peace. It was only slavers dishonestly flying the American flag which they claimed a right to visit and examine. But it is obvious that the distinction was futile, and involved either a subterfuge or a confusion of ideas. From the case supposed, it is clear that American vessels might be boarded and examined under the impression that they were not truly of that nationality; and indeed, in a great variety of instances, it could only be by the exercise of the alleged right of search that the true character of the vessel sailing under American colours could be ascertained. What the British Government really renounced, then, was not the right of search, but the right (which in truth had never been asserted) of seizing or detaining genuine American vessels engaged in the slave-trade. The right of search itself, however, was the very thing which the Government of the United States persistently and strenuously denied. That Government would probably not have objected to any number of vessels falsely bearing its flag being boarded or captured; but the falsehood could only be established by examination of the vessel and its papers. This necessarily involved the right to search any vessel under the American flag, since that flag might be a deception; and this again would be certain sometimes to lead to actual American ships being visited. Here was the point at issue, and neither Lord Palmerston nor Lord Aberdeen did anything towards surmounting the difficulty.

The difficulty was indeed serious. Mr. Stevenson, in his rejoinder to Lord Aberdeen, remarked :—“In cases of conflicting rights between nations, the precise line which neither can pass, but to which each may advance, is not easily found or marked; and yet it exists, whatever may be the difficulty of discerning it. In ordinary cases of disagreement there is little danger; each nation may, and often does, yield something to the other. Such, however, it is to be feared, is not the present case. The peculiar nature of the power asserted, and the consequences which may be apprehended from its exercise, make it one of an important and momentous character. Involving, as it does, questions of high and dangerous sovereignty, it may justly be regarded as deeply endangering the good understanding of the two countries." Matters were made still worse by an incident which occurred towards the close of 1841. On the 27th of October in that year, the brig Creole, of Richmond, Virginia, sailed from Hampton Roads to New Orleans, with a cargo of merchandise, and one hundred and thirty-three slaves. On the evening of the 7th of November, a number of these slaves rose upon the crew, killed

a passenger who was the owner of some of them, severely wounded the captain and three others, and, obtaining complete mastery of the vessel, carried her to the port of Nassau, in the island of New Providence a British possession. At the request of the American consul at that place, the Governor ordered a guard on board, to prevent the escape of the mutineers, and to take measures for an investigation. The inquiry resulted in nineteen of the slaves, who were identified as having been concerned in the outrage, being placed in confinement till the arrival of instructions from England. The others were set at liberty, on the ground that, as nothing had been made out against them, they became free men by the act of landing on British territory. Great efforts were instituted by the American consul at New Providence to persuade the Governor to give up the nineteen accused, that they might be sent to the United States; but they were detained in the gaol at Nassau until their trial in the British colony which they had sought. This righteous determination not to surrender the wretched men to the fury of exasperated slave-owners provoked a great outburst of rage in the Southern States of America; but amongst the Abolitionist circles in the North the conduct of the British Government was applauded. The Americans had, indeed, themselves furnished a precedent for this course of action not long before. Some negroes, who had been carried off from the coast of Africa by a Spanish slaver, rose in revolt during the middle passage, seized the ship, and slaughtered some of the crew. Having landed in the United States, they were there tried on charges of murder, and acquitted; it being decided that slave-trading was unlawful, and that any kind of resistance might be resorted to by those who were being forcibly torn from their native country.*

Questions of slavery, the slave-trade, and the right of search, continued to occupy attention in the year 1842; but another matter now arose to agitate the minds of men, both in America and Europe. Several of the States repudiated the engagements they had contracted by bonds towards the people of other countries. It was urged by the repudiating communities that the bonds were not assignable, and that, as they had been negotiated by the original holders, payment could not be legally enforced by the assignees. One of the principal defaulting States was Pennsylvania, which was for the time in a state of great embarrassment. Nevertheless, so eminent an American statesman as Mr. Webster did not believe that Pennsylvania was

* Annual Register for 1842.

petition to Congress, sent to that body in April by the celebrated English wit, the Rev. Sydney Smith. He was a holder of American securities, and a sufferer by the repudiation, and he turned his trenchant pen with stinging effect against the doers of the evil. If, he said, the disavowal of her obligations by Pennsylvania had been the result of misfortune, every friend of America would have been content to wait. "But," continued the canon of St. Paul's, "the fraud is committed in the profound peace of Pennsylvania by the richest State in the Union, after the wise investment of the borrowed money in roads and canals, of which the repudiators are every day reaping the advantage. It is an act of bad faith, which, all its circumstances considered, has no parallel and no excuse. Nor is it only the loss of property which your petitioner laments; he laments still more that immense power which the bad faith of America has given to aristocratical opinions, and to the enemies of free institutions in the old world. It is in vain any longer to appeal to history, and to point out the wrongs which the many have received from the few. The Americans, who boast to have improved the institutions of the old world, have at least equalled its crimes. A great nation, after trampling under foot all earthly tyranny, has been guilty of a fraud as enormous as ever disgraced the worst king of the most degraded nation of Europe. It is most painful to your petitioner to see that American citizens excite, wherever they may go, the recollection that they belong to a dishonest people, who pride themselves on having tricked and having pillaged Europe; and this mark is fixed by their faithless legislators on some of the best and most honourable men in the world, whom every Englishman has been eager to see and proud to receive. It is a subject of serious concern to your petitioner that you are losing all that power which the friends of freedom rejoiced that you possessedlooking upon you as the ark of human happiness, and the most splendid picture of justice and of wisdom that the world had ever seen. Little did the friends of America expect it; and sad is the spectacle to see you rejected by every State in Europe as a nation with whom no contract can be made, because none will be kept; unstable in the very foundations of social life; deficient in the elements of good faith; men who prefer any load of infamy, however great, to any pressure of taxation, however light."

Just as these reproaches were in some respects, they were not entirely just, for they charged upon the whole nation what was only the act of certain parts of the nation. As a general fact, the hopes of the human race were not blasted by the bad faith

of a few American States; but, as far as it went, the repudiation was disgraceful and disastrous, and the cry of indignation which it aroused was perfectly natural. A memorial was presented to the American Minister in London by holders of the repudiated stocks; yet for a long while nothing was done to remove their grievance. In subsequent years, most of the defaulting States resumed payment; but in the meanwhile much inconvenience was suffered by the unfortunate bondholders. English ignorance of American institutions led to a wide diffusion of Sydney Smith's mistake. It was said by many that the United States had repudiated their obligations; but in truth the Federal Government had nothing to do with the matter. The defalcation was that of certain individual States, acting on their own behalf, with reference to their own local debts. The United States, in their collective capacity, were in no respect answerable for these bonds, or mixed up with their repudiation. A writer such as Sydney Smith should more carefully have indicated this very important distinction.

The repudiation of the insolvent States increased a tendency which had been acquiring force in England for some years-the tendency to denounce and satirise American institutions, American character, and American manners, in a spirit of the most unsparing severity. For a long while, English writers rather neglected America than either reviled or ridiculed her. Even the memories of the War of Independence seem to have created no other feeling than a sullen desire to be rid of such rebellious and ungrateful children, and to forget all about them. Nor did the war which followed, some thirty years later, do more than arouse a sentiment of momentary exasperation. At the peace of 1815, the Americans were still the alien descendants of their English congeners, with whom the latter felt loftily displeased, but whom they hardly thought it worth their while, or consistent with their dignity, to criticise very narrowly. was the extraordinary progress and development of the young Republic during the next twenty years which first excited the keen wits of English censors. English authors went over to the wonderful, halfunshaped, tumultuous, heterogeneous, bizarre new country, which threatened to eclipse all others, yet in some respects needed so much tuition herself. English actors crossed the Atlantic, and brought back types of character, or of caricature. It is doubtful if Englishmen generally had any conception at all-whether a true or a false conceptionof what an American was like, until the second half of the decade extending from 1820 to 1830. Then it was that the Yankee of the popular mind

It

1842.1

sprang up, and took his place side by side with the familiar figures of John Bull, the frog-eating Frenchman, the grandiose Spaniard, the stilettoed Italian, and the turbaned Oriental. Knowledge had been increased, but it had not brought charity or discernment with it, as half-knowledge never will. The Americans, perhaps, had provoked some amount of retaliation by a habit of boastfulness, and the implied depreciation of other countries. At any rate, the retaliation came, and that with venomous intensity. An English writer of American history lamented it as early as 1832.* It was in that very year that the novelist, Mrs. Trollope, who had been to the United States in 1829, published a volume of sketches of Transatlantic life which created the utmost soreness amongst the people concerned. In 1839, Captain Marryat (himself the son of a lady who came of a family of American loyalists) put forth "A Diary in America," which was dipped in the sharpest extract of bitterness and sarcasm. Again, in the year at which this narrative has now arrived, the most popular of English writers-one, moreover, who had been idolised in the New World-submitted to his readers a collection of "American Notes," embodying, in many ludicrous and some repellent forms, the results of a few months' tour in the United States. Charles Dickens gave mortal offence to his admirers in America by having, after all the unparalleled adulation of which he had been the object, presented a picture of the people and the country widely different from what they had hoped. The strictures made by these English writers may have been partially true; but the spirit in which they wrote was so unmistakably depreciatory, so laboriously caustic, that it was not in human nature to be otherwise than deeply hurt. Mrs. Trollope and Captain Marryat in particular, and Dickens in a less degree (though perhaps in an equal degree in his subsequent work, "Martin Chuzzlewit"), produced their effects by isolating the worst and vulgarest specimens of American life, the most grotesque combinations of American society, and causing them to stand for the whole. But Dickens left no permanent sting, for he meant to leave none. It was sometimes said in America, in those now rather distant days, that, if Dickens revisited the United States, he would be flogged, or tarred-andfeathered. Yet when he went again in 1867–8, near the close of his life, his welcome even surpassed the first, and he announced that a specific acknowledgment of all that kindness should thence

History of the United States in Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia, Vol. II., 1832.

39

forward accompany every copy of his two works referring to America.

The "Notes" of 1842, however, helped to swell the English feeling against America and all things American. It was said, "Here is the lively portraiture of the people who don't pay their debts.' Another writer, who about the same period contributed to a similar, though a more good-natured, impression, was the Nova-Scotian, Judge Haliburton. "Sam Slick" did not present a very dignified, or even respectable, type of national character; but he came to be accepted as the representative of the Anglo-American in the North, while at the same time-and perhaps with more reason—a slave-driver was taken as the fitting and sufficient exemplar of the South. These views of American nature were all that the great mass of the English people cared to form in the early years of Queen Victoria's reign. There was no English work, by any author of position, except the production of Harriet Martineau (1837), giving a thoughtful, temperate, serious account of American society and institutions. It was left to a Frenchman to make the chief attempt in this direction. The same country which had produced the Marquis de Lafayette, produced also the Count Alexis de Tocqueville; and the one aided America by his pen, as the other had by his sword. The celebrated work by de Tocqueville on "Democracy in America" was first published in 1835, when the author was only thirty years of age. It is an elaborate, and on the whole friendly, examination of the political and social condition of the United States, as affected by the institutions of the country. The writer had himself been in America, and he recorded what he observed. Nothing, he remarks in the introduction to his work, struck him more forcibly than the general equality of conditions. "I readily discovered," continues he, "the prodigious influence which this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society, by giving a certain direction to public opinion, and a certain tenor to the laws; by imparting new maxims to the governing powers, and peculiar habits to the governed. I speedily perceived that the influence of this fact extends far beyond the political character and the laws of the country, and that it has no less empire over civil society than over the Government. It creates opinions, engenders sentiments, suggests the ordinary practices of life, and modifies whatever it does not produce. The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that the equality of conditions is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived, and the central point at which all my observations

constantly terminated." This, no doubt, goes far towards explaining many of the most salient features of American politics and history. Power is equally divided among the masses, and the masses rule in all things, even to the determining of manners. But, as late as the Presidency of Mr. Tyler, the bulk of the American people lacked sufficient refinement to present in all respects an

agreeable picture to the older civilisations of Europe. Hence the impatience of so many English authors, who would not look beyond the primordial chaos to the completed orb. They were wanting in the analytical acumen and philosophical observation of the Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville; and England, in 1842, was exactly in the humour to enjoy their bitterest gibes.

ONE of the most frequent sources of perplexity in the politics of the United States was the Tariff. This had often been seen previous to 1842; it was seen again in that year. By the Act of 1833, introduced by Henry Clay as a compromise between the Congress and the nullifiers of South Carolina, it had been provided that the duties on foreign goods were to reach their minimum of reduction on the 30th of June, 1842, when they would stand at so low a point that protection to native industry would be greatly modified, and the South would cease to be burdened by the excessive imposts of earlier years. As the time was now at hand when this condition would be realised, Congress, not approving the abandonment of Protection, passed a temporary Act on the 29th of June, by which the duties in force on the 1st of that month were extended to the 11th of August, together with the laws for collecting them. This measure, which was called the Little Tariff Bill, was vetoed by President Tyler. Another measure, denominated the Revenue or Tariff Bill, was then passed by both Houses; upon which, on the 10th of August, Mr. Tyler sent a Message to Congress, stating that he should exercise his veto in that case also. Provision was made in the second Bill for distributing the proceeds of the sale of public lands amongst the several States; but the

* Translation by Henry Reeve.

embarrassed condition of the national funds would not, in the President's opinion, allow of this, and he doubted whether that was a time for parting with a fund which of all others might be made most useful in sustaining the public credit. In September, Congress passed a new Tariff and Revenue Bill, which omitted the clauses for distributing the proceeds of the land-sales; and this was at once sanctioned by the President. Mr. Tyler had now exercised his right of veto five times since his elevation to the chief post-a period of barely a year and a half; and to many it seemed that this prerogative of the Presidential office had been strained to an alarming degree.

The Whigs were offended and troubled; and when Mr. Tyler signified his intention to forbid the second Tariff Bill, a select committee of the Senate was appointed to consider the subject. The report of this body was drawn up by Mr. John Quincy Adams. It was couched in very strong, or rather in very violent, language, and amounted to a severe condemnation of the President for the manner in which he was discharging the duties of his office. It spoke of "the purchased presses of the Executive Chief" casting upon Congress, without rebuke or restraint from him, the blame of delay in the passing of the Tariff Bill. The conciliatory measures of Congress, it was observed, had been contemptuously rejected by the Chief Magistrate,