Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 4

[155] he sought to produce a popular impression against us. There is evidence that very early in the struggle he had been free in personal intercourse in expressing his sympathy with the Southern insurrection;¹ but he first gave his views to the public early in 1862,—at first in a guarded, and later in a more positive, manner; venturing further than any member of the Cabinet, and, according to Mr. Adams, ‘transcending the line of policy’ which it had agreed upon.² There is no way so effective in carrying opinion against a cause as to make it appear hopeless, and Mr. Gladstone chose that way. At Leith, January 11, he said: ‘All thinking men had come to the conclusion that the party apparently the strongest had committed themselves to an enterprise which would probably prove to be beyond their strength.’ At Manchester, April 24, before the Chamber of Commerce, he argued from historical analogies that the North could not succeed in its gigantic enterprise, and that it was impossible to conquer a people set upon independence; refused to see in the struggle any question of freedom or slavery; or if such an issue were to be admitted, he rebuked the idea that free institutions were to be propagated at the point of the sword, or the horrors of war bent to philanthropic ends; reaffirmed Russell's declaration that the contest was on one side for empire and on the other for independence; and set aside the claim of Americans to sympathy on the politic ground that Englishmen could not be expected to risk the permanent hostility of six or ten millions of the Southern people who might hereafter become a great nation.³ His treatment of the American question was throughout captious and cynical. The London Times responded heartily to his espousal of the cause of the Confederates, saying: ‘The view taken by Mr. Gladstone of American affairs is so entirely in accordance with that which we have long advocated, that we do not scruple to adopt that portion of his speech as our own.’⁴ But as if enough had not been said, he returned to the theme again at Newcastle, October 7, when he