A Short History of the Confederate States of America by Jefferson Davis

Author:Jefferson Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Press
Published: 2017-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter XXXV

FEDERAL APPEALS TO EUROPE NOT TO AID “PIRATES”

The excitement produced in the North by the effective operations of our cruisers compelled the attention of the Federal Government to the subject. It might have been expected that they would have sought, by their great fleets, to protect their commerce on the high seas by capturing or driving off our light cruisers; but, instead of doing so, their ships of war were employed in blockading our ports or watching those of the West Indies, from which blockaders were expected to sail. Shameful as was this dereliction of duty, this failure to protect commerce, there was a still more humiliating feature in the conduct of the Federal Government.

While the Confederacy was regarded by the Federal State Department as an insurrection soon to be suppressed, and the cruisers regularly commissioned by the Confederate States were called “pirates,” diplomatic demands were made upon Great Britain to prevent the so-called “pirates” from violating international law, as if it applied to pirates. Appeals to that Government were also made to prevent the sale of materials of war to the Confederacy, and thus indirectly aid the United States in performing what, according to its own declaration, was a mere police duty — to suppress a combination of some evil-disposed persons — gallantly claiming that they, armed cap-a-pie, should meet their adversary in the lists, he to be without helmet, shield, or lance.

To one who, from youth to age, had seen with exultant pride the flag of his country, as it unfolded, disclosing to view the stripes recordant of the original size of the family of States, and the constellation which told of that family’s growth, it could be but deeply mortifying to witness such a paltry exhibition of deception and unmanliness in the representatives of a Government around which fond memories still lingered, despite the perversions of which it was the subject.

If this attempt on the part of the Government of the United States to deny the existence of war, after having, by proclamation of blockade, compelled all nations to take notice that war did exist, and to claim that munitions should not be sold to a country because there were some disorderly people in it, had been all, the attempt would have been ludicrously absurd, and the contradiction too bald to require refutation; but this would have been but half of the story. Subsequently the United States Government claimed reclamation from Great Britain for damage inflicted by vessels which had been built in her ports, and which had elsewhere been armed and equipped for purposes of war. International war recognizes the right of a neutral to sell an unarmed vessel, without reference to the use to which the purchaser might subsequently apply it. The United States Government had certainly not practised under a different rule, but had even gone further than this — so much further as to transgress the prohibition against armed vessels.

At the beginning of the war the United States Government sought to contract

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