captives, and with the serious questions of international law involved in their forcible removal from a British mail steamer. Hardly less perplexing was the position of the Government of Great Britain. All England was boisterously angry, but her statesmen did not desire a war with the United States, even with France as an ally. They knew that such a war meant a convulsion of the entire world, just then, with no prophet to tell them the end of it all. While adopting, therefore, a tone toward the United States which was made only prudently firm by the help of Prince Albert himself as his last good work, the British ministry signified a willingness to help the United States out of the difficulty the zealous

seaman had rashly forced his country into. The two commissioners were transferred once more to British guardianship; the English people declared their honor satisfied; the American people grumblingly assented to a policy which avoided a war with England, and it was only a little while before Captain Charles Wilkes found himself a rear admiral.

The entire "Trent affair," as it was called, bore good fruit at home and abroad in the shape it assumed of a startling warning of the ease with which the peace of nations and prosperity of the civilized world might be shattered by war. The Confederate commissioners had been set forth as dangerous persons, and the possible uses of their mission had been sharply cut down.