On the 10th of February 1882, Mr.
Bancroft Davis, the Assistant-Secretary of State, instructed the American Minister at London to take action concerning one such case, and to report upon it.

The Minister not moving more rapidly than he had been accustomed to do under Mr.Blaine, Mr.Davis grew impatient, and on the 2d of March 1882 (being the anniversary of the adoption of the Coercion Act in England) the American Secretary of State cabled to the Minister in London significantly enough, "Use all diligence in regard to the late cases, especially of Hart and M'Sweeney, and report by cable." Mr.Lowell replied the next day, giving the views in regard to Hart of the American Vice-Consul, and of the British Inspector of Police at Queenstown, and adding an expression of his own opinion that neither Hart nor M'Sweeney was "more innocent than the majority of those under arrest." This was an unfortunate despatch.

It roused the American Secretary of State into responding instantly by cable in the following explicit and emphatic terms: "Referring to the cases of O'Connor, Hart, M'Sweeney, M'Enery, and D'Alton, American citizens imprisoned in Ireland, say to Lord Granville that, without discussing whether the provisions of the Force Act can be applied to American citizens, the President hopes that the Lord-Lieutenant will be instructed to exercise the powers intrusted to him by the first section to order early trials in these and all other cases in which Americans may be arrested." There was no mistaking the tone of this despatch.

It was instantly transmitted to the British Foreign Secretary, who replied the same day that "the matter would receive the immediate attention of Her Majesty's Government." The reference made to the Coercion Act by Mr.Frelinghuysen touched a plain and precise provision, that persons detained under the Act "should not be discharged or tried by any court without the direction of the Lord-Lieutenant." Had the Coercion Act received from Mr.Blaine in March 1881 the attention bestowed upon it in March 1882 by Mr.
Frelinghuysen, this provision might have been used to obviate the dangerous accumulation of injustice to individuals, and of international irritation, resulting from the application to possibly innocent foreign citizens in Ireland of the despotic powers conferred by that Act upon Mr.Gladstone's Government, powers as nearly as possible analogous with those which Mr.Gladstone himself, years before, had denounced in unmeasured terms when they were claimed and exercised by the Government of Naples in dealing with its own subjects.
After the consideration by Her Majesty's Government of this despatch of the United States Government, it is understood in America that Mr.
Forster, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, was invited to communicate with the Lord-Lieutenant, and request him to exercise his discretion in the sense desired, and that Mr.Forster positively refused to do this.
How this may be I do not pretend to say.

But as no satisfactory reply was made to the American despatch, and as public feeling in the United States grew daily more and more determined that a stop should be put to the unexplained arrest and the indefinite detention of American citizens in Ireland, the American Secretary of State made up his mind towards the end of the month of March to repeat his despatch of March 3d in a more terse and peremptory form.