insurrectionary combination of seven States, practicing an insidious strategy to seduce eight other States into its councils.

One needs to be as conversant with our federative system as perhaps only American publicists can be to understand how effectually, in the first instance, such a revolutionary movement must demoralize the general gov ernment. We are not only a nation, but we are States also. All public officers, as well as all citizens, owe not only allegiance to the Union but allegiance also to the States in which they reside. In the more discontented States the local magistrates and other officers cast off at once their federal allegiance, and conventions were held which assumed to absolve their citizens from the same obligation. Even federal judges, marshals, clerks, and revenue officers resigned their trusts. Intimidation deterred loyal persons from accepting the offices thus rendered vacant. So the most important faculties of the federal government in those States abruptly ceased. The resigning federal agents, if the expression may be used, attorned to the revolutionary authorities and delivered up to them public funds and other property and possessions of large value. The federal government had, through a long series of years, been engaged in building strong fortifications, a navy yard, arsenals, mints, treasuries, and other public edifices, not in any case for use against those States, but chiefly for their protection and convenience. These had been unsuspectingly left either altogether or imperfectly garrisoned or guarded, and they fell, with little resistance, into the hands of the revolutionary party. A general officer of the army gave up to them a large quantity of military stores and other property, disbanded the troops under his command, and sent them out of the territory of the disaffected States.

It may be stated, perhaps without giving just offence, that the most popular motive in these discontents was an apprehension of designs on the part of the incoming federal administration hostile to the institution of domestic slavery in the States where it is tolerated by the local constitutions and laws. That institution and the class which especially cherishes it are not confined to the States which have revolted, but they exist in the eight other so-called slave States; and these, for that reason, sympathize profoundly with the revolutionary movement. Sympathies and apprehensions of this kind have, for an indefinite period, entered into the bases of political parties throughout the whole country, and thus considerable masses of persons, whose ultimate loyalty could not be doubted, were found, even in the free States, either justifying, excusing, or palliating the movement towards disunion in the seceding States. The party which was dominant in the federal government during the period of the last administration embraced, practically, and held in unreserved communion, all disunionists and sympathizers. It held the executive administration. The Secretaries of the Treasury, War, and the Interior were disunionists. The same party held a large majority of the Senate, and nearly equally divided the House of Representatives. Disaffection lurked, if it did not openly avow itself, in every department and in every bureau, in every regiment and in every ship-of-war; in the post office and in the custom-house, and in every legation and consulate from London to Calcutta. Of four thousand four hundred and seventy officers in the public service, civil and military, two thousand one hundred and fifty-four were representatives of States where the revolutionary movement was openly advocated and urged, even if not actually organized. Our system being so completely federative and representative, no provision had ever been made, perhaps none ever could have been made, to anticipate this strange and unprecedented disturbance. The people were shocked by successive and astounding developments of what the statute

book distinctly pronounced to be sedition and treason, but the magistracy was demoralized and the laws were powerless. By degrees, however, a better sentiment revealed itself. The executive administration hesitatingly, in part, reformed itself. The capital was garrisoned; the new President came in unresisted, and soon constituted a new and purely loyal administration. They found the disunionists perseveringly engaged in raising armies and laying sieges around national fortifications situate within the territory of the disaffected States. The federal marine seemed to have been scattered everywhere except where its presence was necessary, and such of the military forces as were not in the remote States and Territories were held back from activity by vague and mysterious armistices which had been inforinally contracted by the late President, or under his authority, with a view to postpone conflict until impracticable concessions to disunion should be made by Congress, or at least until the waning term of his administration should reach its appointed end. Commissioners who had been sent by the new confederacy were already at the capital demanding recog nition of its sovereignty and a partition of the national property and domain. The treasury, depleted by robbery and peculation, was exhausted, and the public credit was prostrate.

It would be very unjust to the American people to suppose that this sin gular and unhappy condition of things indicated any extreme favor or toleration of the purpose of a permanent dissolution of the Union. On the contrary, disunion at the very first took on a specious form, and it afterwards made its way by ingenious and seductive devices. It inculcated that the Union is a purely voluntary connexion, founded on the revocable assent of the several States; that secession, in the case of great popular discontent, would induce consultation and reconciliation, and so that revolution, instead of being war, is peace, and disunion, instead of being dissolution, is union. Though the ordinances of secession in the seceding States were carried through impetuously, without deliberation, and even by questionable majorities, yet it was plausibly urged that the citizens who had remained loyal to the Union might wisely acquiesce, so as ultimately to moderate and control the movement, and in any event that if war should ensue, it would become a war of sections, and not a social war, of all others, and especially in those States, the form of war most seriously to be deprecated. It being assumed that peaceful separation is in harmony with the Constitution, it was urged as a consequence that coercion would, therefore, be unlawful and tyrannical; and this principle was even pushed so far as to make the defensive retaining by the federal government of its position within the limits of the seceding States, or where it might seem to overawe or intimidate them, an act of such forbidden coercion. Thus it happened that for a long time, and in very extensive districts even, fidelity to the Union manifested itself by demanding a surrender of its powers and possessions, and compromises with or immunity towards those who were engaged in overthrowing it by armed force. Disunion under these circumstances rapidly matured. On the other hand, the country was bewildered. For the moment even loyal citizens fell naturally into the error of inquiring how the fearful state of things had come about, and who was responsible for it, thus inviting a continuance of the controversy out of which it had arisen, rather than rallying to the duty of arresting it. Disunion, sustained only by passion, made haste to attain its end. Union, on the contrary, required time, because it could only appeal to reason, and reason could not be heard until excitemeut should in some degree subside. Military spirit is an element always ready for revolution. It has a fuller development in the disaffected than in the loyal States. Thousands of men have already banded

themselves as soldiers in the cause of disunion, while the defenders of the Union, before resorting to arms, everywhere wait to make sure that it cannot be otherwise preserved. Even this cautious and pacific, yet patriotic disposition has been misunderstood and perverted by faction to encourage disunion.

I believe that I have thus presented the disunion movement dispassionately and without misrepresenting its proportions or its character.

You will hardly be asked by responsible statesmen abroad why has not the new administration already suppressed the revolution. Thirty-five days are a short period in which to repress, chiefly by moral means, a movement which is so active while disclosing itself throughout an empire.

You will not be expected to promulgate this history, or to communicate it to the British government, but you are entitled to the President's views, which I have thus set forth in order to enable you to understand the policy which he proposes to pursue, and to conform your own action to it.

The President neither looks for nor apprehends any actual and permanent dismemberment of the American Union, especially by a line of latitude. The improvement of our many channels of intercourse, and the perfection of our scheme of internal exchanges, and the incorporation of both of them into a great system of foreign commerce, concurring with the gradual abatement of the force of the only existing cause of alienation, have carried us already beyond the danger of disunion in that form. The so-called Confederate States, therefore, in the opinion of the President, are attempting what will prove a physical impossibility. Necessarily they build the structure of their new government upon the same principle by which they seek to destroy the Union, namely, the right of each individual member of the confederacy to withdraw from it at pleasure and in peace. A government thus constituted could neither attain the consolidation necessary for stability, nor guaranty any engagements it might make with creditors or other nations. The movement, therefore, in the opinion of the President, tends directly to anarchy in the seceding States, as similar movements in similar circumstances have already resulted in Spanish America, and espe cially in Mexico. He believes, nevertheless, that the citizens of those States, as well as the citizens of the other States, are too intelligent, considerate, and wise to follow the leaders to that disastrous end. For these reasons he would not be disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of theirs, namely, that the federal government could not reduce the seceding States to obedience by conquest, even although he were disposed to question that proposition. But, in fact, the President willingly accepts it as true. Only an imperial or despotic government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary members of the State. This federal republican system of ours is of all forms of government the very one which is most unfitted for such a labor. Happily, however, this is only an imaginary defect. The system has within itself adequate, peaceful, conservative, and recuperative forces. Firmness on the part of the government in maintaining and preserving the public institutions and property, and in executing the laws where authority can be exercised without waging war, combined with such measures of justice, moderation, and forbearance as will disarm reasoning opposition, will be sufficient to secure the public safety until returning reflection, concurring with the fearful experience of social evils, the inevitable fruits, of faction, shall bring the recusant members cheerfully back into the family, which, after all, must prove their best and happiest, as it undeniably is their most natural home. The Constitution of the United States provides for that return by authorizing Congress, on application to be made by a certain majority of the States, to assemble a national convention, in which

the organic law can, if it be needful, be revised so as to remove all real obstacles to a reunion, so suitable to the habits of the people, and so eminently conducive to the common safety and welfare.

Keeping that remedy steadily in view, the President, on the one hand, will not suffer the federal authority to fall into abeyance, nor will he, on the other, aggravate existing evils by attempts at coercion which must assume the form of direct war against any of the revolutionary States. If, while he is pursuing this course, commended as it is by prudence as well as patriotism, the scourge of civil war for the first time in our history must

upon our country during the term of his administration, that calamity will then have come through the agency, not of the government, but of those who shall have chosen to be its armed, open, and irreconcilable enemies; and he will not suffer himself to doubt that when the value of the imperilled Union shall be brought in that fearful manner home to the business and the bosoms of the American people, they will, with an unanimity that shall vindicate their wisdom and their virtue, rise up and save it.

It does not, however, at all surprise the President that the confidence in the stability of the Union, which has been heretofore so universally entertained, has been violently shocked both at home and abroad. Surprise and

fear invariably go together. The period of four months which intervened between the election which designated the head of the new administration and its advent, as has already been shown, assumed the character of an interregnum, in which not only were the powers of the government paralyzed, but even its resources seemed to disappear and be forgotten.

Nevertheless, all the world know what are the resources of the United States, and that they are practically unencumbered as well as inexhaustible. It would be easy, if it would not seem invidious, to show that whatever may be the full development of the disunion movement, those resources will not be seriously diminished, and that the revenues and credit of the Union, unsurpassed in any other country, are adequate to every emergency that can occur in our own. Nor will the political commotions which await us sensibly disturb the confidence of the people in the stability of the government. It has been necessary for us to learn, perhaps the instruction has not come too soon, that vicissitudes are incident to our system and our country, as they are to all others. The panic which that instruction naturally produced is nearly past. What has hitherto been most needful for the reinvigoration of authority is already occurring. The aiders, abettors, and sympathizers with disunion, partly by their own choice and partly through the exercise of the public will, are falling out from the civil departments of the government as well as from the army and the navy. The national legislature will no longer be a distracted council. Our representatives in foreign. courts and ports will henceforth speak only the language of loyalty to their country, and of confidence in its institutions and its destiny.

It is much to be deplored that our representatives are to meet abroad agents of disunion, seeking foreign aid to effect what, unaided, is already seen to be desperate. You need not be informed that their success in Great Britain would probably render their success easy elsewhere. The President does not doubt that you fully appreciate the responsibility of your mission. An honored ancestor of yours was the first to represent your whole country, after its independence was established, at the same court to which you now are accredited. The President feels assured that it will happen through no want of loyalty or of diligence on your part if you are to be the last to discharge that trust. You will have this great advantage, that from the hour when that country, so dear to us all, first challenged the notice of nations, until now, it has continually grown in their sympathy and reverence.

Before considering the arguments you are to use, it is important to indidicate those which you are not to employ in executing that mission:

First. The President has noticed, as the whole American people have, with much emotion, the expressions of good will and friendship toward the United States, and of concern for their present embarrassments, which have been made on apt occasions by her Majesty and her ministers. You will make due acknowledgment for these manifestations, but at the same time you will not rely on any mere sympathies or national kindness. You will make no admissions of weakness in our Constitution, or of apprehension on the part of the government. You will rather prove, as you easily can, by comparing the history of our country with that of other states, that its Constitution and government are really the strongest and surest which have ever been erected for the safety of any people. You will in no case listen to any suggestions of compromise by this government, under foreign auspices, with its discontented citizens. If, as the President does not at all apprehend, you shall unhappily find her Majesty's government tolerating the application of the so-called seceding States, or wavering about it, you will not leave them to suppose for a moment that they can grant that application and remain the friends of the United States. You may even assure them promptly in that case that if they determine to recognize, they may at the same time prepare to enter into alliance with the enemies of this republic. You alone will represent your country at London, and you will represent the whole of it there. When you are asked to divide that duty with others, diplomatic relations between the government of Great Britain and this government will be suspended, and will remain so until it shall be seen which of the two is most strongly entrenched in the confidence of their respective nations and of mankind.

You will not be allowed, however, even if you were disposed, as the President is sure you will not be, to rest your opposition to the application of the Confederate States on the ground of any favor this administration, or the party which chiefly called it into existence, proposes to show to Great Britain, or claims that Great Britain ought to show to them. You will not consent to draw into debate before the British government any opposing moral principles which may be supposed to lie at the foundation of the controversy between those States and the federal Union

You will indulge in no expressions of harshness or disrespect, or even impatience, concerning the seceding States, their agents, or their people. But you will, on the contrary, all the while remember that those States are now, as they always heretofore have been, and, notwithstanding their temporary self-delusion, they must always continue to be, equal and honored members of this federal Union, and that their citizens throughout all political misunderstandings and alienations still are and always must be our kindred and countrymen. In short, all your arguments must belong to one of three classes, namely: First. Arguments drawn from the principles of public law and natural justice, which regulate the intercourse of equal States. Secondly. Arguments which concern equally the honor, welfare, and happiness of the discontented States, and the honor, welfare, and happiness of the whole Union. Thirdly. Arguments which are equally conservative of the rights and interests, and even sentiments of the United States, and just in their bearing upon the rights, interests, and sentiments of Great Britain and all other nations.

We freely admit that a nation may, and even ought, to recognize a new State which has absolutely and beyond question effected its independence, and permanently established its sovereignty; and that a recognition in such a case affords no just cause of offence to the government of the country