Meanwhile, Seward drafted his own response to the British government, which Lincoln promised to examine carefully in order to make sure that it contained no offensive language like that in the secretary’s May dispatch to Charles Francis Adams. Seward endorsed the release of Mason and Slidell, even though he maintained that those men were in fact contraband of war. Wilkes had acted without instructions, Seward explained, and though justified in seizing the Confederate emissaries, the captain should have taken the Trent to a prize court for adjudication. Such a step would have been in keeping with the traditional American view of neutral rights, a view that the British had earlier rejected, leading to the War of 1812. But because he voluntarily let the Trent sail away, Wilkes vitiated America’s case for holding Mason and Slidell. Seward gratuitously added that if the survival of the Union had hung in the balance, the prisoners would not have been yielded, and that he was glad the British were finally agreeing with the American position on impressment.
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃