Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Message of the President to the Second Session Thirty-eighth Congress, Part II
Mr. Adams to Mr. Seward.
Sir: The Alabama is at last announced as having arrived at Cherbourg. Her condition requires extensive repairs, permission to make which has been applied for.
Meanwhile her commander, like many American officers, thinks proper to indulge his fancy for writing in the newspapers. I transmit a copy of The Times of this morning, containing a long letter from him, as well as a commentary upon it in the editorial column. I am not sure that a succession of such productions might not, in the end, correct much of the tendency in England to sympathize with the rebel cause.
I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,
Hon. William H. Seward, &c., &c., &c.
The Alabama and her prizes.
To the Editor of the Times:
Sir: Do me the favor to publish in The Times the enclosed communication, which I design as a reply to numerous assaults upon me by the English PRESS-not excepting an occasional “rumble” from yourselves—on the subject of my destroying prizes at sea without adjudication by a prize court. The London Evening Star and kindred negrophilist associates have been particularly [Page 112] virulent and abusive. The term “pirate” is a favorite epithet with them; hut as abuse is always evidence of the weakness of the cause in which it is employed, and as this little failing may be a sort of vocabulistic necessity with them to enable them to pursue their polite calling, perhaps I ought not to quarrel with it.
If in the course of my remarks I have found it necessary to review some of the acts of your government, I trust you will give me credit for doing this in a spirit of justice and fair play, and not with a disposition to be querulous or censorious. I have alleged no fact that will not be conceded, and if my reasoning upon the premises be sound, no harm can have been done to any one, since truth is never unjust. If, on the contrary, the reasoning be unsound, you have the probe and scalpel at hand.
I am, respectfully, &c.,
“The reason why confederate cruises burn their prizes, and the remedy.
“I had the honor to command the first vessel-of-war (the steamer Sumter) commissioned by the Confederate States in the present war, and, having successfully run the blockade of New Orleans and got to sea, it early became necessary for me to adopt some mode of disposing of my prizes. A blockade of the entire coasts of the Confederate States had already been declared, and the enemy was busy in collecting and arming ships to enforce it; and I presumed that in the course of a few months the blockade would be at least sufficient to keep out sail vessels, and of this class, with rare exceptions, it was probable my prizes would be. It was clear, therefore, that I should be effectually prevented from sending my prizes into the confederate ports. Up to the time of my running the blockade (June 30, 1861) I had not seen her Britannic Majesty’s orders in council prohibiting the belligerents from bringing their prizes into British ports; and looking to the unequal operation of such orders, I had strong hopes that none such would be issued. I made my first prizes on the coast of Cuba, and with a view to test the disposition of Spain in this matter I sent them—seven in number—into the port of Cienfuegos. Their arrival was telegraphed to the captain general at Havana. The captain general was without instructions, the orders of neutrality of the Queen of Spain not yet having been received. The prizes were permitted to remain until these orders should arrive. The orders came, and the prizes were afterwards illegally handed over to the enemy, instead of being warned to depart. Spain, as well as France, had followed the lead of Great Britain, and in due time all the smaller commercial nations did the same. To show the objects I had in view in sending in these prizes, I quote below an extract from my letter to the governor of Cienfuegos:
“‘The cargoes of several of these vessels are claimed, as appears by certificates found among the papers, as Spanish property. This fact cannot, of course, be verified, except by a judicial proceeding in the prize courts of the Confederate States. But while this fact is being determined, what is to be done with the property? I have the right to destroy the vessels, but hot the cargoes, in case the latter should prove to be, as claimed, Spanish property; but how can I destroy the former and not the latter? I cannot before sentence unlade the cargoes and deliver them to the claimants, for I do not know that the claims will be sustained; and I cannot destroy the cargoes, for I do not know that the claims will not be sustained. Indeed, one of the motives which influenced me in seeking a Spanish port was the fact that these cargoes were claimed by Spanish subjects, whom I am desirous of putting to as little inconvenience as possible in the unlading and reception of their property after sentence, in case it should be restored to them.’
[Page 113]“It will thus be seen that I was not only anxious to condemn my prizes, but to put neutrals to as little inconvenience as possible. If my prizes had been received into neutral ports, and permitted to remain there until they could be adjudicated by our prize courts, sitting in our own territory, no possible inconvenience that I can perceive could have resulted to neutral nations, and the rights of every one would have been secured—the right of the captor to the full benefit of his prize, and the right of the neutral claimant to adjudication. What inconvenience to Great Britain, for example, could possibly have grown out of the fact of a captured vessel lying quietly at her dock in the port of Liverpool in charge of a ship-keeper and prize agent until she could be adjudicated; and if she should be condemned, why could she not have been sold as quietly at public auction as if she had been seized and sold under an execution for debt? It was my intention to follow the precedent set in the Cienfuegos case—of sending all my prizes into the most convenient ports for the parties concerned; as, where there were English claimants, into English ports; French claimants, into French ports, &c; but this intention was frustrated, as has been seen, by the orders of the Queen’s government—I say the Queen’s government, because that government gave the cue which was followed by all the other nations. By these orders I was deprived at the same time of the right of asylum and sale of my prizes and of the power of adjudication. What course was expected of me under these circumstances? Was it expected that I would abandon the right of capture altogether? or that I would be guilty of the child’s play of capturing the enemy’s ships with one hand and releasing them with the other? that, in short, I would retire from the high seas and leave the enemy to pursue his commerce, his innocent and peaceable commerce,’ as Mr. Adams plaintively and naively calls it, without molestation] If you did not suppose this—and I will not impute such folly to a people who not only know the value of commerce to a belligerent, but who have always annihilated the commerce of their enemies in their own wars—you must have known that I would destroy the enemy’s ships in every case where it was possible. Why, then, do you complain of the course I pursued? Was it just to force that course upon me, and then exclaim against it in pious horror? Is this the kind of fair play upon which Englishmen pride themselves?
“But your neutrality, you say, compelled you to this course. Let us see how that is. What is neutrality? Impartiality. Impartiality in form or appearance merely, or impartiality in substance? When a nation is called upon in good faith to perform that most solemn act of declaring her impartiality between two belligerents, is a mere jugglery of words all that is necessary, or must she look at the practical consequences of the rule she adopts? To this query there would seem to be but one answer. The rule must not only speak in the language of justice, but it must work out the ends of justice. Otherwise it is a sham and a deceit. Let us test the orders of British neutrality by this canon. On their face nothing could be more fair. Whatever is ordained as to the one belligerent is ordained as to the other. The prizes of both belligerents are prohibited from entering British waters. But when these orders were penned what facts and what consequences were in the mind of the minister? Did he or did he not know that he was dealing a staggering blow at the Confederate States at the same time that he was playing directly into the hands of the federal States? Let us see. It will be admitted that the two belligerents had the right to use against each other all the modes of warfare recognized by the international code, and that no nation had the right to prohibit to either of them the use of any of those modes. Privateering was one of those modes, and the circumstances of the two parties to the war were such that this mode of offence was peculiarly valuable to the Confederate States. The federal States had a large commerce and a very respectable navy, they having retained possession of air the ships-of-war of the old service, while the Confederate States had little or [Page 114] no commerce, and were just beginning to improvise a navy. (And here it may not be out of place to mention a fact highly creditable to the parties concerned: Every ship-of-war in the command of a southern naval officer at the date of the secession of his State was duly handed over to the federal government before the officer resigned his commission and returned to his State.) A large proportion of the wealth of the federal States consisted in their commerce,. and if this could be destroyed an important blow would be struck in the war. The volunteer corps of the sea—as legitimate as the volunteer corps of the land—was the most effective weapon with which to strike this blow, and accordingly, in the first days of the war, several privateers were commissioned, and others were being rapidly fitted out, when the Queen’s orders appeared and knocked the whole scheme on the head. As if by magic, the privateers which had already been commissioned disappeared from the seas, and all work was suspended on those in course of preparation, and the little Sumter, afterwards assisted by two or three other small vessels, was obliged to undertake, the herculean task of destroying a commerce second only to that of Great Britain, and which covered every sea. The reason of the disappearance of these private armed ships is obvious. They are prepared at the cost of individuals, and depend wholly upon their captures for success. If these cannot be made avail able the enterprise becomes abortive, and the capital invested in it is sunk; and they could not be made available by reason of the Queen’s orders referred to, denying them the right of asylum in British ports, the British foreign secretary well knowing that they could not be made available in the confederate ports because of the blockade, the blockade having been proclaimed on the 18th of April, 1861, and the orders in council not having been issued until the 1st of the following June. So far as results were concerned the British government might as well have said to the Confederate States, in the words of the ‘declaration’ of Paris,’ Privateering is and remains abolished, although the said States were not bound by the said declaration, the United States, then the federal mouthpiece, having declined to accede thereto before the war.
“There was no occasion for Mr. Seward to endeavor to ‘sneak’ into this ‘declaration’ after the war, in the hope that by becomiug a party to it Great. Britain would illogically hold that the Confederate States, now acknowledged as belligerents, would be bound by the act of their enemy. The British foreign secretary knew his business better than this. With the most commendable sagacity he took care of his logic and of his friend Mr. Seward at the same time, and accomplished the object of the federal government by his orders in council, without permitting its minister to humiliate himself.
“This was one result of the declaration of neutrality—Anglicè partiality—put forth by Great Britain. But the mischief did not end here. The Confederate States being compelled to restrict their operations upon the high seas to their ships-of-war, those ships were also seriously embarrassed by this declaration. Their inability to adjudicate their prizes has been already referred to. As a consequence of this inability they could make no beneficial use of them. Not only so, they were compelled in many instances to release them on ransom bond for the benefit of neutrals; that is to say, to give neutral claimants of cargoes an opportunity after the war, when the bonds should be sued upon, to vindicate their claims in a court of justice, which opportunity their own governments had denied to them during the war, by rendering it impossible for them to go before a confederate prize court. The release of these vessels operated strongly, too, in favor of the enemy. For it amounted to a loan to him of so much property, of which he had been rightfully deprived, with which to carry on the war; his bonds, in the mean time, being of no use to the captors, as it was impossible to collect them until after the war. This double mischief, therefore, ensued in these bond cases—the enemy continued to carry on his commerce, and commerce to a belligerent is strength; while the captor’s means, [Page 115] quoad the war, were not increased by his captures. The reader will now see why as few of these ships as possible were released on bond, the release being confined to those cases in which an apparent bona fide neutral claim was presented on the face of properly prepared papers. Nevertheless, to show the good faith with which the captor must have acted towards neutrals in this matter, every ship destroyed by him was so much property destroyed against his own interest: for, the ship being destroyed, no prize money could be realized, whereas the bond would be valuable to him at the end of the war. And although it was to be presumed that every officer would, from a sense of duty, destroy as many of his prizes as possible, yet we see that, at least, he had no private interest to urge him to destroy them when there was a question of neutral rights, his leaning being, in fact, the other way.
“This, then, is the working of those British orders in council which, on the face of them, appear to be entirely unexceptionable. Stripping off the diplomatic disguise of language—which is so thin and transparent that the wonder is that it should have been resorted to at all with the hope of concealment—more unjust, oppressive, and unneutral orders could not have been devised. If the practical effect of these orders is such as I have stated, what excuse can be offered for adopting them? Can it be said that no other course was open to the British government under the laws of nations? If so, that would be a sufficient excuse; for where a government has no alternative it would certainly be unjust to hold it responsible for all the consequential damages of its acts. It might be said, with truth, in reply to our complaints, ‘We were obliged, under the laws of nations regulating and controlling our neutrality, to exclude your prizes from our ports; and if, by reason of your inferior naval force, and the consequent blockade of your ports, the rule operates more harshly upon you than upon the enemy, that is your misfortune, not our fault.’ But the fact is there is no such excuse to offer. It was, at least, equally as open to Great Britain to admit as to exclude our prizes, as I will now proceed to show. The practice of nations has been various on this point, and it rests in the discretion of each nation to admit prizes into its ports or to exclude them as it may think fit. This seems to be the general understanding of the law on this question, although there is very respectable authority for the opinion that a nation cannot lawfully exclude the prizes of a belligerent without previous treaty stipulations to that effect.— (Loccenius de Jure Maritimo, L. 2, c. 4, s. 7.) As a general rule, belligerent nations have not favored the carrying of their prizes into neutral ports, and the reasons are obvious. It is much more convenient for the prize courts that they should have the actual custody of the prize to be adjudicated. And the bringing in of prizes to the home ports gives the subjects of the captor an opportunity of dealing in prize property, an object of no small importance in a maritime war where many valuable captures are made. It gives the government, too, the advantage of buying in such ships as it may wish to equip for the purposes of war—an advantage of which the federal States have frequently availed themselves during the present war. Hence belligerent nations have generally required their cruisers to bring their prizes into the home ports. Still, in cases where the contrary practice was convenient, nations have freely availed themselves of it without let or hindrance from neutrals, unless there was a treaty in the way. In former wars in which Great Britain has been concerned Leghorn and Lisbon were frequently made use of for this purpose; the prizes being condemned and sold without ever reaching the home ports at all. But taking the modern practice to be for the neutral to admit or exclude prizes at pleasure, the presumption always is, previous to the issue by the neutral of any order on the subject, in favor of the admission—this having been the more common practice. On this point see Wkeaton’s Elements, (Lawrence,) p. 498; see also 3 Phillimore’s International Law, p. 467, sec. 363. The treaties between nations on this subject have been as various as the practice. In 1778 a treaty was entered [Page 116] into between France and the United States, whereby no ship of the enemy of either party was allowed to sell her prize, or discharge her cargo, or buy more provisions than immediately indispensable in the ports of the other.
“In 1800 a similar treaty was entered into by the same parties.
“In 1794 a treaty of exclusion was made between England and the United States.
“In 1806 a treaty was made between the same parties containing similar provisions.
“In 1782 a treaty was entered into between the United States and Holland, then one of the principal maritime powers, whereby the sale of prizes brought by either party into the ports of the other was legalized.
“In 1742 a treaty was made between Spain and Denmark authorizing the reception and sale of prizes reciprocally and so late as 1829 a treaty was ratified between Holland and the republic of Colombia authorizing the reception of prizes into each other’s ports.
“Now, if the treaties between Great Britain and the United States were still in existence, there is no doubt that Great Britain would be obliged under those treaties to apply the rule of exclusion the Confederate States; but it will be remembered that a war occurred between the two contracting parties in 1812, subsequently to the formation of those treaties, which abrogated them; and the subject has not since been renewed either in the treaty of Ghent, which put an end to that war, or in any subsequent treaty. The ignoring of such a question, after it had once been made the subject of a treaty, places in a very strong light the intention of the parties to remain perfectly free to exercise their discretion for the future. Great Britain, then, has no excuse for the unjust and unneutral course she has pursued. She can neither affirm that she had no alternative under the laws of nations; nor that she was bound by any treaty obligation.
“One more question, which has already been incidentally noticed, remains to be disposed of. If Great Britain had permitted the entry of prizes into her ports, would this have enabled the captors to condemn them so as to give an indefeasible title to the purchaser? Without doubt. Notwithstanding Lord Stowell, in the case of the ‘Flad Oyen,’ (1 Rob., pp. 139-142,) declared the practice (he was commenting on the practice of the French courts, in the heat of a French war, and every lawyer knows the vim with which his lordship assailed everything French) to be ‘infrequent and irregular,’ it is now well settled that a belligerent prize court, sitting in its own country, may adjudicate a prize lying in neutral waters, provided the possession of the captor remains. And this position seems to be as unanswerable in principle as it is well settled in practice. The proceeding in a prize case is in rem, and to give the court jurisdiction it is only necessary that it should have possession of the prize. But this need not be actual possession by the officers of the court, as by the marshal and his bailiffs. It is sufficient if the captor, or his duly appointed agent, has possession, because his possession is that of the government under whose authority the court sits, as effectually as would be that of the marshal; and no principle is better settled than that a neutral government has no right to interfere with the captor’s possession of his prize—the case only excepted of the capture having been made within the waters of the neutral territory. So that if the prize be admitted into the neutral port at all—and the argument proceeds upon that hypothesis—the captor’s possession remains as firmly established as if he and his prize were in his own country. In support of this jurisdiction of the prize court I quote the following authorities:
“In 1.11 Phillimore’s International Law, p. 482, it is said: ‘An attentive review of all the cases decided in the courts of England and the North American United States during the last war (1812) leads to the conclusion that the condemnation of a capture by a regular prize court, sitting in the country of the belligerent, of a prize lying at the time of the sentence in a neutral port is [Page 117] irregular, but clearly valid. It appears to be the inclination of the English prize court during the present war (Russian) to limit to cases of necessity the condemnation of vessels lying in a neutral port. It is scarcely necessary to add, after what has been said as to the former French law on condemnations by judges of the belligerent in neutral ports, (that is, the judge and the prize both being in the neutral port,) that such condemnations of vessels lying in neutral ports are holden valid by the French prize courts.’ Again, in the volume already quoted, p. 426, it is said: ‘The courts of the North American United States allow that property may be condemned in the courts of the captor while lying in a neutral country, but still they rightly hold that it can only be so adjudicated upon while the possession of the captor remains; for if it be divested, either in fact or by operation of law, that possession is gone which can alone sustain the jurisdiction. And it is to be observed that, a fortiori, where the property is already in the custody of a neutral tribunal, and the title is there, sub judice, no other foreign court can, by any adjudication of its own, rightfully take away, forestall, or defeat the jurisdiction of this neutral tribunal;’ and the author quotes 7 Wheaton’s Reports, 355. It thus appears that, unless the captor divests himself of the possession of the prize, (as by sale, without waiting for condemnation,) or his possession is divested by operation of law, (as by his bringing a prize captured within neutral waters within neutral jurisdiction,) the belligerent prize court, sitting in its own country, has ample power to adjudicate.
“There would seem, then, to be no difficulty in the way of Great Britain’s revoking her unjust and unneutral orders in council and returning to a sense of justice. If individuals are bound in conscience to retract their errors when once discovered, how much more are nations bound to do so, the consequences of whose errors are so much more wide-spread? By doing justice to the Confederate States Great Britain will not be doing injustice to the federal States. If she gives an asylum in her ports to the former, she will equally give it to the latter; and if this should work an incidental advantage to the Confederate States, why should this be objected to more than the opposite rule, which has worked them so many disadvantages? And will it be less graceful in Great Britain to perform this act of justice because one of the parties in the forum is struggling against odds, while the other has become overbearing, nay, truculent and defiant, from a fancied excess of brute strength? It is never safe for a nation, any more than an individual, to temporize, especially with a bully, and at the cost of injustice to a weaker party. Great Britain innocently fancies that she is ‘laying up against a rainy day’—that is to say, that she is conciliating the universal Yankee nation’ by her present one-sided course, and establishing wise and safe precedents to be followed by that people hereafter when she shall herself become a belligerent. But I warn her that it is all fancy, and that she will reap the reward of her timidity in the usual way—timidity on the part of nations always inviting further insult and outrage. A people who have become so lunatic as to destroy a constitutional government and voluntarily submit their neck to the yoke of a coarse and illiterate tyrant for the sake of butchering, in gratification of their revenge, eight millions of their former fellow-citizens, will hardly permit themselves to be ruled by English precedents, to be calmly quoted to them by some future peace-loving Earl Russell from ponderous blue-books.”
[Untitled]
A letter from Captain Semmes on the subject of maritime law cannot fail to command attention. If we are to take the statements of his enemies literally, this officer is the commander of a piratical vessel, and itherefore a pirate himself, liable to be strung up to the yard-arm of the first ship that catches him. The very idea of such a character quietly sitting down, with Phillimore and Wheaton [Page 118] before him, to justify “his own proceedings and claim the sympathy of the English public, is not a little incongruous. It seems to show that, whether a pirate or not in a technical sense, he has more refined feelings than we commonly attribute to persons of that lawless class, and believes himself to be serving in a good cause. For ourselves, we have never regarded Captain Semmes in any such light, or supposed the term “pirate” to have been applied to him in sober earnest. A pirate is a highwayman of the seas, preying on commerce without a commission from a belligerent state, and this could never be said with truth of Captain Semmes. The charge against him was that he took upon himself to condemn and burn his prizes at sea without bringing them before a proper court of adjudication; but this practice, if it were ever so illegal, is no more piracy than it is forgery. If any journal, “negrophilist” or otherwise, has called it so, it can have been only by a figure of speech. At the same time, the right of a belligerent cruiser to destroy merchantmen on the high seas as the Alabama has done, has certainly been questioned, though somewhat vaguely, and Captain Semmes’s apology for this part of his conduct cannot be considered superfluous.
The sum and substance of his argument is, that he burnt the ships because he had no other means of annoying the federals, and this is the best account that he could give of the matter. The truth is, that the text-books of international law are almost silent upon the subject. They assume that it will be the interest of the captor to carry his prizes into a port of his own country, so as to dispose of them and realize their value. They hardly contemplate the case in which, all those ports being strictly blockaded, he must either forego the power of injuring his enemy’s carrying trade, or take the law into his own hands. Not that even Captain Semmes would venture to claim for himself the same authority as a prize court. He does not pretend that any decision of his could divest the property in any ship or cargo, or confer a good title on a purchaser. He merely determines, at his own peril, after an inspection of the ship’s papers, that she belongs to such and such parties, whether neutrals or belligerents, and acts accordingly. If he makes a mistake, his government is responsible for it; and if neutral goods should be destroyed in an enemy’s vessel, the neutral merchant is entitled to compensation. Captain Semmes complains that he was compelled in many instances to release prizes on ransom bond for the benefit of neutrals interested in the cargo, thereby leaving the enemy free to employ them for commercial purposes during the rest of the war. This consideration, he tells us, was the reason why “as few of these ships as possible were released on bond.” On the other hand, he takes credit to himself and his officers for every ship set on fire, inasmuch as they sacrificed their own chances of prize money to the good of the Confederate States.
We need not follow Captain Semmes further into these questions as to the disposal of prizes, because the notions which he combats really involve a confusion of thought. The validity of captures can only be decided conclusively by a prize court, and it is erroneously inferred from this that an enemy’s property cannot be destroyed till it has been found to be such by judicial inquiry. The fallacy, thus stated, is obvious; it consists in not distinguishing between the essential fact—viz: the ownership of the vessel—and the mode of procedure by which that fact must be established so as to bar adverse claims. It is a great pity that Captain Semmes was not content with exposing this error, and has thought it necessary to retort upon the government of this country. His grievance is that the orders in council, dated June 1, 1861, were issued with the full knowledge that they would operate unfairly towards the confederates. He denounces them on this ground as “unjust and unneutral,” and urges us in the strongest language to recall them. Before we advert to his elaborate disquisition on the usage of neutral nations with respect to the admission or exclusion of prizes, we must take exception to the principle on which the whole [Page 119] of it is based. “What is neutrality?” asks Captain Semmes. “Impartiality,” not in form only, but in substance—that is, not only actual impartiality, but such impartiality as will stand the test of, “practical consequences.” There cannot be a greater misconception of neutrality than this. To be neutral is to remain at peace while other nations are at war, and to give no assistance to either. It is essentially a negative attitude, and nothing would be more likely to lead to a practical violation of it than such attempts to dress the balance as Captain Semmes requires from us. His theory is that we should deliberately calculate the bearing of any regulation about the use of our own territory that we may see fit to make upon the interests of the two belligerents. If the one happens to be weaker, we must take care that we do not add to the inequality of force, and so adjust our conduct that the issue of the contest may be the same as if Great Baitain were not in existence. Not to dwell on the hopeless impossibility of steering such a course, we utterly deny that it would be impartial, or that, if impartial, it would be neutral. To refrain from closing our own ports, because the confederates have no access to their own, would be the very height of partiality. To allow both parties to fit out naval expeditions in them, though it might be impartial, would be a reductio ad absurdum of neutrality. The safest rule is to think much less of the belligerents than of ourselves, and to decline all responsibility for the possible effects of a righteous and disinterested policy on the fortunes of the war. Captain Semmes thinks he has proved his point when he calls the orders in council “a staggering blow” at “the Confederate States,” and a “playing into the hands of the federal States.” If such was their intention—which he does not even assert—cadit questio. If such was the incidental result of them, being, as they were, in strict accordance with the spirit of neutrality, what does it prove?
The basis, then, of Captain Semmes’s reasoning being radically unsound, the superstructure can hardly be stronger. It is in vain that he accumulates authorities to show that if we had not expressly excluded the prizes of both belligerents, the presumption would have been in favor of their admission. Very likely it might, though it is a point upon which the text writers speak with hesitation; but what is beyond all question is, that we had a perfect right so to exclude them, and that we exercised it. Of course, it would have been very convenient to the Confederate States to have prize courts of their own, sitting at Charleston or Savannah upon prizes constructively in their custody, but in fact lying safely in the Mersey or the Thames. No doubt it was extremely vexatious to see the prime inducement to privateering cut away by the order in council, for no private adventurer could afford to adopt the tactics of the Alabama and her consorts. “As if by magic, the privateers which had already been commissioned disappeared from the seas,” and, “so far as results were concerned,” “the declaration of Paris was put in force against the confederates. The inference drawn by Captain Semmes is, that being free to choose one of two alternatives, we should have chosen that which would have been least hard upon him. This reminds us of the “sympathy” which the northerners used to demand that we should infuse into our neutrality. Had we yielded to such appeals on either side, we should by this time be playing the part of the Homeric Zeus, now giving the Trojans a lift, now inclining the scales in favor of the Greeks. Again we must protest against so absurd a view of our true position as neutrals. We do not care to discuss with Captain Semmes the question whether we were bound by any treaty obligations to do as we did; it is enough for us that we were not prohibited by any such obligations, and acted in perfect good faith. Everything that has since happened confirms us in the belief that it was far better to refuse than to concede the privilege of asylum to both of the belligerents. Other nations thought the same, and the fact of their following our example, which Captain Semmes, converts into a fresh topic of accusation against us, ought to have opened his eyes to the extravagance of his [Page 120] last paragraph. It would have been more to the purpose if, instead of imputing unworthy motives to this country, he had taken the opportunity of explaining the circumstances under which the Alabama and other confederate cruisers have been equipped in fraud of that neutrality which he invokes. Justice is one thing, but parties who claim something more than justice, because they are “struggling against odds,” must at least come into court with clean hands.