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XVI.

IDEON WELLES, Secretary of the Navy, sums up the

whole case very satisfactorily in his plain, straight-forward way of speaking. After detailing the operations of the rebel cruisers Stonewall, Shenandoah, etc., the Secretary says:

Throughout the whole period of the rebellion these exhibitions of the manner in which the English authorities exercised neutrality were witnessed. On one occasion two persons secreted themselves on the United States steamer Tuscarora, at Queenstown, with a view, it was suspected, of entering our service, and the British Government was on that occasion greatly exercised lest some violation of neutrality or breach of the Foreign Enlistment Act had taken place which would work harm to the rebels. A less anxious solicitude appears to have been entertained of breach of neutrality when whole crews were enlisted for the Shenandoah and other rebel piratical cruisers, which sailed forth to plunder American commerce. Before leaving the Atlantic, the Shenandoah succeeded in destroying several vessels, and was next heard of in Melbourne, Australia, where she was received and entertained with great hospitality, and furnished with ample supplies and repairs for the long cruise upon which she was about to enter. On the 8th of February she is reported to have left Melbourne, and was next heard of in the North Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Otrecht, where she attacked and captured twenty-nine unarmed whale-ships, of which twenty-five were destroyed and four were bonded. Although notified by some of his victims that the rebel armies

576

BANCROFT AS AN HISTORIAN.

had surrendered and the rebellion was suppressed, Waddell gave no heed to the intelligence, but continued his work of destruction until four months after the fall of Richmond, when he was advised by an English vessel that Lee was on parole and Davis a prisoner.

The English Government, in the exercise of all that neutral tenderness and care which it had manifested for the rebels from the beginning of the insurrection, when finally compelled to admit the extinguishment of the rebellion, made special reservation to protect the rebel piratical cruisers, and particularly the Shenandoah, which was an outlaw, without country or home other than England, after the prostration of the rebel organization. Warned by neutral England, whose subjects constituted almost her entire crew, that the organized insurrection was annihilated, the Shenandoah had no alternative but to seek again the shelter and protection of that neutral power where she was built, and from which she was armed and manned. Under the name of the Sea King she had cleared and sailed as an English vessel, with an English flag and an English crew, and as late as February she stood on the books at the Register's office of British shipping in her original name, in the name of her original owners. Such may have been the case when the pirate was warned that he had not the pretext of a rebel organization to soften his crime, and that he was an outlaw. Of all her captures, not one was ever sent in for adjudication, and I am not aware that she ever entered the port of any country but England. It was fitting, therefore, that she should return for refuge to the country of her origin.

The Sea King, alias the Shenandoah, entered the Mersey on the 6th of November, and her pirate captain, in a formal letter to the English minister, surrendered the vessel to the English Government.

XVII.

R. GEORGE BANCROFT'S reputation abroad is due

necessarily possess a clear conception of the object he proposes to accomplish; unflagging toil in reaching the fountains of historic truth; magnetic power to attract all homogeneous materials in self-blending affiliation; clearness of analysis and sweep of generalization; genial sympathy with the men and the times he writes about; and, above all, perfect faith in the sublime destiny of the race.

BANCROFT"S ORATION ON LINCOLN.

577

With much of all this, Bancroft has something rarer and greater still, which more than all else accounts for his universal popularity with his own countrymen, and his magic sway over earnest minds throughout the world. He is a democrat; his social and political philosophy is Democracy. He believes in God as a Universal Father, and in all men as brethren. Man everywhere is sacred. No being can give or take away his divine rights. No limits can be set to his progress as an individual, nor to civil society of which he is a member.

Such is the character of all Mr. Bancroft's historical writings. But his Oration in the Capitol, on Abraham Lincoln, is more strikingly marked by those strong characteristics which distinguish the scope of his humanity and the fervor of his patriotic spirit. The following passages fall so appropriately into this place that they will best tell their own meaning without any comment, while they illuminate many other portions of this work.

XVIII.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.

The country had for its allies the river Mississippi, which would not be divided, and the range of mountains which carried the stronghold of the free through Western Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee, to the highlands of Alabama. But it invoked the still higher power of immortal justice. In ancient Greece, where servitude was the universal custom, it was held that if a child were to strike its parent, the slave should defend the parent, and by that act recover his freedom. After vain resistance, Lincoln, who tried to solve the question by gradual emancipation, by colonization, and by compensation, at last saw that slavery must be abolished, or the Republic must die; and on the first day of January, 1863, he wrote liberty on the banners of the armies. When this proclamation, which struck the fetters from three millions of slaves, reached Europe, Lord Russell, a countryman of Milton and Wilberforce, eagerly put himself forward to speak of it in the name of mankind, saying: "It is of a very strange nature," a measure of war of a very questionable kind," "an act of vengeance on the slaveowner," that does no more than "profess to emancipate slaves where the United States authorities cannot make emancipation a reality." Now, there was no part of the country embraced in the proclamation where the United States could not and did not make emancipation a reality. Those who saw Lincoln most frequently had never before heard him speak with bitterness of any human being; but he did not conceal how keenly he felt that he had been wronged by Lord Russell. And he wrote, in reply to another caviler: "The emancipation policy and the use of colored troops were the greatest blows yet dealt to the rebellion. The job was a great national one, and let none be slighted who bore an honorable part in it. I hope peace will come soon, and come to stay; then will there be some black men who can remember that they have helped mankind to this great consummation."

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578

PALMERSTON AND LINCOLN.

RUSSIA AND CHINA.

The proclamation accomplished its end, for, during the war, our armies came into military possession of every State in rebellion. Then, too, was called forth the new power that comes from the simultaneous diffusion of thought and feeling among the nations of mankind. The mysterious sympathy of the millions throughout the world was given spontaneously. The best writers of Europe waked the conscience of the thoughtful, till the intelligent moral sentiment of the Old World was drawn to the side of the unlettered statesman of the West. Russia, whose Emperor had just accomplished one of the grandest acts in the course of time, by raising twenty millions of boudmen into freeholders, and thus assuring the growth and culture of a Russian people, remained our unwavering friend. From the oldest abode of civilization, which gave the first example of an imperial government with equality among the people, Prince Kung, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, remembered the saying of Confucius, that we should not do to others what we would not that others should do unto us, and in the name of the Emperor of China closed its ports against the war-ships and privateera of the seditious."

PALMERSTON AND LINCOLN.

Hardly had the late President been consigned to the grave, when the Prime Minister of England died full of years and honors. Palmerston traced his lineage to the time of the Conqueror; Lincoln went back only to his grandfather. Palmerston received his education from the best scholars of Harrow, Edinburg, and Cambridge. Lincoln's early teachers were the silent forest, the prairie, the river and the stars. Plmerston was in public life for sixty years; Lincoln for but a tenth part of that time. Palmerston was a skillful guide of an established aristocracy; Lincoln a leader, or rather a companion, of the people. Palmerston was exclusively an Englishman, and boasted in the House of Commons that the interest of England was his Shibboleth; Lincoln thought always of mankind as well as his own country, and served human nature itself. Palmerston, from his narrowness as an Englishman, did not endear his country to any one court or to any one people, but rather caused uneasiness and dislike; Lincoln left America more beloved than ever by all the peoples of Europe. Palmerston was self possessed and adroit in reconciling the conflicting claims of the factions of the aristocracy. Lincoln, frank and ingenuous, knew how to poise himself on the conflicting opinions of the people. Palmerston was capable of insolence towards the weak, quick to a sense of honor, not heedful of right; Lincoln rejected counsel given only as a matter of policy, and was not capable of being willfully unjust. Palmerston, essentially superficial, delighted in banter, and knew how to divert grave opposition by playful levity; Lincoln was a man of infinite jest on his lips, with saddest earnestness at his heart. Palmerston was a fair representative of the aris tocratic liberality of the day, choosing for his tribunal, not the conscience of humanity, but the House of Commons; Lincoln took to heart the eternal truths of liberty, obeyed them as 'comrands of Providence, and accepted the human race as the judge of his fidelity. Palmerston did nothing that will endure-his great achievement, the separation of Belgium. placed that little kingdom where it must gravitate to France; Lincoln finished a work that all time cannot overthrow. Palmerston, a shining example of the ablest of a cultivated aristocracy. Lincoln shows the genuine fruits of institutions where the laboring man shares and assists to form the great ideas and designs of his country. Palmerston was buried in Westminster Abbey by the order of his Queen, and was followed by the British aristocracy to his grave, which after a few years will hardly be noticed by the side of the graves of Fox and Chathain; Lincoln was followed by the sorrow of his country across the Continent to his resting-place in the heart of the Mississippi valley, to be remembered through all time by his countrymen and by all the peoples of the world.

GREAT BRITAIN.

There was a kingdom whose people had in an eminent degree attained to freedom of industry and the security of person and property. Its middle-class rose to greatness. Out of that

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