]

[Footnote 193: The United States Supreme Court in 1862, decided that
Lincoln's blockade proclamation of April 19, 1861, was "itself official
and conclusive evidence ... that a state of war existed." (Moore, Int.
Law Digest, I, p. 190.)]

[Footnote 194: _A Cycle of Adams' Letters_, I, p. 16. Henry Adams to
C.F. Adams, Jnr.]

[Footnote 195: Rhodes, _History of the United States_, III, p. 420
(_note_) summarizes arguments on this point, but thinks that the
Proclamation might have been delayed without harm to British interests.
This is perhaps true as a matter of historical fact, but such fact in no
way alters the compulsion to quick action felt by the Ministry in the
presence of probable _immediate_ fact.]

[Footnote 196: This was the later view of C.F. Adams, Jnr. He came to
regard the delay in his father's journey to England as the most
fortunate single incident in American foreign relations during the
Civil War.]

CHAPTER IV

BRITISH SUSPICION OF SEWARD

The incidents narrated in the preceding chapter have been considered
solely from the point of view of a formal American contention as to
correct international practice and the British answer to that
contention. In fact, however, there were intimately connected wth these
formal arguments and instructions of the American Secretary of State a
plan of possible militant action against Great Britain and a suspicion,
in British Governmental circles, that this plan was being rapidly
matured. American historians have come to stigmatize this plan as
"Seward's Foreign War Panacea," and it has been examined by them in
great detail, so that there is no need here to do more than state its
main features. That which is new in the present treatment is the British
information in regard to the plan and the resultant British suspicion of
Seward's intentions.

The British public, as distinguished from the Government, deriving its
knowledge of Seward from newspaper reports of his career and past
utterances, might well consider him as traditionally unfriendly to Great
Britain. He had, in the 'fifties, vigorously attacked the British
interpretation of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and characterized Great
Britain as "the most grasping and the most rapacious Power in the
world"; he had long prophesied the ultimate annexation of Canada to the
United States; he had not disdained, in political struggles in the State
of New York, to whip up, for the sake of votes, Irish antagonism to