of
foreign statesmen, who had believed too readily, as did their officers
on the spot, that the barrier was not to be passed--that the Queen City
of the Confederacy was impregnable to attack from the sea. Whatever may
have been the actual purposes of that mysterious and undecided
personage, Napoleon III, the effect of military events, whether on sea
or shore, upon the question of interference by foreign powers is
sufficiently evident from the private correspondence which, a few months
after New Orleans, passed between Lords Palmerston and Russell, then the
leading members of the British Cabinet.[R] Fortunately for the cause of
the United States, France and Great Britain were not of a mind to
combine their action at the propitious moment; and the moral effect of
the victory at New Orleans was like a cold plunge bath to the French
emperor, at the time when he was hesitating whether to act alone. It
produced upon him even more impression than upon the British Government;
because his ambitions for French control and for the extension of the
Latin races on the American continent were especially directed toward
Louisiana, the former colony of France, and toward its neighbors, Texas
and Mexico.

[Footnote R: See Walpole's _Life of Lord John Russell_,
vol. ii, pp. 349-351.]

The sympathies, however, of the classes from whom were chiefly drawn the
cabinets of the two great naval States were overwhelmingly with the
South; and the expressions alike of the emperor and of his principal
confidants at this time were designedly allowed to transpire, both to
the Southern commissioners and to the British Government. On the very
day that Porter's mortar schooners opened on Fort Jackson, Louis
Napoleon unbosomed himself to a member of the British Parliament, who
visited him as an avowed partisan of the Confederate cause. He said that
while he desired to preserve a strict neutrality, he could not consent
that his people should continue to suffer from the acts of the Federal
Government. He thought the best course would be to make a friendly
appeal to it, either alone or concurrently with England, to open the
ports; but to accompany the appeal with a proper demonstration of force
upon our coasts, and, should the appeal seem likely to be ineffectual,
to back it by a declaration of his purpose not to respect the blockade.
The taking of New Orleans, which he did not then anticipate, might
render it inexpedient to act; that he would not de