Where is Adams?—Debate in the Commons—The neutrality proclamation—First interview with Lord John Russell—Seward’s horseplay—The power of Uncle Tom
A poem in Punch, on March 30, 1861, neatly expressed Britain’s cotton dilemma:
Though with the North we sympathize,
It must not be forgotten,
That with the South we’ve stronger ties,
Which are composed of cotton.
The journalist William Howard Russell’s revelation that the South hoped to exploit these ties, along with his poignant descriptions of slave life, provoked outrage in England when his reports started to appear in April. But the North gained less support than Southerners had feared, since, in his inaugural address on March 4, Lincoln had promised not to interfere with slavery. The Morrill Tariff, with its rampant protectionism and whiff of anti-British bias, was an even greater gift to the Confederacy.1
At the U.S. legation, Benjamin Moran read the angry protests against the new tariff and took it to mean that the country as a whole had turned against the North. But George Dallas, the outgoing American minister whose existence was barely acknowledged by Seward, was much more sanguine about the hostile opinion expressed in newspapers. Britain “cannot be expected to appreciate the weakness, discredit, complications, and dangers which we instinctively and justly ascribe to disunion,” he told Seward on April 9. “English opinion tends rather, I apprehend, to the theory that a peaceful separation may work beneficially for both groups of states and not injuriously affect the rest of the world.”2 He had obviously heard this said by many different people: even Thackeray had written to an American friend, asking, “In what way will it benefit the North to be recoupled to the South?” After all, at this time, England had not wanted “the Colonies” to go their own way, “and aren’t both better for the Separation?”3
Nor did Dallas believe there was anything to be feared from the British government. Lord John Russell had rebuffed Seward’s demand for a promise never to have any dealings with the South or its representatives, but “his lordship assured me with great earnestness that there was not the slightest disposition in the British government to grasp at any advantage,” Dallas reported to Seward.4 Far from looking for an advantage, the cabinet was approaching a state of panic over American affairs. Russell was shocked that six weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration there was still no replacement for the now irrelevant Dallas, and he was mystified as to what could be delaying the arrival of Charles Francis Adams at such a perilous moment in his country’s history.
Benjamin Moran thought Dallas’s benign view of the British made him either an idiot or a crypto–Southern sympathizer. Dallas was certainly neither, but the knowledge that he was soon to go home may have made him apathetic when he should have been wooing potential Northern allies in Parliament. Moran also knew of at least one MP who was collaborating with the nascent Southern lobby in England. William Gregory, the MP for Galway, had given notice in the House of Commons that he was going to propose recognition of the South on May 1. Moran thought the move had been prompted by Gregory’s friend Robert Campbell, the American consul in London.4.1
Campbell was a genial though strident secessionist from North Carolina who had supplied Gregory with letters of introduction for his tour of the United States in 1859. In Washington, he had stayed in a boardinghouse popular with Southern senators; their “fire-eating talk” of independence, interspersed with liberal amounts of whiskey, had swept the MP into their ranks. Privately, he thought their humanity had been dulled by slavery, but Gregory accepted his new friends’ claim that emancipation was morally and economically impossible.5
Moran was furious with Dallas for failing to curb the pro-Southern activities of consuls who had not yet been replaced by Republican appointees, but he dared not speak when his own future seemed so uncertain. He remained in suspense until confirmation of his reappointment arrived on the fifteenth. Moran’s other fear—that he was the only loyal American official left in Britain—seemed a raging certainty after he caught one of the new Southern envoys, Ambrose Dudley Mann, sneaking into the legation to see Dallas.
The arrival of the Confederate envoys was not unexpected; their identities had been public knowledge for several weeks. Consul Robert Bunch wrote from Charleston to warn the foreign office that they were three of the rankest amateurs ever to have been sent on so sensitive a diplomatic mission. He attributed President Davis’s selection of such men to Southern arrogance and the belief that the Confederacy did not need proper advocates when cotton could do the talking. Mann had served as a U.S. minister to Switzerland but Bunch dismissed him as “a mere trading politician, possessing no originality of mind and no special merit of any description.” The second envoy, William Lowndes Yancey, had never been anything but a rabble-rouser. His campaign to reopen the slave trade, not to mention his support for expeditions against British territories in Central America, made him a peculiar choice to send to England. Bunch was particularly disdainful of Yancey: “He is impulsive, erratic and hot-headed; a rabid secessionist.” Bunch could not see a single reason for the appointment of the third envoy, Pierre Rost, apart from his friendship with Jefferson Davis’s family and his proficiency in Creole French.6
Moran despised Dallas’s excuse that Mann was an old and valued friend until he, too, was forced to choose between loyalty and patriotism. A few days after Dudley Mann visited the legation, Moran received a letter from a friend in London who asked him for the Confederate envoy’s address. The friend, Edwin De Leon, until recently the U.S. consul in Egypt, had invited him to his wedding two years earlier, but Moran was appalled at his request and wrote sorrowfully that “I would do anything in reason for him, but could not find it in my conscience to assist treason.”7
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Forcing a debate in the House of Commons had become William Gregory’s mission, and he would not be thwarted. Palmerston pulled the pro-Confederate MP aside in the Commons on April 26 and demanded to know why he saw fit to place the government in such an awkward position. He reminded Gregory that the speeches would be reprinted in Southern and Northern newspapers and that both sides would end up being “offended by what is said against them, and will care but little for what is said for them; and that all Americans will say that the British Parliament has no business to meddle with American affairs.” He reported to Lord John Russell that Gregory “admitted the truth of much I said, but said he had pledged himself to Mr. Mann, the Southern envoy.… Perhaps your talking to Gregory, either privately or in the House, might induce him to put his motion off.”8 Russell was anxious about being pushed to make a public statement ahead of events. George Dallas had shown that he was as ignorant of the situation as the Foreign Office. During his last interview with Russell on May 1, he had insisted that a blockade was not under consideration, since there was no mention of the fact in the latest State Department instructions; it had to be a fabrication of the New York press. But Russell discovered the next day from Lord Lyons’s dispatches that the idea was very much under consideration.
The day after Palmerston’s confrontation with Gregory, the British government learned that the Confederates had captured Fort Sumter. The initial newspaper reports were brief, but it appeared as though the South had won an easy victory. (The Thompson family in Belfast became the envy of the neighborhood after they received a long account of the battle from their son, a Union private in the Sumter garrison.)9 “We cut a sorry enough figure indeed,” complained Moran as he read through the dailies. “Everybody is laughing at us.” Many papers described the news as “a calamity” and “a subject of regret, and indeed of grief,” but Moran’s attention was held by the Illustrated London News, which printed a pious editorial in favor of peace and “no coercive measures,” next to an announcement that Frank Vizetelly, the paper’s star artist, war reporter, and brother of the editor, was taking the next steamer to New York.10 The tutting and clucking in the British press about the demise of the democratic experiment and the sorry state of “our American cousins” also grated on Moran’s nerves. The Economist recalled Britain’s futile reaction to the American Declaration of Independence and advised the North to settle the dispute with grace; to continue fighting now, its editor, Walter Bagehot, scolded, would be “vindictive, bloody and fruitless.”11 The conservative Saturday Review could not resist making a dig at Seward, who, “though he cannot keep the Federal fort at Charleston, has several times announced his intention of annexing Canada.”12
Ill.6 Punch depicts the North and South as a mismatched couple.
Lord John Russell had still not spoken to William Gregory when the Southern commissioners Yancey and Rost finally reached London on April 29, a week after Mann. Unaccustomed to foreign travel, they had passed two miserable days in Southampton and had arrived in the capital feeling bewildered and frightened. Rather than pausing for a moment to consider the best way of contacting the Confederate community, they sent a telegram to the American legation addressed to Ambrose Dudley Mann. “The unblushing impudence of these scoundrels,” ranted Moran, “to send their message to the US Legation for one of their fellow traitors.”13 The timing and announcement of their arrival was fortunate for Lord John Russell, since it gave him a bargaining chip with Gregory, who agreed to postpone his motion to June 7 in return for a Foreign Office meeting with the Southerners on May 3.
Russell was not making a great concession, since it was standard Foreign Office practice to receive representatives from breakaway countries. These meetings never carried official weight, nor were the emissaries accorded diplomatic rank. Russell assumed that Dallas had lived in England long enough to know this, and that Charles Francis Adams could have it explained to him when he eventually arrived. Russell was disturbed by the thought of Confederate privateers roaming the seas, and, at his request, the Admiralty was already taking precautionary measures to reinforce the North Atlantic squadron. The prospect of encountering lawless privateers so frightened Dallas that he booked passage for his wife and three daughters for May 1, hoping they would be home before transatlantic travel became impossible.
Russell’s satisfaction over his dealings with Gregory lasted only twenty-four hours. On May 2 he received a run of telegrams: the first announced that Lincoln had decided on a blockade rather than port closures; the next, that Virginia, that mainstay of the American Revolution, had seceded, depriving the North of the large weapons arsenal at Harpers Ferry; and finally, that Maryland had erupted in violence, leaving eleven people dead in Baltimore during street fighting between Federal troops and Southern protesters.4.2 “This is the first bloodshed and God knows where it will end,” Moran wrote in his diary. It surprised and comforted him when several Englishmen called at the legation vainly asking to join the Federal army. But the reaction of Russell’s predecessor at the Foreign Office, Lord Clarendon, showed that old resentments had a habit of reviving: “For my own part if we could be sure of getting raw cotton from them, I should not care how many Northerners were clawed at by the Southerners & vice versa!”14
When Russell went to the House of Commons that evening, he was bombarded with questions from MPs, not a few of whom shared Clarendon’s view. He could give little enlightenment, but to those who expressed a desire for British intervention he warned against such a reckless move. “Nothing but the imperative duty of protecting British interests, in case they should be attacked, justified the government in at all interfering,” he told the House. “We have not been involved in any way in that contest. For God’s sake, let us if possible keep out of it.”15 He delivered a similar message to the Southern envoys when they arrived for their interview on Friday, May 3. Gregory had warned them about Russell’s notorious shyness, but they had not expected the frigid politeness with which they were received. Russell caught them off guard by declaring he had “little to say.” William Yancey stumbled through a speech about the Constitution, liberty, and states’ rights. He insisted the slave trade would not be revived, which Russell disbelieved, threw in a warning about cotton, which Russell ignored, and finally asked for immediate recognition, which Russell refused. The envoys returned to their lodgings at 40 Albemarle Street thoroughly disheartened.
Lord John Russell spent the weekend of the fourth and fifth of May carefully analyzing the choices open to the British government. He hoped that antislavery would become the overriding cause of the war, but feared that the North would throw it over without hesitation if the Union could thus be saved. He was also torn between despising the South for its dependence on slavery and admiring its spirited bid for independence. Above all, he agreed with Lord Lyons that to give preferential treatment to the North would be unwise and possibly dangerous with Seward at the helm. Accepting the legality of the blockade, which would require a declaration of official neutrality, struck him as the wisest course, he told his colleagues, especially in light of Seward’s evident keenness to manufacture a reason for declaring war.
The cabinet was not enthusiastic about adopting a policy that was so dangerous to the country’s cotton industry. Palmerston agreed with the proposal, though he felt it was a heavy price for staying out of the conflict. “The South fight for independence; what do the North fight for,” asked the home secretary, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, “except to gratify passion or pride?”16 William Gladstone was privately even more outspoken for the South and compared Jefferson Davis to General Garibaldi. When his friend Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, heard about his views, she was outraged and demanded to know how he could “think the Southern states most in the right—I did not hear you say; I don’t believe it.”17 Nor did she accept his explanation that the wishes of minorities ought to be respected.18 Only the Duke of Argyll, her favorite son-in-law, wholeheartedly supported Russell. He abhorred revolutionary movements on principle; moreover, his friendship with Charles Sumner had given him an insight into American politics. He rightly understood that the Union had to be safeguarded since the South would never abolish slavery on its own.
In declaring neutrality, Russell was convinced he had chosen the best alternative; he had consulted the law officers of the Crown, as he always did when in doubt, and in their opinion the crisis in America was not a minor insurgency but a genuine state of war. The blockade could and should be recognized, they told him, and so should the right of the South to employ privateers. Russell endured some aggressive questioning in Parliament when he announced the government’s decision on May 6. He was also pressured by Gregory into seeing the Confederate envoys for a second time, on the grounds that the Northern blockade had not been confirmed at the first meeting. Russell suspected they would try to make more of the neutrality announcement than the government intended. Their exultant demeanor on May 9 showed that his instincts had been correct.19 The envoys were unaware, however, that even as they pressed their arguments on him, the law officers were composing an additional proviso to Britain’s declaration of neutrality that would make it illegal for a British subject to volunteer for either side in the war. Russell had meant it when he said “for God’s sake, let us if possible keep out of it.”
Yancey, Rost, and Mann were dumbfounded when they read the “Queen’s Proclamation of Neutrality” in The Times on May 14. A close examination of the wording showed that Russell had taken away many of the advantages that belligerent status had initially seemed to give to the Confederacy. He had invoked the rarely used 1819 Foreign Enlistment Act, under which British subjects were forbidden to volunteer for a foreign cause or encourage others to do so.20 The act also prohibited the selling or arming of warships to either belligerent; those who disobeyed the proclamation would be prosecuted, and the offending items confiscated.21 The more populous, industrial North would be able to overcome these obstacles on its own, but not the smaller, agrarian South.
The Southern envoys realized that their two interviews with Russell had failed to make the slightest impression on him. Yancey ascribed their failure to Russell’s prejudice against the “peculiar institution,” as Southerners euphemistically called slavery: “We are satisfied that the public mind here is entirely opposed to the Government of the Confederate States of America on the question of slavery,” he reported to Robert Toombs, the Southern secretary of state. “All we can do at present is to affect public opinion in as unobtrusive a manner, as well as we can.”22
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Charles Francis Adams also read the neutrality proclamation in The Times on May 14. He had arrived in London the night before, having endured the worst sea crossing of his life. The three children, Henry, Mary, and Brooks, had, like him, been prostrate with seasickness. Abigail, his wife, had stayed below deck for a different reason: Cassius Clay, Lincoln’s appointment to the legation in Russia, had embarrassed them by sauntering around the boat like a Punch caricature of the boorish American, with three pistols at his belt and a toothpick between his teeth.
Adams knew nothing of what had passed between Seward and Lyons. But even if he had, his outrage at the British government’s decision to act without waiting for his arrival and consulting him first would have been the same. “Charles Francis Adams naturally looked on all British Ministers as enemies,” acknowledged Henry Adams in his autobiography. “The only public occupation of all Adamses for a hundred and fifty years at least, in their brief intervals of quarrelling with State Street, had been to quarrel with Downing Street, and the British Government.”23
That first morning, Adams was ready to confront Lord John Russell, so he asked George Dallas, who arrived at the hotel after breakfast, to escort him to Russell’s house. To his dismay, the foreign secretary was not at home; a footman informed them that the family had been called suddenly to Woburn Abbey. Russell’s brother, the Duke of Bedford, had collapsed and was not expected to recover. Forced to delay his confrontation for a few days, Adams turned his attention to the family’s living situation. London had changed so much that he barely recognized it from the memories of his childhood. The city seemed ostentatious and gaudy; “shops fail in taste in everything here,” he wrote.24 His disapproval of English exhibitionism did not blind him to the fact that Dallas’s residence was far too modest for its purpose; the family would have to remain at the hotel until something grander was found. He was also irritated with Dallas for having neglected to renew the legation’s lease, which was ending in five days’ time.25 Adams responded to these twin challenges with stoicism, but Abigail’s fragile courage deserted her. Benjamin Moran was called to the hotel to reassure her that the Adamses would not be made social pariahs. Unconvinced, she insisted that he give the family a course in social etiquette. “Altogether I feel pretty sick and tired of the whole thing,” Henry Adams complained to Charles Francis Jr.26
Adams’s first invitation was from an MP named William Forster. Dallas’s inquiries about him revealed that Forster belonged to the Liberal Party and had been an MP for all of three months. Like John Bright, Forster was a Quaker from a northern mill town, in his case Bradford, whose wealth came from manufacturing. But there the similarities ended. Bright was not interested in small acts or minor details; in Anthony Trollope’s damning judgment, “It was his business to inveigh against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business.”27 Forster was a modest and sincere man who sought neither power nor popularity. These attributes inclined the House to be gentle toward the newcomer. His maiden speech on the slave trade had been listened to without interruption (although afterward he was informed by a fellow MP that in London one said la-MENT-able, not LA-ment-able).
Forster’s father had twice visited the United States to preach against slavery, in some places risking his life to be heard. Forster Sr.’s experiences had provided his son with an unsentimental attitude toward the South’s desire for secession. “A Mr. Gregory, MP, for Galway, who lately travelled in the South,” Forster wrote to a friend in America, “has returned well humbugged by the Southerners.” Gregory was talking all sorts of nonsense without anyone’s daring to challenge him: “I wish it had fallen into the hands of a member of more experience to stand up for the North and the Union; but I must do what I can.”28 Forster decided his first step should be to organize a meeting of pro-Northern MPs.
Adams accepted Forster’s invitation even though the date was set for May 16, the day of his presentation at court. When he arrived at Forster’s house, he was disconcerted to discover that there were only seven people at the meeting, three of whom were Americans. Neither John Bright nor Richard Cobden had bothered to come. Cassius Clay and the historian John Lothrop Motley were the other Americans. Forster introduced the first two MPs so quickly that Adams missed their names. But the third, Richard Monckton Milnes, impressed Adams at once. “One might discuss long whether, at that moment, Milnes or Forster were the more valuable ally, since they were influences of different kinds,” recalled Henry Adams.
Monckton Milnes was a social power in London … who knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of men—of a great many men. A word from him went far. An invitation to his breakfast-table went farther.… William E. Forster stood in a different class. Forster had nothing whatever to do with May Fair [the fashionable center of London]. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was quite the opposite of Milnes. He had at that time no social or political position; he never had a vestige of Milnes’s wit or variety; he was a tall, rough, ungainly figure.… Pure gold, without a trace of base metal; honest, unselfish, practical.29
“I found them all very tolerably informed and strongly inclined to the anti-Slavery side,” Adams wrote in his diary. However, Milnes declared he had come “mainly for the abominable selfishness of the South in breaking up a great country”; Adams could not decide whether that was English irony or a genuine statement.30 John Motley informed the meeting that he had received a letter from the Duke of Argyll, who insisted that the British government had no alternative but to declare neutrality. “When the American colonies revolted from England we attempted to treat their privateers as pirates, but we very soon found this would be out of the question,” he wrote. “The rules affecting and defining the rights and duties of belligerents are the only rules which prevent war from becoming massacre and murder.”31
Cassius Clay refused to be persuaded of England’s good intentions. He was already tired of the country, with its rude servants and hotels that claimed not to have his reservation. Adams was also dubious, though he might have felt less wretched about the small number of MPs around the table had he known that the Southern envoys were in no better position. Gregory had managed to introduce Yancey to only two MPs, John Laird, owner of one of the largest shipbuilding firms in the country, and William Schaw Lindsay, a self-made shipping magnate. Both professed interest in helping the South achieve independence, but only on the understanding that slavery would eventually be abolished.
Adams went home after the meeting to change for his presentation at court. This was not the time, he told Moran, “for indulging oddities of any kind,” nor for wearing clothes that made them look like servants caught on the wrong side of the green baize door.32 The plain black uniform mandated by the State Department was to be put away; under his tenure, the legation would attend royal functions in the usual brocade and breeches of the diplomatic corps. Dallas and Adams arrived at Buckingham Palace twenty-five minutes early, giving Adams the chance to study the paintings in the Great Saloon while he steadied his nerves. “I reasoned with myself with severity,” he wrote in his diary.33 Queen Victoria received him with a few gracious words and then asked with polite disinterest whether he had ever been to England before. Keeping his composure, Adams replied that he had, when young.
George Dallas and his son left for Southampton immediately after Charles Francis Adams’s presentation. Adams wrote in his diary, “From this time I take the burden on my shoulders.”34 He was justifiably uneasy about his staff; the legation secretary, Charles Wilson, displayed a lingering disappointment at being denied the Chicago Post Office. Benjamin Moran’s open hostility toward Dallas was also an ill omen. “I part with the whole lot with joy,” Moran crowed when the two Dallases set sail. He felt they had taken him for granted, never asking about his late wife during her illness, nor bothering to include him at legation dinners. His job was all he had, and he clung to it with ferocious desperation. Moran did not know that retaining him at the legation had been Henry Adams’s idea or that he was the one who arranged it with the State Department.35 From the moment Moran set eyes on Henry he regarded him as a rival, even though the young Adams was only his father’s private secretary with no official standing at the legation.
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Minister Adams received his first dispatch from Seward on May 17. Its tone and the peremptory demands of the British government worried him, but he obeyed Seward’s orders and requested an interview with Lord John Russell, who had returned to London following the death of the Duke of Bedford. Russell replied with an offer of lunch that day if Adams was prepared to come to his house, Pembroke Lodge, in Richmond Park. In his haste, Adams arrived at the house before his message of acceptance, which caused Russell to greet him with more reserve than he had intended. Both men were struck for a moment by the physical similarities between them. Their small stature, coupled with their bald crowns, meant that from the back they could be taken for twins. Since neither had the least facility for small talk, the meeting quickly escalated into an acrimonious debate about the neutrality proclamation. Each thought the other rude and arrogant, and each set out to prove his superior knowledge of diplomatic history. They continued arguing after the bell rang for lunch. However, by the end of the meal their animosity had given way to a grudging respect. Russell showed his goodwill by inviting Adams for a stroll around the grounds. “I like Adams very much,” he wrote a few weeks later, “though we did not understand one another at first.”36
When he reflected on the interview, Adams thought he had acquitted himself reasonably well, but he was less positive about the state of relations between the two countries.37 He never imagined the sense of emergency he had created in Lord John Russell. During the closing days of May, the British cabinet spent many hours trying to divine Seward’s real purpose. The Duke of Newcastle’s conversation with him the previous October was again analyzed. It was recalled how Napoleon had always reacted to failure with aggression; was Seward of the same mold, they wondered? If the South became independent, would he try to deflect public anger by attacking Canada? The question became not whether but how many regiments they should send to reinforce the Canadian border. The Duke of Argyll agreed to warn Charles Sumner about the effect of Seward’s threatening behavior. “Mr. Seward knows Europe less well than you do,” Argyll explained in his letter of June 4; “he may be disposed to do high-handed and offensive things which would necessarily lead to bad blood, and perhaps finally to rupture.”38
“The great question of all is the American,” Lord John Russell wrote to Lord Cowley, the British ambassador in Paris, “and that grows darker and darker every day. I do not expect that Lyons will be sent away, but it is possible. Seward and Co. may attempt to revive their waning popularity by a quarrel with Great Britain, but if we avoid all offence, I do not see how they can do it.”39 Since Russell was blind to his remarkable ability to make speeches that offended all parties, his confidence was perhaps misplaced. The cabinet had made a decision on privateering that it hoped would soothe Northern irritation with the belligerency issue: they had stretched the meaning of neutrality as far as it could go by closing British ports in every part of the globe to privateers and their captures. Since the North had no need of privateers, the new prohibition affected only the South and its ability to wage war at sea.
However, the South was picking up backhanded support from politicians who were keen to rub John Bright’s nose in the apparent failure of democracy. “We are now witnessing the bursting of the great republican bubble which had so often been held up to us as a model on which to recast our own English Constitution,” Sir John Ramsden, MP, proclaimed in the Commons on May 27 to a scattering of sarcastic cheers. Gladstone and Russell hurriedly disowned Ramsden’s speech. “I do not think it just or seemly that there should be among us anything like exultation of their discord,” Russell chided. Unfortunately, he diminished the good effects of his speech with some unnecessary observations on the failings of American democracy.40
Reports of the Commons debate reached an American audience already infuriated by excerpts of William Howard Russell’s candid travelogues that had found their way back across the Atlantic. Northerners objected to his description of racism, and especially his honest appraisal of pro-Southern feeling in New York. Southerners were offended by his depiction of them as heartless and arrogant. (“Charleston people are thin skinned,” commented the Southern diarist Mary Chesnut; “I expected so much worse.”)41 Seward was incensed for a different reason. All along he had insisted there was a silent majority of pro-Union voters in the South, but Russell’s letters from Georgia and South Carolina revealed the very opposite. Seward was sure they had influenced Britain’s decision to award belligerent rights to the South and was determined to make Russell pay for his reporting when he returned to the North.
Seward had also learned from Dallas that Lord John Russell had met the Southern envoys. Whether his reaction was driven by fear or embarrassment, it was nevertheless a gross miscalculation with regard to his own standing with Lincoln as well as his future relations with Britain. On May 21, 1861, he composed an insolent and threatening dispatch for Adams to read to Lord Russell, which stated there would be war if England had any dealings with the Confederacy or its envoys. This infamous letter came to be known by its number in the sequence of dispatches: Dispatch No. 10. Lincoln was no more inclined to declare war on England in May than he had been in April. According to Charles Sumner, the president showed him Seward’s dispatch and asked for his opinion. Seward’s blunder was Sumner’s opportunity to ingratiate himself with the White House. Sumner encouraged Lincoln to make drastic changes to the document. The more offensive phrases were removed, the threats toned down. Adams was no longer ordered to present the dispatch to Russell; it was simply for his own guidance.
Washington gossip related that Sumner paid an unscheduled visit to Seward and lectured him on the danger of misusing his powers.42 Already furious at having his dispatch amended, Seward allegedly lost control and kicked his desk, shouting, “God damn them, I’ll give them hell,” referring to Britain and France. “I’m no more afraid of them than I am of Robert Toombs [the Confederate secretary of state].” It was a delicious victory, made sweeter for Sumner when he recounted the interview to Lincoln. “You must watch him and overrule him,” he urged the president.
Map.6 London
Click here to view a larger image.
Seward asserted his independence by reversing some of Lincoln’s changes before the dispatch was sent. He also preserved the original document in the State Department’s files so that when the annual compilation was published, it was his letter rather than the amended dispatch that appeared.43 But he could not erase the perception among the diplomatic community in Washington that Charles Sumner was the more reasonable and better statesman of the two.44 All the foreign ministers heard the gossip about Dispatch No. 10, including Lyons, who was able to give Lord Russell a fair indication of its contents before the letter reached London. Seward accused Britain of deliberately ruining his plan to quarantine the South by encouraging the Confederates to believe that full recognition was imminent. Britain had acted precipitously and maliciously in declaring neutrality, he argued, since the president had only announced his intention to declare a blockade.
Seward was ignoring such inconvenient facts as the four British merchant ships that were seized by U.S. Navy blockaders when they tried to sail from Southern ports.45 He was also discounting the desire of neutral countries to have their legal rights as neutrals acknowledged. Earlier in the month, the State Department had been misinformed about a Canadian steamer named the Peerless that was alleged to have been purchased by the Confederacy. In fact, it was Federal agents who had purchased the ship, but this had not been communicated to Seward. Seward threatened to send the U.S. Navy into Canadian waters to seize the Peerless unless Britain voluntarily handed over the vessel. “I said,” Lyons informed Lord Russell, “that even if the Peerless should in fact be sold to the Seceded States, she could never cause the United States anything like the inconvenience which would follow a deliberate violation of neutral rights.”46
The longer Seward reflected on the belligerency issue, the more he portrayed himself—and by extension the North—as the victim of British machinations. His language toward Lord Lyons was so coarse that the minister sought to avoid social occasions where they might meet. Seward was using his relationship with the New York press to whip up public excitement against Britain; he even went so far as to write an anonymous attack on Lyons for the Daily Herald.47 “I shall do my best not to be a discredit to you,” Lyons promised Russell after a group of senators demanded his expulsion, “but I am on very dangerous ground.”48
The French had yet to announce neutrality officially, although Seward was aware that France and Britain had agreed to work in tandem on American issues. It suited him to claim that England had acted alone and precipitately. He refused to receive Lyons and Mercier together or to acknowledge that there was an official understanding between the two countries. Mercier did not mind, since he was rushing ahead with schemes to end the blockade, which required extreme tact and patience on Lyons’s part to discourage.
“Every imaginable accusation of hostility to the United States is brought against Her Majesty’s Government,” Lyons reported to the Foreign Office. Seward’s propaganda campaign had succeeded in convincing the entire country that Britain had wronged the North. “Disappointment and exasperation are universal and deep,” wrote a New York lawyer in his diary. “The feeling of cordiality toward England—of brotherhood, almost of loyalty, which grew out of the Prince’s visit last fall (how long ago that seems!)—is utterly extinguished.”49 Lyons’s advice to London was to be firm but conciliatory, stay abreast with France, and “manifest a readiness on our part for war [though] the possibility of our being forced into hostilities is so painful a subject that I shrink from contemplating it.” Nevertheless, on June 10, Lyons telegraphed in cipher to Rear Admiral Sir Alexander Milne, the commander of the North Atlantic squadron, to be ready for the following signal: “Could you forward a letter for me to Antigua?” Milne sent a notice to his officers: “Be on your guard and prepared. States may declare war suddenly.”50
Charles Francis Adams first heard of the British government’s anxiety about Seward on June 1, during a dinner party at Lord Palmerston’s house. Lady Palmerston had chosen the guest list with care, inviting people who were known friends of the North, such as Richard Monckton Milnes. Hoping this would have put Adams at his ease, after dinner Lord Palmerston spoke to him about Seward’s behavior. “He intimated,” recorded Adams, “that his ways of doing things towards Lord Lyons had been ungracious and unpleasant.” This was the first time Adams had heard of the tensions in Washington. It seemed unbelievable, and he almost told Palmerston that it had to be a misunderstanding. After reflecting on the conversation the following morning, Adams decided that Seward’s brusque manner was probably the cause, and he resolved to warn his friend to be more circumspect.51
On June 7, Ambrose Dudley Mann went to the Commons to observe William Gregory make his motion for recognition. Moran was also sitting in the Strangers Gallery and noticed with glee that the Southern envoy Mann “scowled awfully” as speakers from both sides of the House criticized Gregory for his unseemly haste. At length the scolding became unbearable, and Gregory withdrew his motion. Adams was writing his report of the debate when Dispatch No. 10 arrived at the legation. “I scarcely know how to understand Mr. Seward,” he wrote in disbelief. “The rest of the government may be demented for all that I know, but he surely is calm and wise.” Henry Adams was less forgiving. “A dispatch arrived yesterday from Seward,” he informed his brother on June 11, “so arrogant in tone and so extraordinary and unparalleled in its demands that it leaves no doubt in my mind that our Government wishes to face a war with all Europe.… I urged papa this morning, as the only man who could by any chance stop the thing, to make an energetic effort.”52
Adams was still angry and embarrassed that the neutrality proclamation had been issued on the day of his arrival. He considered Lord John Russell’s explanation to be spurious and self-serving. Nor did he accept Mr. Forster’s contention that “GB had done all they could to aid us.” Cunard had offered to lease twenty steamships to the Federal navy, which would have doubled its force of working steamers, until the Foreign Enlistment Act made such transactions illegal. But it was difficult for Adams to take the moral high ground when Seward seemed so intent on giving it away.
During an interview with Russell on June 12, Adams rephrased much of Seward’s dispatch and “softened as well as I could the sharp edges.” He also threw in a question about the Great Eastern, which had departed for Canada the week before with more than two thousand troops on board.53 Russell answered bluntly that it was due to Seward’s threats to seize a British vessel in Canadian waters; more regiments were on their way, he added. This was “another curse of Seward’s horseplay,” Adams recorded in irritation.54 He could easily imagine how news of the reinforcements would be received in Washington, and he consoled himself with the fact that he had not yet signed the lease for his house: Henry Adams thought they would all be home in two months.
The expectation of his recall lent an unreal cast to the London season; Charles Francis Adams attended the first drawing room of the season feeling more like an observer than a participant. In his diary he admitted that as far as aristocracies went, the English managed theirs tolerably well but the system remained deficient. “My feelings, as you know, have never been partial to the English,” he wrote to a friend.55 He resented the relatively low status accorded to him by the rules of English society. The American legation in London had none of the social and political importance enjoyed by its British counterpart in Washington, and the fact that he was the third Adams to represent America counted but little among families whose record of diplomatic service went back two or three hundred years. The feeling that “he was there to be put aside” was magnified by the English reluctance to speak to strangers. “No effort is made here to extend acquaintances,” Adams complained after the family went to a ball only to spend the entire evening in a lonely cluster.56 Yet he knew this had not been the experience of Charles Sumner, or of John Motley, and he wondered whether Sumner was poisoning his English friends against him and Seward.57
But those who did try to be friendly to Adams were often put off by his stiff manner. Five cabinet members gave dinners in his honor in June; only one, the Duke of Argyll, was prepared to repeat the experiment. “I have not yet been to a single entertainment where there was any conversation that I should care to remember,” Adams complained to Charles Francis Jr.58 The Argylls were able to look past Adams’s reserve since they regarded him more as a cause than a person. Adams unbent a little once he experienced the difference between a normal London dinner and the informal, lively gatherings at Stafford House. “The Duke and Duchess,” he recorded in his diary, “have the simplest and most engaging manners of any of the nobility I have yet seen.”59
Even Americans could find Adams difficult to approach. “He said he was very glad to see me,” recorded a visiting diplomat, “in a tone which no doubt was intended for kindness. It was certainly courteous. But there was a lack of warmth and stiffness about it which … made me feel as though the temperature of the room had dropped several degrees.”60 Adams was incapable of producing charm on demand, a serious handicap for a diplomat. “My own wish,” he wrote in his diary, “is to be silent when I have nothing to say, and not to be compelled to make conversation on topics which do not interest me.”61 Lord and Lady Macclesfield went out of their way to welcome the new minister, only to be met with suspicion. “I am at a loss to know the cause of their civility to us,” he wrote, adding, “It is always irksome to me, who have the same cold manners [as the English] to attempt to make acquaintances, so that I hardly know how I shall get on.”62 Yancey sneered in his report to the Confederate secretary of state that “in his diplomatic and social relations, Mr. Adams is considered a blunderer,” though the same could be said of him.
Adams would have welcomed any excuse to stay at home. “We are invited everywhere, and dine out almost every day, but this brings us no nearer [to belonging],” he admitted to Charles Francis Jr.63 Henry Adams yearned to cut a dash among the fashionable young men, like any twenty-three-year-old, but, as an “American who neither hunted nor raced, neither shot nor fished nor gambled, and was not marriageable,” there was no obvious circle for him to join. Nor did he have school or university ties to ease his entry. Tagging along to events with his father made him feel like a burden. “Every young diplomat,” he wrote, “and most of the old ones, felt awkward in an English house from a certainty that they were not precisely wanted there, and a possibility that they might be told so.”64 Henry’s introduction to the season began with a dance given by the Duchess of Somerset, where he was forced into a Scottish reel with the daughter of the new Turkish ambassador. He could not remember a more excruciating twenty minutes.
Adams was too busy to notice his son’s unhappiness. Seward showed more restraint in his subsequent dispatches, but he continued to insist on a retraction of the neutrality proclamation.65 The Queen’s Advocate, Sir John Harding, claimed that his sympathies lay with the North, but, recorded Adams, when “I tried to explain to him the nature of my objection, which is much misunderstood here, he defended it with the usual argument.”66 The British attitude in general dismayed him. “People do not quite understand Americans or their politics,” he wrote to Charles Francis Jr. He had heard that Richard Cobden thought separating from the South would be good for the North,67 and John Bright had come out strongly for “strict neutrality.”68 “They think this a hasty quarrel,” complained Adams. “They do not comprehend the connection which slavery has with it, because we do not at once preach emancipation. Hence they go to the other extreme and argue that it is not an element of the struggle.”69
Adams was himself guilty of mischaracterization. The English reaction was far more complicated than he allowed. The celebrated novelist Mrs. Gaskell, an ardent admirer of the United States, confessed to being “thoroughly puzzled by what is now going on in America.” “I don’t mind your thinking me dense or ignorant,” she wrote candidly to the future president of Harvard, Charles Eliot Norton. “But I should have thought (I feel as if I were dancing among eggs) that separating yourselves from the South was like getting rid of a diseased member.” She added: “You know I live in S. Lancashire where all personal and commercial intimacies are with the South. Everyone looks and feels sad (—oh so sad) about this war. It would do Americans good to see how warm the English heart is towards them.”70
Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species had been published in 1859, highlighted another aspect that troubled the English. “Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God,” he wrote to the botanist Asa Gray, “that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery.”71 A leading abolitionist, Richard Webb, voiced a similar complaint from Ireland: “Neither Lincoln nor Seward has yet spoken an antislavery syllable since they took office.”72 Seward had specifically instructed all U.S. ministers and consuls to avoid mentioning the word in connection with the Union. The deliberate omission was a grievous miscalculation. Seward had sacrificed the North’s trump card in Britain in the hope that it would appease the South. Instead, he had provided ammunition to his critics who accused the North of hypocrisy. The Economist had already stated, “The great majority of the people in the Northern States detest the coloured population even more than do the Southern whites.”73 At the beginning of June, Moran’s nemesis, Sarah Parker Remond, gave credence to the charge in an article about her family’s persecution as free blacks in New England. Though she included a plea for England to support the North, it sounded absurd against the backdrop of her heart-rending experiences.74
Yet for all the finger-pointing and public criticism of the North, the Southern envoys failed to make the slightest change in Britain’s policy. “We are satisfied that the Government is sincere in its desire to be strictly neutral in the contest,” Yancey repeated in his next letter to Secretary Toombs, “and will not countenance any violation of its neutrality.”75 Writing to a close friend in the South, Yancey admitted that the mission was not turning out the way he had envisioned: “In the first place, important as cotton is, it is not King in Europe.” Furthermore, he added, “The anti-Slavery sentiment is universal. Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been read and believed.”76
4.1 The U.S. consulate in London was a separate entity from the legation in the nineteenth century, and dealt primarily with matters arising from shipping and trade.
4.2 It took ten days for a newspaper report in New York to be reprinted in The Times. There was a slightly quicker diplomatic route: if Lord Lyons needed to send an urgent message, he could send a telegram to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where it would be taken by steamer to Liverpool and telegraphed to London; this could cut the delay to eight or, in good weather, seven days.