Roswellington That Ends Wellington

The climax of Chapter 1 Part 6, as the Washington Cabinet vote to reject the British demands, is Lincoln reading an excerpt from Wellington's letters. Given his background as a lawyer, it is perhaps not surprising that Lincoln cut out everything nice that Wellington said about the British:

“I confess that I think you have no right from the state of the war to demand any concession of territory from America. Considering everything, it is my opinion that the war has been a most successful one, and highly honourable to the British arms; but from particular circumstances, such as the want of the naval superiority on the Lakes, you have not been able to carry it into the enemy's territory, notwithstanding your military success and now undoubted military superiority, and have not even cleared your own territory of the enemy on the point of attack. You cannot then, on any principle of equality in negotiation, claim a cession of territory excepting in exchange for other advantages which you have in your power. I put out of question the possession taken by Sir John Sherbrooke between the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Bay. It is evidently only temporary, and till a larger force will drive away the few companies there; and an officer might as well claim the sovereignty of the ground on which his piquets stand, or over which his patrols pass. Then if this reasoning be true, why stipulate for the uti possidetis? You can get no territory; indeed the state of your military operations, however creditable, does not entitle you to demand any; and you only afford the Americans a popular and creditable ground which, I believe, their government are looking for, not to break off the negotiations, but to avoid to make peace. If you had territory, as I hope you soon will have New Orleans, I should prefer to insist upon the cession of that province as a separate article than upon the uti possidetis as a principle of negotiation.”

What is more surprising is that Lincoln is able to read the extract at all. It is supposedly provided to him by General Mansfield via Major-General Wool: however, the meeting takes place on 27 December 1861, and volume 9 of Wellington's Supplementary Despatches (which contains the quotation) wasn't published in London until June 1862. The Library of Congress did hold the 'Memoirs and Correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh' in which the quotation appears, but it seems unlikely that Wool would have read it. Nor is it likely that Wool happened across the quotation in a newspaper: between 1840 and 1862 it appeared three times, all in 1853. In that year Wool was administering the Department of the East from Troy, New York, but the papers which printed the quotation were in Washington and Richmond. Unfortunately, this appears to be the author forcing his characters to act as a mouthpiece for his own prejudices, instead of attempting to let them speak for themselves.