Mr. Dayton to Mr. Seward.
Sir: I have the honor to acknowledge the reception of your despatches Nos. 411, 412, and 413.
Despatch No. 411 apprises me of the fact that the President awaits with unusual solicitude the answer of this government to my communication made to the minister of foreign affairs on the 22d of September last, in reference to the vessels now being prepared in certain ports of France for the rebels. I have already forwarded to you that answer and its translation, which, I trust, will have relieved this solicitude.
Will you do me the favor to examine your files and see whether England and France did not, on the breaking out of the Crimean war, (1854,) address a joint note or notes of like character to the United States, requesting that it would, “in the spirit of just reciprocity, give orders that no privateer under Russian colors shall be equipped or victualled, or admitted with its prizes into the ports of the United States?” Mr. Cobden, in a speech in Parliament. so stated, yet I can find no trace of this note on my files or in the published documents; nor can anything like it be found, as M. Drouyn de l’Huys informs me, in the French foreign office. If such communication were made, I desire to bring it to the [Page 803] notice of this government in connexion with its treatment of the rebel ship Florida in the port of Brest.
If the pretence that this vessel is a regularly commissioned ship-of-war is raised as a justification, the decision of Paris against privateering is “a thing of moonshine.”
It matters not, for practical purposes, whether the written authority a vessel carries is called a “commission or letter of marque”—they are pieces of paper emanating from the same source, differing only in form.
I am, sir, your obedient servant,
Hon. William H. Seward, Secretary of State, &c., &c., &c.