thing but persist in
effort for recognition, now so vital--the people felt that dignity was
uselessly compromised, while their powerless representatives were kept
abroad, to knock weakly at the back door of foreign intervention.

Slight reaction came, when Mason and Slidell were captured on the high
seas, under a foreign flag. Mr. Seward so boldly defied the rampant
Lion; Congress so promptly voted thanks to Captain Wilkes, for
violating international law; the Secretary of the Navy--after slyly
pulling down the blinds--so bravely patted him on the back--that the
South renewed her hope, in the seeming certainty of war between the two
countries. But she had calculated justly neither the power of
retraction in American policy, nor Secretary Seward's vast capacity for
eating his own words; and the rendition of her commissioners--with
their perfectly quiet landing upon British soil--was, at last, accepted
as sure token of how little they would accomplish. And, for over three
years, those commissioners blundered on in thick darkness--that might
not be felt; butting their heads against fixed policy at every turn;
snubbed by subordinates--to whom alone they had access; yet eating,
unsparingly and with seeming appetite, the bountiful banquet of cold
shoulder!

It is not supposable that the people of the South realized to the full
that humiliation, to which their State Department was subjecting them.
Occasionally Mr. Mason, seeing a gleam of something which might some
day be light, would send hopeful despatches; or before the hopeful eyes
of Mr. Slidell, would rise roseate clouds of promise, light with
bubbles of aid--intervention--recognition! Strangely enough, these
would never burst until just after their description; and the secretary
fostered the widest latitude in press-rumors thereanent, but deemed it
politic to forget contradiction, when--as was invariably the case--the
next blockade-runner brought flat denial of all that its precedent had
carried.

Still, constant promises with no fulfillment, added to limited private
correspondence with foreign capitals, begat mistrust in elusive
theories, which was rudely changed to simple certainty.

Edwin DeLeon had been sent by Mr. Davis on a special mission to London
and Paris, after Mr. Yancey's return; his action to be independent of
the regularly established futility. In August, 1863, full despatches
from him, to the southern President and State Department, were captured
an