University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XI
THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)

MINISTER ADAMS troubled himself little about what
he did not see of an enemy. His son, a nervous animal,
made life a terror by seeing too much. Minister
Adams played his hand as it came, and seldom credited his opponents
with greater intelligence than his own. Earl Russell suited
him; perhaps a certain personal sympathy united them; and indeed
Henry Adams never saw Russell without being amused by
his droll likeness to John Quincy Adams. Apart from this shadowy
personal relation, no doubt the Minister was diplomatically
right; he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by making a
friend of the Foreign Secretary, and whether Russell were true or
false mattered less, because, in either case, the American Legation
could act only as though he were false. Had the Minister
known Russell's determined effort to betray and ruin him in October,
1862, he could have scarcely used stronger expressions than
he did in 1863. Russell must have been greatly annoyed by Sir
Robert Collier's hint of collusion with the rebel agents in the
Alabama Case, but he hardened himself to hear the same innuendo
repeated in nearly every note from the Legation. As time went
on, Russell was compelled, though slowly, to treat the American
Minister as serious. He admitted nothing so unwillingly, for
the nullity or fatuity of the Washington Government was his
idée fixe; but after the failure of his last effort for joint intervention
on November 12, 1862, only one week elapsed before he received
a note from Minister Adams repeating his charges about
the Alabama, and asking in very plain language for redress.
Perhaps Russell's mind was naturally slow to understand the force
of sudden attack, or perhaps age had affected it; this was one of
the points that greatly interested a student, but young men have

a passion for regarding their elders as senile, which was only in
part warranted in this instance by observing that Russell's generation
were mostly senile from youth. They had never got beyond
1815. Both Palmerston and Russell were in this case. Their
senility was congenital, like Gladstone's Oxford training and
High Church illusions, which caused wild eccentricities in his
judgment. Russell could not conceive that he had misunderstood
and mismanaged Minister Adams from the start, and when,
after November 12, he found himself on the defensive, with Mr.
Adams taking daily a stronger tone, he showed mere confusion
and helplessness.

Thus, whatever the theory, the action of diplomacy had to be
the same. Minister Adams was obliged to imply collusion between
Russell and the rebels. He could not even stop at criminal negligence.
If, by an access of courtesy, the Minister were civil
enough to admit that the escape of the Alabama had been due to
criminal negligence, he could make no such concession in regard
to the ironclad rams which the Lairds were building; for no one
could be so simple as to believe that two armored ships-of-war
could be built publicly, under the eyes of the Government, and
go to sea like the Alabama, without active and incessant collusion.
The longer Earl Russell kept on his mask of assumed ignorance,
the more violently in the end, the Minister would have
to tear it off. Whatever Mr. Adams might personally think of
Earl Russell, he must take the greatest possible diplomatic liberties
with him if this crisis were allowed to arrive.

As the spring of 1863 drew on, the vast field cleared itself for
action. A campaign more beautiful—better suited for training
the mind of a youth eager for training—has not often unrolled
itself for study, from the beginning, before a young man
perched in so commanding a position. Very slowly, indeed, after
two years of solitude, one began to feel the first faint flush of
new and imperial life. One was twenty-five years old, and quite
ready to assert it; some of one's friends were wearing stars on

their collars; some had won stars of a more enduring kind. At
moments one's breath came quick. One began to dream the
sensation of wielding unmeasured power. The sense came, like
vertigo, for an instant, and passed, leaving the brain a little
dazed, doubtful, shy. With an intensity more painful than that
of any Shakespearean drama, men's eyes were fastened on the
armies in the field. Little by little, at first only as a shadowy
chance of what might be, if things could be rightly done, one
began to feel that, somewhere behind the chaos in Washington
power was taking shape; that it was massed and guided as it had
not been before. Men seemed to have learned their business—
at a cost that ruined—and perhaps too late. A private secretary
knew better than most people how much of the new power
was to be swung in London, and almost exactly when; but the
diplomatic campaign had to wait for the military campaign to
lead. The student could only study.

Life never could know more than a single such climax. In that
form, education reached its limits. As the first great blows began
to fall, one curled up in bed in the silence of night, to listen with
incredulous hope. As the huge masses struck, one after another,
with the precision of machinery, the opposing mass, the world
shivered. Such development of power was unknown. The magnificent
resistance and the return shocks heightened the suspense.
During the July days Londoners were stupid with unbelief.
They were learning from the Yankees how to fight.

An American saw in a flash what all this meant to England,
for one's mind was working with the acceleration of the machine
at home; but Englishmen were not quick to see their blunders. One
had ample time to watch the process, and had even a little time to
gloat over the repayment of old scores. News of Vicksburg and
Gettysburg reached London one Sunday afternoon, and it happened
that Henry Adams was asked for that evening to some
small reception at the house of Monckton Milnes. He went early
in order to exchange a word or two of congratulation before the

rooms should fill, and on arriving he found only the ladies in the
drawing-room; the gentlemen were still sitting over their wine.
Presently they came in, and, as luck would have it, Delane of
the Times came first. When Milnes caught sight of his young
American friend, with a whoop of triumph he rushed to throw
both arms about his neck and kiss him on both cheeks. Men of
later birth who knew too little to realize the passions of 1863
—backed by those of 1813—and reënforced by those of 1763
—might conceive that such publicity embarrassed a private secretary
who came from Boston and called himself shy; but that
evening, for the first time in his life, he happened not to be thinking
of himself. He was thinking of Delane, whose eye caught
his, at the moment of Milnes's embrace. Delane probably regarded
it as a piece of Milnes's foolery; he had never heard of young
Adams, and never dreamed of his resentment at being ridiculed
in the Times; he had no suspicion of the thought floating in the
mind of the American Minister's son, for the British mind is the
slowest of all minds, as the files of the Times proved, and the
capture of Vicksburg had not yet penetrated Delane's thick
cortex of fixed ideas. Even if he had read Adams's thought, he
would have felt for it only the usual amused British contempt for
all that he had not been taught at school. It needed a whole
generation for the Times to reach Milnes's standpoint.

Had the Minister's son carried out the thought, he would surely
have sought an introduction to Delane on the spot, and assured
him that he regarded his own personal score as cleared off—sufficiently
settled, then and there—because his father had assumed
the debt, and was going to deal with Mr. Delane himself. "You
come next!" would have been the friendly warning. For nearly
a year the private secretary had watched the board arranging
itself for the collision between the Legation and Delane who stood
behind the Palmerston Ministry. Mr. Adams had been steadily
strengthened and reënforced from Washington in view of the final
struggle. The situation had changed since the Trent Affair. The

work was efficiently done; the organization was fairly complete.
No doubt, the Legation itself was still as weakly manned and had
as poor an outfit as the Legations of Guatemala or Portugal. Congress
was always jealous of its diplomatic service, and the Chairman
of the Committee of Foreign Relations was not likely to
press assistance on the Minister to England. For the Legation not
an additional clerk was offered or asked. The Secretary, the Assistant
Secretary, and the private secretary did all the work that the
Minister did not do. A clerk at five dollars a week would have done
the work as well or better, but the Minister could trust no clerk;
without express authority he could admit no one into the Legation;
he strained a point already by admitting his son. Congress
and its committees were the proper judges of what was best for
the public service, and if the arrangement seemed good to them, it
was satisfactory to a private secretary who profited by it more
than they did. A great staff would have suppressed him. The
whole Legation was a sort of improvised, volunteer service, and he
was a volunteer with the rest. He was rather better off than the
rest, because he was invisible and unknown. Better or worse, he
did his work with the others, and if the secretaries made any
remarks about Congress, they made no complaints, and knew that
none would have received a moment's attention.

If they were not satisfied with Congress, they were satisfied
with Secretary Seward. Without appropriations for the regular
service, he had done great things for its support. If the Minister
had no secretaries, he had a staff of active consuls; he had a well-organized
press; efficient legal support; and a swarm of social allies
permeating all classes. All he needed was a victory in the field,
and Secretary Stanton undertook that part of diplomacy. Vicksburg
and Gettysburg cleared the board, and, at the end of July,
1863, Minister Adams was ready to deal with Earl Russell or
Lord Palmerston or Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Delane, or any one
else who stood in his way; and by the necessity of the case, was
obliged to deal with all of them shortly.

Even before the military climax at Vicksburg and Gettysburg,
the Minister had been compelled to begin his attack; but this
was history, and had nothing to do with education. The private
secretary copied the notes into his private books, and that was all
the share he had in the matter, except to talk in private.

No more volunteer services were needed; the volunteers were
in a manner sent to the rear; the movement was too serious for
skirmishing. All that a secretary could hope to gain from the affair
was experience and knowledge of politics. He had a chance to
measure the motive forces of men; their qualities of character;
their foresight; their tenacity of purpose.

In the Legation no great confidence was felt in stopping the rams.
Whatever the reason, Russell seemed immovable. Had his efforts
for intervention in September, 1862, been known to the Legation
in September, 1863, the Minister must surely have admitted that
Russell had, from the first, meant to force his plan of intervention
on his colleagues. Every separate step since April, 1861, led
to this final coercion. Although Russell's hostile activity of 1862
was still secret—and remained secret for some five-and-twenty
years—his animus seemed to be made clear by his steady refusal
to stop the rebel armaments. Little by little, Minister Adams
lost hope. With loss of hope came the raising of tone, until at last,
after stripping Russell of every rag of defence and excuse, he closed
by leaving him loaded with connivance in the rebel armaments,
and ended by the famous sentence: "It would be superfluous in
me to point out to your lordship that this is war!"

What the Minister meant by this remark was his own affair;
what the private secretary understood by it, was a part of his
education. Had his father ordered him to draft an explanatory
paragraph to expand the idea as he grasped it, he would have
continued thus:—

"It would be superfluous: 1st. Because Earl Russell not only
knows it already, but has meant it from the start. 2d. Because
it is the only logical and necessary consequence of his unvarying

action. 3d. Because Mr. Adams is not pointing out to him that
'this is war,' but is pointing it out to the world, to complete the
record."

This would have been the matter-of-fact sense in which the private
secretary copied into his books the matter-of-fact statement
with which, without passion or excitement, the Minister announced
that a state of war existed. To his copying eye, as clerk,
the words, though on the extreme verge of diplomatic propriety,
merely stated a fact, without novelty, fancy, or rhetoric. The fact
had to be stated in order to make clear the issue. The war was
Russell's war—Adams only accepted it.

Russell's reply to this note of September 5 reached the Legation
on September 8, announcing at last to the anxious secretaries that
"instructions have been issued which will prevent the departure
of the two ironclad vessels from Liverpool." The members of the
modest Legation in Portland Place accepted it as Grant had
accepted the capitulation of Vicksburg. The private secretary
conceived that, as Secretary Stanton had struck and crushed
by superior weight the rebel left on the Mississippi, so Secretary
Seward had struck and crushed the rebel right in England, and he
never felt a doubt as to the nature of the battle. Though Minister
Adams should stay in office till he were ninety, he would never
fight another campaign of life and death like this; and though the
private secretary should covet and attain every office in the gift
of President or people, he would never again find education to
compare with the life-and-death alternative of this two-year-and-a-half
struggle in London, as it had racked and thumb-screwed him
in its shifting phases; but its practical value as education turned
on his correctness of judgment in measuring the men and their
forces. He felt respect for Russell as for Palmerston because they
represented traditional England and an English policy, respectable
enough in itself, but which, for four generations, every Adams had
fought and exploited as the chief source of his political fortunes.
As he understood it, Russell had followed this policy steadily, ably,

even vigorously, and had brought it to the moment of execution.
Then he had met wills stronger than his own, and, after persevering
to the last possible instant, had been beaten. Lord North and
George Canning had a like experience.

This was only the idea of a boy, but, as far as he ever knew, it
was also the idea of his Government. For once, the volunteer
secretary was satisfied with his Government. Commonly the self-respect
of a secretary, private or public, depends on, and is proportional
to, the severity of his criticism, but in this case the English
campaign seemed to him as creditable to the State Department as
the Vicksburg campaign to the War Department, and more decisive.
It was well planned, well prepared, and well executed. He
could never discover a mistake in it. Possibly he was biassed by
personal interest, but his chief reason for trusting his own judgment
was that he thought himself to be one of only half a dozen
persons who knew something about it. When others criticised
Mr. Seward, he was rather indifferent to their opinions because
he thought they hardly knew what they were talking about, and
could not be taught without living over again the London life of
1862. To him Secretary Seward seemed immensely strong and
steady in leadership; but this was no discredit to Russell or Palmerston
or Gladstone. They, too, had shown power, patience and
steadiness of purpose. They had persisted for two years and a
half in their plan for breaking up the Union, and had yielded at
last only in the jaws of war. After a long and desperate struggle,
the American Minister had trumped their best card and won the
game.

Again and again, in after life, he went back over the ground to
see whether he could detect error on either side. He found none.
At every stage the steps were both probable and proved. All the
more he was disconcerted that Russell should indignantly and with
growing energy, to his dying day, deny and resent the axiom of
Adams's whole contention, that from the first he meant to break
up the Union. Russell affirmed that he meant nothing of the sort;

that he had meant nothing at all; that he meant to do right; that
he did not know what he meant. Driven from one defence after
another, he pleaded at last, like Gladstone, that he had no defence.
Concealing all he could conceal—burying in profound secrecy
his attempt to break up the Union in the autumn of 1862—he
affirmed the louder his scrupulous good faith. What was worse
for the private secretary, to the total derision and despair of the
lifelong effort for education, as the final result of combined practice,
experience, and theory—he proved it.

Henry Adams had, as he thought, suffered too much from Russell
to admit any plea in his favor; but he came to doubt whether this
admission really favored him. Not until long after Earl Russell's
death was the question reopened. Russell had quitted office in
1866; he died in 1878; the biography was published in 1889. During
the Alabama controversy and the Geneva Conference in 1872,
his course as Foreign Secretary had been sharply criticised, and
he had been compelled to see England pay more than £3,000,000
penalty for his errors. On the other hand, he brought forward—
or his biographer for him—evidence tending to prove that he was
not consciously dishonest, and that he had, in spite of appearances,
acted without collusion, agreement, plan, or policy, as far as concerned
the rebels. He had stood alone, as was his nature. Like
Gladstone, he had thought himself right.

In the end, Russell entangled himself in a hopeless ball of admissions,
denials, contradictions, and resentments which led even his
old colleagues to drop his defence, as they dropped Gladstone's;
but this was not enough for the student of diplomacy who had
made a certain theory his law of life, and wanted to hold Russell
up against himself; to show that he had foresight and persistence
of which he was unaware. The effort became hopeless when the
biography in 1889 published papers which upset all that Henry
Adams had taken for diplomatic education; yet he sat down once
more, when past sixty years old, to see whether he could unravel
the skein.

Of the obstinate effort to bring about an armed intervention,
on the lines marked out by Russell's letter to Palmerston from
Gotha, 17 September, 1862, nothing could be said beyond Gladstone's
plea in excuse for his speech in pursuance of the same
effort, that it was "the most singular and palpable error," "the
least excusable," "a mistake of incredible grossness," which passed
defence; but while Gladstone threw himself on the mercy of the
public for his speech, he attempted no excuse for Lord Russell who
led him into the "incredible grossness" of announcing the Foreign
Secretary's intent. Gladstone's offence, "singular and palpable,"
was not the speech alone, but its cause—the policy that inspired
the speech. "I weakly supposed ... I really, though most
strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness." Whatever
absurdity Gladstone supposed, Russell supposed nothing of the
sort. Neither he nor Palmerston "most strangely believed" in
any proposition so obviously and palpably absurd, nor did Napoleon
delude himself with philanthropy. Gladstone, even in his
confession, mixed up policy, speech, motives, and persons, as
though he were trying to confuse chiefly himself.

There Gladstone's activity seems to have stopped. He did not
reappear in the matter of the rams. The rebel influence shrank in
1863, as far as is known, to Lord Russell alone, who wrote on
September I that he could not interfere in any way with those vessels,
and thereby brought on himself Mr. Adams's declaration of
war on September 5. A student held that, in this refusal, he was
merely following his policy of September, 1862, and of every step
he had taken since 1861.

The student was wrong. Russell proved that he had been feeble,
timid, mistaken, senile, but not dishonest. The evidence is convincing.
The Lairds had built these ships in reliance on the known
opinion of the law-officers that the statute did not apply, and a
jury would not convict. Minister Adams replied that, in this case,
the statute should be amended, or the ships stopped by exercise
of the political power. Bethell rejoined that this would be a violation

of neutrality; one must preserve the status quo. Tacitly Russell
connived with Laird, and, had he meant to interfere, he was
bound to warn Laird that the defect of the statute would no longer
protect him, but he allowed the builders to go on till the ships
were ready for sea. Then, on September 3, two days before Mr.
Adams's "superfluous" letter, he wrote to Lord Palmerston begging
for help; "The conduct of the gentlemen who have contracted
for the two ironclads at Birkenhead is so very suspicious,"—he
began, and this he actually wrote in good faith and deep confidence
to Lord Palmerston, his chief, calling "the conduct" of
the rebel agents "suspicious" when no one else in Europe or
America felt any suspicion about it, because the whole question
turned not on the rams, but on the technical scope of the Foreign
Enlistment Act,—"that I have thought it necessary to
direct that they should be detained," not, of course, under the
statute, but on the ground urged by the American Minister, of
international obligation above the statute. "The Solicitor General
has been consulted and concurs in the measure as one of policy
though not of strict law. We shall thus test the law, and, if we
have to pay damages, we have satisfied the opinion which prevails
here as well as in America that that kind of neutral hostility
should not be allowed to go on without some attempt to stop it."

For naïveté that would be unusual in an unpaid attaché of Legation,
this sudden leap from his own to his opponent's ground, after
two years and a half of dogged resistance, might have roused
Palmerston to inhuman scorn, but instead of derision, well earned
by Russell's old attacks on himself, Palmerston met the appeal
with wonderful loyalty. "On consulting the law officers he found
that there was no lawful ground for meddling with the ironclads,"
or, in unprofessional language, that he could trust neither his law
officers nor a Liverpool jury; and therefore he suggested buying
the ships for the British Navy. As proof of "criminal negligence"
in the past, this suggestion seemed decisive, but Russell, by this
time, was floundering in other troubles of negligence, for he had

neglected to notify the American Minister. He should have done
so at once, on September 3. Instead he waited till September 4,
and then merely said that the matter was under "serious and
anxious consideration." This note did not reach the Legation till
three o'clock on the afternoon of September 5—after the "superfluous"
declaration of war had been sent. Thus, Lord Russell
had sacrificed the Lairds: had cost his Ministry the price of two
ironclads, besides the Alabama Claims—say, in round numbers,
twenty million dollars—and had put himself in the position of
appearing to yield only to a threat of war. Finally he wrote to
the Admiralty a letter which, from the American point of view,
would have sounded youthful from an Eton schoolboy:—

The hilarity of the secretaries in Portland Place would have
been loud had they seen this letter and realized the muddle of difficulties
into which Earl Russell had at last thrown himself under
the impulse of the American Minister; but, nevertheless, these
letters upset from top to bottom the results of the private secretary's
diplomatic education forty years after he had supposed it
complete. They made a picture different from anything he had
conceived and rendered worthless his whole painful diplomatic
experience.

To reconstruct, when past sixty, an education useful for any
practical purpose, is no practical problem, and Adams saw no use
in attacking it as only theoretical. He no longer cared whether

he understood human nature or not; he understood quite as much
of it as he wanted; but he found in the "Life of Gladstone"
(II, 464) a remark several times repeated that gave him matter for
curious thought. "I always hold," said Mr. Gladstone, "that politicians
are the men whom, as a rule, it is most difficult to comprehend";
and he added, by way of strengthening it: "For my own
part, I never have thus understood, or thought I understood,
above one or two."

Earl Russell was certainly not one of the two.

Henry Adams thought he also had understood one or two; but
the American type was more familiar. Perhaps this was the sufficient
result of his diplomatic education; it seemed to be the
whole.