monstrous doctrine to admit that one nation may inquire into the
title by which another nation holds her ships of war. And there can be
no difference in this respect between tenders and ships originally
commissioned. The flag and the pennant fly over them both, and they are
both withdrawn from the local jurisdiction by competent commissions. On
principle you might as well have enquired into the antecedents of the
Alabama, as of the Tuscaloosa. Indeed, you had a better reason for
inquiring into the antecedents of the former than of the latter, it
having been alleged that the former escaped from England in violation of
your Foreign Enlistment Act. Mr. Adams, the United States Minister, did
in fact demand that the Alabama should be seized, but Earl Russell, in
flat and most pointed contradiction of his late conduct in the case of
the Tuscaloosa, gave him the proper legal reply, to wit: that the
Alabama being now a ship of war, he was estopped from looking into her
antecedents. One illustration will suffice to show you how untenable
your position is in this matter. If the Tuscaloosa's commission be
admitted to have been issued by competent authority, and in due form
(and I do not understand this to be contested except on the ground of
her antecedents), she is as much a ship of war as the Narcissus, your
flag-ship. Suppose you should visit a French port, and the port admiral
should request you to haul down your flag on the ground that you had had
no sufficient title to the ship before she was commissioned, or that she
was a contract ship and you had not paid for her, and the builder had a
lien on her, or that you had captured her from the Russians, and had not
had her condemned by a prize court, what would you think of the
proceeding? And how does the case supposed differ from the one in hand?
In both it is a pretension on the part of a foreign power to look into
the antecedents of a ship of war--neither more nor less in the one case
than in the other. I will even put the case stronger. If it be admitted
that I had the right to commission a tender, and the fact had been that
I had seized a French ship and put her in commission, you could not
inquire into the fact. You would have no right to know but that I had
the orders of my Government for this seizure. In short, you would have
no right to inquire into the matter at all. My ship being regularly
commissioned, I am responsible to my Government for my acts, and my
Government, i