President, on reaching the last paragraph of Mr. Motley’s
letter, in which he begged respectfully to resign
his post, “without waiting to learn what Mr.
Seward had done or proposed to do, exclaimed, with
a not unnatural asperity, ’Well, let him go,’
and ‘on hearing this,’ said Mr. Seward,
laughing, ’I did not read my dispatch.’”
Many persons will think that the counsel for the defence
has stated the plaintiff’s case so strongly
that there is nothing left for him but to show his
ingenuity and his friendship for the late secretary
in a hopeless argument. At any rate, Mr. Seward
appears not to have made the slightest effort to protect
Mr. Motley against his coarse and jealous chief at
two critical moments, and though his own continuance
in office may have been more important to the State
than that of the Vicar of Bray was to the Church,
he ought to have risked something, as it seems to me,
to shield such a patriot, such a gentleman, such a
scholar, from ignoble treatment; he ought to have
been as ready to guard Mr. Motley from wrong as Mr.
Bigelow has shown himself to shield Mr. Seward from
reproach, and his task, if more delicate, was not
more difficult. I am willing to accept Mr. Bigelow’s
loyal and honorable defence of his friend’s memory
as the best that could be said for Mr. Seward, but
the best defence in this case is little better than
an impeachment. As for Mr. Johnson, he had held
the weapon of the most relentless of the ‘Parcae’
so long that his suddenly clipping the thread of a
foreign minister’s tenure of office in a fit
of jealous anger is not at all surprising.
Thus finished Mr. Motley’s long and successful
diplomatic service at the Court of Austria. He
may have been judged hasty in resigning his place;
he may have committed himself in expressing his opinions
too strongly before strangers, whose true character
as spies and eavesdroppers he was too high-minded
to suspect. But no caution could have protected
him against a slanderer who hated the place he came
from, the company he kept, the name he had made famous,
to whom his very look and bearing —such
as belong to a gentleman of natural refinement and
good breeding —must have been a personal
grievance and an unpardonable offence.
I will add, in illustration of what has been said,
and as showing his feeling with reference to the matter,
an extract from a letter to me from Vienna, dated
the 12th of March, 1867.
. . . “As so many friends
and so many strangers have said so much that is
gratifying to me in public and private on this very
painful subject, it would be like affectation,
in writing to so old a friend as you, not to touch
upon it. I shall confine myself, however, to
one fact, which, so far as I know, may be new to
you.
“Geo. W. M’Cracken is
a man and a name utterly unknown to me.