Page:Anglo-American relations during the Spanish-American war (IA abz5883.0001.001.umich.edu).pdf/22

6 certainly it had as much right as did the thirteen colonies to set up an independent state. If this were true, then Lincoln was obviously a second George III.

In May, 1861, the Queen issued a proclamation of neutrality. To the North, which considered the war purely a domestic question and looked upon the Confederacy as an organization of rioters and traitors, the British proclamation seemed hasty, if not hostile. In November of the same year another grievance arose when Captain Charlies Wilkes stopped the Trent, a British mail steamer, and seized Messrs. James Murray Mason and John Slidell, Confederate commissioners, as prisoners. Immediately British opposition assumed a serious aspect and Lord Palmerston, the British premier, and Lord John Russell, secretary for foreign affairs, demanded the release of the men.

Scarcely was the Trent affair closed when another difficulty arose between the two countries. In 1862, the Florida, a Confederate cruiser built in Liverpool, sailed for the Bahamas. Later in the same year, in spite of the efforts of Charles Francis Adams, the American minister at London, the Alabama, a second destroyer, sailed from the same port for the Azores. By 1863, due to the more stringent neutrality of the Palmerston government and to the persistent efforts of Mr. Adams, three other destroyers, then being constructed under the same conditions as the Alabama and the Florida, were prevented from leaving