THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR 219 



tively laid at Britain s door the responsibility 

 for all the loss and humiliation due to these 

 proceedings. Nor did the Lincoln government 

 fail to make an adequate and proper appeal to 

 the British ministry for a more rigorous and 

 efficient enforcement of its own laws touching 

 such matters. Charles Francis Adams had a 

 task more delicate and exacting than that of 

 either his father or his grandfather at the court 

 of Saint James s, and the perfect success with 

 which he performed it has been recognized in 

 full by his adversaries. He brought Earl Rus 

 sell to realize that the Alabama should not be 

 permitted to sail from Liverpool, though the 

 earl s order to detain her arrived too late to 

 serve its purpose. A year later, when a far 

 more serious menace to the Northern cause was 

 prepared by the clever Confederate agents in 

 England, and two great ironclads were nearing 

 completion by the same firm that built the 

 Alabama, Adams went to the verge of a hostile 

 rupture before he persuaded Russell to seize 

 the vessels. The detention of the ironclads 

 was a sickening blow to the hopes of the South. 

 In the North it caused great elation, but it 

 served at the same time to evoke the truculent 

 vow that when the Union should have been 



