the tone of arrogance as in Punch’s cartoon, “You do what’s right, my son, or I’ll blow you out of the water,” portended no happy solution.  Yet this cartoon at least implied a hope of peaceful outcome, and that this was soon a general hope is shown by the prompt publicity given to a statement from the American General, Winfield Scott, in Paris, denying that he had said the action of Captain Wilkes had been decided upon at Washington before he sailed for Europe, and asserting that no orders were given to seize the envoys on board any British or foreign vessel[434].  Nevertheless, Adams, for the moment intensely aroused, and suspicious of the whole purpose of British policy, could write to his friend Dana in Boston:  “The expression of the past summer might have convinced you that she [Great Britain] was not indifferent to the disruption of the Union.  In May she drove in the tip of the wedge, and now you can’t imagine that a few spiders’ webs of a half a century back will not be strong enough to hold her from driving it home.  Little do you understand of this fast-anchored isle[435].”

There can be no doubt that one cause of a more bitter and sharper tone in the British press was the reception of the counter-exultation of the American press on learning of the detention and the exercise of “right of search” on a British ship.  The American public equally went “off its head” in its expressions.  Writing in 1911, the son of the American Minister to Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams, jun., in 1861, a young law-student in Boston, stated:  “I do not remember in the whole course of the half-century’s retrospect ... any occurrence in which the American people were so completely swept off their feet, for the moment losing possession of their senses, as during the weeks which immediately followed the seizure of Mason and Slidell[436].”  There were evident two principal causes for this elation.  The North with much emotion and high courage entering in April, 1861, upon the task of restoring the Union and hoping for quick success, had now passed through a wearisome six months with no evident progress towards its object.  Northern failure had developed a deep mortification when, suddenly and unexpectedly, a bold naval captain, on his own initiative, appeared to have struck a real blow at the South.  His action seemed to indicate that the fighting forces of the North, if free from the trammels of Washington red tape, could, and would, carry on energetic war.  Certainly it was but a slight incident to create such Northern emotion, yet the result was a sudden lifting from despondency to elation.