Letter of J. P. Benjamin to John Slidell
Source: United States, Naval War Records Office
Title: Official records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion. / Series II - Volume 3: Proclamations, Appointments, etc. of President Davis; State Department Correspondence with Diplomatic Agents, etc.
Publisher: Government Printing Office
Publication date: 1922
Pages: 1013 - 1014
Copied from: Cornell University's MoA Multivolume Monographs, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (1894 - 1922)
SIR: I have the honor to acknowledge receipt of your several dispatches. Nos. 50, 50 bis, and 51, dated, respectively, on the 3d, 6th, and 15th ultimo, and received, together on the 16th instant.
Your No. 50 bis. in relation to Mr. de Leon, bears nearly the same date as my dispatch to you on the same subject and requires no special remark. While appreciating the motives which induced your forbearance from complaint, I can not but think that the Department ought to have been apprised earlier of the facts related in your dispatch, especially as to his opening, without the slightest warrant of authority, the sealed dispatches addressed to you, and committed to his care. This fault was of so very grave a nature that it alone would probably have sufficed to put an end to Mr. de Leon’s agency, and we should thus have been spared the annoyance of the scandal created by the interception and publication of the objectionable correspondence which caused his removal. Your No. 50 bis has been considered official and placed in the regular files, notwithstanding the doubt intimated in its concluding passages, because the subject had already taken its proper place in the official correspondence of the Department.
Reverting to more agreeable duties, I observe with a satisfation, which has been shared by the President, the continued manifestations by a high personage of favorable dispositions toward the Confederacy, as evinced not only in the matter of the Rappahannock but in the communication of the dispatch as related in your No. 51, and which was fully understood by reference to your No. 32. I trust that intelligence equally favorable will soon be received on the whole subject connected with the postscript of my No. 27.
I take it for granted that you have seen the correspondence between the President and the Pope, but enclose it, as published here, with the translation made in the Department of the Pope’s letters. The effect on our people has been good, and we hope that some benefit will be experienced from this correspondence in the influence excited on Roman Catholics in the North.
The President thinks you are mistaken in your estimate of the person who wrote you the note from Trieste of 7th November last, as copied into your No. 50. At all events,, from the beginning of the war that person has been constantly writing to the President with expressions of warm sympathy for our cause, and has in various ways manifested in it an interest which the President would be loath to suspect as simulated or assumed for treacherous purposes. If you can give any of the grounds which have excited your suspicions, they might be sent in cipher, for it is of course important that the President should not entertain a mistaken impression on this point.
On the whole subject embraced in the Trieste letter, and in your Nos. 50 and 51, my last dispatch No. 27 will have given you the fullest information of the views and policy of this Government and of the measures adopted to carry them into effect. We await with interest the result of the deliberation of the archduke on the subject of accepting the throne of Mexico. The announcement of the French Government to the Corps Legislatif that the "sole reservation" was in relation to the popular vote of the Mexicans justified us in considering the matter as settled, and we were not prepared for the information to the contrary contained in your dispatches. Recent Northern papers bring news to the 2d January (more than two weeks later than your No. 51), announcing that the French journals deny that the archduke has imposed conditions on his acceptance, and thus give color to the inference that his hesitation is at an end. I need hardly add that our interests are so deeply affected in this whole subject that we await with solicitude the official news that is to banish all doubt as to the future government of Mexico.
You will perceive by what was stated in my No. 27 that your note to the Emperor of 4th December was in entire accordance with the views entertained here, and that there was even identity in the observation made, that each musket intercepted was equivalent to abstracting a soldier from our ranks. We still remain without news of the French occupation of Matamoras, although daily hoping to receive it. The delay of the French commanders in a movement so important confirms my impression that they are anxious to avoid a possible conflict with our enemies, rather than to conduct their operations in the most effective manner.
The correspondence with Messrs. Fraser, Trenholm & Co. relative to the captured silver has been copied and sent to the Secretary of the Navy.
I am, respectully, your obedient servant,
Hon. JOHN SLIDELL,
Paris, France.
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