Seward’s general instruction, Bancroft notes, bore date of April 24, nearly a month before any foreign Power had recognized Southern belligerent rights; it indicates “a plan by which he hoped to remove all excuse for such action.”  In despatches to Dayton, Seward asserted a twofold motive:  “a sincere desire to co-operate with other progressive nations in the melioration of the rigours of maritime war,” and “to remove every cause that any foreign Power could have for the recognition of the insurgents as a belligerent Power[259].”  This last result was not so clear to Dayton at Paris, nor was the mechanism of operation ever openly stated by Seward.  But he did write, later, that the proposal of accession to the Declaration of Paris was tendered “as the act of this Federal Government, to be obligatory equally upon disloyal as upon loyal citizens.”  “It did not,” writes Bancroft, “require the gift of prophecy to tell what would result in case the offer of accession on the part of the United States should be accepted[260].”

Seward’s object was to place the European nations in a position where they, as well as the United States, would be forced to regard Southern privateers as pirates, and treat them as such.  This was a conceivable result of the negotiation before European recognition of Southern belligerency, but even after that recognition and after Dayton had pointed out the impossibility of such a result, Seward pressed for the treaty and instructed Dayton not to raise the question with France.  He still had in mind this main object.  “If Seward,” says Bancroft, “had not intended to use the adherence of the United States to the declaration as a lever to force the other Powers to treat the Confederates as pirates, or at least to cease regarding them as belligerents, he might easily and unofficially have removed all such suspicions[261].”  In an interview with Lyons on July 6 Seward urged a quick conclusion of the treaty, arguing that its effect upon the revolted states could be determined afterwards.  Naturally Lyons was alarmed and gave warning to Russell.  “Probably it was this advice that caused Russell to insist on the explanatory declaration[262].”

It would appear, then, that Seward much underestimated the acuteness of Russell and Thouvenel, and expected them “to walk into a trap.”  Nor could his claim “that there was no difference between a nation entirely at peace and one in circumstances like those of the United States at this time” be taken seriously.  “He was furnishing his opponent with evidences of his lack of candour.”  This clouded the effect that would have followed “a wise and generous policy toward neutrals, which had doubtless been in Seward’s mind from the beginning[263].”  In the end he concluded the negotiation gracefully, writing to Adams a pledge of American respect for the second and third articles of the Declaration of Paris—­exactly that which Lyons had originally been instructed by Russell to secure.