Captain Wilkes seizes the Trent—Northern glee—Britain prepares for war—Prince Albert’s intervention—Waiting for an answer—Seward’s dilemma—Lord Lyons takes a risk—Peace and goodwill on Christmas Day
“A cold, raw day,” William Howard Russell noted in his diary on November 16, 1861. “As I was writing,” he continued, “a small friend of mine, who appears like a stormy petrel in moments of great storm, fluttered into my room, and having chirped out something about a ‘jolly row,’—‘Seizure of Mason and Slidell,’—‘British flag insulted,’ and the like, vanished.” Russell hastily grabbed his coat and followed him outside, where he bumped into the French minister, Henri Mercier, coming from the direction of the British legation. “And then, indeed, I learned there was no doubt about the fact that [on November 8] Captain Charles Wilkes, of the U.S. steamer San Jacinto, had forcibly boarded the Trent, a British mail steamer, off the Bahamas, and had taken Messrs. Mason, Slidell, [and their secretaries] Eustis, and Macfarland from on board by armed force, in defiance of the protests of the captain and naval officer in charge of the mails.”1
The American press was jubilant over the capture. “Rightly or wrongly, the American people at large look upon it as a direct insult to the British flag,” wrote Lord Lyons.2 But the opportunity to humiliate England was not the only reason behind the public’s excitement. Mason and Slidell had been needling the North from the Senate floor for many years, and their banishment to Fort Warren in Boston Harbor was deemed a fitting punishment.8.1 The New York Times’ first editorial on the affair called for Wilkes to be honored with a medal or a public holiday. The Philadelphia Sunday Transcript went further and committed the country to war, reminding its readers that American soldiers had routed “the best of British troops” in 1812 and would do so again. “In a word, while the British government has been playing the villain, we have been playing the fool,” the paper declared. “Let her now do something beyond driveling—let her fight. If she has a particle of pluck … if she is not as cowardly as she is treacherous—she will meet the American people on land and on the sea, as they long to meet her, once again, not only to lower the red banner of St. George … but to consolidate Canada with the union.”3
Ill.11 Punch sends a British warning to the United States, December 1861.
What was not clear to Russell, however, was whether Captain Wilkes had acted on his own or in accordance with secret U.S. government instructions. His visits to the State and Navy departments on November 18 were inconclusive, since the former was not prepared to comment, but the latter had obviously been taken by surprise.4 No one at the Navy Department had a good word to say in Wilkes’s defense. Although a renowned cartographer, he had the reputation of being a bully and a braggart.5 The command of the San Jacinto had been given to him with great reluctance; “he has a super-abundance of self-esteem and a deficiency of judgment,” warned an official in August. “He will give us trouble.”6 Since his appointment, Wilkes had been trawling the oceans in defiance of his actual orders on a personal hunting expedition for Confederate ships. It was sheer luck that he stumbled onto the Confederate commissioners, and it was pure Wilkes—his colleagues told William Howard Russell—to decide that a search and seizure of the four men on a neutral ship would be legal under international law.
At the British legation, Russell encountered Lord Lyons politely fending off questions from a group of foreign ministers who had come ostensibly to offer their support, but really to ascertain England’s probable response. This, Lyons made clear, would have to come from London. He explained to Russell that his overriding concern was to prevent anything coming from himself or the legation that might help the warmongers. The staff had been given orders not to discuss the Trent with anyone, although Russell could see from the look on their faces that they thought war was inevitable.
The following day, Russell prepared his letter to The Times. “I rarely sat down to write under a sense of greater responsibility,” he admitted in his diary. 7 Russell assumed that his report would be “the first account of the seizure of the Southern Commissioners which will reach England,” and the thought of how the public would react to the news filled him with foreboding. He was no longer just describing the attack on the Trent, but also the North’s exultation and the U.S. government’s silence, which he feared would be as provocative to the English as Wilkes’s original act. Without excusing the Lincoln administration, Russell tried to explain the pressures placed upon it by democracy: “There is a popular passion and vengeance to be gratified by the capturing and punishment of Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell,” he wrote, “and I believe the Government will retain them at all risk because it dare not give them up.”8
Russell was only partially correct about the administration. Public opinion naturally played a role in its deliberations, but from the start virtually all the members of the president’s cabinet were adamantly opposed to releasing the commissioners. Lincoln allegedly complained to a journalist on November 16 about the embarrassment Wilkes had caused the country. “I fear the traitors will prove to be white elephants,” he reportedly said. “We must stick to American principles concerning the rights of neutrals. We fought Great Britain for insisting, by theory and practice, on the right to do precisely what Captain Wilkes has done.”9 If that is true, Lincoln would have been the only member of his administration, apart from Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general, to accept that Wilkes had violated international law and the only member to realize the grave threat to America’s moral reputation if the government supported him. The United States had fought the War of 1812 in part to defend its broad interpretation of “neutral rights.” It had protected the slave trade, allowing it to flourish, and had expelled the British minister, John Crampton, in 1856, risking a third Anglo-American war, for his perceived violation of these rights. The United States would be inviting the censure and mockery of the entire world if the government suddenly repudiated a fundamental principle of American foreign policy because it was no longer expedient to maintain.
Regardless of how Lincoln originally understood the issue, within twenty-four hours of hearing the news he had joined the celebrations. He wrote about the seizure with exclamation marks to Edward Everett, the former American minister in London. To General McClellan, who came to deliver a warning from the Prince de Joinville that England would demand an apology, Lincoln replied categorically that the commissioners were not going to be released. The cabinet, excepting Montgomery Blair, behaved shamefully. The worst offender was the attorney general, Edward Bates, who gave ill-judged and incorrect legal advice to his colleagues. “Some timid persons are alarmed, lest Great Britain should take offense at the violation of her Flag,” he wrote in his diary. “There is no danger on that score. The law of Nations is clear upon the point, and I have no doubt that, with a little time for examination, I could find it so settled by English authorities.”10
General McClellan also called on Seward to give him Joinville’s warning, but the secretary of state did not want to hear bad news—especially from McClellan, whom he disliked. He resented having his expertise questioned and told the general that his information about England was based on ignorance. “I said I thought I was right,” recorded McClellan; “he again contradicted me & I told him that the future would prove the correctness of my story.” McClellan left, inwardly cursing that “so weak and cowardly a thing should now control our foreign relations.”11 Seward’s unfounded optimism that Britain would not dare make a protest thoroughly depressed Lord Lyons. “I am so worn out with the never ending labour of keeping things smooth,” Lyons wrote to Lord Russell on November 22. He had heard about Seward’s reaction and was beginning to wonder whether the policy of keeping quiet was “leading these people to believe that they may go all lengths with us with impunity.… I am sometimes half tempted to wish that the worst may have come already,” he confessed. “However I do not allow this feeling to influence my conduct and I have done nothing which can in the least interfere with any course which you may take concerning the affair of the ‘Trent.’ ”12
There was apparently limited discussion of the Trent affair at the cabinet meeting on November 24. Lincoln agreed that they would wait to hear Britain’s response before the government publicly committed itself on the legality of the seizure. No one remarked on the South’s euphoric reaction to the capture or questioned why its press was so quick to agree that the British had been given a studied blow. President Jefferson Davis had laid particular stress on the insult in a speech to the Confederate Congress on November 18. “These gentlemen were as much under the jurisdiction of the British Government upon that ship and beneath its flag as if they had been on its soil,” he said. Wilkes’s act was no different from a kidnapping on Piccadilly.13
After the cabinet meeting, Seward realized that it would be impossible to keep Charles Francis Adams in limbo for two or three more weeks. He composed a dispatch on November 27 saying as little as possible about the affair except to admit that Wilkes had acted without orders. The administration was waiting for Britain’s reaction, he informed Adams. That night, the apotheosis of Wilkes continued. The governor of Massachusetts spoke at a public banquet in his honor, praising him for giving “illustrious service” to the war and for humbling the “British lion” to boot. Gideon Welles ignored Lincoln’s injunction to wait and published a letter of congratulation to Wilkes, which, fortunately, mentioned that the captain had acted on his own initiative.
When Congress reconvened on December 2, Lincoln did not specifically refer to Wilkes in his speech, but the House of Representatives passed a vote of thanks and awarded him a gold medal. In Boston, Anthony Trollope was forced to pronounce on the subject, though he felt there was more farce than force to the affair. “Who ever before heard of giving a man glory for achievements so little glorious?” he asked. Trollope was amused when people quoted obscure legal authorities at him in order to justify the Trent affair. “ ‘Wheaton is quite clear about it,’ one young girl said to me. It was the first I had ever heard of Wheaton, and so far was obliged to knock under,” he wrote. “All the world, ladies and lawyers, expressed the utmost confidence in the justice of the seizure.” Yet, Trollope added, “it was clear that all the world was in a state of the profoundest nervous anxiety on the subject.”14 As the countdown began for the arrival of newspapers from London, the press began to change its tone as editorials asked: What if the British lion roared back?
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The “lion” had been roaring since November 27. On Palmerston’s orders, the secretary of state for the colonies, the Duke of Newcastle, advised the governor-general of Canada to prepare for war: “Such an insult to our flag can only be atoned by the restoration of the men who were seized,” he wrote, “and with Mr. Seward at the helm of the United States, and the mob and the Press manning the vessel, it is too probable that this atonement may be refused.” His opinion was shared in both Houses; peace, argued Lord Clarendon (who had been foreign secretary in the 1850s), was not “worth the price of national honour.”15
Although the law officers were unanimous that the seizure was unlawful, at a meeting on November 29 the British cabinet was unable to agree on the proper measure of response to the Americans. If it were too strong, argued Gladstone, the Lincoln administration would be denied a graceful exit. Too weak, countered Palmerston, and it would send a false impression of Britain’s intentions. They resolved to leave the drafting of the letter to Lord Russell. He was to state the facts of the case and demand the restoration of the commissioners along with an apology for the outrage. Failure to do so within seven days of receiving the letter would mean the immediate departure of Lord Lyons to Canada and war between the two nations.
When the cabinet reconvened the following day, nobody had a positive comment about Russell’s resulting draft, which was clumsy and overly obsessed with national honor. The three main principles at stake (the rights of neutral countries in time of war, the right to free movement on neutral ships, and the protection of diplomatic correspondence) were not made clear at all.16 But the more the cabinet tried to amend the letter, the more defensive Russell became, until finally they agreed that Lord Lyons should receive two letters. The first would outline the case; the second would contain the threat that the United States had seven days to comply with Britain’s demand. The temporary truce collapsed immediately, as they now had not just one but two letters over which to fight. Gladstone incensed Palmerston with his musings on whether the law was entirely on their side.8.2 17 Finally there came a point when further discussion was useless, and even though no one was satisfied, the drafts were sent to the Queen and Prince Albert for their approval.
The prince lay ill with typhoid fever when the letters arrived at Windsor Castle on November 30. He had been kept informed of the cabinet’s discussions and had rightly feared that the official response would be pompous and aggressive. In the last of the prince’s many services to his adopted country, he roused himself from his bed and composed a memorandum (though he could hardly hold a pen in his hand) on what the letter ought to say. There should be “the expression of a hope,” he wrote,
that the American captain did not act under instructions, or, if he did, that he misapprehended them—that the United States Government must be fully aware that the British Government could not allow its flag to be insulted, and the security of her mail communications to be placed in jeopardy; and Her Majesty’s Government are unwilling to believe that the United States Government intended wantonly to put an insult upon this country.
Gone were the peremptory demands and in their place were merely polite statements of expectation.8.3 18
Russell conceded that the changes were necessary, but even so he doubted that they would temper Seward’s reaction or produce an apology.19 He therefore composed a third letter to Lyons, describing how the demands should be presented. Russell wanted him to be tactful but unequivocal; the release of the prisoners would negate the need for atonement, but no words or species of apology would appease Britain’s anger if the prisoners were retained.20 With any luck, Seward would realize that retreat was preferable to war, but it would be up to Lyons to make the secretary of state understand that there could be no amateur dramatics, no clever little feints or attempts at bargaining. Only a straightforward answer would do.
The postmaster general, Lord Stanley, was keeping his wife informed of the cabinet’s deliberations. “The accounts from America,” he wrote on December 2, had confirmed their fears; Northern public opinion could be summed up as “great exaltation at the insult to England, great satisfaction at the capture of Mason and Slidell and the deification of Capt. Wilkes.”21 The next day Captain Conway Seymour boarded the Boston-bound Europa with the cabinet’s letters.22 Lord Stanley chafed when he realized how long it would be until they received a reply: “It cannot get to [Lord Lyons] in less than 12 days & another 12 days to return will be the earliest we can get any intelligence of its reception.” As soon as the messenger left, however, Russell began to suffer misgivings about the plan. “I cannot imagine their giving a plain yes or no to our demands,” he wrote. “I think they will try to hook in France, and if that is, as I hope, impossible, to get Russia to support them.”23 At the bottom of Russell’s anxiety was the sense that the Americans had misunderstood his actions and that he was being wrongly blamed for reasons he still could not understand. “Not a word had been spoken, not a deed done by him but what showed the friendliest feeling,” Lady Russell wrote loyally about her husband’s dealings with the North.24
Palmerston thought that the United States would not even bother with negotiation. The “masses,” he categorically stated, will “make it impossible for Lincoln and Seward to grant our demands; and we must therefore look forward to war as the probable result.” George Cornewall Lewis, the secretary for war, complained that they were doing France’s dirty work, which was rather ungrateful of him considering that Napoleon III had promised his support. “It is quite certain that the French Govt wish for war between England and America,” wrote Lewis. “The blockade of the South would be raised, and they would get the cotton which they want.”25
Late on December 3, Russell and Palmerston called another cabinet meeting. The Treasury had received an alarming report that a Federal agent had bought up the country’s entire saltpeter reserves—about 4.5 million pounds. Most of it was due to be shipped the following day. The cabinet agreed to an immediate export ban; lacking sufficient mines of their own, the Federals would be hard-pressed to manufacture gunpowder without this precious commodity.26 The Admiralty issued a worldwide alert to every station. Admiral Milne’s instructions to ready his squadron reached him in Bermuda, where he replied: “The ships’ companies are in a high state of excitement for war, they are certainly all for the South. I hear the Lower Decks to-day are decorated with the Confederate colours.”27
The next day, the fourth, Stanley scribbled to his wife, “I write from the Cabinet where it has been decided to issue another Order in Council, prohibiting the exportation of arms & munitions of war, in addition to the former order prohibiting the exportation of saltpetre. I fear that the prospects of a satisfactory & amicable settlement are small.”28 One or two of his colleagues had protested against the ban, fearing that it would ruin Britain’s arms trade, but Stanley was entirely with Palmerston and Russell. “If we are to be at war it is as well not to let them have improved rifles to shoot us with.”29 “If this goes on,” added Stanley, “a Brigade of Guards will go out, one Battalion out of each Regiment.” His younger son, Jonny, would be among the first to go.
The cabinet agreed to form a six-member war committee. Military experts were called in, and at the War Office, strategic plans drawn up during previous periods of tension were taken out for revision. Maine was to be the first target, with simultaneous actions by the Royal Navy to blockade Boston, New Bedford, Newport, Long Island, New York, and the Delaware River. If necessary, some of these ports would be bombarded into submission. “War has no doubt its honours and its evils,” Admiral Milne reminded the secretary of state for the navy, who deprecated such wanton destruction, “but to make war felt it must be carried out against the Enemy with energy, and every place made to feel what war really is.”30
The strategic difficulties were indeed formidable. The Canadian border was more than 1,500 miles long, thinly fortified and connected by only the most basic roads and waterways. It would require a minimum of 10,000 regular troops and 100,000 militia volunteers to repel an invasion.31 Moreover, as The Times had pointed out, “We can sweep the Federal fleet from the seas, we can blockade the Atlantic cities; but we cannot garrison and hold 350,000 square miles of country.” If the Americans chose to attack Montreal or Quebec, they would face a paltry British force of less than 5,000. Canada’s only real defenses were snow and bad weather.32 Their best option was to launch the first strike and capture Maine. “Do not be surprised if you hear of us all being made prisoners of war before the end of February,” one of the departing officers wrote pessimistically.
If the Yankees are worth their salt, they will at once make peace with the South and pour 100,000 men into Canada where they can easily compensate themselves for their losses of the Confederate states, and England be perfectly unable to prevent it. Unless the British Government at once make up their minds to fitting out an expedition which can start (as soon as war is declared) to seize Portland, and open up the railway communication from there to Quebec, I cannot see how we are to maintain our position in Canada this winter.33
Lord Stanley went down to Southampton to see his son off. Lady Stanley was too distraught and remained in London. The navy did not have the eighteen troopships on hand to transport the 11,000 soldiers who were going to Canada in the first wave. Jonny’s vessel, the Adriatic, had been purchased from an American shipping firm and refitted in such haste that the U.S. flag could still be seen on the paddle box. As the Adriatic passed the Nashville on Southampton Water, the Guards band started to play “I’m Off to Charleston.” This cheeky act of bravado elicited a few halfhearted cheers from relatives who had gathered on the banks to wave farewell.34 “It will be very cold in Canada and I am afraid Jonny will feel it,” Stanley wrote to his wife.35 Their son was sailing at a dangerous time. Ice was beginning to close Canada’s navigable rivers, and monster storms would soon lash her seas.36
“The all engrossing question is will America be foolish enough to go to War with us,” wrote James Garnett, the owner of a large mill in Clitheroe in Lancashire. “Many people think it will.”37 Yancey and Dudley Mann fervently hoped so. They had not wasted any time in presenting Lord Russell with a letter of protest, and they had followed up two days later, on November 29, with a list of ships that had slipped through the blockade since April. Here was proof, they had argued, that the Northern blockade was ineffective and therefore not binding on neutral countries. Russell’s cold response on December 7 left them temporarily crushed, until they reflected on the thousands of British soldiers who were leaving for North America. This was a case, they decided, of actions speaking louder than words.
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Charles Francis Adams was both furious and humiliated that his knowledge of the Trent affair was no better than what a reader could glean from The Times. “Mr. Seward’s ways are not those of diplomacy,” he wrote bitterly on December 9. “Here have I been nearly three weeks without positively knowing whether the act of the officer was directed by the govt or not.”38 Henry Adams was equally indignant. “What Seward means is more than I can guess,” he told his brother Charles Francis Jr. “But if he means war also, or to run as close as he can without touching, then I say that Mr. Seward is the greatest Criminal we’ve had yet.” The seizure had undone all his father’s hard work. “We have friends here still, but very few. Bright dined with us last night, and is with us, but is evidently hopeless of seeing anything good.… My friends of the Spectator sent up to me in a dreadful state and asked me to come down to see them, which I did, and they complained bitterly of the position we are now in.”39
Henry was not exaggerating the difficulties confronting Northern supporters. William Forster lamented to his wife that his efforts for peace resembled “the struggles of a drowning man.”40 John Bright was at first too nervous to speak about the Trent affair, explaining apologetically to Adams that since his opposition to the Crimean War he had lost his appetite for being a national hate figure. Given Bright’s violent rhetoric, Adams rather hoped that this was true. Unfortunately, Bright overcame his fears and made a speech in Rochdale on December 4 that blasted the country for not being sufficiently pro-Union. This was too much even for the Spectator, which accused Bright of being prepared to sacrifice any principle if it did not sit well with America.41 Harriet Martineau was one of the few English writers who could write with authority, since she was personally acquainted with Captain Wilkes, and even she was careful in her choice of words. Wilkes was not, she stressed in her articles for the Daily News, an Anglophobe or a warmonger, “but he lacks judgement and knowledge.”42
Benjamin Moran realized the extent of the feeling against the North when he chanced to look out the window of his taxi and see that the American owners of the Adelphi Theatre had added the Confederate flag next to the usual Stars and Stripes. “The sight of this base emblem of slavery, treason and piracy made me ill with rage,” he wrote in his diary.43 The Confederates and their supporters were also putting up posters in railway stations and distributing rebel banners to street hawkers. Hackney cabs were given miniature Union Jacks crossed with the Confederate flag.44 Moran heard that such overt displays of Confederate sympathy were even more prevalent in Liverpool. The new consul, Thomas Haines Dudley, reported that Southern exiles living in the city were gleefully capitalizing on the Trent incident.
Although Moran longed to have an American representative in the country who would not be afraid to engage with the press, he regarded Thurlow Weed’s arrival on December 2 as a mixed blessing. “This morning’s Times contains a letter from Thurlow Weed defending Mr. Seward,” wrote Moran in mid-December. “The letter is strong in some things, but weak in others and The Times assails its vulnerable points with its usual malignity.”45 Until the Trent affair, Weed had been in France working with Henry Sanford on schemes to influence European opinion.
Seward’s idea to send the three emissaries—Archbishop John Hughes, Bishop Charles McIlvaine, and Thurlow Tweed—“seems to me of no value,” Charles Francis Adams had written frankly to Edward Everett. But Weed disagreed; when he arrived at the U.S. legation on December 6, his first thought was that he should have come earlier. There was a general air of disarray about the place. The misfits in the basement made him wonder how business was done, while upstairs, Charles Francis Adams was in an alarming state: bewildered and angered by Seward’s silence, paranoid about England’s intentions, and mentally more than halfway home.46
Weed immediately sent out letters and left his cards in all the great houses of London. The relative ease with which he connected with “intelligent and influential English friends of the North” led him to suspect that Adams had not tried very hard to penetrate society. Weed was able to arrange an interview with Lord Russell and had a perfectly sensible, albeit noncommittal, conversation with him. Although he did not say it in so many words, Weed was appalled that Adams had allowed Seward to become so thoroughly feared and hated.47 “You have been infernally abused, and are wholly misunderstood here,” Weed told Seward. Everyone he met believed that the secretary of state was determined to have a war. This was true even of Seward’s friends. Lady Napier unhappily related to Weed a remark Seward had made just before their departure from Washington. “On some occasion,” wrote Weed, “you talked about the incoming Administration going to war with England; that subsequently when alone with you, she asked, ‘Why do you talk about war with England?’ and that you replied seriously, ‘that it was the best thing that could happen for America.’ ”48 More damning still, The Times printed the story of his “joke” to the Duke of Newcastle, during the Prince of Wales’s tour of America in 1860, that when in power he would manufacture a quarrel with England.49
It was already midnight on December 10 when Thurlow Weed sat at his desk to compose one of the most serious letters he had ever written to his friend. “I have finally got Lord [sic] Newcastle’s own version of what was said to him,” he wrote; “whatever you did say—was said. This, with the allusions to Canada … is regarded as evidence of your determined enmity to England, and even the Friends you made here—many of whom I have met—are carried away by this idea. And consequently War, unless you avert it, is inevitable. I pray that I am not mistaken in the hope that you comprehend the disastrous effects of such a war.”50
The days passed and still there was no word from Washington. Nothing, however, worried Weed so much as his friend’s silence. He sent a letter to Lincoln, imploring him to “turn the other cheek”; Adams sent yet another letter to Seward.51 On December 14, Punch published a cartoon entitled “Waiting for an Answer,” which showed Britannia ready to fire a cannon. At the Foreign Office, Lord Russell continued to fret over whether they had made the right decision. Their dispatch to Lyons left no room to maneuver if Seward prevaricated or refused point-blank. But “I do not think,” wrote Russell, “the country would approve an immediate declaration of war.” A “peace meeting” at Exeter Hall in the Strand had attracted four thousand people. Russell asked Palmerston if they should give the United States a second chance, should the worst happen, so long as Seward’s letter was a “reasoning, and not a blunt answer.”52
Ill.12 Britannia ready to fire, Punch, 1861.
On Monday, December 16, London was plastered with black-bordered announcements of Prince Albert’s death. He had died at eleven o’clock on Saturday night. Moran knew about the prince’s alteration of the cabinet dispatch to Lord Lyons, and though he feared his action could be misinterpreted, he went defiantly to Buckingham Palace and signed his name in the condolence book. For good measure he added the names “Mr. and Mrs. Adams” next to his own. Late that same night, a messenger arrived with a dispatch from the State Department. The letter was short, too short considering the nature of the crisis, but it did contain Seward’s admission that Wilkes had acted “without any instructions” as well as the remark that the American government hoped that London would “consider the subject in a friendly temper.” Adams thought this “was not discouraging” but hardly a clear endorsement for peace. He wondered whether it was even worth showing to Lord Russell. Alarmed by this untimely display of diffidence, Moran and Wilson pleaded with Adams to go to the Foreign Office. Troopships were still departing for Canada and time was running out.
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The British lion had turned tail, or so Washington thought during the first week of December. Mercier’s execrable English created such confusion that Lincoln came away from their conversation believing that the British minister had given Mercier good news about England, and that Britain’s law officers saw nothing wrong in the commissioners’ seizure. “There would probably be no trouble about it,” Lincoln cheerfully asserted to his friend Senator Orville Browning after the meeting.53 Lincoln was also being misled by Charles Sumner, whose straightforward and sensible position on the Trent had become infected by his craving for popularity. At the beginning of the crisis, Sumner had assured the Duchess of Argyll that he would do everything in his power to resolve “any ill-feeling between our two countries.”54 But after he saw Lincoln on December 1 and realized that the president had no desire to release the prisoners, he abandoned his original position and suggested that they turn the case over to international arbitration. The plan protected the United States’ pride and salvaged Sumner’s; he had not been consulted or included in any of the cabinet discussions about Captain Wilkes. Sumner had no hesitation about blaming Seward: “The special cause of the English feeling is aggravated by the idea on their part that Seward wishes war, they say—‘very well—then we will not wait,’ ” he told a friend in New York. “If the [British] Govt & the people could be thoroughly satisfied of the real good will of this Administration, a great impediment to Peace would be removed.” That impediment, of course, was Seward.55
The arrival of the British newspapers on Friday, December 13, brought an abrupt end to all the speculation and celebrations that had been allowed to proliferate unchecked since November 16. The angry leaders and articles demanding reparation left no doubt as to how the British regarded Wilkes’s act. On Monday morning in New York there were rowdy scenes at the stock exchange as investors dumped their bonds and rushed to buy commodities such as gold, saltpeter, and gunpowder. A run on the banks suspended all business, including the payment of a loan to the Treasury that Secretary Chase had been expecting in mid-December. The New York offices of Barings and Rothschild’s closed their doors, and Rothschild’s transferred their American holdings to France to safeguard them from confiscation by the U.S. government.56
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell took a brief rest from her teaching duties at the New York Infirmary to explain to her friends in London that it was all a terrible mistake. “Indeed, I have never before had cause for so much gloom,” she wrote. “The Trent affair was no intentional insult to the English flag—on the contrary … the whole thing is marked more by the ill-breeding of Americans and a reckless ignoring of consequences than by … deliberate insults which England attributes to her.” Her friends and relatives were keenly divided on the issue. “With part of our own family furiously American and part as furiously English—disapproving as we do of the conduct of both countries—it is a terrible trial of feeling,” she admitted.57
In Washington, Seward was aghast, having received over the weekend the first of Adams’s dispatches regarding the British response to the Trent affair. A plaintive letter had also come from the Duchess of Sutherland begging him to stay true to his ideals: “I do not know if you will recollect me; but I think so. I liked much having known you. Your feeling toward England seemed so friendly. Your aspirations, your earnestness against slavery were so great, I rejoiced in hearing you speak,” she wrote.58 The letters so shook him that he ran across the street to the White House. He burst in on Lincoln, who was entertaining a few friends, to announce that Britain was preparing for war. “I don’t believe England has done so foolish a thing,” declared Orville Browning, one of the senators present. After Seward had read out Adams’s dispatch, their incredulity turned to outrage. Browning jumped up and urged Lincoln to “fight to the death.”59
More newspapers arrived on the sixteenth, with reports that Britain was backing up her demands with thousands of “crack troops.” Perhaps almost as disturbing for Seward was the discovery that Sumner and Lincoln had been discussing the Trent affair behind his back. Seward realized he had three choices: to press for war, to follow Sumner’s lead and support arbitration, or to argue for the correct but unpopular course demanded by England. Seward hated all three options. That night he went to the Portuguese minister’s ball looking bloodshot and disheveled. He ruined his attempt to appear relaxed by swearing and speaking too loudly. Toward the end of the evening Seward unsteadily approached a group of guests, which included William Howard Russell and the Prince de Joinville, and began boasting of what would happen to Britain if she forced the United States into war. “We will wrap the whole world in flames!” he exclaimed. “No power so remote that she will not feel the fire of our battle and be burned by our conflagration.”60
William Howard Russell assumed that Seward had made up his mind to fight, even though a guest at the ball had scoffed that the secretary of state “always talks that way when he means to break down.” Russell’s letters from home showed that war was a foregone conclusion over there; The Times was already making arrangements for him to report from Canada. The following night, however, Russell went to Seward’s house for dinner and was greeted by the secretary of state as if the events of the previous day had never happened. Seward smoothly assured him “that everything consistent with US honour would be done” to assuage Britain’s feelings.61 Russell silently disagreed with Seward’s prediction; he thought the public would never stand for it and neither would Congress.62 From his military contacts, Russell heard that the army’s commanders were confident they would whip the British, which he found rather amusing, having recently spent an evening with Captain Leonard Currie, the English assistant adjutant general to General Smith, who told him “amusing stories of utter want of subordination, mutiny in refusing to go on guard or on duty, etc.”63
Seward’s dinner was in full swing when the Europa sailed into Boston Harbor. Quietly and unobtrusively, Captain Conway Seymour boarded the Washington train for the last stage of his journey. He had been traveling for only a few hours when the train came to a shuddering halt in the dark countryside. Hearing that repairs would not take place until the morning, Seymour commandeered a horse and rode all night to Baltimore, where he succeeded in chartering a special train to Washington. Finally, a little before midnight on Wednesday, December 18, the white-faced and exhausted Queen’s messenger climbed the steps of Lord Lyons’s house.
The following day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Lyons presented himself at Seward’s office. (In one of those strange quirks of timing, on the other side of the Atlantic, Charles Francis Adams had his meeting with Lord Russell on the same day, at the same hour.) Everything, it seemed to him, depended upon his delivery. He had to persuade the secretary of state to bring his games to an end without provoking him into making some last desperate attempt at bravado. Lord Russell was confident in his minister, but his namesake, William Howard Russell, shuddered to think that peace depended on the shyest man in North America. “Lord Lyons is a very odd sort of man,” he wrote to the editor of The Times on December 20, “and not quite the person to deal with this crisis tho’ he is most diligent, clear headed and straight viewed. He is nervous and afraid of responsibility—and he has no personal influence in Washington because he never goes into American society tho’ he gives dinners very frequently.”64
Lyons was nervous, but he carried himself with surprising aplomb. Seward let him speak without interruption and then asked to know the truth: What would happen if the government refused or requested further discussion? “I told him that my instructions were positive and left me no discretion,” reported Lyons. Seward looked straight at him and begged for more time; he would never be able to bring around Lincoln’s cabinet, let alone the country, in only seven days. Lyons believed him and agreed to return in two days, at which point the clock would be started. He went home feeling that his mission was already lost; he sincerely doubted that two, ten, or twenty days would make a difference. Rear Admiral Milne was sent a coded telegram instructing him to be ready to transport the legation staff to Canada.
When Lyons returned to Seward on Saturday, December 21, he was met with a plea for a couple more days. Ordinarily Lyons never disobeyed orders, but he knew that Seward was in a corner. Lyons had received an assurance from Baron Mercier that France’s letter in support of Britain would be arriving any day. If Seward did not succeed in convincing the president’s cabinet, the United States would be fighting an Anglo-French alliance in the North and the Confederacy in the South. A new appointment was set for Monday the twenty-third at 10:00 A.M., but this had to be the final meeting, he told Seward. The official protest would be presented on Monday, and the United States would have seven days to respond. That afternoon, Lincoln told Senator Browning that Seward had asked Lyons to read the demands to him in two days’ time. The president had “an inkling of what they were,” reported Browning, unaware that Lincoln knew exactly what they were since Seward had been keeping him informed from the beginning. After Seward’s first meeting with Lyons, Lincoln had approached the editor of the Philadelphia Press for his help in “preparing the American people for the release of Mason and Slidell.”65 But Lincoln was being pulled in different directions; Sumner had also come by the White House to show him letters from John Bright and others that supported arbitration. Frustrated by his three-way conversation with Lyons, Lincoln asked Sumner why he could not speak to the minister himself. “If I could see Lord Lyons, I could show him in five minutes that I am heartily for peace,” he said.66 But Sumner would not allow it, saying without justification that a meeting between the president and a minister would be a breach of protocol. Sumner went further and not only extracted a promise from Lincoln to show him any correspondence before it was sent to Lord Lyons, but also set him up to defy Seward.
On the twenty-third, Lord Lyons went to the State Department for the third time, wondering if the meeting with Seward would be their last together. There was little for them to say to each other after he presented Lord Russell’s letter; but Lyons could not help feeling sorry for Seward. He knew that the secretary of state was carrying an immense burden. Lyons had tried to make the situation easier for him by granting the extra time; if the transatlantic cable had still been working, he would not have had the discretion, but as it was, Lyons boldly made the decision in his belief that Seward would do his utmost to prevent a war. “You will perhaps be surprised to find Mr. Seward on the side of peace,” Lyons explained to Lord Russell. But “ten months of office have dispelled many of his illusions … he no longer believes … in the ease with which the United States could crush rebellion with one hand, and chastise Europe with the other.” Lyons was optimistic that Seward had learned his lesson and would never again regard relations with England as “safe playthings to be used for the amusement of the American People.”67
Seward persuaded Lincoln to call a cabinet meeting for ten o’clock on Christmas morning. The secretary of state began by passing around copies of Lord Russell’s “seven-days” letter. As he talked, however, it became clear that the cabinet remained opposed to releasing the Confederate commissioners.68 Sumner, who was also present, spoke after Seward; he had come armed with letters from England. John Bright’s was particularly eloquent about the aristocratic mob screaming for war. Sumner outlined to the cabinet what he had previously told Lincoln: since capitulation was politically impossible, an offer to go to arbitration was the government’s only option. Otherwise Britain and probably France would break the blockade. The ironclad ships of the Royal Navy would smash the wooden U.S. fleet, the North would in turn be blockaded and its ports destroyed. The Confederacy, in the meantime, would sign a free trade agreement with England, “making the whole North American continent a manufacturing dependency of England.”69
Sumner was still speaking when the door opened and a messenger brought in the official French response to the crisis. The dispatch unambiguously denounced Wilkes’s act as a violation of international law. For a second, Seward was crestfallen, until he realized that his case had just been made for him. Edward Bates, the attorney general, was the first to see that Sumner’s proposal for arbitration was hardly less dangerous than retaining the commissioners. Bates recorded in his diary: “I … urged that to go to war with England is to abandon all hope of suppressing the rebellion.… The maritime superiority of Britain would sweep us from the Southern waters. Our trade would be utterly ruined and our treasury bankrupt. In short … we must not have war with England. There was great reluctance on the part of some of the members of the cabinet—and even the President himself—to acknowledge these obvious truths.”70 The situation was too galling, objected Salmon P. Chase, despite, or possibly because, the country was facing bankruptcy unless he could raise another loan. The markets had reacted almost as badly to the notion of arbitration as they had to that of the prisoners arriving in Fort Warren. Banks were nearly at the bottom of their reserves, government bonds were plummeting again, and gold was running high.71
The meeting adjourned at 2:00 P.M. with an agreement to reconvene the following day. Before he left, Lincoln turned to Seward and asked him to summarize his arguments on paper. The president would do the same for Sumner’s arbitration idea, and they would debate the two positions in the morning. Seward wrote all night; Lincoln made a half-hearted attempt before accepting that it was useless to delay the inevitable. When Senator Browning anxiously questioned him after dinner, Lincoln reassured him that there was not going to be a war with England.
By morning Seward had drafted a twenty-six-page response to Lord Lyons, which in effect dismissed the entire imbroglio as a consequence of Wilkes’s forgetting to take the San Jacinto to a prize court for adjudication. He hoped it answered all the cabinet’s objections, but he was too tired to judge. He left his house on Lafayette Square early and paid a surprise visit to Chase. If the secretary of the treasury could be persuaded, he thought, the others would follow his line. In fact, Chase, like Lincoln, had already begun to come around to Seward’s way of thinking. Seward showed him the letter and explained why his idea was so much better than Sumner’s. Rather than risk war by insisting on arbitration, they should pack the commissioners off to London and claim it as a victory for American neutral rights.72 Chase consoled himself with the thought that if that happened, revenge on England would only be postponed.
Emotions were running high in the Senate. A last-ditch attempt by Senator Hale to force a resolution against releasing the rebel commissioners prevented Sumner from attending the meeting on the twenty-sixth. His absence allowed Seward to explain his letter to a far less critical audience. Seward kept expecting Lincoln to offer his alternative, but the president said nothing, and after comparatively little discussion, the cabinet approved Seward’s proposal. He could hardly believe the sudden change of opinion. When the others had filed out, Seward turned to Lincoln and asked him why he had not made the case for arbitration. Because “I could not make an argument that would satisfy my own mind,” the president replied.73
The cabinet had agreed to say nothing of the matter until Lyons received Seward’s letter on the following morning, the twenty-seventh. That night, Sumner was in an ebullient mood when he attended a dinner given by William Howard Russell. After some diversionary talk about Prince Albert’s death, the discussion turned exclusively to the Trent. Even at this late stage, Russell told the group, he had not heard a single voice in favor of giving up the Southerners; the government would never be able to pull off something so unpopular. But Sumner corrected him. There was no need for the administration to do anything so drastic, he insisted. “At the very utmost,” he declared, “the Trent affair can only be a matter for mediation.” Russell assumed that he was hearing the official line, since Sumner was in “intimate rapport with the President.”74
The next day Russell was reading the Washington newspapers, which were still insisting that the rebels would never be given up, when he received a note from one of the secretaries at the British legation. “What a collapse!” he wrote, a trifle disappointed that it was back to business as usual. Sumner’s surprise was even greater. Not twenty-four hours ago, the president had been adamantly opposed to any such settlement. Sumner had already accepted Seward’s invitation to dinner that night. Begging off now would only call attention to his defeat.
Among the guests at Seward’s was Anthony Trollope, who was oblivious to the drama unfolding in front of him.75 Charles Sumner was unusually quiet and left the talking to Senator Crittenden, who made disparaging comments about Florence Nightingale to Trollope, no doubt unaware that the woman whose reputation he was trashing had recently donated her sanitation reports and hospital plans to the U.S. War Department.76 Seward played the genial host to the hilt; after dinner, he invited the four senators at the table to accompany him to his study. He bade them all sit down while he took out the dispatches from London and Paris. To these he added his twenty-six-page reply to Lord Russell, his dispatch to Charles Francis Adams, and his response to the French foreign minister. Sumner and the others then had to sit in silence while Seward read out every line.77
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A week later, on January 1, 1862, the two Confederate commissioners and their secretaries sailed for England on board the warship HMS Rinaldo. “[The Americans] are horribly out of humour,” Lyons wrote to Lord Russell on December 31. He did not think this was the end of the story, but for now they could put their faith in Seward. “For he must do his best to maintain peace, or he will have made the sacrifice … in vain.”78 Seward had triumphed, but only just, and only for the moment. His reply to Russell, which Seward had composed with his domestic audience firmly in mind, failed as a legal document or as a new elaboration of U.S. foreign policy, but it successfully appealed to Northern readers, especially the part where he claimed that because of the Trent case, Britain would never again attempt to impress American sailors (a practice last used in 1812).
Sumner tried to diminish Seward’s victory by claiming that the president had preferred arbitration but the need for a quick decision had forced him into a hasty act.79 There was perhaps some consolation to him in the vitriolic and bitter speeches that enlivened Congress during the first week of January. On the ninth, Sumner gave a long speech in the Senate that was meant to explain and justify the government’s decision. All the press, most of the president’s cabinet, nearly every senator, and all the foreign ministers—except Lord Lyons—went to hear the performance. Senator Sumner had dressed for the occasion. Afterward, he was remembered as much for his olive-green gloves and tailored suit as for what he said. It was notoriously hard to follow Sumner. “He works his adjectives so hard,” a journalist once commented, “that if they ever catch him alone, they will murder him.”80 He spoke for three and a half hours, flatly contradicting many of the arguments Seward had employed in his dispatch to Lord Russell.
The public’s response exceeded all Sumner’s expectations. There were tributes and editorials in the press. People who usually avoided him because of his abolition politics were eager to shake his hand.81 Sumner’s previous criticisms of Seward’s reckless diplomacy were repeated and turned into the reason for Britain’s “overreaction.” The remarkable courage and patriotism Seward had displayed in forcing the cabinet to make an unpopular decision were brushed aside.
Ill.13 Punch crows after the Union backs down, January 1862.
Lord Lyons knew what it was like to have one’s intentions maligned and efforts discounted, and he was among the few people in Washington who secretly applauded Seward for his bravery. The shy minister did not know it, but he, too, had gained an admirer on account of his behavior during the crisis. As “one who witnessed the difficulties of Lord Lyons’s position here, and how his pathway was strewn with broken glass,” wrote Adam Gurowski, the State Department’s chief translator, “[I] must feel for him the highest and most sincere consideration.… During the whole Trent affair, Lord Lyons’s conduct was discreet, delicate, and generous … a mind soured by human meanness is soothingly impressioned by such true nobleness in a diplomat and an Englishman.”82
8.1 It may have disappointed Northerners to know that the prisoners ate far better and had larger rooms than the regulars at Willard’s.
8.2 Gladstone was posturing for effect; Wilkes had clearly violated international law both by taking the Confederates off the ship and by acting as his own court of law in determining that they could be taken instead of going to a prize court, which alone had the authority to make such a ruling. The prize court would have set the Trent and the Confederates free, since people can’t be kidnapped willy-nilly off the high seas. Wilkes’s argument, that the Confederates were a living, breathing dispatch, which made them in legal terms “contraband of war,” would have been laughed out of court. But the likelihood is that Wilkes would have precipitated a crisis even if he had sailed to a prize court, because England would have demanded an apology from the United States for stopping a British mail ship without cause, and the apology would have become the sticking point.
8.3 Years later, Queen Victoria wrote of the memorandum: “This draft was the last the Beloved Prince ever wrote.”