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In my conversations with English gentlemen, I have found it was in vain to combat their sentiment.

The so-called anti-slavery feeling

seems to have become with them a sentiment akin to patriotism. I've always told them that in the

South, we could rely confidently, that after independence, when our people and theirs became

better acquainted by direct communication, when they saw for themselves the true condition of the

African servitude with us, the film would fall from their eyes, and that in the meantime,

it was not presumptuous to suppose that we knew better than they did what to do in our affairs.

Welcome to Journey Through Time. I'm Sarah Churchwell.

And I'm David, or the jogger. And David, that rather arrogant note was part of a dispatch that was sent from Paris, in fact, at the beginning of January 1864, to J.P. Benjamin, who was then the Secretary of State, to the Confederate States of America.

Yeah, there's a lot going on in that note.

There's a whole lot to unpack there.

Now, the author of that letter was a Confederate commissioner named James Mason,

...