An unlikely friendship—The Fingal escapes—The success of Confederate propaganda—Seward rues his mistake—Appointment of Mason and Slidell—Capture of the Trent
The departure of Samuel Phillips Day on the Young America from New York in the middle of October coincided with the escape of the Theodora out of Charleston. The cargo on board the swift blockade runner was not cotton, but the successors to Pierre Rost and William Yancey. Frustrated by their failure to secure diplomatic recognition after the victory at Manassas, Confederate president Jefferson Davis had selected two of the South’s most prominent and experienced politicians, Senators James Mason and John Slidell, to be the new Confederate commissioners in Europe. Slidell was to go to Paris, Mason was to remain in London, and Ambrose Dudley Mann would be transferred to Brussels.
In place of the broad suggestions given to the original commissioners, Mason carried with him a long and detailed set of instructions on how to approach the British government. In particular, the Confederate cabinet ordered him to ram home the illegality of the blockade under the Declaration of Paris, in the hope that this would encourage Britain to force the reopening of Southern ports. Without its own fleet, the Confederacy remained incapable of lifting the blockade. So far, just one cruiser had been launched: a converted passenger ship renamed CSS Sumter, whose limited capabilities made it effective only as a raider against merchant ships.
The chronic shortages caused by the blockade were forcing whole regiments to sit idle for want of arms and munitions. Even before the departure of Mason and Slidell, Davis had sent an agent to England, his instructions hidden for safekeeping inside the sole of his boot, imploring Caleb Huse to “send forward supplies as rapidly and as securely as possible.… You will not allow yourself to be governed by the political agents of the Government, but act upon your own responsibility.”1 Davis’s exhortation had been anticipated; frustrated by the slow pace of shipments, Edward Anderson and James Bulloch had pooled their funds and bought their own steamship, the Fingal.
The challenge for the Confederates lay in keeping the identity of the Fingal from Henry Sanford’s spies; otherwise the U.S. Navy would have no difficulty in tracking and capturing the cargo before it reached Savannah. They were helped by one of Anderson’s most important suppliers, who had a relative in the Foreign Office. “Money will accomplish anything in England,” wrote Anderson. “The bait took, and every night before I retired to bed I was thoroughly advised of all [Charles Francis Adams’s] operations for the day.”2 He was counting on the mole to give sufficient warning if the Fingal was discovered.
Anderson frequently passed Federal agents in the street, but he had learned to tell the difference between those who were genuine arms purchasers like himself and those whose real business was to keep a watch on his own movements. “My friend McGuire is indefatigable in his attentions towards me,” he observed. “His instructions must be very stringent for he posts himself opposite the very door of the Hotel.” Ignatius Pollaky, Sanford’s detective, insisted that he had a “fix on upon every agent of the rebellion,” but still the name and location of the Fingal remained a mystery.3 Sanford had been successfully intercepting the Confederates’ telegrams until clerks at the Liverpool telegraph office became suspicious and uncovered the operation. This blunder enabled the Confederates to lodge an official complaint with the authorities. Reports appeared in the press, accusing the U.S. legation of setting up an illegal “system of political espionage and terrorism” in Britain.4 Charles Francis Adams was mortified to be blamed for Sanford’s handiwork. The spying “has been productive of great evil,” raged Moran in his diary. “Not one farthing of good has it done us.”5
Adams had never imagined that his post would be so troublesome and difficult. “Indeed the position of a minister at this Court is far more important and responsible than I had supposed,” he admitted in his diary.6 It disturbed him that Seward would stoop to playing dirty tricks against his opponents. “Early training in the school of New York State politics” had blunted some of his finer qualities, Adams thought. “[This] shows itself in a somewhat brusque and ungracious manner towards the representatives of foreign nations … [and], in a rather indiscriminate appliance of means to an end.” Adams had no desire to be a part of Seward’s schemes, but equally he resented learning about them in the press.
A suspicion that Seward’s behavior was the real reason behind Lord Russell’s invitation to stay at Abergeldie Castle in Scotland made Adams extremely reluctant to accept. He had no wish to travel a thousand miles in order to be grilled about his wayward chief, especially since his confidence in Seward had declined over the summer. Benjamin Moran was delighted to have the opportunity to act as the minister’s conscience. “I have advised him to go, and he probably will,” he wrote complacently in his diary on September 21. Two days later, Adams reluctantly boarded the train for the overnight journey to Aberdeen.
Although Seward’s threats of war had died down since Bull Run, the substitution of high rhetoric for low-level harassment had made the British cabinet nervous about the U.S. secretary of state’s intentions. Knowing that Adams shared his dislike of ceremony, Lord Russell had asked him to his private retreat in Scotland in the hope that the informal setting would enable them to be frank toward each other; it had worked with John Lothrop Motley, who had visited earlier in the month before taking up his new post at the U.S. legation in Vienna. During Adams’s visit, Russell deliberately avoided any searching interviews or prolonged conversations of the type the minister dreaded. Their “desultory” talks ebbed and flowed around family meals and bracing country walks along the wooded banks of the river Dee.
Russell’s campaign to charm Adams was a complete success. “He was for the first time,” recorded Adams, “easy, friendly, I might almost call it genial … I liked him better the nearer I saw him.” Some of the misunderstandings and fears from the summer, which had seemed so intractable, simply melted away. “The result of this protracted interview was decidedly advantageous,” wrote Adams. “In the first place we tacitly grew into more confidence in one another.”7
Refreshed by his initiation into the pleasures of alfresco tea with Scotch eggs and boiled peat water, Adams’s good mood lasted until his return to the legation on September 27, where he found a scene of perfect chaos. Benjamin Moran was losing his temper at an unruly crowd of would-be volunteers and passport seekers while the secretary, Charles Wilson, who, if not drunk, was only recently sober, sat hunched behind his desk reading the newspapers. Only after the legation had been cleared and the latest surveillance reports retrieved from the piles of rubbish in Wilson’s corner did Adams learn that no progress at all had been made in finding Bulloch’s secret cargo ship. He was about to give up on the project when a stranger came to the legation on October 1 offering to sell information about the rebels. Much as it offended Adams’s sensibilities to pay him, he realized it was their best chance to thwart the Confederates: “The truth is,” he wrote in his diary, “of late they have been too cunning for us.”8
Ten days later, the Confederates’ mole in the Foreign Office sent word that Adams knew the name and the location of the Fingal. Anderson and Bulloch went down to Holyhead in Wales on October 15 but were too late to prevent a customs officer from boarding the Fingal, his pen and notebook in hand. Bulloch was aghast: “I thought of the rifles and sabres in the hold, and the ill-armed pickets on the Potomac waiting and longing for them.”9 The two men took a desperate risk. Anderson tricked the customs officer into leaving the steamer. Then, instead of sailing into dock as promised, Bulloch ordered the Fingal to weigh anchor and “we cracked on all the steam her boilers would bear.” They expected to be fired upon or chased by a customs ship, but nothing happened. “It was half past eight o’clock before we got fairly out to sea beyond the reach of batteries and pursuit,” wrote Anderson. “How my heart lightened as I looked at the blue water again and found myself on board a good staunch ship once more.”10
Shortly after the Fingal’s escape, the U.S. legation heard that the Bermuda had arrived at Savannah. “Wilson pretends to disbelieve it,” complained Moran on October 17. “But I fear it is fact.” Otherwise, he thought, there would not be so many advertisements in The Times for investors to buy shares in blockade-running ships. “John Bull would violate every law of honor and every principle of justice if he can secure his own ends thereby,” Moran declared.11 The same criticism was being leveled, with equal rancor, by the British government against Seward.
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“Mr. Seward appears to have deemed it advisable to get up a little excitement about the European Powers again” was how Lord Lyons wryly characterized the situation to Lord Russell on October 22.12 William Howard Russell was not constrained like Lyons by the language of diplomacy. Seward was up to “his usual tricks,” he noted in a letter to J. C. Bancroft Davis. “He is determined to resort to his favorite panacea of making the severed States reunited by a war with England.”13 Neither Lyons nor William Howard Russell thought it was a coincidence that Seward’s latest salvos against England had started when public confidence in the Lincoln administration was wavering. “A victory would do much to set things straight,” Lyons had written privately to Lord Russell in September, “but some of the illusions with which the war was begun are gone forever. The appearance of unanimity in the North has completely vanished.”14 Lyons was referring to the political controversy started by Union general John C. Frémont in the border state of Missouri, who in August had announced the emancipation of all slaves in the state belonging to Confederate sympathizers. Frémont’s impetuous act not only threatened to tear the army apart, with some regiments appearing ready to resign en masse rather than fight for the Negro, but also gave the strongest possible incentive to Missouri and the other slave-owning border states to join forces with the Confederacy.
Lincoln was already considering the removal of Frémont from his post when General McClellan suffered his first significant defeat. It was only a small engagement between two brigades at a place called Ball’s Bluff, forty miles upriver from Washington, but the high number of Federal soldiers killed and wounded shook Lincoln’s confidence in his new military commander. The possibility that the South might grow from eleven to thirteen or fourteen states could tip the scales against the North. The next day, October 22, Lincoln announced to his cabinet that he was repudiating both Frémont and his emancipation declaration. He was prepared to lose the support of the radical abolitionists in his own party, but not that of Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland, which would make “the job on our hands,” Lincoln confessed, “too large for us.”15
Lord Lyons had at first paid little attention to Seward’s rather obvious attempts to distract attention from the U.S. government’s woes.16 He was too busy trying to prevent the secretary of state from undermining the Anglo-French alliance. Seward had begun to woo Emperor Napoleon III in the delusion that France was the friendlier of the two nations.7.1 17 When Henri Mercier, the French minister, warned him that his government was losing patience with the blockade, Seward hinted that if the emperor withdrew his recognition of Southern belligerency, the North would do everything in its power to ensure a steady supply of cotton. Rather than being grateful for this show of favoritism, the French saw it as further proof that the North was heading for defeat. Mercier regarded Southern independence as a fait accompli and was trying to persuade Lyons that it was in everybody’s interest for the Great Powers to recognize the Confederacy. Logic must prevail over sentiment, Mercier patiently but persistently argued. Lyons refused to be drawn in: “I take, perhaps, a more hopeful view than M. Mercier does of the Military prospects of the North,” he explained to Lord Russell.19
However, Lyons could not ignore Seward’s declaration on October 26 that the North was “expelling” Consul Bunch from Charleston (where it had no effective jurisdiction) for holding talks with the Confederacy about privateering. The staff at the British legation was furious that Seward had made no reference to the French consul, who had also taken part in the negotiations. Lyons maintained a stony silence during his interview with Seward, knowing that it would annoy the secretary of state to be denied a reaction. “Mr. Bunch has merely been selected as a safer object of attack than the British or French Government,” he reported angrily to Lord Russell after the meeting.20 It was not the transparency of Seward’s motives that worried Lyons but the American’s failure to realize the impact of his words and deeds on the international stage. “He always tries violence in language first,” observed Lyons, “and then runs the risk of pledging himself and the nation to violent courses, if he be taken at once at his word.”21
When Lord Russell heard the news about Consul Bunch, he understood that his efforts with Adams were unlikely to have the slightest effect on Seward’s behavior. “It is the business of Seward to feed the mob with sacrifices every day,” he wrote to Lord Palmerston, “and we happen to be the most grateful food he can offer.” As long as there were no actions accompanying the secretary of state’s words, Russell thought the safest course was to ignore him, since Seward was a “singular mixture of the bully and coward.”22 Palmerston agreed, although he wished that more regiments had been sent to Canada as a warning to Seward against becoming too cocky. But the British cabinet’s anxieties were dismissed by the new secretary for war, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, who advised them not to be fooled by Seward’s charade of aggression: “The Washington government is violent and unscrupulous,” he wrote, “but it is not insane.”23
Throughout Britain, however, the effect of Seward’s threats, which he ensured were known to the press, was to swing public opinion dramatically away from the North. The mills had already moved to short time in order to preserve their dwindling cotton stocks. Reynolds’s Newspaper, a popular weekly aimed at the working classes, blamed the Northern blockade rather than the Southern cotton embargo for the looming crisis. “England must break the Blockade,” cried an editorial in early autumn, “or Her Millions must starve.”24 Henry Adams was trying without success to plant favorable articles in the press. “I hope that you will see in some of the London newspapers if not my writing, at least my hand,” he wrote in confidence to his brother Charles Francis Jr. “They need it, confound ’em.”25 Benjamin Moran was convinced that the Confederates were either feeding Reuter with false information or encouraging him to slant his news. “That he is under the influence of the rebels is too clear to be the subject of doubt,” he fulminated in his diary. Only after the news service turned a recent Federal victory into a defeat was Moran able to persuade Charles Francis Adams to deliver a friendly warning to Reuter.26
Ill.10 Punch acknowledges the threat posed by the Union blockade to “King Cotton.”
Henry Adams complained to Charles Francis Jr. that their father would not engage in any form of journalism or public speaking. Although the senior Adams received many more invitations than his Confederate rivals, he invariably turned them down. While he agreed to attend the Lord Mayor’s dinner on November 9 on the assurance that he would not be called upon to speak, William Yancey eagerly accepted an invitation to the less coveted Fishmongers’ Company because there was a chance that he might.27
The departing Confederate commissioners had been working hard, they informed Richmond, to cultivate anyone “likely to bring to bear a favorable influence on the British cabinet.”28 But the greatest Southern propaganda coup had nothing to do with the envoys’ efforts. In September a book entitled The American Union, which defended the South’s claim to independence, became a surprise bestseller. The author was a Liverpool businessman named James Spence whose travels in America had persuaded him that while slavery was doomed, the cultural and economic differences between the North and South would never be overcome. In his opinion, it was politically and morally unfeasible for two such distinct entities to remain united.
The great strength of The American Union was its sober style and earnest attempt to discuss the merits of secession. Although Northern sympathizers disagreed with Spence’s arguments, they had to admit that the book was too well written to dismiss. “It is studiously suited to the English taste,” explained the abolitionist Richard Webb, “being moderate in tone, lucid in style, and free from personalities.”29 Moreover, the subject matter—independence—appealed to English sensibilities. “I believe Englishmen instinctively sympathize with rebels,” the American vice consul, Henry Wilding, commented to his former superior, Nathaniel Hawthorne, so long as “the rebellion be not against England.”30 “Why do the Southern agents have it all their own way?” grumbled Charles Francis Jr. when he heard about the success of The American Union and other polemics. “Our agents abroad apparently confine their efforts to cabinets and officials and leave public opinion and the press to take care of themselves.”31
Henry Adams assured his brother that the situation in England was worse than he could imagine; even “our own friends fail to support us.” Lincoln’s rejection of General Frémont and his emancipation proclamation had played into the Confederates’ hands; without the slavery issue, the North was simply a large country fighting a rebellion in its nether regions. “Look at the Southerners here,” Henry wrote indignantly on October 25; “every man is inspired by the idea of independence and liberty while we are in a false position.”32 The Times seemed to take a malicious pleasure in repeating as often as it could the hoary claim that the war was a contest between one side fighting for “empire” and the other “for independence.”33 The only politician who was prepared to attack Delane’s crafty misrepresentation of the conflict was the Duke of Argyll, who delivered a ringing defense of the Union at his annual estate dinner on November 2. “I do not care whether we look at it from the Northern or from the Southern point of view,” the Illustrated London News reported him as saying. “Gentlemen, I think we ought to admit, in fairness to the Americans, that there are some things worth fighting for, and that national existence is one of these.”34
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The public in both countries would have been shocked had they known Seward’s real thoughts about the state of Anglo-American relations. Although the secretary of state was always talking as though he were locked in a life-and-death struggle with Britain, he knew that there was no desire in London for conflict with the North. Even if he discounted Lyons’s protestations and Adams’s dispatches, John Motley, whose opinion Seward trusted, had been giving him verbatim reports of his conversations with persons of note in England, including Lord Russell, Prince Albert, and the Queen. Motley’s letters contained “a most cheering account of the real sentiment of honest sympathy existing in the best Class of English Society towards us,” exclaimed the president’s private secretary John Hay, who was present when Seward read out sections to Lincoln.35
The truth was that Seward cared little for what foreign governments thought about the war so long as they obeyed his directive to regard it as a minor insurrection and not a fully fledged rebellion. He worried even less about foreign sentiment and persistently ignored the warnings from his consuls and Henry Sanford that the North was squandering its goodwill abroad.36 “Foreign sympathy … never did and never can create or maintain any state,” Seward wrote flippantly to John Bigelow, the new American consul in Paris.37 But once he learned that the new Confederate commissioners were to be Senators Mason and Slidell, Seward started to feel anxious about the North’s representation in Europe. John Bright’s complaint about the Morrill Tariff having “done immense harm to the friendly feeling which ought to exist here towards you,” and Motley’s observation of the “very great change in English public sympathy since the passing of the Morrill Tariff,” suddenly became the talk of the State Department.38
William Howard Russell had disregarded rumors that Seward was looking for emissaries to send to Europe until he bumped into him on November 4 and learned that the stories were true. “He begged of me to come and dine with him tomorrow,” Russell recorded in his diary, “to meet Mr. Everett who is here as one of a secret commission.”39 But having embraced the need for special agents abroad, Seward discovered that it was no easy task to find the right men. The august Edward Everett, a former secretary of state, minister to Britain, governor of and senator for Massachusetts, and the greatest orator of his generation, changed his mind two days later, and several other candidates showed a similar reluctance. Finally Seward was able to enlist four suitable representatives: General Winfield Scott, who had been forced to retire from the army; John Hughes, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, who would battle with Slidell for the sympathy of the French; the Episcopal bishop of Ohio, Charles McIlvaine, who was to woo the Anglican clergy; and his own old political partner Thurlow Weed, who Seward knew would be more than a match for James Mason. William Howard Russell could see why Seward admired Weed as a political lobbyist, although he doubted that the skill would serve him as well in a foreign environment. “Thurlow is a crafty old fellow,” he wrote to the Times correspondent in New York, “but he will be of small weight among the polished politicians of France or England.”40 Weed, Archbishop Hughes, and General Scott sailed together on November 8 from New York. Weed was angered by a newspaper report that exposed the nature of their mission. He was sure that Charles Sumner had either written it or told the writer what to say in order to embarrass Seward. Weed had seen him the day before and noticed that he had a “hang-dog look.” But they had only Seward to blame for the pandemonium on the docks.
All persons wishing to depart from New York, including foreigners, were suddenly required to have their passport countersigned by the secretary of state. Among those most severely affected were British travelers passing through New York on ship connections to other ports. British consul Archibald’s Manhattan office was filled with stranded families seeking his help. Some of them would have to wait another month for the next boat to their destination. Even a British Army officer who was en route from Canada to his regiment in Nassau was forcibly detained at the quayside. Archibald begged Lyons to make Seward appoint a civil servant with signatory powers, so at least the process might be done in New York.41 Archibald assumed that the purpose of all this was to annoy England.42 He was not alone in thinking so; Anthony Trollope accused Seward of having “resolved to make every Englishman in America feel himself in some way punished because England had not assisted the North.”43
The real reason lay with Mason and Slidell. Initial reports claimed that they had managed to sail out of Charleston on board CSS Nashville, another converted steamship like the Sumter. The secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, had immediately dispatched several warships to run her down before she reached Europe, but the only ship that spotted the Nashville—USS Connecticut—lost sight of her in the pursuit. Then Seward received a different report: the Confederates had traveled by way of Cuba and were going to dock in New York in early November.44 No longer sure what to believe, Seward imposed the passport regulation to save the administration from the embarrassment of the Confederates’ escaping in full view.
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The Nashville was not carrying the envoys, although her mission was no less dangerous to the North. The Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, had ordered her to England to be fitted as a war steamer. The Nashville had reached St. George’s harbor in Bermuda when the Fingal arrived on November 2, carrying Edward Anderson and James Bulloch. The two ships anchored only a few hundred yards from each other. “The Nashville ran up the Confederate flag as we stood in,” recorded Anderson, “& I supposed had been sent out by Mr. Mallory for the express purpose of communicating with us, but how to learn this was the question.” Their disguise was working a little too well. “To all intents and purposes we were an English merchant steamer,” he recorded. “We were sporting the British flag, had an English captain and crew, and desired above all things to keep our movements secret. To send a boat to the Nashville direct would be to betray ourselves.” It was a ridiculous situation. The ships rocked gently side by side, neither daring to make the first move. Anderson grew impatient. “Taking a spyglass from one of the quarter masters I affected to be admiring the surrounding objects until by degrees my vision turned upon the Nashville. Her officers were on deck scrutinizing us.” He ordered coded signals to be raised, but it soon became clear that they meant nothing to the Nashville. Finally, one of the Fingal’s officers rowed over on the pretext of asking for a casket of fresh water and was recognized by a former crewmate.
The captain of the Nashville turned out to be a former naval colleague of Anderson’s named Robert Pegram. That night, as they swapped news and experiences, Pegram warned Anderson and Bulloch to banish any thoughts of an easy entry into Savannah: if his encounter with the Connecticut was anything to go by, they would be chased all the way from the Outer Banks.
Five days later, on November 7, the Fingal set sail for the South during a tropical storm. After five nights of hurricane-force wind, the weather calmed, and the Confederates were glad to realize they were only 140 miles from Savannah. “The night closed in upon us bright and clear, with the moon shining sweetly down upon us,” wrote Anderson. “Everyone was on the alert.” The moment of reckoning had come. It was not long before they caught sight of a Federal ship bobbing on the water. “The silence of the dead was preserved on board our vessel,” Anderson continued. “In my anxiety as I stood beside the helmsman, I could hear the throbbing of my heart.” As dawn approached, the heavy night dew condensed into a thick, wet fog. Suddenly, one of the caged cockerels began its morning crow. A dozen hands reached frantically into the coop. The creature was strangled and thrown overboard. A second cockerel awoke, and then a third, forcing the crew to pitch the whole cage into the sea. It was too late for secrecy now. The Fingal raced toward the harbor, somehow managing to elude the steam frigate that guarded the entrance. At last, wrote Anderson on November 12, “everything had come about just as I had dreamed of.”45 Thousands lined the quayside to cheer the Fingal’s entry into Savannah.46
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Anderson and Bulloch’s arrival in Richmond, however, was overshadowed by the Federal capture of Port Royal in South Carolina on November 7. The South had lost the only good harbor between Charleston and Savannah, while the North gained a second base on the Confederate coast that could provide fuel and supplies to the blockading fleets. The battle had brought together the largest U.S. battle fleet ever assembled up to that time. Seventy-seven vessels carrying 12,000 troops had set sail on November 1 from the recently captured Cape Hatteras. Ebenezer Wells and the reinstated 79th were among the three regiments on board USS Vanderbilt.
The expedition began smoothly enough, but by nightfall the wind had picked up and the flotilla began to lose its cohesion. The next day a fierce gale assaulted the Union convoy. A supply ship went down with all hands; another jettisoned its guns in a frantic attempt to stay afloat. On the Vanderbilt, the terrified soldiers and animals howled in unison. As the storm continued to rage, the horses were driven into such a frenzy that a dozen were able to struggle free and went careering about the ship. Unable to capture or subdue them, Wells was forced to kill the animals by slitting their throats. Their blood spilled out across the deck and down through every crack and crevice, traumatizing the already shattered soldiers. When the battered fleet reassembled outside the sandbank off Port Royal on November 7, the 79th Highlanders were too sick and exhausted by their journey, recorded Wells, to care whether they were in the South or in Hell.
The uplifting sight of artillery shells smashing through the Confederate defenses at Port Royal brought the soldiers back to life. “We took them on completely by surprise,” recorded Wells. In less than a day, the two forts guarding the entrance to the port were bombarded into submission. The Federals followed up their victory by sweeping inland and seizing the town of Beaufort. “The soldiers and inhabitants all left in a hurry so much so that when we landed some of us had the satisfaction of sitting down to unfinished breakfasts and finishing them,” Wells wrote. Afterward he and his friends made a thorough inspection of the empty plantations, riding around in the owners’ carriages and generally helping themselves to anything of interest.47
Southerners, observed Anderson, “were frightened to death by the capture of Port Royal” and looking for someone to blame.48 At the Confederate War Department, he learned that President Davis was considered in some quarters to be the main culprit because of his constant meddling and countermanding of orders. Leroy Walker had resigned as secretary of war in September, and the new secretary, Judah P. Benjamin, had no qualification for the post other than his loyalty to Davis.
In Benjamin’s defense, he had inherited a badly organized and unhappy department. Boredom and disease were sapping the strength of the Confederate armies. Sam Hill’s regiment, the 6th Louisiana Volunteers, was losing half a dozen men a month.49 “Our hospital tents are full of sick; I am always busy,” wrote Mary Sophia Hill from their camp in northern Virginia after yet another healthy young man died from typhus. One of her dying charges asked for a letter to be written to his mother in England, giving “an account of his death, and his reason for joining the Southern army.” It was done as he requested, although she thought the letter contained little to comfort the young man’s mother. Some of Mary Sophia’s friends urged her to leave the camp for her own safety. “But I will risk it,” she wrote on November 13. “I am determined to keep my brother in view, and I have no other means of protection.”50 Sam was always losing something, his blanket one day, his belt and cartridge box the next. He had no idea how to forage for himself and remained dependent on the food parcels sent to Mary by their friends in New Orleans.
The Southern press demanded to know why their troops were so poorly supplied. “We are credibly informed,” expostulated the Richmond Examiner, “that there has not been a day within the past two months when full rations were served to the army. There has been great and almost constant want of candles and soap; sometimes and for the past ten days allegedly no sugar or rice.”51 Judah Benjamin was valiantly trying to reorganize the sclerotic relationship between the army and the commissary, but neither department was willing to compromise or take responsibility for mistakes. Yet he was also guilty of shortsightedness, as Edward Anderson discovered when he tried to interest him and Mallory in running a joint operation to improve the flow of supplies from England. Believing that Mason and Slidell would soon be in Europe, Benjamin thought there was no need to take action against a blockade that would not be around for much longer. Mallory also regarded the blockade as merely a stumbling block rather than a threat to the South’s existence. “Mallory met my suggestions with evident discourtesy,” Anderson recorded, “and yet he knew nothing whatever of the details of my arrangements.”52 Benjamin failed to understand the importance of Anderson and his ideas, and although the agent begged to be sent back to London, he allowed Anderson to be reassigned to General Robert E. Lee’s staff. Anderson spent the rest of the war commanding the forts and batteries around Savannah, his expertise and brilliance wasted.
James Bulloch fared somewhat better than Anderson, suggesting to Mallory that they use the Fingal to ship cotton to England and take the profits to pay for supplies brought back on the return journey. But once the Fingal was loaded with cotton and made ready to go, Bulloch realized that she was too slow to outrun the blockading fleet. Rather than allowing him to transfer the cargo to a faster vessel, Mallory lost confidence in the idea and ordered Bulloch to return to London on a civilian blockade runner. Like Benjamin, Mallory decided that the shipping business was a distraction from far more pressing matters; the privateering scheme had failed to attract many volunteers, and for the moment all he had was the Sumter and the Nashville, neither of which would stand up against an actual naval vessel. On reflection, Mallory thought it was just as well that the new Confederate commissioners had traveled on a private vessel rather than the easily identifiable Nashville.
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The three U.S. warships dispatched by Secretary Welles had searched in vain for the arriving Confederate commissioners Mason and Slidell. One of the vessels, the James Adger, limped into Southampton on November 2 after being damaged in a storm off the coast of Ireland. The Adger’s unexpected arrival led Henry Sanford to consider using it against a Confederate cargo ship called the Gladiator, which was about to set sail from a London dockyard. Sanford’s plan was complicated and probably illegal: he thought that if he could bribe the Gladiator’s pilot to steer the ship into a mud bank on the Thames, the Adger could seize the cargo and the crew and steam away before the authorities had time to react.
Sanford hurried to the U.S. legation to share his idea, expecting some resistance from Adams but not the furious tirade that greeted him. Adams interrupted Sanford in midflow to reveal that his spy system was being shut down. “Whilst he was quietly sitting on the other side of the channel without any responsibility for the acts of the worthless people whom he was employing,” Adams told him, “the odium of their dirty conduct was inevitably fastened upon me.” But no more: he had obtained Seward’s agreement that from now on Sanford would have to confine his activities to Belgium, where he belonged. Shocked and bewildered, Sanford first protested, then pleaded, and finally tried bargaining with Adams, but the minister cut him off by rising from his chair. Mortified, Sanford followed suit, saying goodbye with as much dignity as he could muster; “but,” wrote Adams, “I imagine he will never forgive me.”53 Benjamin Moran had always envied Sanford, and his humiliation felt like justice served: “One million of dollars were placed at this man’s disposal for Gov’t purposes and it has been greatly squandered to our injury,” Moran wrote in his diary. “With one half of what he threw away in odious espionage I could have bought the British Press … every newspaper writer in London can be purchased, from those of The Times down.… I do not mean to say that each would openly take cash; but each will take a consideration suitable to his taste.”54
Adams was still uncertain whether Sanford had left for good when a polite summons arrived from Lord Palmerston on November 12. Regardless of its tone, the request for an immediate meeting suggested trouble. Adams was filled with trepidation as he made his way to Cambridge House at 94 Piccadilly through another London fog. He had never been there during the day, but the yellow gloom that shrouded the city made the difference seem slight. Flaming pyres only partially illuminated the forecourt. Inside, gaslights threw off as much smoke as light.7.2 Palmerston was waiting for him in a library that was untenably dark by American standards. He was alone, and “at once opened on the subject then evidently weighing on his mind”: the government knew the true purpose of the James Adger.55 For a moment Adams thought that Sanford had carried out his plan, but as Palmerston talked it became clear that his concern had nothing to do with the Gladiator.
The British government, he said, had learned that the North was hunting for the Confederate commissioners Mason and Slidell, though its latest information on the duo was sketchy and contradictory. The Foreign Office could not be certain, but their reports suggested that the Confederates were traveling on a British mail ship, and that the Adger had been sent to intercept her. Palmerston was less concerned about the Adger’s right to seize the rebels—although he did consult the law officers on the question—than the obvious threat such an act posed to national honor, since an attack on a British ship could not pass unchallenged. The Confederates could send an entire fleet of commissioners to England, he informed Adams gravely, without its having the slightest effect on the British government’s actions. The North would do better to leave all British ships alone. Offended by Palmerston’s assumption that the United States would stoop to waylaying British mail packets, Adams explained rather huffily that the Adger had been chasing a rebel cruiser called the Nashville. Having failed to find her, the captain was waiting for the departure of the Gladiator, which—he labored the point—was laden with arms and munitions for the South. Palmerston refused to be drawn in and responded with the candid assertion that the North might eventually crush Southern resistance, “but that would not be restoring the Union.”
After the meeting, Adams’s relief that it had nothing to do with Sanford was tempered by his indignation at Palmerston’s accusations. A week later, on the twenty-first, the Adger’s prey, the Nashville, sailed into Southampton with a Confederate flag brazenly flying from its mast. Although the Confederate commissioners were not on board, there were thirty prisoners from a Northern clipper called the Harvey Birch, which the Nashville had captured and burned in the English Channel. Lord Russell promptly sent orders that she was not to receive any military supplies or fittings. Her arrival was embarrassing and obviously provocative to the North. Charles Francis Adams demanded the arrest of Captain Pegram on the charge of piracy. Pegram responded with a letter to The Times pointing out that he was a regularly commissioned officer of the Confederate navy and therefore not a pirate. The locals in Southampton preferred Adams’s version and treated Pegram like a swashbuckling hero.
Russell naturally refused Adams’s request, since the Nashville was a bona fide ship of war belonging to a recognized belligerent, but he did agree to keep her under surveillance in case the Confederates attempted to smuggle guns on board.56 The torrent of correspondence between the legation and Whitehall was now so great that Henry Adams and the two secretaries were overwhelmed by the drudgery of copying and archiving each and every letter. Benjamin Moran’s tirades and twitterings made life in the office almost intolerable for Henry, who struggled “to resist complete nervous depression” resulting from the prolonged exposure.57 On the morning of the twenty-seventh, the subject of Moran’s ire was Lord Russell’s latest response, which he characterized as unforgivably “hostile.” The embittered secretary cursed Russell and Palmerston “for playing into the hands of the rebels.” The prime minister had hated America since the War of 1812, contended Moran, and “has deliberately determined to force us into war.”58 He believed it was only a matter of time before Palmerston found some pretext to unleash his designs.
The moment came sooner than Moran expected. At precisely half past twelve, a messenger called with another telegram from the U.S. consul in Southampton. This time it was not about the Nashville. A ship from St. Thomas had arrived, bearing the astonishing news that Mason and Slidell had been captured off the coast of Cuba. They had been traveling on the Trent, a British mail packet bound for St. Thomas, when USS San Jacinto under Captain Charles Wilkes forcibly stopped the vessel and took the commissioners prisoner. The jaded occupants of the U.S. legation began cheering, even though, Henry Adams admitted, they knew it meant “not merely diplomatic rupture—but a declaration of war.” His opinion was echoed around the country: “Have these Yankees then gone completely crazy to carry out this mad coup with the Confederate Commissioners?” Friedrich Engels asked Karl Marx, whose prodigious journalistic output from his home in Manchester included weekly articles about the Civil War. “To take political prisoners by force, on a foreign ship, is the clearest casus belli there can be. The fellows must be sheer fools to land themselves in war with England.”59
Charles Francis Adams was not at the legation to hear the news. He had accepted an invitation from Richard Monckton Milnes to join a large house party at Fryston Hall in Yorkshire. Neither Charles Francis nor Abigail had experienced life in a grand country house before; Fryston’s “somewhat ancient” decoration and total lack of modern conveniences confirmed their prejudices about the superiority of New England to Olde England. The wet weather forced the guests to huddle together in Milnes’s library, whose relatively efficient fireplace made it also double as the breakfast room. By the twenty-seventh, the guests had become restless. Unable to stand the confinement any longer, the group—which included the MP William Forster, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, and Austen Henry Layard, the excavator of the ancient city of Nineveh (who had recently put away his tools to become Lord Russell’s undersecretary for foreign affairs)—accepted Milnes’s invitation to brave the rain for a visit to the ruins of Pomfret Castle.
A messenger bearing Moran’s telegram from London tracked Adams down at the ruins. The minister would always remember standing in the persistent drizzle making polite conversation with his fellow guests while in his hand he clutched the news about the Trent. “We had a very dark and muddy walk home,” he recorded. William Forster accompanied him, but Adams did not reveal the contents of the telegram, Forster told his wife, until “as we got in, Adams said, in his cool, quiet way ‘I have got stirring news.’ ” Forster continued: “I think he is as much grieved as I am, and does not think a hundred Masons and Slidells would be worth the effect on us.” The news had spread by dinner, making it a torturous affair. No one knew what to say, and Forster’s attempts to make conversation were so ham-fisted that Adams could not help commenting in his diary: “He is no courtier.” In the end, it was left to a local manufacturer who had been invited to make up the numbers to fill the void, which he did at great length in a diatribe addressed solely to Adams on the iniquities of the Morrill Tariff.60
The next morning, Layard and Forster went to London immediately after breakfast. Adams thought it best to travel by a different train and left at noon. Milnes and his wife were so warm and earnest at the parting that Adams felt rather emotional; it seemed at that moment as though no one in England had ever been so kind to him. He arrived at the legation in the evening to find Henry, Moran, and Wilson overexcited and once again making inappropriate comments to a crowd of visitors. A note from Lord Russell was waiting on Adams’s desk. The hour was late, he realized with a tinge of relief. The meeting would have to wait until tomorrow, giving him a little more time to prepare.
“There was a shade more of gravity visible in his manner, but no ill will,” Adams wrote after the interview on the twenty-ninth. He had decided to be frank with the foreign secretary. “Not a word had been whispered to me about such a project,” he confessed. This seemed to reassure Russell, who then asked whether the Adger had received orders respecting British vessels. Adams replied no, not as far as he knew. There was nothing more to be said by either man. “The conference lasted perhaps ten minutes,” Adams recorded. He could not imagine Seward being as civil in similar circumstances. But he was under no illusions that Lord Russell’s politeness signified an unwillingness to retaliate. During the carriage journey home, Adams wondered if this had been his final visit to the Foreign Office: “On the whole, I scarcely remember a day of greater strain in my life.”61 The press, he saw, was urging the government to stand up for British rights. Even liberal papers like the Manchester Guardian accused the American government of testing “the truth of the adage that it takes two to make a quarrel.”62
Lord Russell described his conversation with Adams at a hastily called cabinet meeting on Friday, November 29. Every member was present, except for the Duke of Argyll, who was on holiday in France. Palmerston was bristling with pugnacious indignation. He had spent the past few days calculating ship distances and totting up troop numbers. Whether Captain Wilkes’s act had been premeditated or not, Palmerston had decided it was time “to read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten.”63
7.1 Lyons suspected that Seward and Mercier had only a vague idea of what the other was saying, and although he faithfully reported all that Mercier told him, Lyons warned Lord Russell not to take his words too literally. “Your Lordship will not fail to recollect that the conversation, which was carried on in English, was repeated to me by M. Mercier in French, and that it took place between a Frenchman not very familiar with English, and an American having little or no knowledge of French.”18
7.2 Cambridge House, wrote Sir George Trevelyan memorably, was “Past the wall which screens the mansion, hallowed by a mighty shade, / Where the cards were cut and shuffled when the game of State was played.”