THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
proclaimed our war for the maintenance of the Union to be a war for the abolition of slavery as a primary object, for our government did not take that position at home. But in the instructions given to our ministers, and especially those representing the United States in England and France, he not only forbade them “to draw into debate any opposing moral principles which may be supposed to lie at the foundation of the controversy between those—(the seceding)—States and the Federal Union”—that is, ever to mention the subject of slavery, but he actually asserted that “the Territories will remain in all respects the same, whether the revolution shall succeed or fail; the condition of slavery in the several States will remain just the same, whether it succeed or fail.” He thus positively stripped our cause of its peculiar moral force, and he did this by going so far as to say a thing which not only a cautious politician would have found it unnecessary to say, but which, as his own philosophical sense must have told him, could not be true.
The fact is that Mr. Seward's mind was befogged by a most curious misapprehension. He thought that cotton ruled the world, to the exclusion of moral principle and human sympathy. He actually believed that the dependence of their cotton industries upon the supply of the raw material to be furnished by our Southern States would be the decisive element to determine the policy of England and France. Incredible as it now would seem in the retrospect, were it not verified by documentary evidence, even as late as July, 1862, when Lincoln first revealed to the Cabinet his intention to issue a proclamation of emancipation, Seward feared that, if we attempted to free the slaves, Europe would interpose for the purpose of keeping them in bondage. There is a written memorandum by Secretary Stanton referring to the debates in the Cabinet on
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