CHAPTER IX

THE TRENT AND THE MONITOR

IT HAS never been easy for Americans to forgive official Great Britain for her attitude toward the United States in the early days of the Civil War. The haste with which Great Britain and France recognized the Confederates as belligerents was in itself a disappointment, and this recognition, itself an unneighborly act on the part of both these nations, was followed by acts of aid and comfort to the Confederate forces which no pretense of neutrality, much less of friendship, could disguise. The readiness of Great Britain to give offense was equaled by her readiness to take offense. The delicacy of the relations between the two countries became painfully apparent in the Trent affair.

On November 8, 1861, Captain Charles Wilkes, commanding the United States steamer San Jacinto, halted the British royal mail steamship Trent, and removed from her James M. Mason and John Slidell, with their two secretaries, and took them to Boston where they were imprisoned in Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. Mason and Slidell were the accredited envoys of the Confederacy to England and France. They ran the blockade at Charleston in the autumn of 1861, and arrived at Havana. They announced their purpose to sail from there for Great Britain on the Steamer Trent on November seventh. On the following day Captain Wilkes compelled the Trent to halt as she was sailing through the Bahama Channel, and sent a force of marines on board to take off the emissaries of the Confederate Government. The Trent then proceeded upon her voyage. This act on the part of Captain Wilkes was hailed with great

joy throughout the North. Secretary Welles wrote to Captain Wilkes a letter of congratulation, declaring that his conduct was marked by intelligence, ability, decision and firmness, and that it "had the emphatic approval of this department." Secretary Stanton also applauded the act.

Congress convened just at the time the interest in this matter was at its height. One of its first acts on the opening day of the session was to pass by unanimous consent a vote of thanks to Captain Wilkes. This resolution was introduced by Owen Lovejoy, and the House lost no time in placing the hot-headed resolution on its record.

Chittenden in his book of Recollections, asserts that Secretary Seward from the first disapproved the action; but Chittenden's recollections were sometimes very wide of the facts; Gideon Welles declares that Seward at the beginning was opposed to giving up the emissaries, but yielded when the demand of Great Britain became peremptory. Considering the attitude of Seward toward Great Britain as shown by his Thoughts for the President's Consideration, on April 1, 1861, in which he was then ready to go to war with Great Britain, Welles is more likely to be correct in this matter than Chittenden.

Whatever the attitude of others, there appears to be no doubt of Lincoln's view of the case. He had grave misgivings from the start concerning the right of Captain Wilkes to stop and search a British vessel on the high seas.

"I fear the traitors will prove to be white elephants," he said. "We must stick to American principles concerning the rights of neutrals. We fought Great Britain for insisting by theory and practice on the right to do exactly what Captain Wilkes has done. If Great Britain shall now protest against the act and demand their release, we must give them up, apologize for the act as a violation of our doctrines, and thus forever bind her over to keep the peace in relation to neutrals, and so acknowledge that she has been wrong for sixty years."

Meantime, Great Britain was working her navy yards night

and day in open and visible preparation for war against the United States. The British press flamed with denunciations of the American insult to the British Navy. At one time war seemed inevitable.

Mr. Frederick Seward, who was assistant to his father, maintained that it was Secretary Seward who at this juncture saved the country from a calamitous and unjustifiable war with Great Britain. Charles Francis Adams, the American Ambassador at the Court of St. James, agreed with him. But while high honor is due to Adams at this juncture, and some also to Seward, it appears to have been Lincoln's common sense and sound judgment which saved the day. All through the excitement he was calmly considering America's historic attitude toward the question of the right of search, and the practical way of saving America the necessity of a war with Great Britain. On Lincoln's advice and practically upon his decision that it must Le done, the prisoners were returned to Great Britain. This act greatly strengthened America before the public sentiment of England.

"If reparation were made at all, of which few of us felt more than a hope," wrote John Stuart Mill, "we thought that it would. be made obviously as a concession to prudence, not to principle. We thought that there would have been truckling to the newspaper editors and supposed fire-eaters who were crying out for retaining the prisoners at all hazards. . . . We expected everything, in short, which would have been weak, and timid, and paltry. The only thing which no one seemed to expect is what has actually happened. Mr. Lincoln's government have done none of these things. Like honest men they have said in direct. terms that our demand was right; that they yielded to it because it was just; that if they themselves had received the same treatment, they would have demanded the same reparation; and if what seemed to be the American side of the question was not the just side, they would be on the side of justice, happy as they were to find after their resolution had been taken, that it was also the side which America had formerly defended. Is there any one capable of a moral judgment or feeling, who will say

that his opinion of America and American statesmen is not raised by such an act, done on such grounds?"

In the United States, however, there was no such unanimity of sentiment. The return of Mason and Slidell was denounced by many as an act of weakness on the part of the administration; and some who conceded the practical necessity of the act were grief stricken at the humiliation of it. Owen Lovejoy, who had always refused to be silent in his denunciation of the crime of slavery, spoke out hot words which many men deemed unwise, but whose sentiments very many people shared. He said:

"Every time this Trent affair comes up; every time that an allusion is made to it . . . I am made to renew the horrible grief which I suffered when the news of the surrender of Mason and Slidell came. I acknowledge it, I literally wept tears of vexation. I hate it; and I hate the British government. I have never shared in the traditionary hostility of many of my countrymen against England. But I now here publicly avow and record my inextinguishable hatred of that government. I mean to cherish it while I live, and to bequeath it as a legacy to my children when I die. And if I am alive when war with England comes, as sooner or later it must, for we shall never forget this humiliation, and if I can carry a musket in that war, I will carry it. I have three sons, and I mean to charge them, and I do now publicly and solemnly charge them, that if they shall have, at that time, reached the years of manhood and strength, they shall enter into that war."*

Senator Hale, of New Hampshire, went so far as to threaten the administration of Mr. Lincoln.

"If," said he, "this administration will not listen to the voice of the people, they will find themselves engulfed in a fire that will consume them like stubble: they will be helpless before a power that will hurl them from their places."*

Before many months, however, an event occurred which did

*Congressional Globe, 2d Session 37th Congress, January 7, 1862, p. 177. †Congressional Globe, 2d Session 37th Congress, p. 333.

much to strengthen the cause of the North in the sight of Great Britain, particularly with respect to the conflict to be waged on the ocean.

The navy yard at Norfolk, Virginia, had been captured by the Confederates. Among the other vessels which then fell into the hands of the enemy, was a war-ship named the Merrimac. The Confederates sheathed her sides with iron, and changed her name to the Virginia. She was finished in the spring of 1862, and on March seventh she sailed out of Norfolk Harbor. On the following day she sailed down the James River and attacked and destroyed two United States frigates, the Cumberland and the Congress. A third vessel, the Minnesota, was coming to the aid of the Cumberland, but ran around and lay at the mercy of the destroyer.

The cannon balls fired by these three vessels fell as harmlessly as peas upon the iron armor of the Merrimac. The only harm she suffered in this attack which lost the Union Navy two ships, and seemed to doom a third, was the damage done to her own prow when she rammed the Cumberland. She withdrew to her anchorage, and waited for another day on which she expected easily to finish the Minnesota.

On Sunday morning, March ninth, the Virginia, which is still known in literature as the Merrimac, moved triumphantly toward the Minnesota, never questioning that her wooden walls would be crushed by the first impact. Suddenly, from under the stern of the Minnesota, sailed a small nondescript craft and advanced to meet the Merrimac.

The Monitor, which was the name of this vessel, had been built in a Connecticut shipyard by an ingenious Swedish engineer, John Ericsson. She mounted two eleven-inch Dahlgren guns, each carrying a solid shot weighing one hundred and sixtyeight pounds. These guns were mounted in a revolving turret which stood upon the low deck only a few inches above the water line.

This absurd-looking craft emerged and interposed its ridicu