At the present moment it is of interest to get acquainted in somie 
measure with the leading figures in the Trent drama. On one side 
stands the active hero, Captain Wilkes, the commander of the San 
Jacinto; on the other, the passive heroes, J. M. Mason and John 
Slidell. Captain Charles Wilkes is a direct descendant of the 
brother of the celebrated English demagogue, [John] Wilkes, who 
threatened for a moment to shake the throne of George III.'% 
The struggle with the North American colonies saved the 
Hanoverian dynasty at that time from the outbreak of an English 
revolution, symptoms of which were alike perceptible in the cry of 
a Wilkes and the letters of a Junius. Captain Wilkes, born in New 
York in 1798, forty-three years in the service of the American 
navy, commanded the squadron that from 1838 to 1842 explored 
the North and South Pacific Ocean by order of the Union 
government. He has published a report on this expedition in five 
volumes.* He is also the author of a work on Western America, 
which contains some valuable information on California and the 
Oregon district.” It is now certain that Wilkes improvised his coup 
de main independently and without instructions from Wash- 
ington. 

The two intercepted commissioners of the Southern Confedera- 
cy—Messrs. Mason and Slidell—form a contrast in every respect. 
Mason, born in 1798, is descended from one of those old 

aristocratic families of Virginia that fled from England after the 
Royalists had been defeated at the battle of Worcester." The 
grandsire of our hero* belongs to the circle of men who, along 
with Washington, Jefferson, etc.. are designated by the Americans 
as ‘the revolutionary fathers”.” John Slidell is neither, like Mason, 
of aristocratic lineage, nor, like his colleague, a slaveholder by 
birth. His native town is New York, where his grandfather and his 
father lived as honest tallow-chandlers.© Mason, after he had 
occupied himself for some years with the study of law, stepped on 
the political stage. He figured repeatedly since 1826 as a member 
of the House of Representatives of Virginia; made his appearance 
in 1837 in the House of Representatives of the American Congress 
for a session; but his importance only dates from 1847. In that 
year Virginia elected him to the American Senate, in which he 
held his seat until the spring of 1861. Slidell, who is now 
sixty-eight years old, was obliged to leave New York as a young 
man in consequence of adultery and a duel, in short, of a scandal. 
He betook himself to New Orleans, where he lived first by 
gambling, later by practising law. Having become first a member 
of the legislature of Louisiana, he soon made his way to the House 
of Representatives and finally to the Senate of the American 
Congress. As a director of election rogueries during the presiden- 
tial election of 1844 and, later, as a participant in a swindle in state 
lands, he had even somewhat shocked the sort of morals that 
prevail in Louisiana. 

Mason inherited influence; Slidell acquired it. The two men 
found and supplemented each other in the American Senate, the 
bulwark of the slave oligarchy. In accordance with the American 
Constitution, the Senate elects a special Committee of Foreign 
Relations, which plays about the same role as the Privy Council*'”° 
formerly played in England, before the so-called Cabinet, a 
quantity theoretically unknown to the English Constitution, 
usurped the Privy Council’s functions. Mason was for a long time 
chairman of this committee; Slidell, a prominent member of it. 

Mason, firmly convinced that every Virginian is a demi-god and 
every Yankee a plebeian rascal, never sought to conceal his 
contempt for his Northern colleagues. Haughty, overbearing, 

insolent, he knew how to knit his brows in a somber, Zeus-like 
frown and in fact transported to the Senate the manners native to 
the plantation. A fanatical eulogist of slavery, a shameless 
slanderer of the North and particularly of the Northern working 
class, a blusterer against England, Mason wearied the Senate with 
the prolix importunity of a persistent flow of speech that vainly 
sought to hide its complete vacuity under a hollow pomp. As a 
sort of demonstration, he went around in recent years in Virginian 
home-made gray linen; but, and this is characteristic of the man, 
the gray coat was adorned with loud buttons, all of which came 
from a state of New England, from Connecticut. 

Whilst Mason played the Jupiter Tonans* of the slave oligarchy 
on the proscenium, Slidell worked behind the scenes. With a rare 
talent for intrigue, tireless perseverance and an unscrupulous lack 
of regard, but at the same time wary, covert, never strutting, but 
always insinuating himself, Slidell was the soul of the Southern 
conspiratorial conclave. One may judge the man’s repute from the 
fact that when in 1845, shortly before the outbreak of war with 
Mexico, he was sent there as Ambassador, Mexico refused to treat 
with such an individual.'?! Slidell’s intrigues made Polk President. 
He was one of the most pernicious counsellors of President Pierce 
and the evil genius of Buchanan’s administration. The two, Mason 
and Slidell, were the chief sponsors of the law on runaway 
slaves '”?; they brought about the bloodbath in Kansas,’ and both 
were wirepullers for the measures whereby Buchanan’s administ- 
ration smuggled all the means to secession into the hands of the 
South, whilst it left the North defenceless.!*4 

As early as 1855 Mason declared on a public occasion in South 
Carolina that “for the South only one way lies open—immediate, 
absolute and eternal separation”. In March 1861 he declared in 
the Senate that “he owed the Union government no allegiance” ,“ 
but retained his seat in the Senate and continued to draw his 
senatorial salary as long as the safety of his person allowed—a spy 
in the supreme council of the nation and a fraudulent parasite on 
the public exchequer. 

Mason’s great-grandmother was a daughter of the celebrated Sir 
William Temple. He is therefore a distant relative of Palmerston. 

October 14, 1856.— Ed. 

Tribune, No. 6202, March 12, 1861. In quoting, Marx uses the English word 

Mason and Slidell appeared to the people of the North not merely 
as their political opponents, but as their personal enemies. Hence the 
general jubilation over their capture, which in its first days even 
overwhelmed regard for the danger threatening from England. 

December 8, 1861