On the 30th of June 1859, the consulate of the United States was removed from Shimoda to Kanagawa, where the American flag was raised at the consulate July 1st. The Legation of the United States was established in Yedo July 7, 1859. Amid dense crowds of people, and a party of twenty-three[55] Americans, Mr. Harris was escorted to his quarters in a temple. The regent Ii carried on affairs in Yedo with a high hand, not only signing treaties without the Mikado’s assent, but by imprisoning, exiling, and ordering to decapitation at the blood-pit, his political opposers. Among those who committed _hara-kiri_ or suffered death, were Yoshida Shoin, and Hashimoto Sanai. The daimiōs of Mito, Owari, and Echizen,[56] were ordered to resign in favor of their sons and go into private life. “All classes now held their breath and looked on in silent affright.” On the 13th of February 1860, the embassy, consisting of seventy-one persons left Yokohama in the _Powhatan_ to the United States, arriving in Washington May 14, 1860. The English copy of the Perry treaty had been burned in Yedo in 1858, and one of their objects was to obtain a fresh transcript. The writer’s first sight and impression of the Japanese was obtained, when these cultivated and dignified strangers visited Philadelphia, where they received the startling news of the assassination in Yedo, March 23d, of their chief Ii, by Mito _rō-nins_. The signing of treaties without the Mikado’s consent was an act of political suicide on the part of the Yedo government. Not only did “the swaggering prime minister” Ii, become at once the victim of assassin’s swords, but all over the country fanatical patriots, cutting the cord of loyalty to feudal lords, became “wave-men” or _rō-nin_. They raised the cry, “Honor the Mikado, and expel the barbarian.” Then began that series of acts of violence—the murder of foreigners and the burning of legations, which foreigners then found so hard to understand, but which is now seen to be a logical sequence of preceding events. These amateur assassins and incendiaries were but zealous patriots who hoped to deal a death-blow at the Yedo usurpation by embroiling it in war with foreigners. More than one officer prominent in the Meiji era has boasted[57] of his part in the plots and alarms which preceded the fall of the dual system and the reinstatement of the Mikado’s supremacy. To this the writer can bear witness.