The British Government made a formal demand that the commissioners should be given up.  Through the influence of Prince Albert, and with the approval of the Queen, this demand was couched in most conciliatory language.  Slidell and Mason were handed over to Great Britain, and an apology was made by Secretary Seward.

During the progress of the Civil War a number of fast-sailing vessels were fitted out in England, and employed in running the blockade of the Southern ports, to supply them with arms, ammunition, and manufactured goods of various kinds.  Later, several gunboats were built in British shipyards by agents of the Confederate government, for the purpose of attacking the commerce of the United States.  The most famous of these vessels was the Alabama, built expressly for the Confederate service by the Lairds, of Birkenhead, armed with British cannon, and manned chiefly by British sailors.

Charles Francis Adams, the American Minister at London, notified Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, of her true character.  But Palmerston permitted the Alabama to leave port (1862), satisfied with the pretext that she was going on a trial trip.[1] She set sail on her career of destruction, and soon drove nearly every American merchant vessel from the seas.  Two years later (1864) she was defeated and sunk by the United States gunboat Kearsarge.  After the war the Government of the United States demanded damages from Great Britain for losses caused by the Alabama and other English-built privateers.

[1] The Queen’s advocate gave his opinion that the Alabama should be detained, but it reached the Foreign Secretary (Lord Russell) just after she had put out to sea.

A treaty was agreed to by the two nations; and by its provisions an international court was held at Geneva, Switzerland (1872), to deal with the demands made by the United States on Great Britain.  The court awarded $15,500,000 in gold as compensation to the United States, which was duly paid.  One very important result of this decision was that it established a precedent for settling by arbitration on equitable and amicable terms whatever questions might arise in future between the two nations.[1]

[1] This treaty imposed duties on neutral governments of a far more stringent sort than Great Britain had hitherto been willing to concede.  It resulted, furthermore, in the passage of an act of Parliament, punishing with severe penalties such illegal shipbuilding as that of the Alabama.  See Sheldon Amos’s “Fifty Years of the English Constitution, 1830-1880.”

599.  Municipal Reform (1835); Woman Suffrage; the Jews.

Excellent as was the Reform Bill of 1832 (S582), it did not go far enough.  There was also great need of municipal reform, since in many cities the taxpayers had no voice in the management of local affairs, and the city officers sometimes spent the income of large charitable funds in feasting and merrimaking while the poor got little or nothing.