on. The North with much emotion and high
courage entering in April, 1861, upon the task of restoring the Union
and hoping for quick success, had now passed through a wearisome six
months with no evident progress towards its object. Northern failure had
developed a deep mortification when, suddenly and unexpectedly, a bold
naval captain, on his own initiative, appeared to have struck a real
blow at the South. His action seemed to indicate that the fighting
forces of the North, if free from the trammels of Washington red tape,
could, and would, carry on energetic war. Certainly it was but a slight
incident to create such Northern emotion, yet the result was a sudden
lifting from despondency to elation.

But almost equally with this cause of joy there operated on American
minds the notion that the United States had at last given to Great
Britain a dose of her own medicine in a previous era--had exercised upon
a British ship that "right of search" which had been so keenly resented
by America as to have become almost a _permanent_ cause of a sense of
injury once received and never to be forgotten. There was no clear
thinking about this; the obnoxious right of search in times of peace for
vagrant seamen, the belligerent right exercised by Britain while America
was a neutral, the practice of a "right of visit" claimed by Britain as
necessary in suppression of the African Slave Trade--all were confused
by the American public (as they are still in many history textbooks to
this day), and the total result of this mixing of ideas was a general
American jubilation that the United States had now revenged herself for
British offences, in a manner of which Great Britain could not
consistently complain. These two main reasons for exultation were shared
by all classes, not merely by the uninformed mob of newspaper readers.
At a banquet tendered Captain Wilkes in Boston on November 26, Governor
Andrews of Massachusetts called Wilkes' action "one of the most
illustrious services that had made the war memorable," and added "that
there might be nothing left [in the episode] to crown the exultation of
the American heart, Commodore Wilkes fired his shot across the bows of
the ship that bore the British lion at its head[437]."

All America first applauded the act, then plunged into discussion of its
legality as doubts began to arise of its defensibility--and wisdom. It
became a sort of temporarily popular "parlour game" to argue the
internati