CHAPTER XXXII

ARBITRATION WITH GREAT BRITAIN

On the very threshold of his Administration Grant found confronting him the problem of our grievances against Great Britain which had been accumulating ever since her recognition of Confederate belligerency in the first year of the Civil War. Upon the heels of recognition - a perfectly legitimate proceeding, although resented bitterly throughout the Northhad come the devastating cruises of the Alabama, Florida, and Shenandoah, fitted out in British yards, under the eyes of British functionaries, and manned with Confederate naval officers with the express design of preying on our foreign commerce.

Charles Francis Adams, our Minister at London, had demanded reparation for damage caused by the British-built Confederate cruisers, but the British Government toward the end of 1865 had somewhat curtly declined consideration of our claims and nothing further was done about it until in August, 1868, Reverdy Johnson arrived in London as Minister by Johnson's appointment and undertook without delay negotiations looking toward a settlement. A noticeable change had come upon the spirit of Eng

lish statesmen confronted with the probability of an embroilment in continental quarrels. They were now glad to reach an understanding with the United States so that the precedent established by the Alabama case might not be used to justify the fitting out of hostile cruisers in American ports to prey on English commerce in event of war.

Johnson was welcomed with effusiveness, and he was flattered by the marked attentions he received. He entered joyfully on a career of after-dinner oratory, gushed over those who had been most ostentatious in their sympathy for the Confederate cause, shook hands in public with Laird, who bragged about having built the Alabama, and went so far in his endeavor to ingratiate himself in his new post as to arouse distrust at home. When in January he concluded with the British Foreign Secretary the Johnson-Clarendon Convention, both he and Seward were dazed to find that terms which twelve months earlier would have been ratified with little opposition were now resented by the Senate and the people as the result of truckling to the English Government by a tuft-hunting diplomat. Besides, feeling against England had grown more bitter. The sympathy for Ireland in her struggle for home rule was gaining strength, and Fenian border raids against Canada had become a factor to be considered.

The convention was carried over into the new Administration, and when it came up for action in the Senate, it was almost literally without a friend. Ratification was defeated by a vote of 54 to 1, on April 13, 1869. The debate consisted chiefly in a speech by Sumner for which there was no need and which might much better never have been uttered. But Sumner, never discreet, insisted upon a spoken record of his attitude, and his impassioned attack upon Great Britain, from which the ban of secrecy was removed by formal vote, went into history to become a mischief-breeding influence on subsequent events.

It was close upon the heels of the rejection of the Johnson-Clarendon Convention, while Sumner's extraordinary demands still stirred public imagination, that Motley was named as Johnson's successor at the Court of St. James. Charles Francis Adams, the elder, recently returned from the British mission and watching at home the progress of affairs, wrote privately that the practical effect of Sumner's speech and the rejection of the treaty was "to raise the scale of our demands for reparation so very high that there is no chance of negotiation left, unless the English have lost all their spirit and character." Sumner with splendid efflorescence of mathematics had figured that our direct or individual losses "due to the

foraging of the Alabama" were $15,000,000, but this modest sum left without recognition "the vaster damage to commerce driven from the ocean," which he reckoned at $110,000,000, and he added, "Of course this is only an item in our bill."

He traced the prolongation of the war directly to England. "The rebellion was originally encouraged by hope of support from England," he cried; "it was strengthened at once by the concession of belligerent rights on the ocean; it was fed to the end by British supplies...; it was quickened into frantic life with every report from the British pirates, flaming anew with every burning ship; nor can it be doubted that without British intervention the rebellion would have soon succumbed under the well-directed efforts of the National Government. Not weeks nor months but years were added in this way to our war, so full of costly sacrifice."

Calculating that the rebellion was suppressed at a cost of more than $4,000,000,000 and that through British intervention the war was doubled in duration, he came easily to the conclusion that England was chargeable with half the total expenditure, or $2,000,000,000, making our entire bill against her $2,125,000,000, at a low estimate. This sounded large and bellicose, but the explanation seems to be that Sumner had no intention either of collecting

such a claim or of risking war with England to enforce it. What Sumner had in mind was not the collection of an enormous indemnity in money, but rather the adjustment of all differences through annexation of British territory and the withdrawal of the British flag from North America.

The annexation of Canada, especially in view of the aggressive Irish sentiment at the time and the recurring Fenian demonstrations, was not a preposterous proposal, but there was a difference of opinion. as to how best to go about it. Chandler in the Senate had suggested that it was an essential to continue peace: "We cannot afford to have our enemies' base so near us. It is a national necessity that we should have the British possessions. I hope that such a ne~ gotiation will be opened and that it will be a peaceful one; but if it should not be, and England insists on war, then let the war be short, sharp, and decisive." We have Grant's own authority for believing that he would not have been afraid of such an outcome. He thought at one time during the year that Sheridan could have taken Canada in thirty days. Moreover, British statesmen did not set such store on their American possessions fifty years ago as later, and they might have welcomed a separation effected in a creditable way. The real obstacle to annexation lay with the Canadians themselves, who have never