Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 32.djvu/117

 Confederate Diplomacy. 105

published paragraphs and authors wrote bound volumes arguing for the South, members of Parliament from their seats prodded the ministry for its shirking policy toward the South. The Tories were as much our friends as if they had been of us, on the land.

While the Southern sympathizers in England were thus busy in practical ways at home, they did not fail to approach Napoleon III in their urgency of the Southern cause. The Emperor of France was a willing listener. He took up the cause of the South through formal channels of diplomacy with England. He held interviews with English members of Parliament, committing himself to the most advanced suggestions of co-operation with their own Govern- ment for the recognition and support of the independence of the Confederacy. He urged them to force the British ministry to fav- orable action.

Robert Barnwell Rhett, deputy from South Carolina, had given the subject of Government for the South the study of an acute and philosophic mind for more than the life of a generation. He took his seat at Montgomery well prepared with an outline of foreign policy for the young republic which he had done so much to make possible. Mr. Rhett' s suggestion was founded upon certain accom- plished facts of daily experience in the relations of the commerce of the slave States to European trade. The export commerce of the slave States in raw material was the richest in the world. The official report of the fiscal year ending June 30, 1859, gave the ex- ports initiating in the slave States at $188,693,490 and the exports initiating- in the free States at $5,281,091. England was both the chief ocean carrier and the chief manufacturer of the main subject of Southern commerce, cotton. The industries of France were also largely involved in the carrying trade and the manufacture of Southern raw material.

THE RHETT SCHEME.

Upon the demonstrated value of Southern commerce and the his- torical record of Southern civil and military character, Rhett' s ob- ject of a foreign diplomacy rested. The Rhett scheme was, to proceed without a moment's delay to assail the well-known anti- slavery prejudice and fanatacism of the Palmerston ministry on the moral aspect of Southern slavery with an irresistible temptation of treaty stipulation into the interest of English commerce and manu- factures known to be generally controlled by Whigs and aboli- tionists. The Rhett scheme would pledge the trade of England and