Seven states secede—“Slaveownia”—Seward rises to the occasion—Bluster—Adams is offended—William Howard Russell at the White House—The April Fool’s Day memorandum—The Confederate cabinet—The fall of Fort Sumter—Lincoln declares a blockade—Southern confidence
“It seems impossible that the South can be mad enough to dissolve the Union,” Lyons wrote to the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, after Lincoln was elected president on November 6, 1860. Yet South Carolina had already announced it would hold a special convention to decide whether to secede, and the news sent the price of shares tumbling on the New York Stock Exchange. The financial markets suffered another blow when a merchant vessel departed from Charleston, South Carolina, on November 17 with only the state flag flying from its mast. President Buchanan pleaded in vain with his proslavery cabinet to agree on a united response.
Lord Lyons cursed the little pig from San Juan Island and its penchant for Farmer Cutlar’s potatoes. He wished he had been able to settle San Juan’s boundary dispute during the Prince of Wales’s visit. With the secession crisis gathering momentum and Buchanan growing increasingly feeble in the face of his colleagues, he doubted that the issue could be resolved before Lincoln’s inauguration. Lyons suspected that the Republicans would be far less inclined than the Democrats to agree on a compromise. He had noticed that the Republican Party as a whole—not just Seward—tended to pander to anti-British sentiment as a way of showing that its abolition platform was independent of foreign opinion. It was important not to give the Republicans a reason to complain, Lyons wrote to Lord John Russell, and he suggested that the government refrain from making any public statements about the current political turmoil in America.
Lord John Russell received Lyons’s letter on December 18, the same day the South Carolina convention began its debate on the question of secession. The British cabinet had become increasingly concerned by the South’s reaction to Lincoln’s victory. Palmerston assumed it meant a second American Revolution was at hand. “There is no saying what attitude we may have to assume,” he wrote with concern to the Duke of Somerset, “not for the purpose of interfering in their quarrels, but to hold our own and to protect our Fellow subjects and their interests.”1 Lyons’s insistence that Britain stand aloof seemed eminently sensible. “I quite agree with Lord John Russell and Lord Lyons,” Palmerston stated in a memorandum for the cabinet. “Nothing would be more inadvisable than for us to interfere in the Dispute.”2 The law officers of the Crown assured Russell that the South Carolina ship flying its state flag could dock at Liverpool without any fuss. Customs officials there would treat the questionable flag as though it were a bit of holiday bunting, beneath anyone’s notice and certainly not a matter for official comment.3
The imperative to stay out of America’s troubles was one of the few issues that united Palmerston’s fractious cabinet. The other was Giuseppe Garibaldi’s campaign to unite Italy. Here, too, the cabinet had agreed in July that the best course was to remain neutral and allow Garibaldi to fail or succeed on his own. Since setting out in the spring of 1860 to lead the Sicilian revolution against the Bourbon monarchy, Garibaldi had inspired hundreds of British volunteers to join his brigade. Dozens of officers had taken a leave of absence from the army in order to don the famous red shirt. Two ships from the navy’s Mediterranean squadron were almost emptied as sailors left en masse to form their own battery. Even the Duke of Somerset, Palmerston’s First Lord of the Admiralty, could not dissuade one of his own sons from running away to join the English battalion. The willingness of so many volunteers to help the Italians left the army and navy chiefs with little doubt that they would have a problem on their hands if war erupted in America, where both sides spoke English and the ties of friends and family were even stronger.
“We have the worst possible news from home,” the assistant secretary of the American legation, Benjamin Moran, wrote in his diary. A few days later he stood with the American minister, George Dallas, in front of a wall map of the United States, speculating with him as to which of the Southern states would go.4 “The American Union is defunct,” pronounced Moran after the next diplomatic bag revealed that South Carolina had voted to secede on December 20, 1860.
Moran was relieved by the reaction of the British press to what it called the “cotton states.”5 The Times scoffed at the idea of secession: “South Carolina has as much right to secede from … the United States as Lancashire from England.”6 But The Economist was less sympathetic, calling South Carolina’s secession poetic justice since Americans were always bragging about their perfect democracy. The Illustrated London News was the worst, in Moran’s opinion, since it asked “our American Cousins” to let the cotton states go in order to avoid making the same mistake as Austria, which had almost bankrupted itself resisting the Italians’ desire for independence.7 Yet most newspapers followed the line of The Times. Words such as “sharp,” “ignoble,” and “unprincipled” were frequently used to describe South Carolina. Punch suggested that the seceding states could name their new country “Slaveownia.”8
Ill.5 Punch tells the Southern planters that the days of slavery are numbered, December 1860.
The boastful rhetoric of Southern politicians was also attacked in the press. Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas came in for particular censure for his arrogant speech to the Senate on December 6, 1860. The South would be able to dictate her own terms to the world, he declared, because “Cotton is King.… He waves his sceptre not only over these thirty-three states, but over the island of Great Britain.” Queen Victoria herself, Wigfall roared, must “bend the knee in fealty and acknowledge allegiance to that monarch.” The South could turn off the supply of cotton and cripple England in a single week. The cabinet feared Wigfall could be right and agreed with Palmerston “that no time should be lost in securing a supply of cotton from other quarters than America.”9
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The South owed more than $200 million to the North, with most of the debt concentrated in New York, a city whose commercial ties with the cotton states were so close that some banks accepted slaves as collateral. The financial community was sent into a panic by the readiness of Southern businesses to use South Carolina’s self-declared independence as an excuse to repudiate their debts. The New York Post denounced the practice as treachery, declaring, “The city of New York belongs almost as much to the South as to the North.” The victims of the financial crisis were not only New Yorkers. In Britain, investors had almost $400 million in U.S. stocks, bonds, and securities; Benjamin Moran lost most of his savings in a matter of weeks. But the impact went deeper and wider in New York, and included victims such as Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, whose hard-won funds for her women’s medical college simply evaporated. Mayor Fernando Wood was so anxious about the state of the financial markets that he briefly entertained a proposal for New York to secede from the Union and become a “free city.”
In late December, with Lincoln still in Illinois going through appointment lists and President Buchanan having retreated to his bedroom in the White House, Seward took the lead role in guiding the North’s response to the seceding states. Thurlow Weed’s prediction that Lincoln would “share” power—and the escalating crisis—had convinced Seward to put aside his hurt pride and agree to become secretary of state.10 His self-belief and ambition returned in full force once the decision was made: “I have advised Mr. L that I will not decline [the post],” Seward wrote to his wife on December 28. “It is inevitable. I will try to save freedom and my country.”11
The Senate had appointed the “Committee of Thirteen,” and the House of Representatives the “Committee of Thirty-three,” to address Southern grievances. Seward not only dominated the Senate committee but also made sure that his supporters—particularly Charles Francis Adams—were among the thirty-three. Their work became all the more urgent after news reached Washington that the Southern states were seizing federal arsenals and forts. Seward’s strategy was to conciliate and delay for as long as possible. The South had been threatening to secede for years; he was convinced that if the hotheads could be contained, the moderates would gradually reassert control. He talked with such assurance that young Henry Adams felt he was in the presence of greatness.12 But to Charles Sumner, Seward’s willingness to guarantee the institution of slavery in order to save the Union was an insupportable betrayal of abolition principles. Sumner cornered Henry’s brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., when he visited the Senate and ranted at him like a “crazy man,” blaming “the compromisers, meaning Seward and my father.”13 As far as Sumner was concerned, his friendship with Adams was irreparably broken.
Seward ignored Sumner’s ravings, confident that his conciliation plan would work given sufficient time. But in early January, two delegations from the New York business community were told by Southern leaders in Washington that a movement had started that could not be stopped. Mississippi voted to secede on January 9, Florida on the tenth. Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana followed in quick succession; their senators left Washington and went to Montgomery, Alabama, where a special convention was due to begin on February 4. Texas followed on February 1, 1861, the seventh state to secede from the Union. On the morning of the third, Seward paid a surprise call on Lord Lyons, to reassure him that the South would be back in the fold in less than three months. Lyons had been wondering for several weeks when either the old or the new administration would remember the existence of the diplomatic community. He did not discount the value of being able to talk privately with the incoming secretary of state, but everything else about the interview made Lyons dread his future relationship with Seward. He sent two reports of the meeting to Lord John Russell. In the official dispatch, which would be printed for public consumption in the parliamentary “Blue Book,” he gave a bland description that only hinted at the threats and preposterous claims Seward had leveled at him. Seward had, wrote Lyons with classic understatement, “unbounded confidence in his own skill in managing the American people.”
In the separate dispatch marked “private and confidential,” however, Lyons admitted that he had been horrified by Seward’s mix of cynicism and naïveté. The secretary of state had tried to persuade him that there was enough federal patronage at his disposal to bribe the South back into the Union. As far as Seward was concerned, there was no need to discuss the international ramifications of the conflict because none existed. As long as there was no bloodshed, he told Lyons, the seceding states would eventually change their minds. Seward also repeated to him a recent conversation with the minister for Bremen (one of the smaller states of the German Confederation), “no doubt for my instruction.” The hapless diplomat had complained about the Republican Party’s election promise to place tariffs on foreign imports, saying that such a move would turn Europe against America at the moment when she most needed friends. Seward claimed to have replied that nothing would give him more pleasure, since he would then have the perfect excuse for an international quarrel, “and South Carolina and the seceding states would soon join in.” “I am afraid,” concluded Lyons, “that he takes no other view of Foreign Relations, than as safe levers to work with upon public opinion here.”14
A few days later, Lyons heard that Seward was trying to pass a message to him and the French minister that they should ignore anything he might say about either Britain or France, since underneath he had “the kindest motives towards the two countries.” Lyons thought that Seward’s visit to Britain the previous summer had given him not only a handful of fond memories but also the dangerous misconception “that England will never go to war with the United States” and therefore “could be safely played with without any risk.”15 Lord John Russell advised Lyons to be blunt with Seward: he should understand that England’s “forbearance sprung from a consciousness of strength, and not from the timidity of weakness.”16
On February 8, 1861, Henry Adams wrote to his brother that Seward was in high spirits “and chuckles himself hoarse with his stories. He says it’s all right. We shall keep the border states … the storm is weathered.” The next day in Montgomery, Alabama, the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America elected Senator Jefferson Davis—one of Seward’s closest Washington friends before the crisis—as provisional president. William Lowndes Yancey, the voice of secession, proclaimed memorably “that the man and the hour have met.” Davis was inaugurated on February 18. A future general in the Confederate army informed his wife that “the firm conviction here is that Great Britain, France and Russia will acknowledge us at once in the family of nations.”17 Davis placed so much confidence in the power of cotton that he appointed Yancey, who had never been abroad, to lead the Confederate diplomatic mission to Europe.
Seward was still offering deals to Southern negotiators, even though Confederate troops were threatening the tiny federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston, when Lincoln arrived in Washington on February 23. Everything about the new president proclaimed his rusticity. The two years he had spent in Congress during the late 1840s appeared to have left him in the same unpolished state as when he first entered it. During Seward’s first private conversation with him, Lincoln admitted with startling candor that he had no idea about international relations, saying, “I shall have to depend upon you for taking care of these matters of foreign affairs, of which I know so little, and with which I reckon you are familiar.” More extraordinarily still, Lincoln showed Seward his inaugural address and invited him to give his comments.18 Less than a week before Lincoln’s arrival, Seward had insisted to the Bremen minister that the presidency was a matter of luck—rather like the monarchy—and no one took the officeholder seriously. “The actual direction of public affairs belongs to the leader of the ruling party here.”19 Seward was obviously referring to himself, as though he was expecting Lincoln to settle meekly into his role as the ceremonial leader of the country, leaving him in charge.
No matter how hard Seward argued and cajoled, however, Lincoln would not be swayed from his notion that he alone had the right to select the members of his cabinet. Nor did he accept Seward’s contention that the United States should abandon Fort Sumter rather than take a stand against Southern threats. Seward dared not reveal his promises to the Southern negotiators that Fort Sumter would not be reinforced. While Seward struggled to assert his will over Lincoln, the Northern Republicans in the Senate took advantage of the missing Southern politicians, who were free-traders to a man, to pass the Morrill Tariff on February 27. The protectionist bill placed high import duties on most imported manufacturing goods; since 40 percent of Britain’s export trade went to the United States, the effect of the tariff on Britain would be devastating. Its impact on international relations ought to have been of the highest priority to the State Department.3.1
Seward was bitterly disappointed by Lincoln’s refusal to alter his appointments to the cabinet. His dismay was not palliated by the fact that the six other members were either neutral toward the president or former rivals, and equally suspicious of one another. Three—Caleb Smith (Interior), Edward Bates (attorney general), and Simon Cameron (War)—were cool toward him. But the others—Salmon Chase (Treasury), Gideon Welles (Navy), and Montgomery Blair (postmaster general)—were outright enemies.3.2 Seward tendered his resignation on March 2. Lincoln calmly offered him the American legation in Britain as an alternative. He already had a second choice for secretary of state: William L. Dayton, the attorney general of New Jersey. “I cannot afford to let Seward take the first trick,” Lincoln explained to his private secretary. Furious at being outsmarted by the novice leader, Seward conceded defeat before Dayton could be alerted of his good fortune. He withdrew his resignation on March 4, and the unsuspecting Dayton was put down for London. But having lost the battle to keep some of his greatest enemies out of the cabinet, Seward became even more determined that no one should interfere with his conciliation strategy, and all through March he feverishly schemed and maneuvered behind Lincoln’s back.
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Among the diplomatic community in Washington, the main topic of conversation was whether the North would employ any commercial sanctions against countries doing business with the South. Lyons agreed with Lord John Russell that Britain’s commercial interests were paramount, but he also thought that it would be a calamity if the North forced the “maritime Powers of Europe to interfere” to protect their cotton supply since, in his view, the “stain of slavery” made the South “loathsome to the civilized world.”21
On March 20, Seward made another of his unscheduled visits to Lyons, this time to sound out the minister’s opinion on how the British would react if the North “interrupted” the South’s commerce. Realizing this meant a blockade of Southern ports, Lyons attempted a little bluster of his own and threatened point-blank that if the North recklessly deprived Britain of cotton, she would fight back, and “the most simple, if not the only way, would be to recognize the Southern Confederacy.” Recognition, in legal terms, meant granting the South the status of a sovereign country. The North would not only then suffer a psychological blow but might also find itself facing a united Europe that was prepared to protect the supply of cotton at the point of a gun.
Lyons was unaware that he had committed a grave error. He had given the impression to Seward, who thought that Lyons was too unimaginative to be bluffing, that Britain was looking for an excuse to recognize the South. Seward pretended that he agreed with Lyons’s position, a tactic he often employed when he wanted to buy time. According to Seward’s political philosophy, a frightened enemy was better than an untrustworthy friend. When he left the legation, it was to think about how to keep Britain at bay rather than how to help her avoid a disruption to her cotton industry.
The following day, Lyons gave a formal dinner that included Seward and the senior members of the diplomatic corps. Though Washington had not taken to the minister, it welcomed his copious champagne and French chef. The dinner itself passed without incident, but by the time the guests had moved to the drawing room, Seward was lubricated and loquacious. His gravelly voice suddenly rose above the gentle hum, causing Lyons to stop his conversation and turn around. He saw that Seward was having a heated discussion with the French and Russian ministers. Seward impatiently motioned him to join them.
“When I came up,” Lyons reported, “I found him asking M. Mercier [the French minister] to give him a copy of his instructions to the French Consuls in the Southern States.” Unsure whether Seward was mad or just grossly ignorant, the Frenchman retreated behind a veil of diplomatic coyness, assuring him that the instructions contained nothing more than an exhortation to protect French commerce while observing strict neutrality. Seward then repeated the demand to Lyons, who employed the same device. This was tantamount to poking a rhinoceros. Seward lost control of himself. According to witnesses, he accused Lyons of threatening him with Britain’s acknowledgment of the South. “Such recognition will mean war!” he is said to have shouted. “The whole world will be engulfed and revolution will be the harvest.”22 Lyons avoided being specific in his own report, merely saying that Seward had become “more and more violent and noisy,” so he had turned away, taking “a natural opportunity, as host, to speak to some of the ladies in the room.”23
The French minister, Henri Mercier, was a large, hearty figure who did not cave easily. He was sufficiently irritated by Seward’s badgering to suggest to Lyons that they obtain discretionary power from their governments to recognize the South whenever they saw fit. Lyons was appalled by the idea and persuaded Mercier that it would put them in considerable personal danger from Northern and Southern extremists. He proposed a different plan—that they keep to a unified policy at all times. Seward would be less ready to pick a quarrel if it meant engaging America in a battle of two against one, and he would never be able to use one country as his tool against the other. Mercier agreed. A few days later, Lyons heard that there had been a “stormy sitting of the Cabinet” on the day of his dinner and assumed this was the reason for Seward’s outburst.
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In only three weeks, Seward had changed from being the self-appointed “ruler” to the odd man out in Lincoln’s cabinet. He tried to maintain his old mastery while struggling to find a place in the new order. His ability to dictate to Lincoln had come down to thwarting Charles Sumner’s bid to become the minister to Great Britain. Seward managed to persuade Lincoln that Charles Francis Adams should have the post. William Dayton was once again moved around the checkerboard of patronage and given the Paris legation, despite being unable to speak French. It was a pyrrhic victory for Seward, however, since by staying in Washington, Sumner became the new chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The post would give him great power and leverage against Seward, if he could change Lincoln’s impression of him as a pompous know-it-all. “Sumner,” Lincoln allegedly said after their initial meeting in late February, “is my idea of a Bishop.”24
Adams was no longer sure he wanted to be a minister when the telegram announcing his appointment arrived in Massachusetts. “The president had seemed so intent on the nomination of Dayton, that the news finally came on us like a thunderbolt,” recalled Charles Francis Jr. “My mother at once fell into tears and deep agitation; foreseeing all sorts of evil consequences, and absolutely refusing to be comforted; while my father looked dismayed. The younger members of the household were astonished and confounded.” Mrs. Adams was surprised, continued Charles Francis Jr.,
when presently every one she met, instead of avoiding a painful subject or commiserating her, offered her congratulations or expressions of envy. So she cheered up amazingly. As to my father, he had then lived so long in the atmosphere of Boston, that I really think the great opportunity of his life when suddenly thrust upon him caused a sincere feeling of consternation. He really felt that he was being called on to make a great personal and political sacrifice.25
Adams’s poor opinion of Lincoln had increased after the inauguration ball, when the president did not even pretend to recognize him. He traveled to Washington to accept his appointment in a state of deep pessimism. Breakfast with Seward on March 28 made him feel worse; “he spoke of my appointment as his victory,” complained Adams indignantly, “whilst he made a species of apology for the selection of Mr. Wilson which seemed to me a little lame.” Charles Wilson was to have the important post of legation secretary as compensation for missing out on the plum job of heading the Chicago Post Office, a position with a high salary and little responsibility.26 Seward admitted that the Illinois newspaper editor could hardly be less qualified or suited to work under Adams, but Lincoln had insisted on the move as a quid pro quo for replacing Dayton.
Seward accompanied Adams to the White House for his interview with Lincoln. Adams was shocked by the “ravenous crowd” of office seekers who milled around the building, blocking stairs and corridors.27 Inside Lincoln’s office they found the president in deep conversation with a congressman over other potential candidates to fill the much-discussed Chicago Post Office job. When Adams began to express his gratitude for the appointment to London, Lincoln hurriedly cut him short, saying it was all Seward’s doing. He then turned his back on Adams in order to engage Seward and the congressman in further discussion on “the Chicago case.” Adams waited, uncertain whether the conversation was over, until a gesture from Seward indicated he had been dismissed.28
Adams was insulted. “Such was his fashion of receiving and dismissing the incumbent of one of the two highest posts in the foreign service of the country!” he complained in his diary. Nor had he been invited to attend the first state dinner of the White House, taking place that night, a gross slight considering that Seward was bringing as his guest William Howard Russell of The Times, who had arrived in Washington shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration.
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The forty-year-old war correspondent William Howard Russell, known to his friends as Billy, was the most famous journalist in the world. His honest and searing reports during the Crimean War had made a heroine of Florence Nightingale as they had rocked the Aberdeen administration.
Russell was the ideal choice to represent The Times in the United States. Overeating and excessive drinking were his chief vices—especially drinking, which had grown worse as his wife, Mary, became increasingly frail and dependent on him. Their four older children were in boarding school, but Russell had left her nursing their four-month-old son, Colin, who seemed as weak and poorly as his mother. After saying goodbye, “I went to the station in a storm of pain,” Russell wrote in his diary, feeling guilty that the night before he had been enjoying himself at the Garrick Club, where the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray proposed a toast in his honor.29
The qualities that made Russell an unsatisfactory husband to Mary were precisely those that John Thadeus Delane, the editor of The Times, hoped would endear him to the Americans. Russell was at his happiest in company; over dinner his round face and bright blue eyes would come alive as he amused his listeners with witty observations and stories. He could converse easily with anyone, which Delane knew was a vital prerequisite for success in democratic America.
Although the circulation of The Times was small by U.S. standards, hardly more than 65,000, the paper’s influence was felt around the globe. Unlike its newer rivals, such as the Daily Telegraph and the Daily News, The Times, which was founded in 1785, had the financial resources to provide the latest news from distant countries. There were many who resented its power: “What an absurd position we are in, so completely dictated to and domineered by one newspaper,” complained the MP Richard Cobden, who was nevertheless grateful when, in April 1859, a fellow passenger on a Mississippi steamboat, Senator Jefferson Davis, had offered to share his copy with him.
William Howard Russell soon discovered that celebrity in America had its drawbacks. A drunken night at the Astor Hotel with the Friendly Society of St. Patrick made the front pages. Apparently—since he could not remember the evening’s events—Russell had made a rousing speech in favor of the Union. He confessed in his diary: “O Lord, why did I do it?” When Delane learned of the episode, he asked him the same question. English writers had a poor reputation in the South for coming “with their three p’s: pen—paper—prejudices.”30 Russell had jeopardized the paper’s credibility and his own, which was not as high in America as he had assumed.31 “I should imagine that you must be very perplexed in England,” a British immigrant in New York remarked to his relatives. “The idea is somewhat amusing to us here that Mr. Russell should be sent over specially to report on American politics, as we are perfectly confident no novice could possibly be acquainted with the ins and outs, schemes, shifts and knaveries of this glorious disunion.”32
During his journey to Washington in March, Russell had shared a railway carriage with Henry Sanford, the new American minister to Belgium. They talked at great length; Russell had no idea that he was conversing with the future head of the U.S. secret service in Europe. Sanford, on the other hand, grasped Russell’s usefulness to the North and invited him to dine with Seward and his friends that evening. Seward dominated the dinner with his jokes and confidential anecdotes, giving Russell the opportunity to study him at length. He liked the way Seward’s eyes twinkled when he talked, although he suspected it was from self-importance rather than kindliness. Seward strutted as though he was “bursting with the importance of state mysteries, and with the dignity of directing the foreign policy of the greatest country—as all Americans think—in the world.”33
The following day Seward showed him around his kingdom, a plain brick building that housed the State Department. There were usually a hundred people scattered throughout its offices, but a recent purging of Southern sympathizers made the place seem almost devoid of activity. Seward’s own office was surprisingly modest in Russell’s view, merely a “comfortable apartment surrounded with book shelves and ornamented with a few engravings.” Also in evidence was his liking for cigars.34 In the afternoon, Seward introduced him to Lincoln. The president may have been new to the role of national leader, but he was an old hand at flattering men’s vanities. “Mr. Russell,” he said. “I am very glad to make your acquaintance, and to see you in this country. The London Times is one of the greatest powers in the world—in fact, I don’t know anything which has more power—except perhaps the Mississippi. I am glad to know you as its minister.”
Russell was “agreeably impressed with his shrewdness, humor, and natural sagacity.” But it was impossible for him to overlook the sheer ungainliness of the president. Lincoln was a “tall, lank, lean man,” he wrote, “considerably over six feet in height, with stooping shoulders, long pendulous arms, terminating in hands of extraordinary dimensions” that were exceeded only by his enormous feet. “He was dressed in an ill-fitting wrinkled suit of black, which put one in mind of an undertaker’s uniform at a funeral.” His ears were wide and flapping, his mouth unnaturally wide, his eyebrows preternaturally shaggy. Yet all was mitigated for Russell by the look of kindness in his eyes.35
The state dinner from which Charles Francis Adams had been excluded was fascinating to Russell for the view it provided of Lincoln’s relationship with his new cabinet. The formality of the occasion did not deter some of them from continuing their arguments with the president over the dispensing of patronage. Russell observed that the difference between Lincoln and politicians “bred in courts, accustomed to the world” was that they used sophisticated subterfuge to escape awkward situations whereas the president told shaggy dog stories. But the effect was the same: Lincoln disarmed his enemies without causing offense. As for the secretaries, they all seemed like men of ordinary or average ability, with the exception of Salmon Chase, the secretary of the treasury, who “struck me as one of the most intelligent and distinguished persons in the whole assemblage.” Mrs. Lincoln caught Russell’s attention for other reasons. She was not as ludicrous as the Washington gossips had led him to believe, but her energetic fanning and overuse of the word “sir” were a decided distraction.
Russell returned to his rooms at Willard’s after the dinner, unaware that Lincoln had asked the cabinet to remain behind for an emergency meeting. Fort Sumter had become the flash point in the tense relations between the North and South; the decision whether to abandon it or fight to preserve federal control could no longer wait. The cabinet deliberations continued the next day. Seward tried every expedient to prevent Lincoln from forcing a decision: he had practically promised Southern negotiators that the president would sacrifice the fort in return for peace and loyalty to the Union. Seward saw dishonor facing him if his double-dealing became known, and his efforts to prevent troops from being sent became ever more serpentine.
Seward was conspicuously absent when William Howard Russell visited the White House again, on March 31, for a near-deserted reception given by Mrs. Lincoln. Nor did he attend Lord Lyons’s dinner that evening, which gave Charles Sumner the field to himself. The other missing person was Charles Francis Adams, who ought to have paid his respects at the British legation after accepting his post but had hurried home to Massachusetts instead. “My visit has changed my feelings much,” he wrote. “For my part I see nothing but incompetency in the head. The man is not equal to the hour.” Like William Howard Russell, he dismissed the rest of the cabinet as “a motley mixture, consisting of one statesman, one politician, two jobbers, one intriguer, and two respectable old gentlemen.”36 Adams was determined to avoid inconveniencing himself or his family any more than was necessary. Although the last of the Southern diplomatic envoys had already left for London, Adams could not see why he should chase after them. He was going to arrange his affairs, pack in an orderly fashion, and, most important of all, attend his oldest son’s wedding in Massachusetts. Decades later, his son Charles Francis Jr. severely criticized his father for being so petulant:
Every stage of our action was thus marked by extreme deliberation; and the Confederate Commissioners took full advantage of the fact. There can, I think, be no question that my brother John’s marriage on the 29th of April 1861, led to grave international complications. It is creditable to neither Seward nor my father that the latter was allowed to dawdle away weeks of precious time because of such a trifle. It was much as if a general had permitted some social engagement to keep him away from his headquarters on the eve of a great battle.37
Adams’s casual neglect of Lord Lyons was another serious mistake. Lyons would have been able to give him valuable insights and directions in his dealings with the British government, among them that the British genuinely desired to keep aloof. He might even have discovered, as Russell did, that Lyons was “strong for the Union.” The information might have been helpful to Seward as well, whose paranoia was increasing by the day. A few days in Seward’s company had allowed Russell to see through the bonhomie to the ambiguities of his character. Initially he had found him to be slightly absurd, but the more Seward insisted that there was no imminent civil war, and that neither England nor France was allowed to refer to it as such, the more Russell inclined to Lyons’s opinion that Seward was either a deluded narcissist or a desperate bully, and possibly both.
Seward was tormented by his declining political influence, telling his wife that he felt like “a chief reduced to a subordinate position, and surrounded with a guard to see that I do not do too much for my country, lest some advantage may revert to my own fame.”38 He made one last effort to reassert his authority and composed a memorandum entitled “Thoughts for the President’s Consideration,” which was delivered to Lincoln’s office on April 1. It is often called the “April Fool’s Day Memorandum,” and in it Seward argued that a foreign war was the only salvation for the Union. What possessed him to make such a bizarre proposal has puzzled historians ever since.39 Seward criticized the administration, meaning Lincoln, for being “without a policy, either domestic or foreign.” As a remedy, Seward proposed to reunite the country by creating a foreign threat—in his words, to “change the question before the Public from one upon Slavery … to one of Patriotism or Union.”40
Seward concluded his letter with the statement, “Whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it. Either the president must do it himself … or devolve it on some member of his Cabinet.… It is not in my especial province, but I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.” This was sheer flummery. Seward was making a last grab for power. He had forewarned Henry Raymond, the editor of The New York Times, and shown him the memorandum so that a positive story would accompany the sudden change in policy.41 As it happened, Raymond had nothing to report. Lincoln shrugged off Seward’s attempt to coerce him with magnificent indifference. The proud secretary of state was gradually being corralled. Once the cabinet decided upon a relief expedition to Fort Sumter, the only concession Seward was able to wrest from Lincoln was that the South Carolina authorities be forewarned. It was not much, but it would save him from appearing to have deliberately and recklessly misled the Southern negotiators about the president’s intentions.
By April 6, the time for deals and machinations had drawn to a close. A relief fleet bearing provisions for the hungry guards of Fort Sumter was making its way toward Charleston. The expectation in Washington was that its appearance would almost certainly provoke violence. William Howard Russell sent a note to Seward asking him for a definite answer regarding the truth about a relief expedition. He was rewarded with an invitation to dine on April 8. The evening began with a foursome of whist beside the fire. As the game progressed, Seward became more vehement in his pronouncements about the government’s intentions. Suddenly, he put down his cards and ordered his son to fetch his portfolio from the office. His daughter-in-law understood the hint and left the room. When they were alone, Seward handed Russell a cigar and removed a paper from the portfolio. It was, he told Russell, the dispatch he was about to send to Charles Francis Adams.
Seward proceeded to read the dispatch aloud, “slowly and with marked emphasis,” almost as though he were declaiming a speech in front of a large audience. “It struck me,” wrote Russell in wonderment,
that the tone of the paper was hostile, that there was an undercurrent of menace through it, and that it contained insinuations that Great Britain would interfere to split up the Republic, if she could, and was pleased at the prospect of the dangers which threatened it. At all the stronger passages Mr. Seward raised his voice, and made a pause at their conclusion as if to challenge remark or approval.42
Russell did not know what to make of such a performance. Ignorant of Seward’s conversations with Lyons, he was baffled why Seward should want to turn a potential ally into an enemy.
The following day, April 9, Davis’s Confederate cabinet agreed to attack Fort Sumter before the Federal relief fleet could arrive. In Washington, Russell scouted in vain for information, sloshing through the rain from one department to the next. He wanted to investigate conditions in the South before one or both sides imposed travel restrictions across the lines, but at the same time he was loath to leave the capital in case he missed something of importance. Finally, on the twelfth, he bought a train ticket for Charleston. As he paid a final round of calls to his new acquaintances, he received strong hints that something was about to happen. In fact, the first Confederate gun had fired on Fort Sumter at 4:30 that morning.
Lord Lyons was keen to hear from Russell during his travels, and invited him to rely on the consulates for his postal needs. The offer soon proved to be indispensable to Russell. He had noticed a certain ugliness creeping into the public mood as he progressed farther south. Virginia was relatively calm, but in North Carolina, he wrote, “the wave of the secession tide struck us in full career.”43 A “vigilance committee” in Wilmington demanded to know his sympathies and refused to let him telegraph his copy to New York. At subsequent train stops, Russell observed drunken posses brandishing their guns.
He reached Charleston on April 16, 1861, two days after the federal garrison had surrendered to the elaborately named Confederate general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. The boisterous celebrations on the city’s streets reminded him of Paris during the last revolution there. Russell did not pretend to understand the South, but “one thing is for certain,” he asserted to Lyons, “nothing on earth will induce the people to return to the Union.”44 Russell was surprised when the British consul in Charleston, Robert Bunch, revealed that less than a quarter of the Southern population owned all 3.5 million slaves. Even if slavery were abolished tomorrow, calculated Russell, fewer than 300,000 whites would be affected out of a population of 5.5 million. Yet every conversation demonstrated a support for slavery and independence that was inextricably entwined with a hatred of the North.
Robert Bunch had been the consul in Charleston since 1853 and was regarded by many as a permanent fixture in Southern society. He gave a dinner for Russell on April 18 that was singular in the brutal frankness with which the guests predicted Britain’s swift humiliation by the South if she did not immediately recognize the Confederate government. Only the day before, Virginia had provisionally voted to join the Confederacy, raising the number of seceded states from seven to eight. Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee looked certain to follow. Mr. Bunch’s Southern guests were exultant. “It was scarcely agreeable to my host or myself,” wrote Russell, to be told that England owed allegiance to the “cotton kingdom.” “Why, sir,” sneered one of the guests, “we have only to shut off your supply of cotton for a few weeks, and we can create a revolution in Great Britain. There are four millions of your people depending on us for their bread.… No, sir, we know that England must recognize us.” Russell and Bunch maintained a polite silence as all the Southern guests present voiced their agreement.45
Two days later, the Charleston papers reported that a local shipping company was starting its own direct line to Europe. Almost as an aside, the papers noted that Jefferson Davis had invited civilian ships to apply for “letters of marque” and that Abraham Lincoln had declared a blockade of Southern ports.3.3 When Russell questioned a businessman about the wisdom of launching a shipping line in the midst of a blockade, he was told, “ ‘If those miserable Yankees try to blockade us and keep you from your cotton, you’ll just send their ships to the bottom and acknowledge us. That will be before autumn, I think.’ It was in vain I assured him he would be disappointed.”46
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Lincoln’s cabinet in Washington had argued furiously over whether to blockade the South. The president’s decision in April to call for 75,000 volunteers had been universally approved, but the blockade issue thrust Seward squarely into a challenge against his foe Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy. Welles and his supporters in the cabinet wanted Southern ports closed by federal mandate rather than blockaded by the U.S. Navy. He pointed out that a blockade was bound by a set of legal definitions and practices. First and foremost, a country could not blockade itself. A blockade was a weapon of war between two sovereign countries, or “belligerents” in technical terms. By formally blockading the South, the North would in effect be granting it belligerent status, which would be extremely useful to the Confederacy. This quasi-recognition of its existence conferred on the South the power to raise foreign loans and purchase supplies from neutral nations. Its navy would have the right of search and seizure on the high seas. It would also be able to enlist foreign volunteers in countries that had not declared neutrality. These would be no mere trifles.
Welles argued that Europe would almost certainly go the next step and recognize the existence of the Confederacy. Nevertheless, it was Seward who prevailed, although whether he truly understood the difference between a blockade and a port closure, or why it mattered in international law, remains open to conjecture.47 In addition to declaring a blockade, Lincoln announced that captured privateers would be treated as pirates and executed.48
Lord Lyons sided with Seward, not about the execution of Southern privateers, but about the blockade, since it would force the North to abide by the Declaration of Paris of 1856.3.4 He soon realized, however, that the secretary of state had no interest in knowing the Paris rules, let alone following them. Seward ignored or failed to carry out even the most basic responsibilities demanded by the declaration.49 Neither the U.S. ministers abroad nor the diplomatic community in Washington were given advance warning. When Seward finally sent an official notice to the foreign ministers on April 27, Lyons was dismayed by the vagueness of the document. It appeared to have been written on the fly, without addressing a single question as to how and when the blockade would be enforced.
Lyons had never quite given up hope that Britain might support the North, either actively or surreptitiously; it was part of the reason he was working so hard to keep the French in check. Henri Mercier had revealed that France was prepared to ignore the blockade if Britain agreed to the same policy. Having known Mercier since their Dresden days, when they used to partner each other in whist, Lyons thought it was typical of him to devise a plan so fraught with danger. He also disagreed with Mercier’s alternative, which was for Britain and France to respect the blockade until the beginning of the cotton season in September. This would be giving the South “a moral encouragement scarcely consistent with neutrality,” he reprimanded Mercier. Furthermore, it might “entail utter ruin upon the [Northern] Administration and their supporters.”50
Lyons could not go any further than this with Mercier; Seward’s behavior had made it impossible. “I confess I can see no better policy for us than a strict impartiality for the present,” he wrote sadly to Lord John Russell on May 6.
The sympathies of an Englishman are naturally inclined towards the North—but I am afraid we should find that anything like a quasi alliance with the men in office here, would place us in a position which would soon become untenable.… My feeling against Slavery might lead me to desire to co-operate with them. But I conceive all chance of this to be gone for ever.51
Seward’s earlier messages to ignore his public statements made Lyons fairly certain that the current display of aggression was for the benefit of the Northern public. It perplexed him that a man of Seward’s intelligence could not see the danger he was courting.52 With an army of 16,000 men and a navy of 9,000, the United States was a military midget compared to any of the Great Powers. “If Seward does not pick a quarrel with us,” wrote Lyons to Lord John Russell, it would not be because “of the insanity which doing so at this crisis … would seem to indicate.” Seward clearly had no intention of “conciliating the European Powers or at all events of not forcing them into hostility.”53 Charles Francis Adams, Jr., later admitted that his family had worshipped a false god. Seward was not the grand strategist or great statesman they had believed him to be. Seward had
found himself fairly beyond his depth; and he plunged! The foreign-war panacea took possession of him; and he yielded to it. The fact is, as I now see him, Seward was an able, a specious and adroit, and a very versatile man; but he escaped being really great. He made a parade of philosophy, and by it I was very effectually deceived.54
President Jefferson Davis declared an official state of war on May 6, the same day that Lyons decided Britain could not risk making common cause with the North. William Howard Russell saw the bill lying on Davis’s desk when he arrived to interview him for The Times. Davis proudly informed Russell that more than 400,000 volunteers had answered his call to arms, far more than they needed or could equip. “He asked me if I thought it was supposed in England there would be war between the two states,” wrote Russell. “I answered, that I was under the impression the public thought there would be no actual hostilities.” “And yet you see we are driven to take up arms for the defence of our rights and liberties,” Davis had replied.55
Russell had witnessed for himself the Southern version of liberty. During a break in his journey to Montgomery, a slave girl, hardly more than ten years old, had begged him to take her away from “the missus.” She promised to serve him faithfully in return, since “she could wash and sew very well.”56 The incident helped Russell to clarify his feelings about the South. At first glance, its ruling class was just like the English aristocracy. “They travel and read, love field sports, racing, shooting, hunting, and fishing, are bold horsemen, and good shots,” he admitted. But behind the façade was not an enlightened society founded on the ideals of ancient Rome but “a modern Sparta—an aristocracy resting on helotry, and with nothing else to rest upon.… Their whole system rests on slavery, and as such they defend it.”57
Montgomery, Alabama, was dreary and hot. “I have rarely seen a more dull, lifeless place,” he wrote. “It looks like a small Russian town in the interior.”58 The ubiquitous slave auctions filled him with disgust. He was also unnerved by the discovery that he was the only white man in the city who was not carrying a loaded revolver. His interview with Davis had been a strange anticlimax. Both men were aware that the meeting could have far-reaching consequences. This was Davis’s first, and perhaps only, opportunity to speak directly to Great Britain. Thousands of miles away, there was an audience waiting to meet the man who could hold Britain’s textile industry for ransom should he so choose. Yet Davis was too proud to make a grand statement or appeal. “He proceeded to speak on general matters,” wrote Russell, “adverting to the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny.” But apart from asking the journalist whether “England [thought] there would be war between the two states,” Davis hardly mentioned the crisis at all. Their conversation was so ordinary that Russell padded out his report for The Times with a description of Davis’s appearance. The former secretary of war under President Pierce was “about fifty-five years of age,” wrote Russell, “his features are regular and well-defined, but the face is thin and marked on cheek and brow with many wrinkles, and is rather careworn and haggard. One eye is apparently blind, the other is dark, piercing and intelligent.”59 Russell avoided mention of Davis’s tic or his demeanor, which, though gentlemanly, was cold.60
Russell was equally disappointed with the Southern secretary of war, Leroy Walker, and the secretary of state, Robert Toombs. The former spat and chewed while talking mostly nonsense, not being a military man; the latter seemed earnest though dim. “Seward had told me,” Russell wrote, “that but for Jefferson Davis the secession plot could never have been carried out. No other man of the part had the brain, or the courage and dexterity.” Consul Bunch had said something similar to him during his stay in Charleston. In a frank appraisal protected by diplomatic seal, Bunch had commended Davis for his statesmanlike qualities but dismissed the rest of the Confederate cabinet as “the dead level of mediocrity.”61 Having now made their acquaintance, Russell agreed.
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The one Southern cabinet member who did make a forcible impression on Russell was Judah P. Benjamin. Russell disliked Jews in general, but he could not help warming to Benjamin, describing him as “the most open, frank, and cordial of the Confederates whom I have yet met.”62 Benjamin, he learned, was not a native Southerner. He had been born in the Caribbean on the island of St. Croix, which technically made him a British subject. His family moved to the South when Benjamin was a baby, eventually settling in Charleston when he was eleven years old. Benjamin’s undeniable brilliance propelled him to Yale Law School when he was only fourteen. Something else—the cause has never been revealed—led to his expulsion. Russell noted in his diary that Benjamin was “clever keen & well yes! What keen and clever men sometimes are”—referring, perhaps, to a certain ambiguity about Benjamin’s sexuality.63 Women enjoyed his company (although not his wife, Natalie, who had moved to Paris with their daughter in 1847); he could banter with them for an entire evening in English or French on any subject they pleased. But behind his perpetual smile there was a mysterious veil that none could penetrate.
Though he was only attorney general, Benjamin had already made himself indispensable to Davis. There was so little for him to do at the newly formed Department of Justice that Benjamin could devote most of his energies to whatever appealed to him. For the time being, he was acting as the president’s grand vizier. He shielded Davis from the office seekers and took on the burden of sorting through many of the tedious but necessary details of government. “When in doubt,” recorded a visitor, all strangers were referred to “Mr. Judah P. Benjamin, the ‘Poo Bah’ of the Confederate Government.”64
In contrast to his inarticulate colleagues, Benjamin immediately engaged Russell in an intelligent debate. Referring to the blockade and the legality of letters of marque, Russell asked, “Suppose, Mr. Attorney-General, England, or any of the great powers which decreed the abolition of privateering, refuse to recognise your flags?” What if, he added, “England, for example, declared your privateers were pirates?” In that case, replied Benjamin, “it would be nothing more or less than a declaration of war against us, and we must meet it as best we can.” He did not seem too downcast by the possibility. It was obvious to Russell that Benjamin was thinking about next season’s cotton crop. Benjamin confirmed his suspicion by saying with a smile, “All this coyness about acknowledging a slave power will come right at last … we are quite easy in our minds on this point at present.”65
Many years later, when Benjamin was an exile in London, Russell bumped into him at a dinner party. They walked home together, reminiscing about the war. Russell reminded him of their meeting in Montgomery, and how Benjamin had been so certain that the British and French would intervene as soon as their cotton stocks were low. “Ah, yes,” Benjamin replied, “I admit I was mistaken! I did not believe that your government would allow such misery to your operatives, such loss to your manufacturers, or that the people themselves would have borne it.”66
Benjamin was too discreet to say that when the Confederate cabinet held their first meeting, his had been the lone voice in favor of making preparations for a protracted war. The secretary of war, Leroy Walker, remembered the meeting with shame: “At that time, I, like everybody else, believed there would be no war. In fact, I had gone about the state … promising to wipe up with my pocket-handkerchief all the blood that would be shed,” he recalled despairingly.
There was only one man there who had any sense, and that man was Benjamin. Mr. Benjamin proposed that the government purchase as much cotton as it could hold, at least 100,000 bales, and ship it at once to England.… For, said Benjamin, we are entering on a contest that must be long and costly. All the rest of us fairly ridiculed the idea of a serious war. Well, you know what happened.67
Benjamin allowed himself to be swayed by his colleagues’ optimism. Europe would end the blockade by the following October, he explained genially to Russell, “when the Mississippi is floating cotton by the thousands of bales, and all our wharfs are full.”68 Shortly after Russell left Montgomery for Mobile, Alabama, the Provisional Confederate Congress voted to prohibit all trade with the North in order to prevent cotton from being shipped via Northern ports. “The cards are in our hands!” proclaimed the editors of the Charleston Mercury, obviously unfazed by the doubts expressed by Russell when he visited their offices, “and we intend to play them out to the bankruptcy of every cotton factory in Great Britain and France or the acknowledgement of our independence.”69
3.1 The taxation on foreign goods depended on the economic interests of various Northern states; sugar, raw wool, iron, flaxseed, hides, beef, pork, grain, hemp, coal, lead, copper, and zinc all received protection from outside competition—as did dried, pickled, and salted fish.
3.2 “He is obtrusive,” complained Welles, “assuming and presuming, meddlesome, and uncertain, ready to exercise authority always, never doubting his right until challenged; then he becomes timid, uncertain, distrustful, and inventive of schemes to extricate himself.… I think he has no very profound or sincere convictions.”20
3.3 A letter of marque was a government license allowing a civilian ship to attack the merchant shipping of an enemy in time of war. Ships that carried such letters were called privateers, to distinguish them from pirates. Davis had resorted to this old-fashioned method of sea warfare because it would be many months before the Confederacy had its own navy.
3.4 The treaty had been drawn up and signed by the seven Great Powers of Europe—Austria, France, Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire, Prussia, Russia, and Sardinia—after the Crimean War in order to establish a set of international laws governing both blockades and privateering. Ironically, America had not signed the treaty because President Franklin Pierce refused to relinquish the right to use licensed privateers.