now disappointed them
by appearing to share the prejudices of his class against the republic.
A series of events soon revealed his temper. So soon as there purported
to be a Confederacy, an understanding had been reached betwixt him and
the French emperor that both powers should take the same course as to
recognizing it. About May 1 he admitted three Southern commissioners to
an audience with him, though not "officially." May 13 there was
published a proclamation, whereby Queen Victoria charged and commanded
all her "loving subjects to observe a strict neutrality" in and during
the hostilities which had "unhappily commenced between the government of
the United States and certain States styling themselves 'the Confederate
States of America.'" This action--this assumption of a position of
"neutrality," as between enemies--taken while the "hostilities" had
extended only to the single incident of Fort Sumter, gave surprise and
some offense to the North. It was a recognition of belligerency; that is
to say, while not in any other respect recognizing the revolting States
as an independent power, it accorded to them the rights of a
belligerent. 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,