London, October 15, 1861
In your last letters I am not a little sorry to see that you are falling into the way that to us at this distance seems to be only the mark of weak men, of complaining and fault-finding over the course of events. In mere newspaper correspondents who are not expected to have commonsense or judgment, this may be all natural, but you ought to know better, for you have the means for hitting the truth nearer. For my own part I tell you fairly that all the gossip and senseless stories that the generation can invent, shall not, if I can help it, shake for one single instant the firm confidence which I feel in those who are guiding our affairs. You are allowing your own better judgment and knowledge to be overruled by the combined talk of a swarm of people who have neither knowledge nor judgment at all; and what is to be the consequence, I would like to know, if you and men like you, who ought to lead and strengthen public opinion in the right path, now instead of exercising your rights and asserting your power for good, give way to a mere vulgar discouragement merely because the current runs for the moment in that direction. Call you that backing of your friends? A plague upon such backing. Every repetition that is given to these querulous ideas tends to demoralize us worse than a defeat would, and certainly here abroad is sure to counteract every attempt to restore confidence either in our nation or her institutions.
Even if I believed in the truth of the sort of talk you quote, I would suspend the moral habeas-corpus for a time and deny it. But I don’t believe it; and more than that, in all the instances which you quote about which I know anything at all, I know it to be false. You, like a set of people with whom you now for the first time agree, seem to have fallen foul of the President and Cabinet and in fact every one in authority as the scapegoats for all the fault-finding of the day, simply because their positions prevent them from showing you the truth. Now so far as military and naval affairs go, I know nothing at all, but one fact I have noticed and this is that our worst misfortunes have come from popular interference with them. Croaking is just as likely to bring another defeat, as that ridiculous bravado which sent our army to Bull Run. But your troubles don’t end with the army and navy; if they did, I might perhaps think that your informants really knew something about a matter on which you and I know nothing. You go on to find fault with the President and the Secretary of State, or at least to quote others who find fault, as though there might be something in it. Here I am willing to make a direct issue with your authorities, and you may choose between us which you will believe and whose information you think best entitled to credit. They say that the Secretary of State’s education and train of mind are not adapted for these times; that his influence is no longer such as it once was; that you can no longer discern under the surface of events that firm grasp and broad conception that we once admired and bent to, in the founder of the republican party; and finally you quote an old calumny, thirty years ago as common as it is today; a year ago as virulent as his prominence could make it; a calumny which you knew then from the testimony of your own eyes and ears to be utterly and outrageously false; and you seem now to suppose that mere repetition is going to shake my own knowledge of facts; my own certainty of conviction; and that too because men who are really ignorant attempt to make you believe that you are so.
You say that Mr. Seward’s hand is not evident in the course of events. I disagree entirely to any such idea. I think it is very evident and so much so that, feeling perfect confidence in him, I have come to the conclusion that our ideas are wrong and that his are right, at least on one question. I am an abolitionist and so, I think, are you, and so, I think, is Mr. Seward; but if he says the time has not yet come; that we must wait till the whole country has time to make the same advance that we have made within the last six months, till we can all move together with but one mind and one idea; then I say, let us wait. It will come. Let us have order and discipline and firm ranks among the soldiers of the Massachusetts school.
But apart from this, when you say that you do not see the hand of the Secretary of State in the course of events, I tell you plainly that you do not know that whereof you speak. I do assure you, and I do pretend to knowledge on this point, that his direction of the foreign affairs of the nation has been one of very remarkable ability and energy, and to it we are indebted now in no small degree; in a very large degree, rather; to the freedom from external interference which allows us to give our whole strength to this rebellion. Never before for many years have we been so creditably represented in Europe or has the foreign policy of our country commanded more respect. They will tell you so in Paris and they will tell you so here, if you don’t go to such authorities as the Times for your information. The high tone and absolute honor of our country have been maintained with energy and lofty dignity, but are we not on good terms still with foreign nations? Have not the threatening clouds that were hanging over our relations with this country a few months since, been cleared away by an influence that no man of common experience would imagine to be accident? And what of Spain? And Mexico? Trust me, when you come to read the history of these days at some future time, you will no longer think that the hand of the Secretary of State has been paralysed or his broad mind lost its breadth, in a time of civil war.
Now let me read you a lesson in history. When the English nation in the year 1795 were struggling with revolutionary France, their armies were beaten, their allies conquered and forced to sue for peace; every military effort failed the instant it was put forth; famine was in the land; revolution raised its head boldly within the very hearing of Westminster Hall; ill-success of every kind, infinitely greater than our own, dogged their foot-steps at every move; and their credit sank under their enormous subsidies to Austria, and eternal draughts on the money market. But did the English people hesitate to give a firm and noble support to Pitt, their Prime Minister, in spite of his gross failures? Not a bit of it. His majority in Parliament and throughout the nation was firmer than ever, and when he threw open a loan at last to the people, even in such a dark hour as that after Bull Run was to us, noble and peasant, King and Commoner, snapped it up in a single week, at a rate at which the money-market would have nothing to do with it. The English have the true bull-dog’s grip, and that is what we must have if we expect to do anything either in victory or in defeat.
If you think the above worth printing, send it to Charles Hale. If not, no matter.
