THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
that the surrender of the captives was only a vindication of the principles of international law concerning the treatment of neutral vessels by belligerents, which this Republic had always maintained, especially against British pretensions. But although an actual conflict had been avoided, a feeling was left behind between the two nations which may well be characterized as “ugly”—a feeling of sore disappointment among many people in England that the “impudence” of an American ship in overhauling a British mail-steamer went “unpunished,” and a feeling of bitter resentment among many people in this country because England had brutally “bullied” us in the hour of our distress and we were obliged to submit to her “insolence.”
I had frequent conversations with Senator Sumner at that period. His personality attracted me greatly. He was strikingly unlike all the public men surrounding him—just as Lincoln was, but in the opposite sense. Lincoln, risen from the lowest social layer, the class of the Southern poor whites, and lifted from the roughest plebeian surroundings by high moral instinct and intellectual ability to a marvelous level of nobility and statesmanlike leadership, the ideal growth of the American soil, to whom the democratic principle was a simple law of nature, and Sumner, a born Puritan character, an aristocrat by instinct and culture, a democrat by study and reflection, a revolutionary power by the dogmatic intensity of his determination to impose his principles upon the world at any cost. There were many who thought that these two men, being so essentially different, could not possibly work together. But on the whole they did, and they were able to do so, because, however great the divergence of their views on some points, they believed in one another's sincerity. Sumner was a doctrinaire by character—an enlightened doctrinaire, yet an unbending and uncompro-
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