duct of England towards America. They are people who, as members of
the Government in times past, have been bullied by the U. S.... They are
not entirely ignorant that the class who are now trying to overthrow the
Government were mainly responsible for the brutality, but they think we
as a nation are disposed to bully, and they are disposed to assist in any
policy that may dismember and weaken us. These scars of wounded pride,
however, have been carefully concealed from the public, who therefore
cannot be readily made to see why, when the President has distinctly made
the issue between slave labor and free labor, that England should not go
with the North. He says these dozen people who rule England hate us
cordially... "

There were more than a dozen, a good many more, as we know from Charles
and Henry Adams. But read once again the last paragraph of Beecher's
letter, and note how it corresponds with what Mr. Bigelow says about the
feeling which our Government (for thirty years "in the hands or under the
influence of Southern statesmen") had raised against us by its bad
manners to European governments. This was the harvest sown by shirt
sleeves diplomacy and reaped by Mr. Adams in 1861. Only seven years
before, we had gratuitously offended four countries at once. Three of our
foreign ministers (two of them from the South) had met at Ostend and
later at Aix in the interests of extending slavery, and there, in a joint
manifesto, had ordered Spain to sell us Cuba, or we would take Cuba by
force. One of the three was our minister to Spain. Spain had received him
courteously as the representative of a nation with whom she was at peace.
It was like ringing the doorbell of an acquaintance, being shown into the
parlor and telling him he must sell you his spoons or you would snatch
them. This doesn't incline your neighbor to like you. But, as has been
said, Mr. Adams was an American who did know how to behave, and thereby
served us well in our hour of need.