Visit to the Fortifications

“Midhurst, Feb. 3. (To Mr. Paulton.)—.... I went last week to Portsmouth to see the fortifications. I spent a couple of days in the neighbourhood. Starting by train from Chichester, I stopped at Havant, where a couple of officers from Portsmouth met me, and we went thence in a fly over the Downs by Portsdown Hill to Fareham, and then from the latter place to Gosport.

“Our road along the downs passed beside the great inland chain of forts covering all the high ground within four or five miles of Portsmouth. It is necessary to see these things to understand them. The South Down forts are not designed for defence against a landing. They, as well as an inner system of forts between the Downs and the sea, are planned on the theory that an enemy has beaten us at sea and landed in force, and having worsted an army on shore, these forts are to prevent the foreign force from taking up a position on the downs, and shelling the docks at four or five miles off. Of course the theory implies that the enemy is free to go elsewhere, and the reasonable inference may be that he would prefer going to London, or at least coming to rob our henroosts who live under the downs! The pro gramme of course contemplates that our own soldiers are safely ensconced in these forts beneath their casemates, and behind gigantic ditches in the chalk—in fact you never saw such precipitous excavations as these are in the Downs to prevent a foreign army from getting at an English army, whilst the country is at their mercy. I need hardly add that there is not an officer of either service with a head on his shoulders who is under fifty, that does not look with supreme contempt, disgust, and humiliation at these works.

“My companions were Captain Cowper Coles, R.N., the inventor of the cupola ships, and Colonel Williams, of the Marine Artillery, who has a pension for wounds, though a young man.

“I saw all that was going on in the dockyards, and came away with the conviction that we are now wasting our money on iron-cased vessels with broadsides, whilst a new invention is in the field which will entirely supersede them. Captain Coles is building a vessel with four cupolas, or rather is superintending the alteration of one on a principle which it is clear must render broadside guns useless.”

“April 22, 1863. (To Mr. Bright.)—There is a great and growing uneasiness about our relations with the United States, and there is so wide an interest taken by our friends from America—of whom there is an influential gathering just now drawn to this side by an apparent fear of some impending mischief—as well as by English people, that I feel quite oppressed with a sense of the responsibility, and write to say that I entreat you to come to town, if only on Friday to return on Saturday. Besides the confidence you give me when we are together, I feel quite sure that the fact of your being present with the power of reply exerts a restraining influence on Palmerston and the other speakers on the Treasury bench, and it is especially important that they should be so restrained on this occasion. I hope therefore that you will find yourself in a situation to come for one night.”

“Sept 8, 1863. (To Mr. Bright.)—The tide of battle seems to have set in so strongly for the North, that I don’t think the friends of freedom need feel any anxiety about the result so far as fighting is concerned. There is, of course, a tremendous difficulty beyond, but there is something more than accident which seems in the long-run to favour the right in this wicked world, and I have a strong persuasion that we may live to see a compensating triumph for humanity as the result of this most gigantic of civil wars.

“I confess I cannot penetrate the mystery of French politics in connexion with the United States question. I suppose the Emperor has been very strongly pressed by Slidell and other interested parties to take some step to encourage the South. His unwise Mexican expedition, about which he must have daily more of doubt and misgiving, has placed him in a false and dangerous position on the continent of North America; and we all know how in public, as in private life, one false step seems only to necessitate another. I have no doubt that his Mexican embarrassment is plied with consummate tact and unscrupulous daring by the Confederate agents. The Richmond government will offer any terms for the French alliance. Fortunately they are in such straits themselves, that they have little to offer as a temptation to an ambitious but cautious mind like Napoleon’s. The influential people who surround the Emperor, such as Fould and Rouher, are of course opposed to any interference in the American quarrel..... After all, our chief reliance for the maintenance of a non-intervention policy by France and England is not in the merits or justice of that course, but—it is sad to say it—in the tremendous warlike power manifested by the free States of America. Some shallow and indiscreet members of our aristocracy exclaimed at the outbreak of the Civil War, ‘The Republican bubble has burst;’ but the experience of the last two years shows that, whether in peace or war, this Republic, instead of a bubble, is the greatest and most solid fact in all history..... It is to be hoped that gradually our educated mob of the clubs will become, however unwillingly, acquainted with the warlike resources of America. At present, nine out of ten of them are under the complacent delusion that we have the power at any moment to raise the blockade, and effect a peace on the basis of separation. And such is the invulnerable conceit of a large part of our aristocratic middle class, that if such facts as I have given above were published by you or myself, they would be read with incredulity, and we should be denounced as Yankee sympathizers.

“I always take for granted the government will not allow the ironclads to leave Laird’s, unless they know their real destination. The progress of the Federal arms will help the Cabinet over some of the legal technicalities of the enlistment act.”

“Midhurst, Oct. 12, 1863. (To Mr. Bright.)—I have nothing to say, but that Mr. Whiting, who is here as successor to Mr. Evarts as legal representative of the Washington government, has been visiting me, and from a rather confidential conversation with him, I find that you must have been misinformed as to the correspondence or communications that have been taking place between Adams and our Foreign Office. The President, from what I gather from Mr. W., who seems to be in the most confidential relations with him and his Cabinet, is determined whatever happens, short of a direct intervention, not to have a rupture with England or France during the Civil War. And he has not authorized Adams to give any notice of leaving his post even if the ironclads are permitted, on the plea of legality, to leave our ports. Nor will he meddle with Mexican politics, whatever may happen, whilst Jeff Davis is in the field. In all this he shows a strong common sense much to be commended.

“Mr. Whiting tells me that Mr. Adams had no assurance up to the last from our Government that the Rams would not leave, and even when our semi-official papers were announcing that they had been arrested, he gave expression to a fear that he might get up any morning and find the ships had escaped. Now that I see by yesterday’s paper that the broad arrow has been put upon the Rams, I suppose the matter is settled.”

“Midhurst, Oct. 17, 1863. (To Mr. Bright.)—I return Aspinall’s and Chase’s letters. I was pleased with Chase when I saw him in Ohio, where he was governor of the State in 1859. He is in his physical and mental traits not unlike Sumner—a massy, stately-principled man, but more practical and less of the rhetorician than his Massachusetts colleague. He is altogether a different type of Seward.

“I have a letter from Evarts by the last mail. He seems well pleased at the detention of the Rams. He had a passage in his letter which seems rather to corroborate your information about Lord Russell. He says, ‘From information which I have of the severity and uncertainty of the final struggle with your ministry, Earl Russell was discreditably slow and unsteady in coming to the right decision. I am sure that when the communications of proofs as to the destination of these ships of war made to your government are made public, common sense on both sides of the water will be shocked at the stumbling hesitancy of the ministerial council in face of the facts, and at the narrow escape the two nations have had from at least partial hostilities.’”

“October 4, 1864. (To Mr. Bright.)—I should say that as a politician Lincoln is very superior to McClellan, who is a professional soldier and nothing more. By the way, Lincoln stumped Illinois for the Senate in opposition to Douglas, the ablest debater in America after Clay. They travelled from county town to county town together, and met the same audience on the same platform in forty or fifty counties, questioning, bantering, and exposing each other’s shortcomings. It is the fashion to underrate Lincoln intellectually in part, because he illustrates his arguments with amusing anecdotes. But Franklin was not less given to apologues, and some of them not of the most refined character. It is quite certain that an inferior man could never have maintained such a contest as Lincoln went through with Douglas. Presidents are apt to fulfil the second term better than the first. Chase is the strongest man of the Republican party, and I sincerely hope Lincoln will bring him back to the Treasury.

“I hope you were pleased with the compliment paid us in California. There is a poetical sublimity about the idea of associating our name with a tree 300 feet high and 60 feet girth! Verily it is a monument not built with men’s hands. If I were twenty years younger I would hope to look on these forest giants; great trees and rivers have an attraction for me.”