longer Northern and
Southern sympathizers: there were only Englishmen indignant at an insult
openly offered to the Union Jack. Northerners might have understood us
better, and been less angry at our attitude, if they had remembered how
they themselves had felt when the guns opened on Sumter.

The evil was aggravated by the triumphant rejoicings with which the
North celebrated the capture and by the complicity of responsible and
even official persons in the honours showered on Captain Wilkes. Seward,
who had a wild idea that a foreign quarrel would help to heal domestic
dissensions, was somewhat disposed to defend the capture. But the
eminently just mind of Lincoln quickly saw that it could not be
defended, while his prudence perceived the folly of playing the Southern
game by forcing England to recognize the Confederacy. Mason and Slidell
were returned, and the incident as a diplomatic incident was closed. But
it had its part in breeding in these islands a certain antagonism to the
Government at Washington, and thus encouraging the growing tendency to
sympathize with the South.

With the opening of the new year the North was cheered by a signal and
very important success. In the course of February Fort Henry and Fort
Donelson, essential strategic points on the front which the Confederate
invaders had stretched across Southern Kentucky, were captured by
General Ulysses Grant, in command of a Western army. The Confederate
forces were compelled to a general retirement, sacrificing the defensive
line for the sake of which they had turned the "neutral" border State
into an enemy, uncovering the whole of Western Tennessee, including the
capital of Nashville, and also yielding the Upper Mississippi. The
importance of the latter gain--for the Mississippi, once mastered, would
cut the Confederacy in two--was clearly apparent to Beauregard, who at
once marched northward and attacked Grant at Shiloh. The battle was
indecisive, but in its military effect it was a success for the North.
Grant was compelled to abandon the ground upon which his army stood, but
he kept all the fruits of his recent campaign.

Another incident, not only picturesque in itself but of great importance
in the history of naval war, marks the opening months of 1862. After the
failure of the first attempt to take Richmond by a _coup de main_ the
war became in its essence a siege of the Confederacy. To give it this
character, however, one thing was essential--