THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
empire founded upon slavery,” could say, and did say, that, as we ourselves admitted, the matter of slavery had nothing to do with our struggle, and that it was merely a contest between the desire of the Southern people to be free and independent, and the Northern people who insisted upon subjugating and ruling them. Nay, the emissaries of the Southern Confederacy in London and Paris promptly availed themselves of their opportunity to take what little anti-slavery wind there was left, out of our sail. They cleverly pointed to the fact that the Republican administration at Washington did not show itself more hostile to slavery than the secessionists themselves, and this ocular demonstration gave great plausibility to their pretense that slavery really had nothing to do with the origin of the secession movement. They even went so far as to throw out a hint that, practically, they might prove even more anti-slavery than the Washington Government, if Great Britain and France would only give the Confederacy active support. In one word, a general survey of public sentiment as it manifested itself in the public press as well as in private conversation and correspondence, led to the conclusion that if any European government for any reason desired to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy, the anti-slavery sentiment was fast losing its power to act as a restraining force.
Under these circumstances I thought it my duty to communicate to my government the result of my inquiries and my reflections thereon, and as the despatch I wrote has been noticed in historical works as “the first impressive warning of this danger,” I may be pardoned for quoting here the principal part of it:—
It is my conviction, and I consider it a duty to communicate it to you, that the sympathies of the liberal masses in Europe are not as unconditionally in our favor as might be desired, and that unless the war end soon or
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