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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: and Henry Adams. But read once again the last paragraph of Beecher's
letter, and note how it corresponds with what Mr. Bigelow says about the
feeling which our Government (for thirty years "in the hands or under the
influence of Southern statesmen") had raised against us by its bad
manners to European governments. This was the harvest sown by shirt
sleeves diplomacy and reaped by Mr. Adams in 1861. Only seven years
before, we had gratuitously offended four countries at once. Three of our
foreign ministers (two of them from the South) had met at Ostend and
later at Aix in the interests of extending slavery, and there, in a joint
manifesto, had ordered Spain to sell us Cuba, or we would take Cuba by
force. One of the three was our minister to Spain. Spain had received him
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