December 2. more so now that the Presidential leap-year approached to agitate the wrongs of Hungary. Upon that question the President, in his message, blended that happy mixture of friendship and prudence which befitted the case. In one passage he promised a rigid adherence to the policy of neutrality, of friendly relations with all nations and entangling alliances with none. But in another he said that the deep interest which we feel in the spread of liberal principles and the sympathy with which we witness every struggle against oppression "forbid that we should be indifferent to a case in which the strong arm of a foreign power is invoked to stifle public sentiment and repress the spirit of freedom in any country."* It did not take long for Congress to give Louis Kossuth in the name of the people of the United States December. a cordial welcome, in due form, to the capital and the country. Shortly before Christmas did the liberator bend his course to the national city, in recognition of this courtesy, breaking his journey at Philadelphia, where a public reception honored him at old Independence Hall. When he reached the railroad station at Washington, a committee of the Senate accosted him; and on the last day of the year, accompanied by Senator Seward, the hero called by prearrangement at the White House, where Secretary Webster presented him in form to the President. Amiable and graceful in manners, intellectual in discourse, and of polite demeanor, Kossuth, enthusiast though he was on the theme which most engrossed him, sustained well his position. President Fillmore received him with great personal respect and kindness, but with becoming reserve; and being complimented upon the sympathetic strain of his late message he took care to reply that the national policy on subjects like that referred to had been long established. ‡ On the 7th of January, the holiday recess being over, * President's message, December 2, 1851. 1852. NON-INTERVENTION DEBATED. 1852, 235 the Hungarian visited both Houses of Congress by formal invitation, and attended in the evening January. a public banquet given in his honor. The freedom of this latter feast loosened the tongues of some statesmen, who vied to say the popular thing. The Hulsemann letter, of which we shall presently speak, was what Webster stood upon, and he expressed a wish that Hungary might estab lish her independence. Free from all official constraint, the impulsive Cass went farther, and declared point-blank in a speech that the United States ought to interpose and prevent Russia from interfering against Hungarian independence. Douglas, an outsider also, and the cleverest presidential angler of the three, while concurring with his fellow-senator, added that he would not join Great Britain in any protest of the kind until that kingdom did justice. to Ireland. January Congress, in the meantime, and more especially its rhetorical branch, the Senate, had plunged into that same embarrassing topic of expostulatory intervention; and long after Kossuth had left this cerebral city of the Union, so cordial in its hospitality, and while he progressed westward, southward, and at length April. through New England and the northeast, lionized and drawing large crowds on the way, like some advance courier of the electoral menagerie of this year, whose influence was disturbing, the debate was prolonged among these marble pillars as to how far our government might interfere effectively in the political struggles of Europe without violating its cherished principles or getting drawn. into danger. A discussion, at first spirited, gradually dragged and grew tedious, and at last became extinct by postponement. Resolutions offered by Cass, Seward, and others, which proposed a protest against Russian intervention, became mingled in some way with others for exhorting great Britain to release her Irish prisoners of state, one of those last, Thomas F. Meagher, who had escaped from Van Dieman's Land, arriving at New York in time to dispute summer honors with the Magyar. Such a turn of events necessarily disconcerted those plans of Kossuth which looked to a joint remonstrance by England and America against his country's oppressors. Bearing up well his dignity through all this fickle flood of popularity, the great exile departed for the British coast in midsummer, dismissed from our people's attention with no unkinder thought than that this splendid orator was something of a political visionary, a bankrupt revolutionist, in fact, like so many others of those stranded Europeans whose opportune day was gone. In close connection with this Hungarian visit was sprung a controversy with the Austrian minister which drew from Webster a despatch renowned as the "Hulsemann letter." In June, 1849, while the issue of the Kossuth 1849-51. outbreak was still doubtful, President Taylor had dispatched to Vienna a special agent, who was to watch the progress of that movement, with a view of recognizing the independence of Hungary should a government de facto be established. The overthrow of the revolutionists of course forbade their recognition, and our agent's report was unfavorable. But when in the following spring the secret instructions of that mission were revealed in a Presidential message and made public, Austria showed resentment. Hulsemann, the Austrian minister at Washington, made a formal remonstrance under the instruc 1850, tions of his government. The despatch came into September. Webster's hands just after he had succeeded Clayton in the portfolio of State after the death of President Taylor. Its language was severe and couched in no civil strain. The reply of our omnipotent Secretary quite demolished the remonstrant; and in a long and masterly despatch, enriched by historical allusion, those permanent principles were vindicated which the United States chose to act upon in recognizing new governments, born of successful revolution. This "Hulsemann letter," the only one, perhaps, which signalized Webster's recall to a position where diplomatic skill might in these years scour in * A. Dudley Mann. 1852. THE HULSEMANN LETTER. 237 vain for glory, stirred the depths of American pride, as its author intended it should, at a time when sympathy with Kossuth was strongest, by boldly enunciating the grounds. of American policy, and letting the people of Europe see how great a nation we were.* For the moment it looked as if a quarrel were on our hands with Austria; but the clouds passed off, and no one seemed better satisfied, as time went on, than Hulsemann himself, whose encounter with an adversary that took such pains to confute made him a celebrity of the day. Faithful to his own instructions, this chevalier returned to the charge after Webster's speech at the Kossuth banquet; † but the offence was easily smoothed over, and Austria certainly had no cause for anger with the final issue of Kossuth's tour. The times abroad were surely not auspicious for popular revolution. With all the glory of her unexampled six months' exhibition, which brought all nations 1852. 1851. of the earth together in peaceful rivalry, Great Britain gained little that year for universal peace. Her own discontented subjects were emigrating in vast numbers, as her latest census showed, and of turbulent Ireland alone the population, through famine and removal, had fallen back. to its point of twenty years before. In France, this very year, the sacred Republican cause was a second time foully betrayed by the Bonapartes; and Louis, the nephew, after successive intrigues to frustrate the law and the will of the representative assembly, which forbade his re-election as President, prolonged his authority by the December. bayonet and a well-planned military usurpation. France, gagged and bound, was put on the high road once more to dazzling imperialism. In Austria, under Metternich's counsel, the Emperor returned to more autocratic rule. A German monarch was intent on suppressing "anarchy and demagogism;" Italy and Spain shut out *See 2 Curtis's Webster, c. 37 In preparing this famous despatch, Webster amplified and extended the argument upon original drafts which were furnished him by his friend Edward Everett, and by Hunter of the State department Ib. ↑ Ib; Diplomatic archives, 1852. the light of liberal doctrines; Russia's secret police ferretted out many conspiracies. Rives, our minister 1852. at Paris, made censure in the despatches he wrote home of the methods by which Louis Napoleon made himself despot of France in violation of his vows to the Republic. When the French minister at Washington complained of these despatches as unwarrantable, an interference with the concerns which belonged to his government, our Secretary disavowed all disrespectful imputation, and requested Rives to make in Paris a like disavowal. This was not in the lofty tone of the Hulsemann letter; and Rives, pointing out the comparison, refused to retract.* The long session of Congress, with its copious discussion 1852, and indefinite purpose, came to an end on the 31st August 31 of August. The squander of the public territory was no novelty while parties catered for popularity in a Presidential year. A wholesale donation bill of this sort which passed the House in favor of the several States failed in the Senate. But an entering wedge for private enterprises at the West was driven by an act which gave to Missouri a right of way and a tract of the public lands to aid in building railroads.† Yielding still farther to the pressure of the railway lobby which had begun in earnest, Congress voted a general right of way through the public lands. Aid was given to construct a ship canal around Sault Ste. Marie. Large appropriations were made for the improvement of rivers and harbors; subsidies were voted. to ocean steamers; and, perhaps, the most salutary act of the session provided for the inspection of steamboat boilers and the better security of passengers.§ It was in vain that Fillmore tried to bring about some changes in the tariff; for though courteous enough to him, this was not his Congress, nor a Whig Congress. While Democrats inclined to criticise the President's continental policy as tame and complaisant to British * Diplomatic Correspondence, 1852. Act August 4, 1852, c. 80. |