Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 39.djvu/167

 Our American Civil War. 155

word had only to be spoken and it chanced to Harriet Beecher Stowe to speak it."

Mr. Adams' disposition to create dramatic situations leads him to overlook in this connection the effect of other publica- tions of that period. He takes no account of the systematic effort of the Northern papers to prejudice the people of Great Britain against the South. The anti-slavery poems of Whittier and Longfellow, the lectures of Emerson, the letters and speeches of Motley and Everett, which were reprinted by hundreds and sown broadcast over the British Isles, as well as the political speeches of Sumner and Stevens in Congress, and the bitter de- nunciations of Wendell Phillips, Lloyd Garrison and others, all of which -were calculated to influence British sentiment, and^ create a feeling hostile to the South, seem to have escaped him. These in lesser degree, perhaps, helped to thrust the slavery ques- tion to the foreground, and to place "the freedom of the slave before Europe as the motive which had aroused the philanthropic North to action."

While Mr. A^dams assures us he is not given to exaggeration or to the picturesque, he could not truthfully say that he does not delight in figures of rhetoric. In elaborating his array of opposing forces, he treats us to many historical incidents com- bined with economic statistics, and caps them all with invoca- tions to the muses and to fiction. He calls to his aid the, Iliad and Locksley Hall, and he appeals for illustration alike to Shakespeare and to Dic'kens.

The "array" of these forces is preliminary to the main point of discussion, which is, why, with such a powerful combination in favor of the Confederacy, and so apparently meagre and al- most pitiable an opposition, the Southern Confederacy failed to obtain recognition. That is the question Mr. Adams under- takes to answer. If he is able to do so he will have furnished an important contribution to history, and will have justified the selection of a subject which his friend, Mr. Bryce, advised against, as one which had fallen into oblivion, and would no longer excite general public interest.