The magnitude very quickly reached by the struggle would
have made this step necessary and proper, so that, if England had only
gone a trifle more slowly, she would soon have reached the same point
without exciting any anger; but now the North felt that the queen's
government had been altogether too forward in assuming this position at
a time when the question of a real war was still in embryo. Moreover,
the unfriendliness was aggravated by the fact that the proclamation was
issued almost at the very hour of the arrival in London of Mr. Charles
Francis Adams, the new minister sent by Mr. Lincoln to the court of St.
James. It seemed, therefore, not open to reasonable doubt that Earl
Russell had purposely hastened to take his position before he could hear
from the Lincoln administration.
When Mr. Seward got news of this, his temper gave way; so that, being
still new to diplomacy, he wrote a dispatch to Mr. Adams wherein
occurred words and phrases not so carefully selected as they should have
been. He carried it to Mr. Lincoln, and soon received it back revised
and corrected, instructively. _A priori_, one would have anticipated the
converse of this.
The essential points of the paper were:--
That Mr. Adams would "desist from all intercourse whatever, unofficial
as well as official, with the British government, so long as it shall
continue intercourse of either kind with the domestic enemies of this
country.
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