Privilege thinks it has a great interest in this contest, and every morning, with blatant voice, it comes into your streets and curses the American Republic. Privilege has beheld . . . thirty millions of men, happy and prosperous, without emperor, without king, without the surroundings of a court, without nobles, except such as are made by eminence in intellect and virtue, without State bishops and State priests.
—JOHN BRIGHT, BRITISH REFORMER, MARCH 26, 1863
ONE HUNDRED DAYS PASSED BETWEEN THE FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and its implementation on January 1, 1863. During this interim, debate on the American question took place inside government cabinets and parliaments and in the press, cafés, taverns, and union halls across Europe. Initial overseas reactions to Lincoln’s proclamation were often cynical and, predictably, reflected class and political biases. “There they are,” Thomas Carlyle, a favorite among conservatives, remarked at a posh London dinner party, “cutting each other’s throats because one half of them prefer hiring their servants for life, and the other by the hour.” Carlyle’s sarcastic comment conceded more than he realized, for the once murky distinctions between the North and South on the slavery question were about to become emphatically clear in the public mind by the end of 1862.1
The first reactions in the foreign press confirmed Seward’s very worst expectations. The conservative journals were filled with shrieks of alarm over impending servile insurrection and race war, and even liberal newspapers engaged in scurrilous ridicule of Lincoln’s moral pretensions. In early October 1862 Monadnock reported to New York Times readers from London that the proclamation “has satisfied nobody.” Critics vilified Lincoln, saying that, unable to beat the South in war, he now “invokes the aid of the savage negroes, and wishes to excite an insurrection, like that of St. Domingo,” another vivid reference to Haiti’s violent revolution in the 1790s. Just as Seward anticipated, the press even invoked comparisons between Lincoln and Nana Sahib, the murderous leader of India’s Sepoy Rebellion against the British in 1857. “It is a great mistake,” Monadnock concluded, “to suppose England wishes immediate or violent emancipation.”2
To no one’s surprise, the London Times mocked the president’s moral posturing, focusing on the preservation of slavery in nonrebel territory: “Where he has no power Mr. Lincoln will set the negroes free; where he retains power he will consider them as slaves.” The Times warned of the “massacres and utter destruction” certain to attend the coming “servile insurrection” of blacks. Lincoln, it prophesied with lurid imagery, “will appeal to the black blood of the African; he will whisper of the pleasures of spoil and of the gratification of yet fiercer instincts; and when blood begins to flow and shrieks come piercing through the darkness . . . he will rub his hands and think that revenge is sweet.”3
A month after news of the proclamation arrived, Henry Hotze, the Confederate publicist in London, remained smugly satisfied that the proclamation had utterly failed to do anything but expose the Union’s venal hypocrisy. The Federal decree, he assured Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, “has been received by the English press in a manner which leaves nothing to desire.” Most have understood it as a disingenuous bid for European sympathy that has not “the slightest merit of sincerity.” James Mason, the Confederate envoy in London, concurred, reporting in early November that Lincoln’s ploy had badly disappointed “the antislavery party here and met with general contempt and derision.”4
It was true that among the British antislavery movement especially, some were openly disappointed and puzzled by Lincoln’s limited and legalistic emancipation edict. “The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another,” the liberal London Spectator noted, “but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.” To prevent disunion, the liberal champion Richard Cobden charged, the North would “half ruin itself in the process of wholly ruining the South” and achieve victory by enlisting slaves in “one of the most bloody and horrible episodes in history.” These were the views of the Union’s friends.5
Karl Marx was among the few to appreciate the ingenious lack of “idealistic impetus” in Lincoln’s proclamation. “He gives his most important actions always the most commonplace form.” Others claim to be “fighting for an idea,” when it is really about “square feet of land.” Lincoln, in contrast, “sings the bravura aria of his part hesitatively, reluctantly and unwillingly, as though apologising for being compelled by circumstances to ‘to act the lion.’” Even his most impressive proclamations appear intended to look like “routine summonses sent by a lawyer to the lawyer of the opposing party, legal chicaneries.” What Marx saw in Lincoln’s September emancipation decree was “the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union.” It was an achievement that would place this “plebian . . . average person of good will” next to Washington in the history of mankind.6
In Paris news of the emancipation decree met with less criticism and with welcome relief, at least among republicans and liberals. Malakoff reported that just before the news arrived, in early October 1862, Confederate agents and supporters had gathered with John Slidell to hail the long-awaited diplomatic triumph of the South. Rumors had been flashing through the European press that Confederate forces had seized Washington, Lincoln was gravely ill, Lee had advanced north across the Potomac again, and New York City was proclaiming secession. These false reports, which Malakoff suspected of being ginned up by Confederate agents in England, took hold with remarkable speed in this “small and inflammable community, ready to grasp at and magnify every shadow of a hope for their side.” Even after news of the Emancipation Proclamation arrived, some Confederate stalwarts were willing to believe that it would guarantee victory of the opposition peace party in the November 1862 congressional elections.7
The French press, according to the reliably astute assessment of Malakoff, divided along predictable ideological grounds. Conservative imperialist journals denounced the “bloody butchery” that sudden emancipation portended, taking their cue from the London Times. But the liberal press in France saw it as a major breakthrough. Opinion Nationale, a leading republican journal, predicted that Lincoln “has now put himself upon the platform which will secure him the sympathies of all the Liberals of Europe, and render intervention an impossibility.” Siècle, the largest republican journal, applauded the president for “entering at last into the heart of the question” by announcing the end of slavery. The “liberal Press and public unanimously approve of the Proclamation,” and the idea of French intervention in the war found no popular support in Paris, Malakoff reported. Liberal journalists across France now enjoyed “an immense advantage” and were “making good use” of it, he added. Henry Sanford, who was visiting Paris when news of the emancipation policy broke in October, also felt certain that Lincoln had secured the sympathies of European liberals. It “gives now a basis for our friends here to work upon and to appeal to the sympathies of civilized Europe.” It was exactly what friends of the Union had been waiting for: a cause they could fully embrace and promote without apology.8
IF MUCH OF THE INITIAL PRESS REACTION WAS AS CYNICAL AND alarmist as Seward predicted, he had himself largely to blame. For the past year, by way of excusing Union inaction against slavery, he had been instructing his emissaries to warn of the racial strife and economic havoc that emancipation would bring.9
But once the emancipation policy was in place, Seward skillfully played it to full advantage. Whatever doubts foreigners had about Union motives, Seward told his envoys to remind Europeans that Lincoln’s proclamation made intervention tantamount to rescuing American slavery from its doom. Seward advised William Dayton to taunt the French foreign minister by asking, “Are the enlightened and humane nations Great Britain and France to throw their protection over the insurgents now?” “Will they interfere to strike down the arm that so reluctantly but so effectually is raised at last to break the fetters of the slave, and seek to rivet anew the chains which he has sundered?” “Is this to be the climax of the world’s progress in the nineteenth century?” He gave similar instructions to Charles Francis Adams in London, noting that “the interests of humanity have now become identified with the cause of our country,” and it was the rebel Southerners who brought emancipation upon themselves.10
By January 1863 the cynical criticism of Lincoln’s proclamation seemed to be softening, in part because the extravagant predictions of bloody slave uprisings and racial mayhem began to collapse from sheer lack of evidence. If Seward had been correct in anticipating Europe’s worst reactions, Carl Schurz’s prophecy that liberal Europe would embrace the Union’s cause was about to be validated as the new year opened.
It helped that Jefferson Davis issued one of his most draconian decrees in late December 1862 when he raised the black flag of war to the death. Davis singled out General Benjamin Butler, infamous in the South for encouraging runaway slaves and his harsh treatment of civilians in New Orleans, as “an outlaw and common enemy of mankind.” Beast Butler and all commissioned officers serving him were to be executed by hanging immediately upon capture. What shocked the world far more was Davis’s decree that “all Negro slaves captured in arms,” and all white officers leading “armed slaves in insurrection,” would be handed over to the states for execution. Davis’s edict suddenly cast the South, not the North, as the instigator of race war.11
In mid-January 1863 the news reached Europe of Lincoln’s signing the Emancipation Proclamation into law. From Paris Malakoff told New York Times readers that the president’s order “has given an immense advantage to the liberal writers.” Despite some moderation in government censorship, in France public political meetings and demonstrations were still suppressed, and the press strictly monitored, but in the spring of 1863 the liberal opposition found bold new ways to register its support of the Union and Liberty, the popular new slogan of the North. In March nearly seven hundred French Protestant ministers issued a widely published petition addressed to British clergy in which they boldly denounced the Confederacy. “No more revolting spectacle has ever been set before the civilized world than a confederacy, consisting mainly of Protestants, forming . . . a confederacy which lays down as the corner-stone of its constitution the system of slavery.” The French ministers called upon their fellow Protestants in Britain to raise their voices in prayer that soon the “coloured man” in America will be “free and equal with the whites.”12
In Britain where freedom of speech and assembly was protected, hundreds of public meetings were called by emancipation societies, women’s antislavery groups, Radicals, workers, Quakers, and other religious dissenters. Some expressed impatience with the press for not fully covering the popular antipathy in Britain toward the South and slavery, and they began using public meetings as newsworthy devices for getting their message out. What the press did not report, the groups themselves publicized by disseminating pamphlets filled with speeches and resolutions. “Opinion here has changed greatly,” pro-Union spokesman John Bright wrote an American friend. “In almost every town great meetings are being held to pass resolutions in favor of the north, and the advocates of the South are pretty much put down.”13
Lincoln involved himself in public diplomacy by issuing a reply to a meeting that took place in Manchester, England. He thanked the “Workingmen of Manchester” for their heroic support, despite the “sufferings” the war had brought to them, and he neatly framed the common cause they supported. “It has been often and studiously represented that the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe,” he wrote. Then Lincoln commended their “sublime Christian heroism” as, “indeed, an energetic and reinspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom.” Adams saw to it that Lincoln’s reply was ceremoniously hand-delivered to the mayor of Manchester. The letter appeared in British newspapers the next day and quickly made its way into the international press.14
Lincoln also sent to Bright a draft resolution, ready for endorsement by public meetings, that neatly summarized the Union cause. “Whereas, . . . for the first time in the world, an attempt has been made to construct a new Nation, upon the basis of, and with the primary, and fundamental object to maintain, enlarge, and perpetuate human slavery, therefore, Resolved: that no such embryo State should ever be recognized by, or admitted into, the family of Christian and civilized nations; and that all Christian and civilized men everywhere should, by all lawful means, resist to the utmost, such recognition or admission.”15
In London the circumspect Charles Francis Adams found himself pushed into the limelight of public diplomacy that he had always instinctively shunned until now. On January 16, 1863, a deputation from the newly formed London Emancipation Society visited him at the legation to issue resolutions of support for the Union and emancipation. Adams found himself called upon to make some remarks. He was very encouraged, he told them, to see “growing here and in Europe generally, a better conception than has heretofore prevailed of the principles involved in the struggle.” “I had not anticipated the probability of being called to say any thing,” he recorded in his diary late that night, “but as it opened a chance for perhaps putting in a seasonable word, I made use of it at once. May the words so hastily summoned be productive of fair fruit!” The society had its resolutions embossed on velum, and Adams forwarded them to the president; meanwhile, they were published in newspapers everywhere. Fair fruit indeed.16
The London Emancipation Society organized a branch in Manchester to mobilize workers across the north of England. Together they sponsored publication of no fewer than four hundred thousand copies of books and pamphlets and sent scores of speakers, many of them university professors and prominent politicians, to meeting halls across the country to summon British men and women to stand by their American brethren. More important, they denounced those in the British press for their “systematic perversion of facts.”
Emancipation Society speakers also assailed the government for its brazen violation of British neutrality by permitting the construction of warships for the slaveholding republic of the South. In January 1863 intercepted diplomatic correspondence from Richmond brought to light negotiations between British shipbuilders and Confederate agent George Sanders for the construction of six ironclad warships. Behind its pose of neutrality, it seemed evident, Palmerston’s government was secretly in collaboration with the Confederacy. Above all, the speakers and resolutions angrily vilified the Southern rebellion and cast it as the enemy of the freedom-loving British. “The so-called ‘southern chivalry’ is waging war against a free, popular government, with the intention, unblushingly proclaimed, of forming a new confederation, whose chief corner-stone shall be the execrable system of human bondage.”17
In early 1863 the air was filled with news of hundreds of emancipation meetings in all parts of Britain. “Just now I am getting the resolutions of very many public meetings in response to the President’s proclamation,” Adams told his diary in mid-January. “It is quite clear that the current is now setting pretty strongly with us among the body of the people.” Now was the time “to strike the popular heart here,” he told himself, and “to checkmate the movement of the aristocracy.” The legation in London was flooded with notices and invitations that winter and spring, and its bookshelves fairly groaned with copies of the published speeches and resolutions from all parts of Britain and many from the Continent, along with private letters from individuals expressing solidarity with the Union and Liberty. Adams was inundated with requests to speak at or attend meetings, but he hastened to assure Seward, “I have taken no part whatever in promoting these movements, having become well convinced that the smallest suspicion of my agency would do more harm than good.”18
What amazed Adams were the spontaneous displays of support coming from the common people and from the pulpits of dissenting religious leaders. The Reverend Charles Spurgeon, an immensely popular Baptist minister, was in the throes of a sermon before thousands of parishioners at his Metropolitan Tabernacle in South London when he suddenly raised a spontaneous prayer for America. “Now, oh! God, we turn our thoughts across the sea to the dreadful conflict of which we knew not what to say, but now the voice of freedom shows where is right. . . . God bless and strengthen the north! . . . Now that we know their cause, we can but exclaim God speed them.” The most remarkable thing, Adams delighted in telling Seward, was that the audience responded to this with a robust “Amen.”19
Seward replied in early March 1863 by assuring Adams that President Lincoln was moved by the expressions of support from the working people of Britain. And without any hint of repentance for his earlier doubts, he added that the “moral opinion of mankind, now happily awakened to the real nature and character of the contest,” would stand by the United States.20
Whatever reticence liberal England had demonstrated before, a contagious enthusiasm for the Union and Liberty swept across the British Isles in the spring of 1863. John Bright had earlier been tepid in his support of Lincoln’s proclamation, fearing that sudden emancipation would bring catastrophe and that the “remedy for slavery would be almost worse than the disease.” But all that changed by early February 1863 when he stood before his fellow townspeople in Rochdale to give a rousing speech linking the Union to the universal cause of human freedom. The American contest was for more than the emancipation of the South’s slaves, or even those of Cuba and Brazil, he told the cheering crowd. The “question of freedom to men of all races is deeply involved in this great strife in the United States.” Then he quoted from the Richmond Examiner, which had announced, “The experiment of universal liberty has failed. The evils of free society are insufferable,” and “therefore free society must fall and give way to a slave society.” “Shame!” the crowd thundered. These slave owners, buyers, and slave breeders, Bright reminded them, had sent envoys to their country, where “they are met with at elegant tables in London, and are in fast friendship with some of your public men . . . and are here to ask Englishmen—Englishmen with a history for freedom—to join hands with their atrocious conspiracy.”21
Bright, of course, was cleverly coupling the Union cause to his own crusade for democracy in Britain. He saved his most lacerating attack on the British aristocracy for the huge meeting of Trade Unions of London that gathered at St. James Hall on March 26. Karl Marx helped organize the meeting, and he might have taken pleasure in hearing Bright’s assault on the privileged class that each morning “curses the American republic” because they saw in it “thirty millions of men, happy and prosperous, without emperor, without king, without the surroundings of a court, without nobles, except such as are made by eminence in intellect and virtue.” “Do not,” Bright admonished the workers before him, “give the hand of fellowship to the worst foes of freedom that the world has ever seen.”22
Southern sympathizers in Britain did all they could to belittle what the conservative Saturday Review called the “carnival of cant” in celebration of emancipation. “All persons of social and political respectability have held aloof” from the emancipation meetings, Henry Hotze assured Benjamin. The London Times likewise dismissed the meetings as unimpressive crowds of middle- and working-class “nobodies.” “They do not indeed belong to the high and noble class,” Charles Francis Adams wrote to Seward, fairly steaming with indignation, “but they are just those nobodies who formerly forced their most exalted countrymen to denounce the prosecution of the Slave Trade . . . and who at a later period overcame all their resistance to the complete emancipation of the negro slaves in the British dependencies.” If these “nobodies,” Adams went on, “become once fully aroused to a sense of the importance of this struggle as a purely moral question,” all sympathy in Great Britain for the rebellion would end.23
The hundreds of well-publicized demonstrations that rippled across Britain in early 1863 signaled a turn in public sympathy that neither the Palmerston government nor the Tory opposition could safely ignore. Nor could other conservative monarchies on the Continent fail to take notice of the depth and direction of public sentiment in opposition to the Confederacy. By early July 1863 Union military successes at Gettysburg and Vicksburg encouraged Union supporters to think the North might prevail militarily as well as morally. A conversation once dominated by upper-class rejoicings over the failure of the Great Republic, solemn pronouncements of its inevitable dismemberment, and predictions of democracy’s failure was now encountering exuberant voices of hope among those in the middle and working classes who saw the Union’s struggle as their own.24
MEANWHILE, CONFEDERATE SYMPATHIZERS WERE SLOW TO ADMIT the popular success of the Emancipation Proclamation abroad, in large part because they were sorely out of touch with the “nobodies,” as the London Times characterized them, who were turning out for meetings and signing resolutions and petitions. In mid-January 1863 Henry Hotze was still pronouncing the Emancipation Proclamation a stupendous failure and gloating over the futility of Lincoln’s appeal to European antislavery sentiment. “More than I could have accomplished has been done by Mr. Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation,” which appears only to have “awakened the fears of both Government and people.”25
To Hotze’s dismay, however, James Spence, the Confederacy’s English champion, seemed willing to embrace emancipation as the proper cause of the South. In his book The American Union, Spence had intended to confound antislavery sentiment by turning it in favor of the South, instead of trying to correct its errors or deny its strength, as Hotze, De Leon, and others seemed intent on doing. The North’s endemic greed and hypocrisy, Spence predicted, would weld the slaves’ fetters anew and might even lead to the reopening of the African slave trade. When assailed by fanatical abolitionists from the North, he admitted, the South had resolutely defended slavery. But once the South was independent and standing foursquare before the court of world opinion, Spence promised, “emancipation would come gently as an act of conscience.”26
In the fall of 1862 Spence began airing these same views at public meetings and in the press in an effort to deflate British enthusiasm for Lincoln’s emancipation policy. This was hardly the kind of help the Confederacy welcomed at this moment. Henry Hotze, who had earlier gushed about Spence’s genius, began complaining to Judah P. Benjamin in October 1862 that their former champion “has of late rendered the idea of ultimate emancipation unduly conspicuous.” This was no time to apologize for slavery, Hotze admonished. The public mind did not “expect any promises of this kind from us,” and it undermined the entire defense of slavery to accept the premise that it was evil and would end soon. Spence seemed to be bragging that “his moral influence with the Southern people” would persuade them to accept a plan for emancipation. Though he may have been sincere in his “friendship . . . and devotion to our cause,” Hotze warned Benjamin, “I almost dread the direction his friendship and devotion seem about to take.”27
Spence’s problems with the Confederacy went beyond what Hotze referred to as his “philanthropic convictions” about slavery. In fall 1862, as a reward for his assiduous promotion of the Southern cause, and at the recommendation of Hotze and Mason, Spence had been appointed financial agent for the Confederacy in Europe. This sinecure ought to have put Spence in line for handsome remuneration. The Confederacy had devised a plan to finance a substantial loan that would be backed by the sale of Confederate cotton bonds, certificates redeemable in cotton at steeply discounted prices, once the war was over or the blockade was broken. The Confederate cotton bonds promised lucrative rewards to European investors, and thus linked their fortunes to those of the Confederacy.28
Spence came to his new assignment full of high expectations, but these were soon deflated by news that John Slidell had already arranged for the sale of 3 million British pounds sterling worth of cotton bonds with Paris financier Baron Frédéric Emile d’Erlanger, scion of one of the most powerful banking houses on the Continent. Slidell had persuaded Richmond that Erlanger’s prestige in Europe would prove an invaluable political asset to the Confederate cause. Spence thought the terms of the deal favored no one except Erlanger, who profited by generous commissions and discounts. It did nothing to relieve Spence’s suspicions when he learned through the press, in January 1863, that Slidell’s daughter had become romantically involved with Emile d’Erlanger and that agents of the financier were in Rome imploring the pope to annul the marriage to his first wife so he could wed Mademoiselle Slidell.29
Furthermore, in January 1863 several intercepted Confederate dispatches were published in the Northern press, revealing, among other things, that Spence was on the Confederate payroll. His previous pose as the disinterested champion of the Southern cause was ruined. At the same time, his deviant views on slavery and emancipation became the subject of ridicule in the pro-Union press abroad. Confederate officials could neither disown him nor defend him without damaging their cause.30
Meanwhile, Spence’s heresy on emancipation was not playing well back in Richmond. At Hotze’s suggestion, a Confederate edition of American Union was published in early 1863 with an unsigned preface that did its best to explain the author’s unorthodox views on slavery. The Richmond Enquirer applauded Spence’s understanding of the South’s constitutional rights but regretted the “bigotry” evident in the “slime of that British philanthropy” which was “the source of all our woes.” “Here we are paying a man for abusing us as a nation of criminals steeped in moral evil!” the same newspaper bellowed in May 1863. Are we unsure that our “institutions and principles” are “sound and rightful” “until Europe has passed on them?”
Spence continued undeterred in his efforts to reconcile the Southern cause with British antislavery sentiment, and in late 1863 he published a pamphlet in which he proudly proclaimed himself an earnest opponent of slavery. Hotze was thoroughly embarrassed by Spence’s “unnecessarily large concessions to the antislavery prejudice,” and he found it “exceedingly gratifying” when Benjamin finally fired Spence as Confederate financial agent in early 1864. As Benjamin baldly explained it to Spence, no government could justify itself in selecting agents “who entertain sentiments decidedly adverse to an institution which both the government and the people maintain as essential to their well-being.”31
THE HOPES OF SOUTHERN SYMPATHIZERS FOR RECOGNITION HAD not died in Britain, however. In early June 1863 Hotze reported that he was busying himself putting up placards all over London with an image of the Confederacy’s recently adopted second national flag “conjoined to the British national ensign.” He clutched at every signal of popular support among the English, including a subscription drive to memorialize the fallen general “Stonewall” Jackson, which a group of eminent English supporters was promoting. The “death of no foreigner has ever so moved the popular heart,” Hotze assured officials in Richmond. The organization of various “Southern Clubs” in the manufacturing districts also led him to predict that “a people’s movement and a people’s champion in favor of recognition” were taking form. The clubs, in truth, seemed to consist of little more than factory owners and merchants distributing handbills and placards among intimidated workers.32
At the end of June 1863, with news of Robert E. Lee’s army marching northward into Pennsylvania, MP John Arthur Roebuck, a gadfly backbencher, thought the moment for recognition of the South had at last arrived. Roebuck, together with MP William Lindsay, a stalwart of the Southern lobby, hatched a plan to bring the question before Parliament. Earlier that month Roebuck and Lindsay had paid a personal visit to Napoleon III in Paris, who apparently gave them assurances that he would recognize the South if England stood with him. As French forces entered Mexico City to realize the emperor’s Grand Design, Napoleon III was flirting again with taking a bold initiative to recognize the South. Slidell met with him on June 18 and could tell that inside Napoleon III’s vacillating mind, the risk of US intervention in Mexico was being weighed against the advantage of Confederate alliance.33
On June 30 Roebuck stood before Parliament to deliver a lengthy speech that defended Southern slavery, blamed its introduction on the British, decried the prejudice and hypocrisy of the North, and boldly proclaimed Napoleon III’s commitment to recognize the Confederacy. The whole speech met with rude shouts of derision and humiliating outbursts of laughter. John Bright rose from his seat to rebut, and before he sat down he had eviscerated Roebuck and embarrassed the entire Southern lobby. Henry Adams watched with glee from the gallery. As he later described it, John Bright, “with astonishing force, caught and shook and tossed Roebuck, as a big mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned, toothless, bad-tempered Yorkshire terrier.” Even Henry Hotze admitted it was an absolute “farce” and reported to Richmond with unrelieved despair. “The whole armory of sarcasm, denunciation, and worst of all, of ridicule, has been exhausted upon their devoted heads,” he lamented to Benjamin.34
Meanwhile, the Confederate’s own envoy was receiving little more respect than Roebuck in London. Foreign Secretary Earl Russell had kept James Mason at bay for months, answering his pleas for interviews with a diplomatic coolness that Mason and Benjamin came to view as an affront to Southern honor. The howling ridicule of Roebuck’s speech in Parliament, which echoed through the liberal press, pushed Benjamin over the edge.
In early August 1863 the exasperated secretary of state shut down the Confederacy’s mission to Britain. He informed Mason that the “Government of her Majesty has determined to decline” our offer of “friendly relation.” “Under these circumstances, your continued residence in London is neither conducive to the interests nor consistent with the dignity of this Government.”
Then, after waiting for some weeks with no apology forthcoming from London, Benjamin dropped the other shoe: he expelled all British consuls residing at Southern cities. They had all been accredited solely by the US government, since Britain refused to recognize Confederate sovereignty, and they had continued at their Southern posts, acting as unofficial liaisons between Britain and the rebel government. But if Britain did not recognize the Confederacy, Benjamin reasoned, its agents had no business being there. King Cotton, having withdrawn from Her Majesty’s court, now tossed her emissaries out of his realm.35
For nearly a year Confederate politicians in Richmond had been urging the recall of all Confederate envoys in Europe. Jefferson Davis complained that Southern commissioners “now waiting in servants’ halls and on the back stairs” were being dishonored. In a widely published speech, William G. Swann of Tennessee also decried the humiliation of Southern envoys abroad. “If these foreign powers will not recognize our nationality, shall we recognize theirs?” “Our independence is to be of our own making and is to be in our keeping,” Swann argued. “We have no friends in this world.”
In April 1863 Swann had sponsored a joint resolution to recall Mason from Britain but narrowly failed to get the required two-thirds majority. That spring the Confederate Congress had refused to approve Davis’s appointment of L. Q. C. Lamar as envoy to Russia. A “deep-seated feeling of irritation at what is considered to be unjust and unfair conduct of neutral powers toward this Confederacy prevails among our people,” Benjamin explained to Lamar. From Paris Edwin De Leon urged the general recall of Confederate envoys, advising that the money to sustain their missions abroad would be better spent on weapons.
But Benjamin was not going that far. By September 1863 he was willing to show Britain he was fed up, but he had no intention of withdrawing from Paris. French consuls in the Confederacy were welcome to stay, and Benjamin instructed Slidell to make this preferential treatment crystal clear in Paris. France was now the Confederacy’s last best hope.36
AFTER NEWS OF GETTYSBURG AND VICKSBURG ARRIVED IN JULY 1863, even Slidell was losing confidence in the Confederacy’s Latin strategy. “The time has now arrived,” he wrote Mason on July 17, 1863, “when it is of comparatively little importance what Queen or Emperor may say or think about us.” The South might have to win its independence without help from Europe. “A plague, I say, on both your houses.”37
Whatever the failings of his mission, Slidell was still enjoying the high life of Parisian society and his affiliation with the Erlanger financial fortune. He was well received at court and was as determined as ever in his efforts to curry favor with Napoleon III. While vacationing at the emperor’s seaside resort in Biarritz in September 1863, Slidell seemed to take cruel pleasure in gloating about his triumphs at court to Mason, who was now sulking in Paris. “My family and I have been twice to the receptions of the Empress,” he wanted Mason to know. “She sympathises most warmly with our cause and so expresses herself without any reserve. I mention these facts because the Empress is supposed, I believe with truth, to exercise considerable influence in public affairs. . . . I forgot to mention that the Emperor at the second reception of the Empress was present—he came to me and shook hands and conversed very cordially for several minutes.”38
Slidell was still shaking hands with royalty, but he was of little help to other Confederate envoys abroad. Indeed, the jealousy and discord that permeated the Confederate diplomatic corps had proven a crippling disadvantage. Slidell thought De Leon had done nothing to advance the cause despite his huge slush fund and vaunted press experience. It had not helped that Slidell discovered that during his Atlantic crossing, De Leon had opened sealed letters to Slidell inside the diplomatic pouch Benjamin had entrusted to him. Slidell kept his contact with De Leon to the very minimum and did not share intelligence from his mole, Pierre Cintrat, inside the Quai d’Orsay.
De Leon, in turn, denounced Slidell as an arrogant, self-indulgent, old fool who was living high in Paris and making lucrative alliances with the likes of Baron Erlanger while his country was bleeding to death at home. In an unctuous, self-serving letter to Jefferson Davis in November 1863, De Leon dealt several oblique blows against Slidell, Benjamin, and all those who had failed to appreciate his talents. “Military ability of the highest order our revolution has produced; but of diplomatic talent it has been most singularly barren.” “The old men of the old regime,” he went on to tell Davis, “like the Bourbon, seem ‘to have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.’” “I may seem to speak bitterly,” he waded deeper, “but I see on this side so much pitiful self-seeking and worthless greed in the swarm of speculators and blockade breakers and swaggering shufflers from danger, who call themselves Confederates.”39
De Leon’s resentment was compounded by his own frustrations with the French, and he saved his harshest words for them. The French, he groused to Jefferson Davis, “are a far more mercenary race than the English, and we must buy golden opinions from them if at all.” All France wanted was money, he sniffed indignantly. This from an agent who had showered huge sums of money on French journalists and publishers and bragged about the success of his bought opinions.40
It was most unfortunate for De Leon’s diplomatic career that several of his candid letters were intercepted by the Union navy. In November 1863 they appeared in the New York Times and the Daily Tribune. The Northern press, naturally, had a field day ridiculing De Leon and celebrating the failings of the rebel mission abroad. Benjamin seized the opportunity to rid himself of this meddlesome, self-aggrandizing rival for the president’s confidence. He wrote to De Leon in early December 1863, expressing his “painful surprise” upon reading the letters, and summarily fired him.41
De Leon, for his part, was marvelously indignant in his reply. “I cheerfully accept the withdrawal of a commission I have never exhibited, of a title I have never used, and of a salary which I have never accepted.” He was now free, he went on, to advance on his own the Southern cause, “to which the better part of my life has been devoted,” adding pointedly that his devotion to the cause had commenced “some years before you took an active interest in the Southern Question.”42
Slidell was thrilled to learn of De Leon’s demise. He considered having Benjamin’s dismissal letter published in Paris journals, supposedly to assuage French public opinion, but it was obviously to further disgrace De Leon. De Leon would stay on in Europe, operating on his own authority as an unaccredited agent and after the war published a self-serving account of his exploits to save the South from the foibles of the “old men of the old regime” that led it to defeat abroad.43
BY THE END OF 1863, WHATEVER PERILS LAY AHEAD IN THE DIPLOMATIC intrigues of the Great Powers, in the fortunes of arms, or in the political challenge Lincoln faced in the election of 1864, the North had successfully aligned the causes of Union and Liberty. It had also effectively polarized the American question in the public mind abroad into one of slavery against freedom and linked that, in turn, to the trial of democracy. Lincoln’s agonizing decision to embrace emancipation would also force the South to reckon with its own dilemma over slavery.