THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)
MINISTER ADAMS troubled himself little about what he did not
see of an enemy. His son, a nervous animal, made life a terror by
seeing too much. Minister Adams played his hand as it came, and seldom
credited his opponents with greater intelligence than his own. Earl
Russell suited him; perhaps a certain personal sympathy united them;
and indeed Henry Adams never saw Russell without being amused by his
droll likeness to John Quincy Adams. Apart from this shadowy personal
relation, no doubt the Minister was diplomatically right; he had
nothing to lose and everything to gain by making a friend of the
Foreign Secretary, and whether Russell were true or false mattered
less, because, in either case, the American Legation could act only as
though he were false. Had the Minister known Russell's determined
effort to betray and ruin him in October, 1862, he could have scarcely
used stronger expressions than he did in 1863. Russell must have been
greatly annoyed by Sir Robert Collier's hint of collusion with the
rebel agents in the Alabama Case, but he hardened himself to hear the
same innuendo repeated in nearly every note from the Legation. As time
went on, Russell was compelled, though slowly, to treat the American
Minister as serious. He admitted nothing so unwillingly, for the
nullity or fatuity of the Washington Government was his idee fixe; but
after the failure of his last effort for joint intervention on November
12, 1862, only one week elapsed before he received a note from Minister
Adams repeating his charges about the Alabama, and asking in very plain
language for redress. Perhaps Russell's mind was naturally slow to
understand the force of sudden attack, or perhaps age had affected it;
this was one of the points that greatly interested a student, but young
men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile, which was only
in part warranted in this instance by observing that Russell's
generation were mostly senile from youth. They had never got beyond
1815. Both Palmerston and Russell were in this case. Their senility was
congenital, like Gladstone's Oxford training and High Church illusions,
which caused wild eccentricities in his judgment. Russell could not
conceive that he had misunderstood and mismanaged Minister Adams from
the start, and when after November 12 he found himself on the
defensive, with Mr Adams taking daily a stronger tone, he showed mere
confusion and helplessness.
Thus, whatever the theory, the action of diplomacy had to be
the same. Minister Adams was obliged to imply collusion between Russell
and the rebels. He could not even stop at criminal negligence. If, by
an access of courtesy, the Minister were civil enough to admit that the
escape of the Alabama had been due to criminal negligence, he could
make no such concession in regard to the ironclad rams which the Lairds
were building; for no one could be so simple as to believe that two
armored ships-of-war could be built publicly, under the eyes of the
Government, and go to sea like the Alabama, without active and
incessant collusion. The longer Earl Russell kept on his mask of
assumed ignorance, the more violently in the end, the Minister would
have to tear it off. Whatever Mr. Adams might personally think of Earl
Russell, he must take the greatest possible diplomatic liberties with
him if this crisis were allowed to arrive.
As the spring of 1863 drew on, the vast field cleared itself
for action. A campaign more beautiful--better suited for training the
mind of a youth eager for training--has not often unrolled itself for
study, from the beginning, before a young man perched in so commanding
a position. Very slowly, indeed, after two years of solitude, one began
to feel the first faint flush of new and imperial life. One was
twenty-five years old, and quite ready to assert it; some of one's
friends were wearing stars on their collars; some had won stars of a
more enduring kind. At moments one's breath came quick. One began to
dream the sensation of wielding unmeasured power. The sense came, like
vertigo, for an instant, and passed, leaving the brain a little dazed,
doubtful, shy. With an intensity more painful than that of any
Shakespearean drama, men's eyes were fastened on the armies in the
field. Little by little, at first only as a shadowy chance of what
might be, if things could be rightly done, one began to feel that,
somewhere behind the chaos in Washington power was taking shape; that
it was massed and guided as it had not been before. Men seemed to have
learned their business--at a cost that ruined--and perhaps too late. A
private secretary knew better than most people how much of the new
power was to be swung in London, and almost exactly when; but the
diplomatic campaign had to wait for the military campaign to lead. The
student could only study.
Life never could know more than a single such climax. In that
form, education reached its limits. As the first great blows began to
fall, one curled up in bed in the silence of night, to listen with
incredulous hope. As the huge masses struck, one after another, with
the precision of machinery, the opposing mass, the world shivered. Such
development of power was unknown. The magnificent resistance and the
return shocks heightened the suspense. During the July days Londoners
were stupid with unbelief. They were learning from the Yankees how to
fight.
An American saw in a flash what all this meant to England, for
one's mind was working with the acceleration of the machine at home;
but Englishmen were not quick to see their blunders. One had ample time
to watch the process, and had even a little time to gloat over the
repayment of old scores. News of Vicksburg and Gettysburg reached
London one Sunday afternoon, and it happened that Henry Adams was asked
for that evening to some small reception at the house of Monckton
Milnes. He went early in order to exchange a word or two of
congratulation before the rooms should fill, and on arriving he found
only the ladies in the drawing-room; the gentlemen were still sitting
over their wine. Presently they came in, and, as luck would have it,
Delane of the Times came first. When Milnes caught sight of his young
American friend, with a whoop of triumph he rushed to throw both arms
about his neck and kiss him on both cheeks. Men of later birth who knew
too little to realize the passions of 1863--backed by those of
1813--and reenforced by those of 1763--might conceive that such
publicity embarrassed a private secretary who came from Boston and
called himself shy; but that evening, for the first time in his life,
he happened not to be thinking of himself. He was thinking of Delane,
whose eye caught his, at the moment of Milnes's embrace. Delane
probably regarded it as a piece of Milnes's foolery; he had never heard
of young Adams, and never dreamed of his resentment at being ridiculed
in the Times; he had no suspicion of the thought floating in the mind
of the American Minister's son, for the British mind is the slowest of
all minds, as the files of the Times proved, and the capture of
Vicksburg had not yet penetrated Delane's thick cortex of fixed ideas.
Even if he had read Adams's thought, he would have felt for it only the
usual amused British contempt for all that he had not been taught at
school. It needed a whole generation for the Times to reach Milnes's
standpoint.
Had the Minister's son carried out the thought, he would surely
have sought an introduction to Delane on the spot, and assured him that
he regarded his own personal score as cleared off--sufficiently
settled, then and there--because his father had assumed the debt, and
was going to deal with Mr. Delane himself. "You come next!" would have
been the friendly warning. For nearly a year the private secretary had
watched the board arranging itself for the collision between the
Legation and Delane who stood behind the Palmerston Ministry. Mr. Adams
had been steadily strengthened and reenforced from Washington in view
of the final struggle. The situation had changed since the Trent
Affair. The work was efficiently done; the organization was fairly
complete. No doubt, the Legation itself was still as weakly manned and
had as poor an outfit as the Legations of Guatemala or Portugal.
Congress was always jealous of its diplomatic service, and the Chairman
of the Committee of Foreign Relations was not likely to press
assistance on the Minister to England. For the Legation not an
additional clerk was offered or asked. The Secretary, the Assistant
Secretary, and the private secretary did all the work that the Minister
did not do. A clerk at five dollars a week would have done the work as
well or better, but the Minister could trust no clerk; without express
authority he could admit no one into the Legation; he strained a point
already by admitting his son. Congress and its committees were the
proper judges of what was best for the public service, and if the
arrangement seemed good to them, it was satisfactory to a private
secretary who profited by it more than they did. A great staff would
have suppressed him. The whole Legation was a sort of improvised,
volunteer service, and he was a volunteer with the rest. He was rather
better off than the rest, because he was invisible and unknown. Better
or worse, he did his work with the others, and if the secretaries made
any remarks about Congress, they made no complaints, and knew that none
would have received a moment's attention.
If they were not satisfied with Congress, they were satisfied
with Secretary Seward. Without appropriations for the regular service,
he had done great things for its support. If the Minister had no
secretaries, he had a staff of active consuls; he had a well-organized
press; efficient legal support; and a swarm of social allies permeating
all classes. All he needed was a victory in the field, and Secretary
Stanton undertook that part of diplomacy. Vicksburg and Gettysburg
cleared the board, and, at the end of July, 1863, Minister Adams was
ready to deal with Earl Russell or Lord Palmerston or Mr. Gladstone or
Mr. Delane, or any one else who stood in his way; and by the necessity
of the case, was obliged to deal with all of them shortly.
Even before the military climax at Vicksburg and Gettysburg,
the Minister had been compelled to begin his attack; but this was
history, and had nothing to do with education. The private secretary
copied the notes into his private books, and that was all the share he
had in the matter, except to talk in private.
No more volunteer services were needed; the volunteers were in
a manner sent to the rear; the movement was too serious for
skirmishing. All that a secretary could hope to gain from the affair
was experience and knowledge of politics. He had a chance to measure
the motive forces of men; their qualities of character; their
foresight; their tenacity of purpose.
In the Legation no great confidence was felt in stopping the
rams. Whatever the reason, Russell seemed immovable. Had his efforts
for intervention in September, 1862, been known to the Legation in
September, 1863 the Minister must surely have admitted that Russell
had, from the first, meant to force his plan of intervention on his
colleagues. Every separate step since April, 1861, led to this final
coercion. Although Russell's hostile activity of 1862 was still
secret--and remained secret for some five-and-twenty years--his animus
seemed to be made clear by his steady refusal to stop the rebel
armaments. Little by little, Minister Adams lost hope. With loss of
hope came the raising of tone, until at last, after stripping Russell
of every rag of defence and excuse, he closed by leaving him loaded
with connivance in the rebel armaments, and ended by the famous
sentence: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship
that this is war!"
What the Minister meant by this remark was his own affair; what the
private secretary understood by it, was a part of his education. Had
his father ordered him to draft an explanatory paragraph to expand the
idea as he grasped it, he would have continued thus:--
"It would be superfluous: 1st. Because Earl Russell not only
knows it already, but has meant it from the start. 2nd Because it is
the only logical and necessary consequence of his unvarying action. 3d.
Because Mr. Adams is not pointing out to him that 'this is war,' but is
pointing it out to the world, to complete the record."
This would have been the matter-of-fact sense in which the
private secretary copied into his books the matter-of-fact statement
with which, without passion or excitement, the Minister announced that
a state of war existed. To his copying eye, as clerk, the words, though
on the extreme verge of diplomatic propriety, merely stated a fact,
without novelty, fancy, or rhetoric. The fact had to be stated in order
to make clear the issue. The war was Russell's war--Adams only accepted
it.
Russell's reply to this note of September 5 reached the
Legation on September 8, announcing at last to the anxious secretaries
that "instructions have been issued which will prevent the departure of
the two ironclad vessels from Liverpool." The members of the modest
Legation in Portland Place accepted it as Grant had accepted the
capitulation of Vicksburg. The private secretary conceived that, as
Secretary Stanton had struck and crushed by superior weight the rebel
left on the Mississippi, so Secretary Seward had struck and crushed the
rebel right in England, and he never felt a doubt as to the nature of
the battle. Though Minister Adams should stay in office till he were
ninety, he would never fight another campaign of life and death like
this; and though the private secretary should covet and attain every
office in the gift of President or people, he would never again find
education to compare with the life-and-death alternative of this
two-year-and-a-half struggle in London, as it had racked and
thumb-screwed him in its shifting phases; but its practical value as
education turned on his correctness of judgment in measuring the men
and their forces. He felt respect for Russell as for Palmerston because
they represented traditional England and an English policy, respectable
enough in itself, but which, for four generations, every Adams had
fought and exploited as the chief source of his political fortunes. As
he understood it, Russell had followed this policy steadily, ably, even
vigorously, and had brought it to the moment of execution. Then he had
met wills stronger than his own, and, after persevering to the last
possible instant, had been beaten. Lord North and George Canning had a
like experience. This was only the idea of a boy, but, as far as he
ever knew, it was also the idea of his Government. For once, the
volunteer secretary was satisfied with his Government. Commonly the
self-respect of a secretary, private or public, depends on, and is
proportional to, the severity of his criticism, but in this case the
English campaign seemed to him as creditable to the State Department as
the Vicksburg campaign to the War Department, and more decisive. It was
well planned, well prepared, and well executed. He could never discover
a mistake in it. Possibly he was biassed by personal interest, but his
chief reason for trusting his own judgment was that he thought himself
to be one of only half a dozen persons who knew something about it.
When others criticised Mr. Seward, he was rather indifferent to their
opinions because he thought they hardly knew what they were talking
about, and could not be taught without living over again the London
life of 1862. To him Secretary Seward seemed immensely strong and
steady in leadership; but this was no discredit to Russell or
Palmerston or Gladstone. They, too, had shown power, patience and
steadiness of purpose. They had persisted for two years and a half in
their plan for breaking up the Union, and had yielded at last only in
the jaws of war. After a long and desperate struggle, the American
Minister had trumped their best card and won the game.
Again and again, in after life, he went back over the ground to
see whether he could detect error on either side. He found none. At
every stage the steps were both probable and proved. All the more he
was disconcerted that Russell should indignantly and with growing
energy, to his dying day, deny and resent the axiom of Adams's whole
contention, that from the first he meant to break up the Union. Russell
affirmed that he meant nothing of the sort; that he had meant nothing
at all; that he meant to do right; that he did not know what he meant.
Driven from one defence after another, he pleaded at last, like
Gladstone, that he had no defence. Concealing all he could
conceal--burying in profound secrecy his attempt to break up the Union
in the autumn of 1862--he affirmed the louder his scrupulous good
faith. What was worse for the private secretary, to the total derision
and despair of the lifelong effort for education, as the final result
of combined practice, experience, and theory--he proved it.
Henry Adams had, as he thought, suffered too much from Russell
to admit any plea in his favor; but he came to doubt whether this
admission really favored him. Not until long after Earl Russell's death
was the question reopened. Russell had quitted office in 1866; he died
in 1878; the biography was published in 1889. During the Alabama
controversy and the Geneva Conference in 1872, his course as Foreign
Secretary had been sharply criticised, and he had been compelled to see
England pay more than L3,000,000 penalty for his errors. On the other
hand, he brought forward--or his biographer for him--evidence tending
to prove that he was not consciously dishonest, and that he had, in
spite of appearances, acted without collusion, agreement, plan, or
policy, as far as concerned the rebels. He had stood alone, as was his
nature. Like Gladstone, he had thought himself right.
In the end, Russell entangled himself in a hopeless ball of
admissions, denials, contradictions, and resentments which led even his
old colleagues to drop his defence, as they dropped Gladstone's; but
this was not enough for the student of diplomacy who had made a certain
theory his law of life, and wanted to hold Russell up against himself;
to show that he had foresight and persistence of which he was unaware.
The effort became hopeless when the biography in 1889 published papers
which upset all that Henry Adams had taken for diplomatic education;
yet he sat down once more, when past sixty years old, to see whether he
could unravel the skein.
Of the obstinate effort to bring about an armed intervention,
on the lines marked out by Russell's letter to Palmerston from Gotha,
17 September, 1862, nothing could be said beyond Gladstone's plea in
excuse for his speech in pursuance of the same effort, that it was "the
most singular and palpable error," "the least excusable," "a mistake of
incredible grossness," which passed defence; but while Gladstone threw
himself on the mercy of the public for his speech, he attempted no
excuse for Lord Russell who led him into the "incredible grossness" of
announcing the Foreign Secretary's intent. Gladstone's offence,
"singular and palpable," was not the speech alone, but its cause--the
policy that inspired the speech. "I weakly supposed ... I really,
though most strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness."
Whatever absurdity Gladstone supposed, Russell supposed nothing of the
sort. Neither he nor Palmerston "most strangely believed" in any
proposition so obviously and palpably absurd, nor did Napoleon delude
himself with philanthropy. Gladstone, even in his confession, mixed up
policy, speech, motives, and persons, as though he were trying to
confuse chiefly himself.
There Gladstone's activity seems to have stopped. He did not
reappear in the matter of the rams. The rebel influence shrank in 1863,
as far as is known, to Lord Russell alone, who wrote on September 1
that he could not interfere in any way with those vessels, and thereby
brought on himself Mr. Adams's declaration of war on September 5. A
student held that, in this refusal, he was merely following his policy
of September, 1862, and of every step he had taken since 1861.
The student was wrong. Russell proved that he had been feeble,
timid, mistaken, senile, but not dishonest. The evidence is convincing.
The Lairds had built these ships in reliance on the known opinion of
the law-officers that the statute did not apply, and a jury would not
convict. Minister Adams replied that, in this case, the statute should
be amended, or the ships stopped by exercise of the political power.
Bethell rejoined that this would be a violation of neutrality; one must
preserve the status quo. Tacitly Russell connived with Laird, and, had
he meant to interfere, he was bound to warn Laird that the defect of
the statute would no longer protect him, but he allowed the builders to
go on till the ships were ready for sea. Then, on September 3, two days
before Mr. Adams's "superfluous" letter, he wrote to Lord Palmerston
begging for help; "The conduct of the gentlemen who have contracted for
the two ironclads at Birkenhead is so very suspicious,"--he began, and
this he actually wrote in good faith and deep confidence to Lord
Palmerston, his chief, calling "the conduct" of the rebel agents
"suspicious" when no one else in Europe or America felt any suspicion
about it, because the whole question turned not on the rams, but on the
technical scope of the Foreign Enlistment Act,--"that I have thought it
necessary to direct that they should be detained," not, of course,
under the statute, but on the ground urged by the American Minister, of
international obligation above the statute. "The Solicitor General has
been consulted and concurs in the measure as one of policy though not
of strict law. We shall thus test the law, and, if we have to pay
damages, we have satisfied the opinion which prevails here as well as
in America that that kind of neutral hostility should not be allowed to
go on without some attempt to stop it."
For naivete that would be unusual in an unpaid attache of
Legation, this sudden leap from his own to his opponent's ground, after
two years and a half of dogged resistance, might have roused Palmerston
to inhuman scorn, but instead of derision, well earned by Russell's old
attacks on himself, Palmerston met the appeal with wonderful loyalty.
"On consulting the law officers he found that there was no lawful
ground for meddling with the ironclads," or, in unprofessional
language, that he could trust neither his law officers nor a Liverpool
jury; and therefore he suggested buying the ships for the British Navy.
As proof of "criminal negligence" in the past, this suggestion seemed
decisive, but Russell, by this time, was floundering in other troubles
of negligence, for he had neglected to notify the American Minister. He
should have done so at once, on September 3. Instead he waited till
September 4, and then merely said that the matter was under "serious
and anxious consideration." This note did not reach the Legation till
three o'clock on the afternoon of September 5--after the "superfluous"
declaration of war had been sent. Thus, Lord Russell had sacrificed the
Lairds: had cost his Ministry the price of two ironclads, besides the
Alabama Claims--say, in round numbers, twenty million dollars--and had
put himself in the position of appearing to yield only to a threat of
war. Finally he wrote to the Admiralty a letter which, from the
American point of view, would have sounded youthful from an Eton
schoolboy:--
September 14, 1863.
MY DEAR DUKE:--
It is of the utmost importance and urgency that the ironclads
building at Birkenhead should not go to America to break the
blockade. They belong to Monsieur Bravay of Paris. If you will
offer to buy them on the part of the Admiralty you will get
money's worth if he accepts your offer; and if he does not, it
will be presumptive proof that they are already bought by the
Confederates. I should state that we have suggested to the
Turkish Government to buy them; but you can easily settle that
matter with the Turks....
The hilarity of the secretaries in Portland Place would have
been loud had they seen this letter and realized the muddle of
difficulties into which Earl Russell had at last thrown himself under
the impulse of the American Minister; but, nevertheless, these letters
upset from top to bottom the results of the private secretary's
diplomatic education forty years after he had supposed it complete.
They made a picture different from anything he had conceived and
rendered worthless his whole painful diplomatic experience.
To reconstruct, when past sixty, an education useful for any
practical purpose, is no practical problem, and Adams saw no use in
attacking it as only theoretical. He no longer cared whether he
understood human nature or not; he understood quite as much of it as he
wanted; but he found in the "Life of Gladstone" (II, 464) a remark
several times repeated that gave him matter for curious thought. "I
always hold," said Mr. Gladstone, "that politicians are the men whom,
as a rule, it is most difficult to comprehend"; and he added, by way of
strengthening it: "For my own part, I never have thus understood, or
thought I understood, above one or two."
Earl Russell was certainly not one of the two.
Henry Adams thought he also had understood one or two; but the
American type was more familiar. Perhaps this was the sufficient result
of his diplomatic education; it seemed to be the whole.