Construction and Reconstruction
Confederates, even such as could be given without openly violating the letter of the neutrality law, was only little less detrimental.
Against these adverse circumstances and influences Republican diplomacy worked with a fine blending of resolution and tact. On the one hand the President sent to Great Britain informally several representative citizens who were specially well qualified to make clear to both the British government and the British people the real causes and issues of the war, and to show them how directly and greatly they were in fact interested in the success of the national arms. The result of such work was soon manifested in a great revulsion of British popular sentiment in favor of the North. Even in the great industrial centres where unspeakable distress had been caused by the embargo on cotton, and where at first there was unmeasured hostility to the United States, there was developed almost as marked sympathy with and enthusiasm for the Federal cause as any American city displayed.
At the same time the sturdy Republican statesman who was Minister at the Court of St. James was as inflexible in his maintenance of our rights as ever his famous father and grandfather had been. At the supreme crisis of affairs, when the result of the war here seemed still trembling in the balance, and when the entrance of Great Britain on the side of the South would have cast fearful odds against us, he did not hesitate calmly and unperturbably to say to the British Foreign Secretary concerning an act which the British government had apparently fully decided to do, "I need scarcely point out to your lordship that this means war!" It would have meant war but it did not because
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