Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 32.djvu/120

 108 Southern Historical Society Papers.

fected Confederate government. Who prepared the people through long years of public discussion, and what the motive of final action, the many books omit to tell. We are denied the simplicity of facts, for the gratification of a patriotic desire to find the men and their motives who built a government which sought to live among the nations.

YANCEY'S FRUITLESS MISSION.

In March, 1861, the Confederate commissioners in Europe, Wm. L. Yancey, President, and F. A. Rost and A. Dudley Mann, Associate Commissioners, with their accomplished young Secretary, Mr. Fearn, of Huntsville, Ala., sailed out of the port of Charleston. Orders were obeyed. Mr. Yancey made Southern rights' speeches and all talked to the kind people who received them into their con- fidence, of the inherent virtue of the Confederate cause. Yancey had no confidence when he left home in his mission. " Don't go to Europe, if you value your reputation," his frieuds warned him. Having exhausted the field of his instructions, he asked to be called home. The request was reluctantly granted by his government. He was too fluent a talker to be spared. The others remained. Mr. John M. Mason, long a distinguished Senator from Virginia, and Mr. John Slidell, a native of New York, long a Senator from Louisiana, were sent out to the Court of St. James and St. Cloud respectively.

MASON AND SLIDELL.

The two commissioners, their respective secretaries, and the fam- ily of Mr. Slidell, passed uninterrupted through the blockade at Charleston and at Havana boarded her Britanic Majesty's mail ship Trent, plying between Vera Cruz, Mexico, and Southampton. Mr. Seward, Secretary of State, had determined from the beginning of the war to bluff England and alarm her ministry. Among the first of his unrelaxing acts in this line was the capture of Messrs. Mason and Slidell under the British flag on the high seas off the coast of Cuba. Seward held his finger firmly on the pulse of Palmerston's timid government. When the time came, he surrendered the com- missioners to a British ship in the harbor of Boston, and in February, 1862, they were landed at Liverpool.

Early in February, 1862, Mr. Mason delivered informally Secre- tary Hunter's message to the British ministry. There was absolutely nothing in it beyond the stale argument Yancey had left behind him, that secession was not revolution in the American system, that