Volume II Part 23 (2/2)
Some of these will be presented.
In the War of the American Revolution, Dr. Franklin and Silas Deane were sent to France as commissioners to look after the interests of the colonies. In the years 1776 and 1777 they became extensively connected with naval movements. They built, and purchased, and equipped, and commissioned s.h.i.+ps, all in neutral territory; even filling up blank commissions sent out to them by the Congress for the purpose. Among expeditions fitted out by them was one under Captain Wickes to intercept a convoy of linen-s.h.i.+ps from Ireland. He went first into the Bay of Biscay, and afterward entirely around Ireland, sweeping the sea before him of everything that was not of force to render the attack hopeless. Mr. Deane observes to Robert Morris that it ”effectually alarmed England, prevented the great fair at Chester, occasioned insurance to rise, and even deterred the English merchants from s.h.i.+pping in English bottoms at any rate, so that, in a few weeks, forty sail of French s.h.i.+ps were loading in the Thames, on freight, an instance never before known.”
In the spring of 1777 the Commissioners sent an agent to Dover, who purchased a fine, fast-sailing English-built cutter, which was taken across to Dunkirk. There she was privately equipped as a cruiser, and put in command of Captain Gustavus Conyngham, who was appointed by filling up a blank commission from John Hanc.o.c.k, the President of Congress. This commission bore date March 1, 1777, and fully ent.i.tled Mr. Conyngham to the rank of captain in the navy. His vessel, although built in England, like many of our cruisers, was not armed or equipped there, nor was his crew enlisted there, but in the port of a neutral. This vessel was finally seized under some treaty obligations between France and England. The Commissioners immediately fitted out another cruiser, and still another. It was also affirmed that the money advanced to Mr. John Adams for traveling expenses, when he arrived in Spain a year or two later, was derived from the prizes of these vessels, which had been sent into the ports of Spain.
Captain Conyngham was a very successful commander, but he was made a prisoner in 1779. The matter was brought before Congress in July of the same year, and a committee reported that this ”late commander of an armed vessel in the service of the States, and taken on board of a private armed cutter, had been treated in a manner contrary to the dictates of humanity, and the practice of Christian civilized nations.” Whereupon it was resolved to demand of the British Admiral in New York that good and sufficient reason be given for this conduct, or that he be immediately released from his rigorous and ignominious confinement. If a satisfactory answer was not received by August 1st, so many persons as were deemed proper were ordered to be confined in safe and close custody, to abide the fate of the said Gustavus Conyngham. No answer having been received, one Christopher Hale was thus confined. In December he pet.i.tioned Congress for an exchange, and that he might procure a person in his room. Congress replied that his pet.i.tion could not be granted until Captain Conyngham was released, ”as it had been determined that he must abide the fate of that officer.” Conyngham was subsequently released.
The whole number of captures made by the United States in this contest is not known, but six hundred and fifty prizes are said to have been brought into port. Many others were ransomed, and some were burned at sea.
Prescribed limits will not permit me to follow out in detail the past history of the United States as a neutral power. It must suffice to recall the memory of readers to a few significant facts in our more recent history:
The recognition of the independence of Greece in her struggle with Turkey, and the voluntary contributions of money and men sent to her; the recognition of the independence of the Spanish provinces of South America, and the war-vessels equipped and sent from the ports of the United States to Brazil during the struggle with Spain for independence; the s.h.i.+ps sold to Russia during her war with England, France, and Turkey; the arms and munitions of war manufactured at New Haven, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island, sold and s.h.i.+pped to Turkey to aid her in her late struggle with Russia.
The reader will observe the prompt.i.tude with which the Government of the United States not only accorded belligerent rights, but, even more, recognized the independence of nations struggling for deliverance from oppressive rulers. The instances of Greece and the South American republics are well known, and that of Texas must be familiar to every one. One could scarcely believe, therefore, that the chief act of hostility, or, rather, the great crime of the Government of Great Britain in the eyes of the Government of the United States, was the recognition by the latter of the Confederate States as a belligerent power, and that a state of war existed between them and the United States. This was the constantly repeated charge against the British Government in the dispatches of the United States Government from the commencement of the war down nearly to the session of the Geneva Conference in 1872. In the correspondence of the Secretary, in 1867, he says:
”What is alleged on the part of the United States is, that the Queen's proclamation, which, by conceding belligerent rights to the insurgents, lifted them up for the purpose of insurrection to an equality with the nation which they were attempting to overthrow, was premature because it was unnecessary, and that it was, in its operation, unfriendly because it was premature.”
Again he says, and, if sincerely, shows himself to be utterly ignorant of the real condition of our affairs:
”Before the Queen's proclamation of neutrality, the disturbance in the United States was merely a local insurrection. It wanted the name of war to enable it to be a civil war and to live, endowed as such, with maritime and other belligerent rights. Without the authorized name, it might die, and was expected not to live and be a flagrant civil war, but to perish a mere insurrection.”
The first extract in itself contains a fiction. If the Queen's proclamation possessed such force as to raise the Confederate States to an equality with the United States as a belligerent, perhaps another proclamation of the Queen might have possessed such force, if it had been issued, as to have lifted the Confederate States from the state of equality to one of independence. This is a novel virtue to be ascribed to a Queen's proclamation. This idea must have been borrowed from our neighbors of Mexico, where a _p.r.o.nunciamiento_ dissolves one and establishes a rival administration. How much more rational it would have been, to say that the resources and the military power of the Confederate States placed them, at the outset, on the footing of a belligerent, and the Queen's proclamation only declared a fact which the announcement of a blockade of the Southern ports by the Government of the United States had made manifest!-- blockade being a means only applicable as against a foreign foe.
Nevertheless, the Government of the United States, although refusing to concede belligerent rights to the Confederate States, was very ready to take advantage of such concession by other nations, whenever an opportunity offered. The voluminous correspondence of the Secretary of State of the United States Government, relative to the Confederate cruisers and their so-called ”depredations,” was filled with charges of violations of international law, which could be committed only by a belligerent, and which, it was alleged, had been allowed to be done in the ports of Great Britain. On this foundation was based the subsequent claim for damages, advanced by the Government of the United States against that of Great Britain; and, for the pretended lack of ”due diligence” in watching the actions of this Confederate belligerent in her ports, she was mulcted in a heavy sum by the Geneva Conference, and paid it to the Government of the United States.
It is a remarkable fact that the Government of the United States, in no one instance, from the opening to the close of the war, formally spoke of the Confederate Government or States as belligerents.
Although on many occasions it acted with the latter as a belligerent, yet no official designations were ever given to them or their citizens but those of ”insurgents,” or ”insurrectionists.” Perhaps there may be something in the signification of the words which, combined with existing circ.u.mstances, would express a state of affairs that the authorities of the Government of the United States were in no degree willing to admit, and vainly sought to prevent from becoming manifest to the world.
The party or individuality against which the Government of the United States was conducting hostilities consisted of the people within the limits of the Confederate States. Was it against them as individuals in an unorganized condition, or as organized political communities?
In the former condition they might be a mob; in the latter condition they formed a State. By the actions of unorganized ma.s.ses may arise insurrections, and by the actions of organized people or states, arise wars.
The Government of the United States adopted a fiction when it declared that the execution of the laws in certain States was impeded by ”insurrection.” The persons whom it designated as insurrectionists were the organized people of the States. The ballot-boxes used at the elections were State boxes. The judges who presided at the elections were State functionaries. The returns of the elections were made to the State officers. The oaths of office of those elected were administered by State authority. They a.s.sembled in the legislative chambers of the States. The results of their deliberations were directory to the State, judicial, and executive officers, and by them put in operation. Is it not evident that, only by a fiction of speech, such proceedings can be called an insurrection?
Why, then, did an intelligent and powerful Government, like that of the United States, so outrage the understanding of mankind as to adopt a fiction on which to base the authority and justification of its hostile action? The United States Government is the result of a compact between the States--a written Const.i.tution. It owes its existence simply to a delegation of certain powers by the respective States, which it is authorized to exercise for their common welfare.
One of these powers is to ”suppress insurrections”; but there is no power delegated to subjugate States, the authors of its existence, or to make war on any of the States. If, then, without any delegated power or lawful authority for its proceedings, the Government of the United States commenced a war upon some of the States of the Union, how could it expect to be justified before the world? It became the aggressor--the Attila of the American Continent. Its action inflicted a wound on the principles of const.i.tutional liberty, a cras.h.i.+ng blow to the hopes that men had begun to repose in this latest effort for self-government, which its friends should never forgive nor ever forget. To palliate the enormity of such an offense, its authors resorted to a vehement denial that their hostile action was a war upon the States, and persistently a.s.serted the fiction that their immense armies and fleets were merely a police authority to put down insurrection. They hoped to conceal from the observation of the American people that the contest, on the part of the central Government, was for empire, for its absolute supremacy over the State governments; that the Const.i.tution was roiled up and laid away among the old archives; and that the conditions of their liberty, in the future, were to be decided by the sword or by ”national” control of the ballot-box.
With like disregard for truth, our cruisers were denounced as ”_pirates_” by the Government of the United States. A pirate, or armed piratical vessel, is by the law of nations the enemy of mankind, and can be destroyed by the s.h.i.+ps of any nation. The distinction between a lawful cruiser and a pirate is that the former has behind it a government which is recognized by civilized nations as ent.i.tled to the rights of war, and from which the commander of the cruiser receives his commission or authority, but the pirate recognizes no government, and is not recognized by any one. As the Attorney-General of Great Britain said in the Alexandra case:
”Although a recognition of the Confederates as an independent power was out of the question, yet it was right they should be admitted by other nations within the circle of lawful belligerents--that is to say, that their forces should not be treated as pirates, nor their flag as a piratical flag. Therefore, as far as the two belligerents were concerned, on the part of this and other governments, they were so far put on a level that each was to be considered as ent.i.tled to the right of belligerents--the Southern States as much as the other.”
The Government of the United States well knew that, after the issue of the Queen's proclamation recognizing our Government, the application of the word pirate to our cruisers was simply an exhibition of vindictive pa.s.sion on its part. A _de facto_ Government by its commission legalizes among nations a cruiser. That there was such a Government even its own courts also decided. In a prize case (2 Black, 635), Justice Greer delivered the opinion of the Supreme Court, saying:
”It [the war] is not less a civil war, with belligerent parties in hostile array, because it may be called an 'insurrection' by one side, and the insurgents be considered as rebels and traitors. It is not necessary that the independence of the revolted province or State be acknowledged in order to const.i.tute it a party belligerent in a war, according to the laws of nations. Foreign nations acknowledge it a war by a declaration of neutrality. The condition of neutrality can not exist unless there be two belligerent parties.”
In the case of the Santissima Trinidad (7 Wheaton, 337), the United States Supreme Court says:
”The Government of the United States has recognized the existence of a civil war between Spain and her colonies, and has avowed her determination to remain neutral between the parties. Each party is therefore deemed by us a belligerent, having, so far as concerns us, the sovereign rights of war.”
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