Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/360

 This language, which was to serve as an answer to my suggestion that the surest way to avert the threatened intervention of foreign powers in our domestic conflict was to give its true weight to the part that slavery played in our struggle, seriously alarmed me. The assertion that now, after the Bull Run disaster, there was “not one man” in the United States who did not count upon our success more confidently than ever before, stood in strange contrast to the greatly increased anxiety expressed by the private letters I received from men of ardent patriotism and mature judgment in America. The sentiment that if foreign intervention could be prevented only by a recognition of the anti-slavery character of our Civil War, then intervention must come—for this was the obvious meaning of Mr. Seward's phraseology—seemed to me reckless in the extreme, if not positively flippant, considering that, if England and France, with their large naval and military resources, actively aided the Confederacy, our chance of conquering the South would be very dangerously lessened. I thought I detected in Mr. Seward's letter a symptom of that sort of petulance which is apt to warp a man's judgment. I apprehended that if Mr. Seward had shown that letter to Mr. Lincoln before sending it off, Mr. Lincoln would not have permitted the expressions mentioned to pass in the form in which they stood. It occurred to me that Mr. Seward might even have failed to submit to Mr. Lincoln my despatch of September 14th, which went so straight against his policy. I consulted Mr. Perry upon that point, and he was troubled by the same question. Harassed by this doubt, I concluded that it was my duty to lay the contents of that despatch, with such enlargements as the progress of events might suggest, before Mr. Lincoln personally. My first impulse was to resign my position to that end; but Mr. Perry persuaded me that a change