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own productions and fabrics, and its own ports and waters, and its highways, and, generally, within all its proper territories. It has a right to maintain that sovereignty against sedition and insurrection by civil preventives and penalties and armed force, and it has a right to interdict and prohibit, within its own boundaries, exportation of its productions and fabrics and the supplying of traitors, in arms against itself, with material and munitions, and any other form of aid or comfort. It has a right, within its own territories, to employ all the means necessary to make these prohibitions effective. . . . It [the law of Congress] does not confine its prohibitions or its requirements to British vessels trading between New York and the Bahamas, but applies them to all vessels of all nations, including the United States, wherever trading, whether with the Bahamas or with any other part of the world. . . . They involve no question of neutral rights, because no neutral has or can have a right more than any citizen of the United States to do an act within their exclusive jurisdiction which is prohibited by the statutes and laws of the country. The act has nothing to do with the blockade of the insurrectionary ports, because it confines its prohibitions and requirements to transactions occurring and to persons residing or being within the ports actually possessed by the United States, and under their undisputed protection and control.”

The Secretary of State and the American Minister at London complained that subjects of Great Britain were the principal foreign supporters of the Confederate commerce, and that the British government should try to check the blockade-running.

"Information derived from our consul at Liverpool," Seward wrote to Adams, "confirms reports which have reached us that insurance companies in England are insuring vessels engaged in running our blockade, and even vessels carrying contraband of war. This is, in effect, a combination of British capitalists, under legal authority, to levy war against the United States. It is entirely inconsistent with the relations of friendship which we, on our part, maintain toward Great Britain; and we cannot believe

1 Dip. Cor., 1863, 301, 302.

that her Britannic Majesty's government will regard it as compatible with the attitude of neutrality proclaimed by that government. . .

"Pray bring this subject to the notice of Earl Russell, and ask for intervention in some form which will be efficient."1

Again, later, he expressed this opinion:

"The blockade amounts practically to a closing of all the insurgent ports except Wilmington, and the contraband trade there is now so exceedingly abridged that it seems unaccountable to us that Great Britain should not be ready to suppress it altogether, and accept in lieu the restoration of a free and prosperous commerce under the treaties and laws of the United States.” 2

Russell thought that "two things totally distinct” had been confounded:

"The foreign enlistment act is intended to prevent the subjects of the crown from going to war when the sovereign is not at war. Thus private persons are prohibited from fitting out a ship-of-war in our ports, or from enlisting in the service of a foreign state at war with another state, or in the service of insurgents against a foreign sovereign or state. In these cases the persons so acting would carry on war, and thus might engage the name of their sovereign and of their nation in belligerent operations. But owners and masters of merchant-ships carrying warlike stores do nothing of the kind. If captured for breaking a blockade or carrying contraband of war to the enemy of the captor, they sub-mit to capture, are tried, and condemned to lose their cargo. This is the penalty which the law of nations has affixed to such an offence, and in calling upon her Majesty's government to prohibit such adventures you in effect call upon her Majesty's government to do that which it belongs to the cruisers and the courts of the United States to do for themselves.

"There can be only one plea for asking Great Britain thus to interpose. That plea is that the blockade is in reality ineffective, and that merchant-ships can enter with impunity the blockaded ports. But this is a plea which I presume you will not urge.

1 Dip. Cor., 1862, 46.

8

21 Dip. Cor., 1864, 201.

3 Dip. Cor., 1862, 93.

Russell's reasoning was sound. Seward had claimed as a right more than could have been legally granted as a favor.

But no one of these incidents was deemed to be of sufficient importance to warrant more than a protest, for there were already too many serious questions.

As has been noticed, Jefferson Davis's reply to Lincoln's call for troops was a call for privateers; but privateering did not meet with the success expected, because the blockade made it impossible to get the prizes before a court for condemnation.

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The first Confederate commerce-destroyer, the Sumter, was purchased at New Orleans in April, 1861. Raphael Semmes was made commander, and his instructions from the Secretary of the Navy were to go to sea and "do the enemy's commerce the greatest injury in the shortest time." He ran the blockade at the mouth of the Mississippi, and, during the first week of July, 1861, captured eight merchantmen. Between that time and the beginning of the next year the Sumter cruised along the coast of South America, back through the West Indies, and then eastward to Spain. In all, she took seventeen or eighteen prizes, caused much alarm and loss, and eluded or ran away from the many vessels sent in pursuit of her, until she was finally blockaded at Gibraltar, and sold in consequence.

2

The early work of the Sumter confirmed the Confederates in their belief in commerce- destroyers, but they realized that marked success would depend on the ability of their government to procure war-ships abroad, for there was no opportunity to construct them at home. Two naval officers specially qualified for making such

1 Scharf, The Confederate States Navy, 787.
2 Soley, 176; Scharf, 789.

purchases were sent to Europe in the winter of 1861-62. Captain James D. Bulloch had the chief responsibility for this very important enterprise. But could such ships be obtained? International law forbids a neutral nation to supply vessels of war to belligerents; and Great Britain had a neutrality law that was supposed to be very stringent.

The Florida was the first of the ships bought in England. She was constructed in the autumn and winter of 1861-62, and it was pretended that she was for the Italian government; but, although it was notorious that she belonged to the Confederacy, the protests of the United States Minister were regarded as insufficient to warrant her detention. In March, 1862, she cleared from Liverpool for Palermo and Jamaica, and British subjects, as officers and crew, were engaged to take her to sea unarmed and to transfer her to a Confederate commander at Nassau. The equipments necessary to the destructive work planned for her were sent in another vessel. At Nassau the United States consul twice tried to have the Oreto, as the ship was still called, seized, on the ground that she was intended for the Confederacy; but the court released her, on account of a lack of evidence to show a violation of the neutrality law. In August she received her armament near an uninhabited island sixty miles from Nassau, and was regularly commissioned for the Confederate service. J. N. Maffitt, soon to be almost as famous as Semmes, became her commander. Not finding it practicable to equip and man the ship fully in Cuba, Maffitt very boldly ran her into Mobile through the blockade. In January, 1863, she steamed out past the blockading squadron and began her search for merchantmen. During the next fifteen months the Florida destroyed thirty-two vessels and bonded four others."

1 Beaman's Alabama Claims, 68.

Maffitt thoroughly carried out his instructions, which, he said, were brief and to the point, leaving much to discretion, but more to the torch.

But it was the Alabama that showed what a single ship could do in injuring commerce; and the alarm and anger that it created, first and last, several times brought Great Britain and the United States to the verge of war. On June 23, 1862, Adams informed Russell that a powerful war-steamer for the Confederate service was about completed and nearly ready for departure from Liverpool. The department of the government to which Russell referred the case reported that there was not sufficient ground to warrant the detention of the vessel or to interfere with it in any way. Evidence that the British government itself decided, July 29th, to be sufficient for these purposes was submitted July 22d, 23d, and 25th.' But before word was sent to Liverpool, the 290, as the cruiser was called at first, had gone to sea without a clearance and on the pretence of making a trial trip. She stopped at Moelfra Bay, about forty miles distant, where she shipped some of her crew and materials. In a few days she reached the Azores. Here British vessels from British ports brought her armament, supplies, and officers. Semmes took command, enlisted a crew from the men that had come in the different ships, and hoisted the Confederate flag. The Alabama soon became a terror to American merchantmen. In a little more than a year and a half she destroyed about sixty vessels and property worth several million dollars. She went first to the North Atlantic, where she captured and burned many whalers and grain-ships. Later she was in the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico. In 1863 she cruised down the coast of Brazil, across to the Cape of Good Hope, through the Indian

Bernard, 362-70.

2

Scharf, 815, gives the particulars.

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