Young as I was, my interest in the coming struggle was deeply aroused. From the position I occupied its significance was brought home to me with the absorbing interest of a factor in my career. My own fortunes and those of my nearest friends seemed at their outset to be bound up in a piece of history that promised to leave its mark upon the world. Nowhere indeed out of America was the secession of the Southern States more keenly watched or canvassed than in Liverpool offices and upon the Exchange of the city, which American trade had begotten and nursed; and the particular aspect of the impending war was most calculated to fill the imagination of youngsters like myself, who were awakening from the dreams of boyhood to the excitements of real life. It will be remembered that, as soon as war was seen to be inevitable, President Lincoln sanctioned the heroic measure of attempting to choke secession by closing every orifice through which supplies could be drawn, and in the middle of April 1861 rebellion was turned into civil war by his declaring the whole of the Southern ports in a state of blockade. One of the immediate results of this act of President Lincoln was the prompt acknowledgment of the South as belligerents by England and France. Yet the Federal States persisted in maintaining that the Confederates were rebels, and that whosoever ventured to recognise them as belligerents must be regarded as friends of rebels and no friends of the North. They ignored the fact that their interference with neutral trade, by this declaration of blockade, was a virtual concession of belligerency to the South. A declaration of blockade presupposes a state of war and not mere rebellion, and the claim by the Federals of a right to seize neutral vessels attempting to break a blockade was one which can be exercised only by a belligerent; exercised by any one else it is mere piracy.