Hard times in Lancashire—Burnside captures Roanoke—The sorrows of Lincoln—A victory at last—Mason and Slidell arrive in Europe—Dawson joins the Nashville—Southern propaganda—The debate in Parliament
“We are beginning the New Year under very poor prospects,” recorded a cotton spinner named John Ward from Clitheroe on January 1, 1862. Twenty-seven thousand workers in Lancashire had been fired and another 160,000 were, like him, surviving on short time. Families on his street were selling their furniture to buy food. “A war with America” would be the final straw, wrote Ward, “as we will get no cotton.… Every one is anxious for the arrival of the next mail, which is expected every day.”1
In Liverpool, crowds gathered each morning on the quayside waiting for America’s response. The arrival of the Africa on January 2 caused brief excitement, but she carried only newspapers in her hold. The telegrapher Paul Julius de Reuter came to see Charles Francis Adams on Monday the sixth to ask if the minister would be so kind as to alert him the minute there was news. “He little imagines how entirely my government keeps me without information,” Adams wrote angrily.2 Two days later, it was Reuter who did Adams the kindness; his office had received an early telegram announcing the commissioners’ release. Weed came an hour later to confirm that it was all over London. Adams’s relief was tempered by his vexation at being the last to know.
Benjamin Moran rushed to St. James’s, the club of the diplomatic corps on Charles Street and probably the only club in London that would have him. For once he was the center of attention as two dozen minor diplomats and secretaries “sprang to their feet as if electrified,” he wrote. Several even shook his hand before running off to the telegraph office. “In a few minutes messages were flashing over the wires to all the Courts of Europe.” In the West End theaters, evening performances were already under way, but as soon as the curtains fell on the first act the news was announced, causing audiences to rise spontaneously and cheer.3 Within the British cabinet, however, reactions were rather more mixed: “The Admiralty is flat and dull, now there is to be no war,” the Duke of Somerset wrote sarcastically to his son, Lord Edward St. Maur.4
Ill.14 Punch depicts the United States as a recalcitrant child in need of a whipping.
More than £2 million had been spent in the scramble to get ships and troops to America. It would be some time before soldiers came home. Jonny Stanley wrote to his parents from Montreal to say that he was safe although lonely. The infinite forests and frozen lakes of Canada were “very dull, and the people, however socially inclined, thoroughly different in manners and ways of thinking.”5 The troops had so little to do that a sizable number would slip away over the winter months, only to reappear on the other side of the American border as Northern volunteers.6
The press assumed that relations between the two countries would quickly return to normal. The Illustrated London News congratulated England for having dealt with the crisis so adroitly. “We are therefore clear of all blame in the whole transaction,” it opined on January 11, “and legally, morally, and even sentimentally, we have shown ourselves friends to the Americans.”7 This was not the view of 20 million Americans. Huddled in his frozen headquarters in northern Virginia, Union general George Meade wrote to his wife that “if ever this domestic war of ours is settled, it will require but the slightest pretext to bring about a war with England.”8 A congressman from Illinois swore on the floor of the House that he had “never shared in the traditional hostility of many of my countrymen against England. But I now here publicly avow and record my inextinguishable hatred of that Government. I mean to cherish it while I live and to bequeath it as a legacy to my children when I die.” From Paris, Seward’s unofficial emissary Archbishop Hughes exhorted him to remember that the “awful war between England and America must come sooner or later,—and in preparing for it, even now, there is not a moment to be lost.”9
Charles Francis Adams had neither the clarity of anger nor the cushion of complacency to comfort him. The news about the Trent had been followed by a letter from Charles Francis Jr. informing his family that he had joined the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry. The unexpected blow made ordinary business seem “utterly without interest,” wrote Adams.10 The upset to the family was not enough, however, to divert attention from an embarrassing gaffe by Henry Adams. On January 10 The Times revealed that “Mr. H. Adams,” the younger son and private secretary of the American minister, had published a mildly insulting article about English society for the American press. Henry had never intended to acknowledge “A Visit to Manchester” as his own, and so he had vented some of his frustrations about his social isolation in London society, pointedly remarking, “in Manchester, I am told, it is still the fashion for the hosts to see that the guests enjoy themselves. In London the guests shift for themselves … one is regaled with thimbles full of ice-cream and hard seed cakes.” Charles Francis Jr. had accidentally left Henry’s name on the manuscript when he sent it to the editor of the Boston Courier.11 Until then, Henry had been enjoying great success as the New York Times’ anonymous London correspondent. “The Chief,” as Henry called his father, gave his son a sharp dressing-down, so sharp that Henry briefly considered self-exile on the Continent.12 He was teased without mercy by Benjamin Moran, who repeated ad nauseam “it is not every boy of 25 who can in 6 mos. residence here extort a leader from The Times.”13
When he visited the Foreign Office on January 11 for his first meeting since the Trent crisis, Adams hoped that Lord Russell had not seen the Times article about his son. There was no cause for concern: Russell could be curiously obtuse about what he read in the papers. (Lady Russell had a far better understanding of the power of the press than her husband; she thought the American public had been goaded beyond endurance by the “sneering, exulting tone” in English newspapers after Bull Run.)14 The two men passed the first half of the interview congratulating each other on preserving the peace, after which it was down to business again. Russell’s current concern was the risk to peace posed by Union and Confederate cruisers. The Sumter had recently arrived at Cadiz, having destroyed a number of U.S. merchant ships along the way. The government expected a confrontation with a U.S. Navy ship but would not tolerate a free-for-all in British waters, which in Palmerston’s words would be a “scandal and inconvenience.” In Southampton, the disruption to ordinary business had risen to unsupportable levels; the crews of the CSS Nashville and USS Tuscarora—which had been pursuing the Nashville since December—were fighting each other in the streets.15 Adams was caught by surprise, not having given a thought to either vessel during the past few weeks. It was back to the old state of affairs, he realized.
Life for all the occupants of the American legation was slowly returning to normal. People had stopped inviting them, Henry told Charles Francis Jr., “on the just supposition that we wouldn’t care to go into society.” The drought ended with a dinner at the Argylls’ on January 17. The evening passed far more enjoyably than the U.S. minister expected; Gladstone sat next to him and showed genuine interest in his views, and the guest on his other side praised him for “my conduct during the difficulties.” But Adams’s enjoyment was curtailed when the conversation turned to Seward and his now infamous quip to the Duke of Newcastle. “I feel my solitude in London much more than I do at home,” Adams wrote in his diary a short time later. “The people are singularly repulsive. With a very considerable number of acquaintances, I know not a single one whose society I should miss one moment.”16
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Adams did not know the true state of affairs in Washington, and Seward did not wish to enlighten him. The Trent was only one of many crises that threatened the administration during the winter of 1862. Criticism of the Federal government’s lack of progress was growing ever louder, with Lincoln receiving the largest share of the blame. The border states had not been secured, and the vast Army of the Potomac encamped around Washington had yet to do anything other than drill. Its leader, General McClellan, remained bedridden with typhoid. The War Department was riddled with incompetence and corruption and the Treasury had run out of gold, leaving Secretary Chase with no alternative but to print more money. On the night of January 10, Seward received a summons to the White House. There he found Chase, Assistant Secretary of War Peter Watson, and two generals gathered in a solemn huddle around the president. They had to act now, Lincoln told them, and find a way to produce victories or face the possibility “of our being two nations.”17 Frustrated by the generals’ objections, Lincoln decided he would issue a presidential order for all naval and military forces to begin an advance on February 22, regardless of obstacles or delays.
The president’s frustration presented an opportunity for Seward to strengthen their relationship at a time when his own allies were deserting him in droves. “There is a formidable clique organized against Mr. Seward,” the attorney general noted in his diary on February 2. “I do not think I heard a good word spoken of Mr. Seward as a Minister even by one of his own party,” observed Trollope of his time in Washington. “He seemed to have no friend, no one who trusted him.”18 Frank Blair, the powerful congressman from Missouri, complained to colleagues that Seward was “selfish, ambitious and incompetent” and apparently more concerned with fighting England than the South.19 A senator attacked Seward for being “a low, vulgar, vain demagogue.”20
Seward gave loyal service to Lincoln; while Mary Lincoln seemed incapable of fulfilling the role of confidante, the former contender for the White House found that he could adapt to the role with ease. Seward could not solve the president’s military problems, but he was able to smooth the way for the secretary of war’s departure on January 14, 1862, and the appointment of Edwin Stanton. The new secretary was arrogant and devious but, in contrast to Cameron, was efficient and would attack the department’s problems with energy. The amiable but useless Cameron chose to spend his forced retirement in Russia, where he replaced the equally useless Cassius Clay as minister.
Simultaneously with Cameron’s removal, some flicker of life appeared in the North’s military machine. On January 14, the English volunteer George Henry Herbert learned that the “Zou-Zous”—as members of the 9th New York Infantry (Hawkins’s Zouaves) were affectionately called—were going to evacuate from Hatteras Inlet. Despite the monotony of drilling and digging at Camp Wool, Herbert had never felt so content with his life. “Since I wrote to you I have received my promotion. I am now 2nd Lieutenant,” he informed his mother. He promised to send a photograph of himself in his new officer’s uniform in his next letter in case it was his last. “Our boys here are in high glee, we are going to leave Hatteras in a day or two,” he explained. “We are part of an expedition under the command of General Burnside. It consists of somewhere about an hundred vessels of all sorts, containing a land force of as near as I can learn, about 10,000 men of all arms. Its destination is unknown. The rumour is New Orleans. I fervently hope so.”21
The rumors were unfounded. Thirteen thousand men were leaving Cape Hatteras, heading up the North Carolina sounds to the mysterious Roanoke Island, a forlorn stretch of grass and swamp between the mainland and the Outer Banks. Its first inhabitants, Sir Walter Raleigh’s ill-fated colonists, had survived in the New World for less than four years before they mysteriously disappeared. Three hundred years later the island seemed as untamed as ever. Its chief importance was strategic: whoever owned Roanoke held the key to Richmond’s back door.22
General Ambrose Burnside (whose name and prodigious whiskers inspired the word “sideburns”) had convinced General McClellan that he could lead a combined amphibious force in light-draft and flat-bottomed boats that would have no trouble navigating the shallow waters of Roanoke Sound. The Confederate garrison guarding Roanoke was small and unlikely to withstand a sustained assault. Burnside was so confident that he gave permission for journalists to accompany the expedition. William Howard Russell heard the news from his sickbed in a hotel in New York. The journalist had been worn down by the unrelenting campaign of abuse against him: “There is a sort of weakness and languor over me that I never experienced before,” he told Delane. Frank Vizetelly would go and report for both of them.23
Ill.15 USS Picket leading the ships of the Burnside expedition over the Hatteras Bar in North Carolina, by Frank Vizetelly.
Vizetelly, so deep in debt that even Russell would no longer lend him money, was overjoyed at the prospect of escaping Washington. He joined Burnside’s flotilla on January 10 with nothing else except a small bag containing a change of clothes and his pencils. “Woe is me!” he wrote after several days of crashing seas and hurricane winds. One night, a thunderous wave hit the boat with such force that he was catapulted from his bed against the cabin door, which burst open, depositing him with a thud in eight inches of briny water. He decided this would be his first and last amphibious expedition.24
The first phase of the attack was easily accomplished and the southern half of Roanoke Island was captured on February 7 without Herbert or his friends firing a shot. “Day broke cold, damp, and miserable,” Vizetelly wrote on the eighth. “After a drink of water and a biscuit for each man, the Federal force prepared to advance into the interior.”25 Cannon fire alerted Herbert that it would soon be his regiment’s turn to leave the makeshift camp. “Near the centre of the island it is very narrow and at the narrowest point a battery was erected,” he explained to his mother. “The road is in fact nothing but a cow path through fine woods and a thick growth of underbrush.”26 The men had to march along the track two by two in order to allow room for the stretcher bearers carrying the wounded back to the ships. “I remember after that,” commented a private in the regiment, “a sort of sickening sensation as if I was going to a slaughter-house to be butchered.”27
“At last we came in front of the battery,” wrote Herbert. The order came to charge and they plunged into the knee-deep swamp that surrounded the Confederate position. Vizetelly watched as they hurled themselves up the slope of the battery. The men behaved, he continued, “in the most brilliant manner, dashing through the swamp and over the stumps of the pine-clearing, and into the battery, which the Confederates were hastily leaving.” When they reached the top, they discovered that the rebels had fled. The 9th took up the chase for four miles and finally cornered the defenders at the northern tip of the island, in their own camp.
Herbert was delighted to hear that a journalist from the Illustrated London News was with them, and he asked his mother to look out for his reports. A total of 264 Union solders and 143 Confederates had been killed in the attack; later, he would consider such casualty numbers remarkably small, but for now he thought he had survived a great battle. Vizetelly admitted to being impressed. “I will not attempt to prophesy a triumph for the Federalists,” he told readers at home, “but, seeing the improved condition in the morale of the Union forces, and feeling somewhat competent to give an opinion, I am inclined to believe that these first successes are not to be their last. I have watched the Northern army almost from its first appearance in the field. I have seen it a stripling … I now see it arrived at man’s estate.”28
News of Burnside’s success on Roanoke Island reached Washington while the city was still under the rosy glow of Mary Lincoln’s triumphant White House ball held on February 5. The capital celebrated even harder when it learned that a great victory had been won in Tennessee. General Ulysses S. Grant had captured Fort Henry on the sixth and Fort Donelson on the fifteenth, giving him control of Tennessee’s two main rivers, the Cumberland and the Tennessee. An important water highway had been opened for the North, which ran from the north of Kentucky all the way down to Mississippi and Alabama.
Lord Lyons wished in his heart he could escape while there was relative calm. “I don’t expect to be ever free here from troubles,” he wrote.29 There would always be another incident. “I have no doubt that for me personally this would be the moment to give up this place. I can never keep things in as good a state as they are,” he confided to his sister two days after the ball. “However, I cannot propose this to the Government, especially after the GCB—and of course feel bound to stay as long as they wish to keep me.”30 Lyons was referring to the Order of the Bath, which Lord Russell had arranged to have bestowed upon him for his handling of the Trent crisis. When he had learned of the honor, Lyons had written to Russell with his characteristic humility that he had done nothing “brilliant or striking;” “the only merit which I can attribute to myself is that of having laboured sedulously, though quietly and unobtrusively … to carry out honestly your orders and wishes.”31 He also commended his staff for their exemplary behavior during the crisis—although he would not have been able to say the same for them now. Since the resolution of the affair, the attachés and secretaries had been living up to their nickname of “the Bold Buccaneers.” Two of the more literary members of the group had decided to put on a play, and persuaded Lyons to allow them to perform it at the British legation.
Ill.16 The 9th New York Volunteers (Hawkins’s Zouaves) and the 21st Massachusetts in a bayonet charge on the Confederate fieldworks on Roanoke Island, by Frank Vizetelly.
The attachés’ youth and high spirits insulated them from the subdued atmosphere that pervaded Washington after the sudden death of Lincoln’s middle son, Willie, on February 20. The precocious eleven-year-old, who had reigned as the undisputed favorite of the family, was suspected to have died of typhoid fever. Mary Lincoln withdrew into her own private agony of grief, leaving her devastated husband with the burden of caring for their other boy still at home, seven-year-old Tad, who was battling the same illness that had killed his brother. The Spectator’s correspondent Edward Dicey was introduced to Lincoln not long after Willie’s funeral and noted the “depression about his face, which, I am told by those who see him daily, was habitual to him, even before the recent death of his child.” During their short interview Lincoln earnestly interrogated him about English public opinion. “Like all Americans,” commented Dicey, he “was unable to comprehend the causes which have alienated the sympathies of the mother country.”9.1 32
The same question about England’s sympathies was being asked in the South. “Seward has cowered beneath the roar of the British Lion,” bemoaned John Jones, a clerk in the Confederate War Department. “Now we must depend upon our own strong arms and stout hearts for defense.”33 Even the shrewd and unflappable diarist Mary Chesnut had given in to her optimism during the Trent affair. For a brief moment she had shared the belief so prevalent in the South that the Royal Navy would appear off the coast and blow the blockade to smithereens. Now she wondered if the British were laughing at them, “scornful and scoffing … on our miseries.”34 Despite the brouhaha over their release, she feared that Commissioners Slidell and Mason were chasing a chimera. “Lord Lyons has gone against us. Lord Derby and Louis Napoleon are silent in our hour of need,” she wrote. The loss of Roanoke and the forts in Tennessee caused an uproar in Richmond. Someone had to bear the blame for these dreadful and unexpected defeats, and who better than the Confederate secretary of war, Judah Benjamin? “Mr. Davis’s pet Jew,” as his critics called him, was accused of having sacrificed Roanoke Island by refusing to send reinforcements. Benjamin’s stint at the War Department had been hampered from the start by his lack of rapport with the military, and this latest crisis would make his position untenable. However, the truth in the case of Roanoke, which out of loyalty he never revealed to Davis, was that there were neither arms nor men to spare.35 Two or three arms shipments a month from England were not enough to maintain one army, let alone several across hundreds of miles.
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The freedom experienced by the four ex-prisoners on board HMS Rinaldo as she crossed the Atlantic in early January was far worse than the dull confinement the Confederate commissioners had endured at Fort Warren. To walk on the icy deck was to risk a thousand deaths. Huge icicles dangled above their heads. Any person not wearing a safety rope was liable to slip or be blown out to sea. Before the journey’s end, many of the sailors had suffered frostbite. “If you have no news of ‘Rinaldo,’ I fear she is lost—horrible to think of,” William Howard Russell wrote to Delane on January 16. Horrible but somehow not unexpected, considering the appalling misfortunes that had already blighted the Southerners’ mission.36
“Mr. Slidell,” declared a Northern journal, “is the ideal of a man who would think it a privilege to get into a scrape himself, if he could only involve his host and patron too.” Mr. Mason, on the other hand, was “more of a bull-dog, ready to fasten on friends and foes alike.”37 Yet, until the Trent affair, there had been nothing in their previous histories to suggest that either James Murray Mason or John Slidell was the type of man whose fate would move armies. They so neatly fitted into Southern stereotypes as to be walking caricatures of a Virginia aristocrat and a Louisiana politician. Mason, who had been brought up amid elegant surroundings and liveried servants, could trace his family back to the English Civil War, in which one of his Cavalier ancestors commanded a regiment at the Battle of Worcester. Slidell, on the other hand, was the son of a moderately successful New York candle maker who had fled the city after a scandal involving a pistol fight and reinvented himself as a successful lawyer in New Orleans.38 Slidell had few hatreds, but one of them was for New Yorkers who refused to forget his humble beginnings.39 He was happier in New Orleans, where he could lift his finger and see his puppets raise their hands.
William Howard Russell had met both men and found them tolerable. Mason was tall, heavyset, and crowned with a bouffant hairdo that was once leonine but had started to recede into a mohawk. His bright blue eyes and ruddy cheeks made him appear kindly, but out of his small, thin mouth came the most unashamedly racist and proslavery statements Russell had ever heard. His proudest achievement up to this point had been the drafting of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which denied escaped slaves any place of sanctuary in the United States. Mr. Mason, Russell informed readers of The Times on December 10, “is a man of considerable belief in himself; he is a proud, well-bred, not unambitious gentleman, whose position gave him the right to expect high office,” though, as would become apparent, not necessarily the talent. His ten years as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had left no discernible trace of experience on him. Mary Chesnut considered him to be one of the bigger imbeciles among her acquaintances: “My wildest imagination will not picture Mr. Mason as a diplomat,” she had written after hearing of his appointment. “He will say ‘chaw’ for ‘chew,’ and he will call himself ‘Jeems,’ and he will wear a dress coat to breakfast. Over here, whatever a Mason does is right in his own eyes. He is above law.” Mary knew the English horror of tobacco chewing, too. “I don’t care how he pronounces the nasty thing but he will do it,” she wrote. “In England a man must expectorate like a gentleman if he expectorates at all.”40 This last observation was certainly true, and it would count against Mason almost as much as his passionate belief in slavery.41
By contrast, “Mr. Slidell,” Russell wrote in his diary, “is to the South something greater than Mr. Thurlow Weed has been to his party in the North.” Like Mason, he was tall and well built, but feline rather than bluff with “fine thin features, [and] a cold keen grey eye.”42 His French was excellent, thanks to his Creole wife, as was his taste in wine. His suave manner was the antithesis of Mason’s chomping heartiness. “He is not a speaker of note, nor a ready stump orator, nor an able writer, but he is an excellent judge of mankind, adroit, persevering, and subtle, full of device, and fond of intrigue … what is called here a ‘wire-puller.’ ”43 He could destroy a man or make him, as he did Judah Benjamin, who owed his entire political career to Slidell’s connections. If the attainment of power was a belief, then Slidell was a practicing zealot. On all other questions he was agnostic. Slidell’s urge to politick was so great, wrote Russell, that if he were shut up in a dungeon he “would conspire with the mice against the cat rather than not conspire at all.”44
The Confederates arrived in England on January 29 to little fanfare. The press, including The Times, had warned the country against turning them into heroes; the Confederate commissioners were representatives of a government that was waging an undeclared war against Britain’s cotton industry. Mason asked his friend William Gregory, MP, whom he had not seen since Gregory’s visit to Washington in 1859, whether British resentment of the cotton embargo was the reason for the “harsh” treatment meted out to the Nashville and Captain Pegram, who had been forbidden to make any military alterations to his ship or stay longer once his repairs were completed. Gregory told him that, on the contrary, this was in accordance with the neutrality proclamation.
The Nashville set sail from Southampton on February 3, cheered on by thousands of well-wishers. (William Yancey’s departure, on the same day but in a different ship, went unremarked.) With her Confederate flags and black-painted hull, the ship managed to look warlike and dashing at the same time. HMS Shannon—with gun ports open and engines running—stood guard between the Nashville and Tuscarora. There could be no engagement between the warring vessels in British waters. Much to Captain Craven’s chagrin, the Tuscarora would have to wait twenty-four hours before she could begin her pursuit of the Nashville.9.2
Unbeknown to Captain Robert B. Pegram, a young man who called himself Francis Dawson had joined the crew under false pretenses as its fifty-first member. Pegram had thought he was dealing with a boy of sixteen or seventeen when Dawson first asked to come on board. He offered him a position “as a sailor before the mast,” meaning the lowest rank of seaman, and assumed that this would be the last he saw of him. Dawson boarded the ship with the help of one of the master’s mates. But he was no teenage runaway; he was in fact a twenty-one-year-old who had failed to break into the theater as a playwright and was looking for a new occupation. His real name was Austin Reeks; his father had ruined the family through one idiotic financial speculation after another, leaving his mother dependent on the charity of relatives. A widowed aunt who paid for Austin’s education was the inspiration for his new name: Francis Warrington Dawson. Mrs. Dawson’s late husband, William Dawson, had been an officer in the Indian Army. The change of identity and the leap into an adventure was not untypical behavior for Austin. He had never wanted to be himself, living in poverty with a father who made him ashamed and a mother he pitied. “My idea simply was to go to the South, do my duty there as well as I might, and return home to England,” Dawson wrote in his reminiscences. One of his great strengths was that he believed his own stories. Once he had claimed that he was motivated to fight for the South by idealism, it became true.
He needed every shred of his sense of duty to survive his difficult initiation into life at sea. On his second day, Dawson’s trunk was broken open and his belongings stolen. The old sea hands disliked the interloper who spoke fine English and said his rosary at night. They resented even more his obvious rapport with the ship’s officers, and they punished him with the worst jobs. After nearly three weeks of hazing from the crew, Dawson decided that his life was “truly a hard one. I could not have borne it but that I know how judicious is the step I have taken.… Time does not in the least reconcile me to the men in the forecastle! More and more do I detest and loathe them.” Fortunately, once Captain Pegram discovered Dawson’s presence, he took pity on him and gave orders for his bunk to be moved to the upper deck. He soon felt an avuncular concern for the impetuous youth and was overheard saying that he would do something for Dawson once they reached home. Dawson hoped so. “I am told that I may make a fortune in the South if I chose,” he wrote his mother. “God grant that I may for your sakes.”45
Dawson was part of a small but growing number of potential recruits who were trying to reach the South in spite of the blockade. “There may be some whose experience in the field or for drill may be useful,” Mason wrote to Richmond after several ex-officers called at the new headquarters of the Confederate commission at 109 Piccadilly. “Will you please advise me what I am to say to such applicants.”46 While he waited, Mason was careful to be encouraging without committing himself or the commission to anything illegal under the Foreign Enlistment Act. The British authorities’ punctiliousness over the Nashville had shown him that there would be no leniency as far as the law was concerned. Slidell could afford to be less fastidious. Soon after his arrival in Paris, he received a visit from a tall, leather-faced Englishman in his mid-fifties who declared his intention of joining the Confederate army. Impressed by the man’s soldierly past and bearing, Slidell agreed to supply him with letters of introduction. In late spring the Knoxville Register announced that an English volunteer, Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell, had arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, on board the blockade runner Nelly.47
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In Parliament, William Gregory was pleased to learn that Richmond had instructed Mason to challenge Britain’s observance of the blockade; safeguarding the country’s economy would be taken much more seriously by MPs than independence for slave owners. The commissioner had come armed with statistics that proved it was a blockade on paper only. True, the records stopped at the end of October, but they nevertheless showed that more than six hundred vessels had succeeded in getting through since April. The first step was to bring Mason together with Lord Russell. Gregory helped Mason draft a note, asking for an unofficial interview. He reminded Mason to use the correct form: “The Right Hon. Earl Russell, Foreign Office. I should not address your letter to his private house.”48 While they were waiting for Russell’s reply, James Spence, the pro-Southern author of The American Union, introduced himself to the group. The Liverpudlian businessman had realized that there were social and financial opportunities to be gained from befriending the nascent Confederacy; in a bid to prove his usefulness, Spence offered to help Mason prepare for his meeting with Lord Russell.
Russell had no wish to see Mason. “What a fuss we have had about these two men,” he exclaimed.49 He had heard that William Gregory and William Lindsay had decided to force a debate on the blockade after the opening of Parliament on February 6. Russell already had a fair idea of the number of ships getting through from the diligent reports of the local consuls, but he balked at challenging its legality. There was no telling when Great Britain might find herself in the similar position of mounting a feeble blockade.50 At the meeting on February 10, Russell resorted to his usual method with the Confederates and forced Mason to do most of the talking. Mason noticed that the foreign secretary “took very little part in the conversation,” and he felt that he had been played throughout the interview. “On the whole,” wrote Mason, “it was manifest enough that his personal sympathies were not with us, and his policy inaction.”51 This was true. “At all events, I am heart and soul a neutral,” Russell wrote to Lord Lyons just before the meeting.52
The Confederate lobby’s obstinacy exasperated Palmerston and Russell. Both were highly sensitive as to how it would appear to the North if Parliament debated whether to disregard its blockade. Coming so soon after the Trent affair, it would add credence to the charge that Britain was simply looking for an excuse to turn on the United States. No one in the cabinet believed that the war could last much longer. Why irritate either side, was the general consensus, when all they had to do was wait for perhaps only three more months? The Lord Chancellor, Lord Westbury, expressed himself in his customary splenetic way: “I am greatly opposed to any violent interference.… Let them tear one another to pieces.”53 To try to forestall a debate, Russell invited James Spence to attend a meeting at the Foreign Office, since it was known that he was held in high esteem by the Confederates. Spence was delighted with his newfound importance. He listened gravely as Russell explained why he should use his influence to stop the Confederates from forcing a vote. As soon as the interview was over, Spence hurried to the commission’s headquarters on Piccadilly to urge the group to redouble its efforts.
Charles Francis Adams had heard that the Confederates’ political friends were pushing the blockade question. He wrote to Seward on February 7 urgently requesting any facts and statistics he could pass on to the North’s supporters in Parliament. It was embarrassing personally and diplomatically, he hinted, for the State Department to leave him so ill informed. Adams had become reconciled to Thurlow Weed’s presence, “but my patience is gradually oozing out of me at this extraordinary practice of running me down with my own colleagues,” he wrote in his diary. “Mr. Seward was not brought up in the school of refined delicacy of feeling or he would not have continued these inflictions.”
What they needed, Weed told Seward, was a host of unofficial representatives whose sole purpose was to shape public opinion. Adams was a good man but useless for anything other than strict diplomacy. “We may want the good-will of England before our troubles are over, and it can be had on easy terms,” he wrote. “I believe now that nine tenths of the English People would rejoice to see us successful.”54 But this was hinged on precarious foundations. It did no good for Seward to argue that slavery was de facto abolished in the small areas of the South held by the Federal army. He would have to say publicly that this was a war for abolition.55 Could not Seward help them a little, Weed asked, by at least granting passports to free blacks? It would help counter the claim that the North was just as racist as the South and hypocritical as well.56
For the upcoming debate in Parliament, Weed and Adams looked to William Forster rather than John Bright to outmaneuver William Gregory and the small but growing Confederate lobby. “On the whole Mr. Forster has been our firmest and most judicious friend,” Adams admitted privately. “We owe to his tact and talent even more than we do to the more showy interference of Messrs. Cobden and Bright.”57 The latter seemed to relish his powers of alienation. On February 17, Bright made a blistering speech in the Commons against aristocratic supporters of slavery, which struck his listeners as ludicrous considering that Lord Shaftesbury was leading a national campaign to reunite a fugitive slave named Anderson with his wife and children. One MP commented afterward, “I don’t think the people of England like [Bright] and his policy better than they do his friends the Yankees.”58
“We are miserably prepared to meet and answer objections,” Weed grumbled to Seward on February 20. “Members of Parliament beset me for materials, and I cannot get anything official. I have picked what could be found of the Newspapers.”59 Although still chastened by his recent exposure in the press, Henry Adams discreetly tried to aid his father by pushing Frederick Seward, Seward’s son, to send over any reports that could be of use. “The truth is, we want light here,” Henry told him. “Our friends have got to be stuffed with statistics and crammed with facts.… The Southerners will parade a great number of vessels which have run it. Our side must show an equal or greater number either captured, or chased, and must have at hand any evidence.” Otherwise, he warned, the Confederates would argue that the fourth provision of the Declaration of Paris was not being met—that the blockade actually exist and be effective—and therefore the blockade was illegal.60
As the day of the debate approached, Adams noticed a rise in the number of newspaper articles sympathetic to the South. He blamed the “unscrupulous and desperate emissaries” who were prepared to spread any number of lies—even that slavery in the South would be abolished after independence—on a credulous British public.61 The “emissaries” were actually one agent, Henry Hotze, a journalist from Mobile, Alabama, who had been appointed by the Confederate State Department to liaise between the commission and the press. Hotze had arrived in England on the same day as Mason and Slidell, but he had not traveled with them. Although he was only twenty-seven years old, Hotze exuded the confidence of someone twice his age. He was fluent in French and German, having spent his childhood in Switzerland. His charm and powers of conversation were still legendary in Brussels, where he had served as the secretary of the American legation during the late 1850s.62
The mission to England had been Hotze’s own idea. During the autumn he had spent a few weeks in London on behalf of the War Department checking on the progress of arms shipments. This was long enough to convince him that the South needed to “educate” the English press, and that he was the person to do it. Although Hotze despised Mason and abhorred his tobacco habit, he accepted that he was dependent on Mason’s contacts until he could make his own.63 Fortunately, Mason had no idea of Hotze’s feelings toward him, and during their first weeks in London he invited the journalist to accompany him everywhere he went. In this way Hotze forged many useful acquaintances and learned a great deal in a short amount of time.
On February 23, Hotze gleefully informed the Confederate State Department that his attempts to cultivate the press had succeeded far beyond his initial expectations. After only three weeks in London he had placed his first editorial in an English newspaper—a feat Henry Adams had failed to achieve in nearly a year. Furthermore, the newspaper was the Morning Post, Lord Palmerston’s own mouthpiece. “With this I have acquired the secret of the ‘open sesame’ of the others I may need,” he wrote from his new lodgings in Savile Row. He had expected weeks, if not months, of disappointment. “Although this success is due to an accidental combination of fortunate circumstances which I could not have concerted … it has nevertheless greatly encouraged me.”64
In the days running up to the debate, Hotze and James Spence helped several of the Southern supporters with their speeches. Meanwhile, the American legation was still frantically putting together a rebuttal of the Confederates’ statistics. Benjamin Moran spent every waking hour with William Forster coaching him on his answers, hoping that Forster’s debating skills were more polished than his manners. Moran was flabbergasted to discover that the MP was married, and his wife “a nice and ladylike person.”65
On Friday, March 7, the combatants assembled in the Commons to watch their proxies fight. The Confederates appeared confident despite the news in the previous day’s papers of the Federals’ double victories at Roanoke and Forts Henry and Donelson. The House was more crowded than normal for a Friday evening and from his vantage point in the Diplomatic Gallery, Moran noticed there were a large number of ministers present. William Gregory’s pro-Southern speech was in his usual ebullient style. Every cheer from the House brought a smile to the Confederates and a grimace to their opponents. His claim that Britain was supporting an illegal blockade to the detriment of her own workers appeared to strike home with many members. After he sat down, a large number left for dinner, evidently having decided there was no need to listen to any more speeches in support of the motion. Forster was well into his speech when the House refilled. “We watched closely,” recorded Mason, “as Forster went on with his exposé, and reduced the tables down almost to nil.” To his surprise, Forster’s speech received an even more favorable reception than Gregory’s. Palmerston appeared to be listening intently, and Gladstone had actually turned around to watch Forster.
After Forster sat down, however, the Federal and Confederate observers realized that the ministry had merely been biding its time while it waited for the supporters of both sides to declare themselves. Sir Roundell Palmer now rose to speak on behalf of the government. A thin, pale man with an unfortunate lisp and squeaky voice, Palmer was no one’s choice as a debater, but as the solicitor general he was more qualified than anyone else present to speak on the legality of the blockade. Palmer’s shyness had always made him seem devoid of emotion—“bloodless,” his critics called him. Tonight, though, unmistakable moral outrage against the South and all that it represented ran through his speech. The government would remain neutral, he declared, because “honour, generosity and justice” demanded it “and because it was the only course consistent with the Divine law, that we should do to others as we would wish others to do to ourselves.” Years later, at the end of a long and illustrious career, he remembered the debate with pride. “The speech … gained me more applause than, perhaps, any other which I ever made.”66
There were more speakers—Thurlow Weed had primed at least twenty to speak on the North’s behalf—but it was obvious to all except Mason that the Confederates had lost the debate. When Gregory rose for the second time, it was to withdraw his motion. Weed was immediately surrounded by a dozen MPs who came over to shake his hand, while only a couple sauntered over to commiserate with Mason.67
Ill.17 Punch’s John Bull knows there is an alternative supply of cotton.
The following morning, Adams tucked into a celebratory breakfast at the legation with Weed, Bright, Forster, and several other supporters. Adams admitted to the group that he had ceased to worry about the debate once he learned of the Federal victories. “Mr. Gregory,” he announced, “could not have selected a more difficult moment for himself as the current of opinion is setting much the other way. Nothing shines so dazzling to the military eye of Europe as success.”68 Adams was allowing his cynicism too much rein. Moreover, if such success could sway political opinion, so could a cotton famine. Though it had not happened yet, Mason informed the Confederate State Department on March 11 that supplies “were now very low,” and the cotton workers were dependent on charity “to keep them from actual starvation.”69 The cause of the South in England, he assured them, was by no means lost.
9.1 Dicey never realized how much his references to the “mother country” alienated Americans. His innocent, if tongue-in-cheek, comparison of New York with London caused great irritation. “Everything around and about me looked so like the Old Country,” he wrote. Landing on the docks, “Irish porters seized upon my luggage as they would have done at the Tower steps in London. Street newsboys pestered me with second editions of English-printed newspapers. An Old-fashioned English hackney coach carried me to my destination, through dull, English-looking streets, with English names; and the driver cheated me at the end of my fare, with genuine London exorbitance.”
9.2 Under the Declaration of Paris, when two belligerent ships arrived at a neutral port, their departure had to be separated by twenty-four hours to forestall the risk of a battle in the neutral country’s waters.