Right Honorable the Earl of Clarendon to Charles Francis Adams, March 24, 1866

Lord Clarendon to Mr. Adams.

Sir: I forwarded to the attorney general your further letter of the 12th instant, relative to the statements made by that gentleman in the House of Commons with reference to the question of amending the foreign enlistment acts of this country and the United States; and I have now the honor to transmit you a copy of a further statement which the attorney general has made to me by way of rejoinder to your letter.

I have the honor, &c., &c., &c.,

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Mr. Adams’s letter of the 12th instant calls for little further observation on my part.

If Mr. Adams understood me “substantially to affirm” the two propositions embodied in this letter, all I can say is that he misunderstood me. I stated (as is the truth) that her Majesty’s government “voluntarily initiated a proposition” to the United States government not “to amend the provisions of the British foreign enlistment law for the benefit of the United States,” but that the foreign enlistment act of both countries should be revised with a view to their simultaneous amendment, if, after mutual communication, such amendments should appear to the two governments to be practicable and desirable.

I further stated the answer, which was in fact given by the United States government to that overture, describing it (and I think truly) as one which did not encourage Her Majesty’s government to proceed further in the matter, and as one which, if the matter had been carried further, might have been used in Parliament as an argument against the existence of any necessity for the alteration of our law. But I did not, either directly or “substantially,” affirm that “her Majesty’s government had been deterred from prosecuting this friendly proposal entirely by the cold and repulsive manner in which that proposition had been met by the United States.”

I disclaim wholly the inference which Mr. Adams considers to follow from the propositions which he attributes to me, namely, that “the whole responsibility for any failure of her Majesty’s government in securing for Parliament greater safeguards against the abuse of neutrality in this kingdom devolves on the United States.” Nothing could possibly be further from my mind than the idea that the United States ought to be held responsible for the decision of her Majesty’s government to abide by and enforce the existing law of this country. It is one thing to attribute (as I think I was fully justified in attributing) considerable practical importance to the opinion expressed by the government of the United States at that juncture, that their own law was “very sufficient” for its intended purpose, and another thing to say or imply that because such was the opinion of the United States her Majesty’s government were not solely and exclusively responsible for forming and acting upon a similar opinion as to the law of this country.

The only other statements in Mr. Adams’s letter which seem to me to require any remark, are those in which he insists that the only thing done by her Majesty’s government was “a suggestion of an intention to make a proposal,” and that “that intention was definitively abandoned before any reply from the United States came to the knowledge of her Majesty’s government.”

I am surprised that Mr. Adams, who speaks so much in this letter of facts, (as opposed to reasoning,) should again have overlooked the fact (proved by the passage of Earl Russell’s letter of the 19th December, 1862, which was extracted in the appendix to my former remarks that her Majesty’s government did not merely “suggest an intention to make a proposal,” but expressly invited suggestions from the government of the United States which they failed to obtain. Upon the other question, whether the intention conveyed by Earl Russell had been “definitively abandoned” before the answer of the United States government was received; Mr. Adams (unless he has some private information not discoverable from the contemporaneous documents, and which has never been communicated to me) seems simply to confound two things materially different, viz:

First. An opinion arrived at by the cabinet under the advice of the lord chancellor, that reliance might be placed on the sufficiency of our foreign enlistment act for its intended purpose; and,

Second. A definitive resolution not to follow up the overture contained in Earl Russell’s letter of the 19th December, 1862. I do not find in the documents to which I have access that any such resolution had been taken, in or out of the cabinet, before Earl Russell learned from Mr. Adams that the United States government did not consider their own foreign enlistment act to require, or indeed to be susceptible of, any improvement.