In the details of the negotiation C.F.  Adams agrees with Bancroft, but with this new interpretation.  The opening misunderstanding he ascribed, as did Lyons, to the simple fact that Seward “had refused to see the despatch” in which Russell’s proposals were made[267].  Seward’s instructions of July 6, after the misunderstanding was made clear to him, pushing the negotiation, were drawn when he was “still riding a very high horse—­the No. 10 charger, in fact, he had mounted on the 21st of the previous May[268],” and this warlike charger he continued to ride until the sobering Northern defeat at Bull Run, July 21, put an end to his folly.  If that battle had been a Northern victory he would have gone on with his project.  Now, with the end of a period of brain-storm and the emergence of sanity in foreign policy, “Secretary Seward in due time (September 7) pronounced the proposed reservation [by Russell] quite ‘inadmissible.’  And here the curtain fell on this somewhat prolonged and not altogether creditable diplomatic farce[269].”

Incidentally C.F.  Adams examined also British action and intention.  Lyons is wholly exonerated.  “Of him it may be fairly said that his course throughout seems to furnish no ground for criticism[270].”  And Lyons is quoted as having understood, in the end, the real purpose of Seward’s policy in seeking embroilment with Europe.  He wrote to Russell on December 6 upon the American publication of despatches, accompanying the President’s annual message:  “Little doubt can remain, after reading the papers, that the accession was offered solely with the view to the effect it would have on the privateering operations of the Southern States; and that a refusal on the part of England and France, after having accepted the accession, to treat the Southern privateers as pirates, would have been made a serious grievance, if not a ground of quarrel[271]....”  As to Russell, combating Henry Adams’ view, it is asserted that it was the great good fortune of the United States that the British Foreign Secretary, having declared a policy of neutrality, was not to be driven from its honest application by irritations, nor seduced into a position where the continuation of that policy would be difficult.

Before entering upon an account of the bearing of the newly available British materials on the negotiation—­materials which will in themselves offer sufficient comment on the theories of Henry Adams, and in less degree of Bancroft—­it is best to note here the fallacy in C.F.  Adams’ main thesis.  If the analysis given in the preceding chapter of the initiation and duration of Seward’s “foreign war policy” is correct, then the Declaration of Paris negotiation had no essential relation whatever to that policy.  The instructions to Adams were sent to eight other Ministers.  Is it conceivable that Seward desired a war with the whole maritime world?  The date, April 24, antedates any deliberate proposal of a foreign war, whatever he may have been