The story of Mason and Slidell is familiar:  accredited as envoys of the Confederacy to England and France, in the autumn of 1861, they ran the blockade at Charleston and came to Havana.  There they did not conceal their purpose to sail for England, by the British royal mail steamship Trent, on November 7.  Captain Wilkes of the United States steam sloop of war San Jacinto, hearing all this, lay in wait in the Bahama Channel, sighted the Trent on November 8, fired a shot across her bows, and brought her to.  He then sent on board a force of marines to search her and fetch off the rebels.  This was done against the angry protests of the Englishman, and with such slight force as constituted technical compulsion, but without violence.  The Trent was then left to proceed on her voyage.  The envoys, or “missionaries,” as they were called by way of avoiding the recognition of an official character, were soon in confinement in Fort Warren, in Boston Harbor.  Everywhere at the North the news produced an outburst of joy and triumph.  Captain Wilkes was the hero of the hour, and received every kind of honor and compliment.  The secretary of the navy wrote to him a letter of congratulation, declaring that his conduct was “marked by intelligence, ability, decision, and firmness, and has the emphatic approval of this department.”  Secretary Stanton was outspoken in his praise.  When Congress convened, on December 1, almost the first thing done by the House of Representatives was to hurry through a vote of thanks to the captain for his “brave, adroit, and patriotic conduct.”  The newspaper press, public meetings, private conversation throughout the country, all reechoed these joyous sentiments.  The people were in a fever of pleasurable excitement.  It called for some nerve on the part of Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward suddenly to plunge them into a chilling bath of disappointment.

Statements differ as to what was Mr. Seward’s earliest opinion in the matter.[170] But all writers agree that Mr. Lincoln did not move with the current of triumph.  He was scarcely even non-committal.  On the contrary, he is said at once to have remarked that it did not look right to stop the vessel of a friendly power on the high seas and take passengers out of her; that he did not understand whence Captain Wilkes derived authority to turn his quarter-deck into a court of admiralty; that he was afraid the captives might prove to be white elephants on our hands; that we had fought Great Britain on the ground of like doings upon her part, and that now we must stick to American principles; that, if England insisted upon our surrendering the prisoners, we must do so, and must apologize, and so bind her over to keep the peace in relation to neutrals, and to admit that she had been wrong for sixty years.