Ambiguous attitudes—Consul Dudley vs. James Bulloch in Liverpool—Henry Adams is embarrassed—Rise of the ironclads—Farewell to Russell—A brilliant maneuver
Not once during the blockade debate had any of the speakers referred to slavery. The issue was an embarrassment to both sides. Northern supporters were not allowed to claim that the war was to end slavery, and Southern supporters naturally could not say, as John Stuart Mill had so trenchantly put it in an essay published shortly before the debate, that the South was fighting for the right “of burning human creatures alive.”10.1 1 Nor would they, since every Confederate sympathizer in Britain assumed that the South would abolish the “peculiar institution” as soon as its economy could sustain free labor.
A speech by Gladstone to an audience in Manchester in April 1862—many of whom were being financially drained by the war—revealed the extent to which ambiguity over the slavery question benefited the South and damaged the North. Gladstone asked the question that was deeply troubling his listeners: Were they suffering for nothing? There was “no doubt,” he declared, “if we could say that this was a contest of slavery and freedom, there is not a man within the length and breadth of this room, there is, perhaps, hardly a man in all England, who would for a moment hesitate upon the side he should take.”3
Ill.18 Punch reminds the British that the South was fighting to keep its slaves.
The Duke of Argyll berated Gladstone for allowing himself to be blinded by fashionable opinion. “That this war is having a powerful, a daily increasing effect on the hold of slavery over opinion in America is, in my judgment, a fact so evident … that I cannot understand its being in question,” he wrote impatiently.4 But Gladstone felt vindicated for expressing his doubts after he received a letter from a Liberian diplomat named Edward Wilmot Blyden, who declared that he was “very glad of the position which England maintains with reference to the war.… Both sections of the country are negro-hating and negro-crushing.”5
Seward’s interdiction against calling the conflict a war for abolition was so strict that Adams was placed in the invidious position of having to turn away Northern supporters who wanted to help. When a deputation from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society visited the American legation in April, “expressing interest and sympathy with our cause,” he could only say a few platitudes about voluntary emancipation after the war.6 This “was not much to their liking,” according to Benjamin Moran.7 It was not enough for Adams to echo John Stuart Mill, that one set of people were fighting for independence in order to keep another in bondage; his listeners wanted him to promise abolition.
Although the slavery question was a persistent stumbling block for both sides in their bid to win public support in Britain, there was nothing to prevent them from waging unrestrained and barely concealed war on every other front. “Both the Northern and Southern parties have chosen to make this country a kind of supplemental fighting ground,” railed the Liverpool Mercury on April 10, 1862. “Their respective agents here have been extremely active in their efforts to promote their own cause, as well as to discover and thwart the plans of their opponents. Each party has a place here which may be styled its headquarters; each party has in its service a number of agents, scouts and spies.”
James Bulloch, the Confederate navy’s purchasing agent and architect of its overseas fleet, had returned to England on March 10 aboard one of Fraser, Trenholm’s commercial vessels. He had been expecting to hear that the Oreto—one of the two raiders commissioned the previous year—was already launched. Instead, he found the vessel bobbing uselessly in Liverpool harbor, in plain view of the world. He quickly went looking for a captain and crew who could sail it out of port before the authorities became suspicious of the empty but martial-looking ship in their midst.
Bulloch was too late. Federal agents had known about the Oreto for several weeks and were already trying to have her seized for contravening the Foreign Enlistment Act. Now that Henry Sanford had been forced to confine his operations to continental Europe, Bulloch’s new adversary was Thomas Haines Dudley, a dour but intrepid Quaker from New Jersey. As a young lawyer, Dudley had actively fought against slavery, taking extraordinary risks such as disguising himself as a slave trader, complete with whip and pistols, and traveling to the South to rescue a free black family who had been kidnapped and forced into slavery. But at the age of thirty-six, Dudley narrowly survived a ferryboat fire that killed more than thirty people, leaving him with permanent physical and mental scars. After his recovery he concentrated on politics; Lincoln, who owed him a sinecure for his help in securing the Republican nomination, had offered him either the legation in Japan or the lower position of consul in Liverpool. Dudley had chosen Liverpool because he thought the doctors would be better in England. Yet he did not intend to ride out his appointment like the timeserving secretary Charles Wilson at the legation in London.8 Dudley’s experience on the ferryboat had left him determined to live the rest of his life with force and conviction.
His personal appearance pleased no less a critic than Benjamin Moran, who thought him “as intelligent as he looks.”9 Tall and wavy-haired, with a sad-looking face that was framed by a neatly trimmed beard, he seemed unthreatening to Moran; but then Moran was not on the receiving end of Dudley’s surveillance operations. Within six months of his arrival at the Liverpool consulate, Dudley had created a new intelligence network that far outstripped Sanford’s effort. The team consisted of himself, his vice consul, Henry Wilding, the London consul, Freeman H. Morse, and a large number of operatives under the direction of Matthew Maguire, Ignatius Pollaky’s more reliable replacement. It was expensive to find spies who were both effective and trustworthy, but this was one area where Seward was prepared to be generous.10
Dudley was able to insert his men only around the fringes of Confederate society, but it was enough to penetrate their defenses. One operative gained hold of the list of Confederate agents in Britain; another obtained proof that the suspicious ship with the capacity to carry sixteen guns in Liverpool was definitely one of Bulloch’s raiders.11 Charles Francis Adams forwarded Dudley’s report to Lord Russell, and the British government began quietly conducting its own investigation.12 By the middle of March, Dudley believed that he had all the information he needed to lodge a protest with the city’s customs officials. He could also prove that the Oreto was not destined for the Italian navy, as claimed by its builders, William C. Miller & Sons.
Bulloch was aware of Thomas Dudley’s scrutiny, however, and already had a strategy, based on the legal advice given to him the previous year, to thwart his attempts to have the vessel seized. An English captain and crew would sail the ship out of Liverpool without a single military component on board; once in neutral waters, the Oreto would rendezvous with the Bahama to receive her guns and supplies. Caleb Huse was put in charge of procuring the arms shipment for the Bahama. The timing could hardly have been worse for him. His funds had run out and he was forced to borrow small sums from friends in Liverpool—£200 here, £1,000 there—to cobble together the cargo, all the while being “watched by the agents of the United States wherever I may go,” as he complained to Major Josiah Gorgas of the Confederate Ordnance Bureau.13
When the Liverpool authorities inspected the Oreto at Dudley’s request, they found nothing that actually contravened the Foreign Enlistment Act, even though it was unusual for a merchant ship to have gun ports. They refused to impound her until Dudley could produce more concrete evidence. Bulloch was lucky, but it would only be a matter of time before something or someone incriminated them and the ship’s clearance would be revoked. On the chill, misty morning of March 22, the Oreto was slowly guided out of the harbor, ostensibly to test her engines. On board was a small party with female guests to give credence that the vessel was simply going on a Saturday outing. But as soon as she left the harbor, the passengers clambered down into the pilot boat and the Oreto steamed out to sea. From now on she would be known under her new name, CSS Florida.
Bulloch had taken a gamble by sending the Florida off without arms or a proper crew. Although the captain, James Duguid, knew the truth, since he was William Miller’s son-in-law, the rest of the English crew had been told they were bound for Palermo. Bulloch was relying on John Low, a Scotsman who had emigrated to the South in his early twenties, to protect his investment. Low was traveling on the Florida as a passenger, though in reality he had command of the vessel. His orders were to have the Florida delivered to Nassau in the Bahamas, where he was to hand the ship over to Lieutenant John N. Maffitt (whom Bulloch knew well and believed was resourceful enough to know what to do with her) or, in his absence, to any Confederate officer.
Thomas Dudley was convinced that the Liverpool customs officers had dragged their feet during the investigation into the Florida. A report in late March that the U.S. Navy had captured Captain Pegram and the Nashville off the coast of North Carolina cheered the Federals a little but did not lessen their sense of grievance against the British authorities, whom they suspected of ill-concealed bias toward the South. Adams went to see Lord Russell on March 25 to protest against England’s laxity over Confederate violations of the Foreign Enlistment Act. Russell listened sympathetically until Adams’s indignation took on such a strident tone that he undermined his case. “Adams has made one of his periodical blistering communications about our countenancing the South,” reported an internal Foreign Office communiqué after the meeting.14
Russell found the American minister’s charge of bias especially unfair after the British government’s myriad concessions to the North, not least its propping up the shaky legal foundations of the blockade.15 Their relations deteriorated further after Adams complied with Seward’s instruction to remonstrate once more against Britain’s declaration of belligerency. This was not some “local riot” of twelve months’ duration, expostulated Russell. Furthermore, he complained, when it came to blockade violations, why was Britain always being made out to be the villain when other nations were following the same practice?16
Ironically, while Adams was accusing Lord Russell of being insincere, the French emperor was playing a multiple hand between his own ministers and the rival American camps. Much to the annoyance of everyone except the Confederates, Napoleon held several private interviews in April with William Schaw Lindsay, MP (who was also a shipping magnate). Lindsay had played a significant role during Anglo-French negotiations of the 1860 trade treaty and was easily able to gain an audience with the emperor without exciting the suspicion of the British embassy. Napoleon said everything Lindsay wished to hear.17 John Slidell’s spirits soared when Lindsay reported back to him. “This is entirely confidential,” he wrote to James Mason in London, “but you can say to Lord Campbell, Mr. Gregory etc. that I now have positive and authentic evidence that France only waits the assent of England for recognition [of the South] and other more cogent measures.”18 Russell was so annoyed by Lindsay’s interference that he refused to meet him when the MP returned to England. The Confederates were elated, however, by the news from France; Consul Morse reported to Seward that the “Rebels here confidently predict two or three great Southern victories and the recognition of the Confederate States before the adjournment of Parliament.”19
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The commencement of Parliament had brought with it the resumption of Lady Palmerston’s “at homes.” Neither James Mason nor Henry Hotze was on the guest list, but Benjamin Moran was able to finagle an invitation for himself, Charles Wilson, and Henry Adams. He was one of the first guests to arrive at Cambridge House on March 22 and spent the early part of the evening gawking at his surroundings. The “drawing rooms are not so large as one might expect,” he pronounced, but they were brilliantly lit for the occasion, and as more people entered they “began to assume an animated and even gorgeous appearance.”20 Too shy to speak to strangers, he hovered in corners and by tables. Henry Adams, on the other hand, arrived determined to make this his entrée into society. He longed to be friends with “Counts and Barons and numberless untitled but high-placed characters.”21 Henry just hoped that the “unfortunate notoriety” caused by his caustic comments on English high society in “A Visit to Manchester” had been forgotten in the intervening three months. At the foot of the lofty staircase he gave his name to the footman, only to hear it called up as “Mr. Handrew Adams.” He corrected him and the footman shouted loudly, “Mr. Hantony Hadams.” “With some temper,” Henry corrected him again, and this time the footman called out, “Mr. Halexander Hadams.” Henry accepted defeat and “under this name made [my] bow for the last time to Lord Palmerston who certainly knew no better.”22 After this painful event, Henry decided it was not worth trying to storm the social ramparts of 94 Piccadilly.
“I have no doubt that if I were to stay here another year, I should become extremely fond of the place and the life,” Henry mused to his brother Charles Francis Jr. on April 11. But for now he had a “greediness for revenge.” He approved of the chief’s “putting on the diplomatic screws.” England should not be allowed to wriggle out of her responsibility for aiding the Confederates. At least the Nashville “has been taken or destroyed,” he added. Moreover, it turned out that the Harvey Birch, which Confederate captain Pegram had triumphantly claimed as his first capture, belonged to Confederate sympathizers. Writing on the same day, Bulloch warned the Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, that Pegram’s mistake had caused them considerable embarrassment. Indiscriminate attacks on Northern ships were perhaps not the best method of waging war.23
Despite Charles Francis Adams’s complaints to Russell, Bulloch knew better than anyone else the truth about the British government’s intentions. It “seems to be more determined than ever to preserve its neutrality,” he wrote in disappointment; “the chances of getting a vessel to sea in anything like fighting condition are next to impossible.” The fate of his prize cruiser under construction, Lairds’ Project No. 290, now preoccupied him. He had her moved to a private graving dock, where she would be masted and coppered out of sight of prying eyes. But with the Nashville captured and the Florida sailing off on a blind adventure, defenseless and without a real crew, Bulloch was beginning to wonder whether they were pursuing the right course of action. His anxiety was, for the moment, misplaced. Three days later, on April 14, Benjamin Moran recorded in shock: “It seems as though the Nashville was not captured at Beaufort, N.C., but escaped. This is one of the most mortifying events of the war to us. Our naval officers on the sea-board have covered themselves with disgrace.”24
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“I cannot say that my value as a sailor had increased materially during the voyage,” wrote Francis Dawson after the Nashville arrived at Morehead City, North Carolina, on February 28. He was so relieved to be on dry land that it hardly mattered to him that he was homeless and friendless. Captain Pegram departed for Richmond as soon as they docked, bearing boxes of much-needed supplies, including stamps and banknote paper. Dawson was left to find his own lodgings. “I had determined to take my discharge from the Nashville, and decide, by tossing-up, which one of the various companies named in the newspaper I should join.” Pegram, however, made good on his promise. “I also wish to call specially your attention to the sacrifices made by Mr. Frank Dawson,” he wrote to Stephen Mallory in early March. The “young Englishman” had “left family, friends, and every tie to espouse our cause,” and, “not to be put off by any difficulties thrown in his way, insisted upon serving under our flag, performing … the most menial duties of an ordinary seaman.”25 On the strength of this recommendation, Dawson was appointed master’s mate, the lowest officer rank in the navy. Pegram personally gave him the news, “one furious cold morning,” while Dawson was “scraping the fore-yard, wet through with the falling sleet and intensely uncomfortable.”26
Dawson’s orders were to report for duty at the Norfolk shipyard in Virginia. This was the same destination as Pegram, who was going to take command of a ship that was still in dry dock. “To crown my satisfaction,” Dawson recorded, “Captain Pegram told me that he intended to make a visit to his family, in Sussex County, Virginia, and would be glad if I should accompany him, and remain with him until it was necessary to go to Norfolk.” They left Morehead on March 10 and took the train up to Virginia. The young man was fascinated by the alien landscape that rolled past his window; there were no neat hedgerows and green pastures filled with sheep, only mile after mile of scrub and woodland. Dawson’s short stay at the Pegrams’ plantation exceeded his wildest expectations. The family adored him, and local worthies hailed him as a foreign knight come to their rescue. Dawson was already a convert to the Southern cause; all the attention he received gave him personal as well as fanciful reasons to embrace the Confederacy. “You may rest assured,” he wrote earnestly to his mother, “that while one of her children has power to wield a sword or pull a trigger, the South will never desist from her struggle against the Northern oppressor.”27
Ill.19 The Confederate steamer Nashville, having run the blockade, arrives at Beaufort, North Carolina.
On the day of Dawson’s departure, news reached the plantation of CSS Merrimac’s encounter with USS Monitor. The ships were the result of a frantic race between the North and South to construct the first American ironclads. The Confederates won (by twenty-four hours) when they launched the Merrimac (renamed CSS Virginia) on March 8, 1862. The vessel was an old U.S. warship that had been burned by Union sailors when they abandoned the Norfolk Navy Yard in Virginia the previous summer. Since then, the Merrimac had been completely remodeled except for her engines, which the Confederates had not had time to repair. Engineers literally “clad” the Merrimac in iron plates and added a ram to the stem of the ship. Long and squat, she looked more like an iron champagne bottle than a ship. Her speed was terrible, but the armor plating made her invincible. When the Merrimac slowly steamed into Hampton Roads to confront the Federal blockading fleet, nothing like her had ever been seen before. Hampton Roads is a wide body of water where three large rivers converge before flowing into Chesapeake Bay and out into the Atlantic. The Union navy had been in control of the bay and Hampton Roads for almost a year. Stephen Mallory knew that it was vital for the Confederacy that he take them back, and as the wooden Union gunboats fired ineffectively at the Merrimac’s hull, it seemed as though he would.
There was cheering in Richmond and hysteria in Washington after the battle. Lincoln called a special cabinet meeting at which the new secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, made a spectacle of himself, ranting that every city on the Eastern Seaboard would now be laid waste. The secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, however, was unfazed. The newly clad and outfitted Monitor was already on its way to Hampton Roads, and he expected a more favorable outcome than the previous day’s rout. The secretary’s hopes were justified. The equally strange-looking Federal vessel, described by some as a “tin can on a shingle” (the tin can being a revolving turret that could fire in any direction), could not sink the Merrimac, but was powerful enough to pin her down. After four hours of point-blank firing, both ships withdrew, damaged but not inoperable. The possibility that the Merrimac might yet force its way to Washington had almost as powerful an effect on Edwin Stanton as the first Hampton Roads bombardment. To stop the Confederate monster, he wanted the main water channels to Washington blocked with sunken ships.
Lord Lyons was fascinated by reports of the encounter between the two ironclads. “This is, I suppose,” he wrote to Lord Russell, “the severest test to which the system of coating vessels in iron armour has yet been exposed.” The officers of Admiral Milne’s North Atlantic squadron were equally agog. The ironclad warships in the British and French navies had, for obvious reasons, never been tested in the same way. Milne’s entire fleet would gladly have assembled to watch another encounter, but the coveted task was awarded to Commander William N. W. Hewett of HMS Rinaldo, who was told to loiter near Fortress Monroe (at the entrance of Chesapeake Bay) “in order to obtain as much information as possible.”28 Newspapers in the North and South were hailing the battle as a revolution in naval warfare, not to mention proof that America would one day rule the oceans.29 Francis Dawson saw the Merrimac when he reported to Norfolk Navy Yard. He noticed something that Commander Hewett had been too far away to see: that the vessel’s armor plating was actually railroad ties rolled flat.
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Lyons was frustrated that he had no eyewitness reports of the battle to pass on to the Admiralty. None of the British journalists he relied upon for news had been present; increasingly of late, their applications for military passes were being turned down by the U.S. War Department. The worst affected was William Howard Russell. He had returned from a two-month sojourn in Canada on March 1, having failed to persuade The Times to release him from his contract. “I am writing to you, my dear Morris, as a friend,” he pleaded with the managing editor of the paper, Mowbray Morris. Russell listed all the reasons—family, finances, even life and death. “I have not met a man in Canada who has not declared to me he never thought I should have left the United States alive.… If you could see what I have had to bear in railway trains and in the street you would at least give me the credit of no common devotion.”30
Russell’s fears were soon confirmed. It was useless to remain in Washington, he told Morris, because no one would speak to him. “They are determined, I hear, to throw every impediment in my way,” he wrote:
McClellan is never to be seen by me, his staff are all surly … the officers I know are fearful of being attacked in the press if they are pointed out for any civility to me. Therefore I never get any intelligence of what is going to be done and secrecy on all points is so well kept I don’t hear of any event coming off, and so cannot get a chance of describing it.31
His friends were sympathetic, but there was nothing they could do to reduce the prejudice against him.
The small band of British journalists in Washington had increased by two with the arrival of Edward Dicey of the Spectator and, recently, a freelance writer named Francis Lawley. They were liable to suffer the same penalty as Russell if they traveled together, but neither was as keen to see action as Russell: a little excursion to General Louis Blenker’s camp and back was sufficient war reporting for them. Blenker, a German exile from the Revolution of 1848, headed a division “filled with black sheep of every nation under the sun,” wrote Dicey. “The word of command had to be given in four languages, and the officers were foreigners almost without exception.”32 Francis Lawley was rather grateful for the opportunity to take things easy for a time. He had joined Anthony Trollope for part of his tour of the Midwest after Rose Trollope went home to England. Lawley and Trollope were friends and distant cousins, a tie that played an increasingly important role as the journey became more challenging. Neither was accustomed to traveling rough, and each thought the other was a ninny over the hardships they endured. After 120 miles on a provincial railroad, Lawley declared that an Englishman did not know discomfort until he had experienced a crowded American railway carriage going fifteen miles an hour across flat nothingness for an entire day.
At thirty-six, Lawley was still young enough to retain the air of a man of promise. But by this stage in his life he had already taken that promise and squandered it several times over until it seemed to his friends and family that it would never be fulfilled. He was the youngest son of the first Baron Wenlock. Success had come to him easily. He was a fellow of All Souls College (the academic citadel of Oxford) at twenty-three, and an MP at twenty-seven. Six months later, in 1852, he achieved an even greater coup when the then chancellor of the exchequer, William Gladstone, made him his private secretary. In 1853 his name was put forward for governor-general of South Australia. To those who did not know him, it seemed as though he was leading a charmed existence. Only those closest to him knew his terrible secret: Lawley was a gambling addict.33 Ironically, the governorship, which he only accepted to escape his racing debts, proved to be his undoing. The colonial secretary objected to sending an unreformed gambler to govern the South Australians. This unexpected rejection led to some unsavory revelations. Since Lawley had already resigned his seat in Parliament, believing the post was his, he was suddenly faced with the loss of his reputation, his career, and his only source of income. He fled England to escape his creditors.
Lawley made a new life for himself, of sorts, as a freelance writer in New York. He admired the energy and optimism of Americans, telling his close friend and fellow gambler William Gregory, “this nation is destined to be greater than the greatest.”34 When the war started, Lawley was able to increase his income slightly by writing articles for English newspapers. He was not sure it was gentlemen’s work. “It is hard,” he confessed to his family, “to write and enter into very minute details without trenching upon information gained in the familiarity of private conversation, and to this I have an intolerable aversion.” He was fortunate in that the Daily Telegraph took a relaxed attitude to the objectivity of its foreign reports. Lawley was resolutely pro-Northern and had no intention of touring the South: “I can do better as a correspondent in the North,” he wrote, “seeing it only and writing from a one-sided view, than if I saw both sides and was embarrassed thereby.”35
Washington suited Lawley very well. His travels with Trollope had trained him to be less delicate about the presence of mud, and his chronic shortage of funds merely put him in a large enough company for it to go unremarked. The “Buccaneers” at the British legation welcomed him at once, and he was given a role in their production of a burlesque opera called Bombastes Furioso. A large part of the English community in Washington was in the play. William Howard Russell reported to Mowbray Morris that it “was a complete success at the legation and Shiny William, as I call Seward, complimented me immensely.”36 This was an impolitic admission for one who was seeking his recall on compassionate grounds. “It is your business to report the military proceedings of the Federal Army,” complained Morris, “and so I repeat: Go to the Front or come home.”37
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Russell felt that neither Delane nor Morris understood his position or else they would not keep insisting that he go where he was barred from entering. Russell could not help worrying that he had made a mistake in returning to Washington. Vizetelly had decided to go west, and the idea no longer seemed so harebrained; a significant battle had taken place on March 7 at Pea Ridge, near the Arkansas-Missouri border. President Jefferson Davis had sent a new general, Earl Van Dorn, to take over the disorganized forces in the region. This much Van Dorn achieved. The little general with a large ego boasted to his wife that he would take his army all the way north to St. Louis in Missouri. His plan was simple: a Union army of only 11,000 men, under General Samuel R. Curtis, controlled the passage from northwest Arkansas into Missouri; Van Dorn would divide his own army into two forces, surround the Federals front and back, and then pounce in a surprise attack.
William Watson, the Scotsman who had joined the 3rd Louisiana Infantry in New Orleans the previous summer, was at first relieved by Van Dorn’s arrival, but he soon developed misgivings over whether the new general understood the limitations posed by territory or was aware of the real condition of the Confederate army. Their supplies were already low when Van Dorn gave the order for every man to be ready to march with ten days’ rations in his haversack. But Union sympathizers had sent word to General Curtis of the Confederates’ approach: Curtis was waiting for them when they attacked.
The Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, began on March 7 as the fog lifted from the trees to reveal a gray winter morning. Watson and his fellow soldiers had been marching through frost and snow with little sleep and no food for almost seventy-two hours. “Cold, hungry, and fatigued we moved sullenly along,” he wrote, “some of the lads almost sleeping on their feet.” They thought they had marched to the rear of the Federal forces only to discover “that they were also in our rear, and they had the advantage of being in a strong position.” Watson’s regiment had stumbled into the center of the waiting Federals; when the firing died down, the 3rd’s officers were all either dead or missing, except for one lieutenant. Fortunately, the sun was beginning to set, and the soldiers who had survived were able to creep away under the cover of darkness. The following morning, a Federal counterattack smashed the Confederates’ line and the rebels fled the battlefield, Van Dorn first. Watson and his fellow soldiers were left to fend for themselves. It was a ninety-mile march to the nearest Confederate stronghold, a trek through rattlesnake-infested country, without food or maps. Seven days later, Watson staggered into the border town of Van Buren, four hundred miles from Van Dorn’s stated destination of St. Louis. In retrospect, Watson admitted, “I never got what the Americans would call the ‘hang’ of this battle.… It was a mass of mixed up confusion from beginning to end.”38 Nevertheless the outcome was clear; the Confederates had suffered 2,000 casualties, the Federals 1,384, and General Curtis’s victory ensured that the key border state of Missouri would stay in Northern hands.
This Federal victory in the west made General McClellan’s failure to commit the Army of the Potomac in a major battle look all the more inexplicable. Lincoln had tolerated the general’s arrogance (though he did not know that McClellan referred to him as “the gorilla”) and shown leniency when the army did not advance into Virginia on February 22 as directed. But his patience was now at an end. Lincoln ordered McClellan to have the Army of the Potomac in motion no later than March 18. Russell could hardly believe that something was finally going to happen after almost eight months of anticipation. He visited McClellan’s headquarters and asked permission to accompany the march. McClellan agreed, with the usual proviso that Russell first obtain the necessary pass from the War Department. As Russell busily wrote letters of request, reports began to filter through of a general retreat by the Confederate army. Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston had also heard of McClellan’s order to move south and had concluded that his own army of 40,000 men would be wiped out in its present position near Manassas. On March 8, Private Sam Hill and the 6th Louisiana were ordered to dismantle the camp that had been their home since July of the previous year and prepare to march twenty-five miles south of Manassas to the Rappahannock River. Leaving behind nearly everything of value, including precious batteries, food supplies, and arms, Johnston’s army trudged along single-track roads through incessant rain. Many fell sick with chills and diarrhea. “I remained doing what I could,” wrote Sam’s sister, Mary Sophia Hill, about her own activities during the dreadful trek through knee-deep mud. She had left the regiment in December in order to visit New Orleans “to see my sister, and get money from Ireland.” The blockade prevented her remittance from coming in, but Mary still raised $150 in donations for the regiment and obtained several boxes of clothes and medicines. Her efforts were for naught, however; by the time she eventually reached Virginia, all but one of her trunks had been stolen. The old civilities of the South were gradually giving way to a harsher reality. Richmond itself was under martial law.
Sam Hill’s brigade finally reached its new camp on the south bank of the Rappahannock on March 17, acting as the rear guard while the rest of Johnston’s army continued on to Orange Court House, an Italianate building in a town of that name, with sweeping steps and a rectangular bell tower not unlike some of the grand residences in New Orleans. Mary managed to find rooms in a little cottage nearby. Here was a pleasant place to rest, even under the leaden skies of a wintry spring. Although the Louisianans were waiting for orders, Mary was kept busy with wounds and injuries, often the result of fighting among members of Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat’s 1st Louisiana Special Battalion. The Louisiana “Tigers” were such a lawless lot that the commander of the Louisiana Brigade had two of them executed by firing squad. Major Wheat was a veteran of Garibaldi’s Sicily campaign, and in March he received a visit from a friend he had not seen since leaving Italy. The visitor was Henry MacIver, the young man who had annoyed William Howard Russell by asking for directions on how to sneak across Federal lines after Bull Run. MacIver had managed to escape his prison cell in Alexandria, steal the clothes and weapon of a Union soldier, and slip into Confederate territory. After being briefly detained as a Yankee spy, MacIver was finally able to achieve his wish and join the Confederate army. He was made a cavalry instructor with the rank of lieutenant and attached to General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s staff.
General McClellan was embarrassed that Joe Johnston, whose timely arrival at Bull Run had caused the Federals to flee, had now succeeded in moving to a new, unknown position. The Confederate’s actions led McClellan to alter his plans and adopt a far more radical strategy involving the transportation by sea of a hundred thousand soldiers, plus supplies, horses, and equipment, to Fortress Monroe on the tip of the Virginia peninsula. From there, the army would march seventy miles east to capture Richmond. The first troops began to be shipped out from Alexandria on March 17. Edward Dicey was able to join a group of observers that included Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had become a great friend, but Russell was once again forced to stay behind. On March 24, he wrote in his diary, “One of the saddest days I have had in all my life, and Heaven knows I have had some sad ones, too.”39 Russell was referring to an article in the New York Herald that accused him of having speculated on the stock exchange using information obtained from the British legation during the Trent affair. The paper printed a copy of a telegram sent by Russell to his friend the lobbyist Sam Ward that appeared to support the allegation. But it was false. All Russell had done was telegraph Ward in New York ahead of the official announcement that the commissioners were being released. This was perhaps unwise, yet Russell claimed that the news was all over Washington by the time he sent the notice. Ward had a copy of the real, undoctored telegram, which proved Russell’s innocence of any financial dealings, but no newspaper would print his explanation.
Russell was mortified by the slur on his character, especially after Lord Lyons let it be known that he regarded the telegram as a gross breach of trust. Not surprisingly, Francis Lawley sympathized with Russell’s predicament and tried to smooth his relations with the legation. Russell found Lawley’s earnest attempts to help almost as humiliating as the original slander. It was not comfortable to be told to stay “as far as you can, from the British legation, during the next five or six weeks” and to refrain “from any step which, however remotely, has the appearance of a desire to push yourself into the old relations.” Although the attachés claimed they believed Russell’s protestation of innocence, he feared they would never fully trust him again. He was lonely and fed up. His friend William W. Glenn, a Southern journalist, offered to provide him with safe passage to the Confederacy. Russell was tempted, but decided he could not, “with honour or propriety go South immediately after so long a residence among the Northern armies.”
Lord Lyons forgave Russell and, at the end of March, invited him back to the legation for dinner. Russell was doubly grateful, not only for the rehabilitation of his character, but also because it gave him the opportunity to corner Edwin Stanton and embarrass him into writing out a pass then and there. Stanton was, however, determined to confine Russell to Washington even if it meant revoking the pass of every war correspondent in the country. On April 2, 1862, the War Department announced that it would no longer recognize press passes, and all reporters currently following the army in Virginia were to return to Washington or be arrested.40 After two days of uproar, the department clarified its stand so that only foreign journalists were affected. Russell wrote to Stanton on the second, pleading with him to reconsider: “I can not conceive Sir, the object of such conduct.” What, he asked, was the “cause for the change on your part towards me.”41 Stanton never replied. By now Russell had written to Lincoln, four generals, Seward, Sumner, and “innumerable Senators,” all without success.
“In the South,” Russell wrote ruefully, “the press threatened me with tar and feathers … the Northern papers recommended expulsion, ducking, riding rails, and other cognate modes of insuring a moral conviction of error.” He would not have allowed himself to be cowed by these threats, but he accepted defeat “when to the press and populace of the United States, the President and the Government of Washington added their power.” Sam Ward tried hard to dissuade Russell from leaving, and he complained to Seward that Stanton had “tomahawked” the North’s most valuable foreign asset.42 The secretary of state paid scant attention to Russell’s departure. Stanton’s appalling blunder of driving away the world’s most famous war correspondent would only become clear later on when the North had no foreign journalists reporting from its side.
Russell set sail for England on April 9 on board the China. “I saw the shores receding into a dim gray fog,” he wrote; “our good ship pointing thank Heaven, towards Europe.”43 His wife and children had not seen him in more than a year, his financial affairs were in a deplorable state, and his career, so it seemed to him, was crumbling. Russell used his final dispatch from New York, on April 3, to explain to readers why he was abandoning his assignment. They were probably more forgiving than his employers, John Delane and Mowbray Morris, who both sent frantic letters begging him to continue at his post. “It is lamentable that at such a time we should be practically unrepresented,” grumbled Delane, since J. C. Bancroft Davis had also resigned, on grounds of ill health. The Times did agree to reimburse the £1,340 that Russell had paid out of his own pocket while in America, but took nearly two years to verify every receipt and expense.44
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Years later, Lord Lyons told William Howard Russell that his presence in Washington during the first year of the war had greatly enlivened the British legation and that the capital was a duller place after he left. Lyons’s irritation with Russell over the telegram scandal had had less to do with the offense than with its timing. Lyons was in the middle of secret negotiations with Seward on a joint slave-trade treaty when the New York Herald published its accusation against Russell. Lyons could not afford to have the legation dragged into a disreputable row when so much depended on discretion and staying out of the public eye.
Lyons had always believed that an antislavery treaty between the two countries was impossible. Only three years before, the mere possibility that the Royal Navy might try to stop an American vessel to search for slaves was sufficient to provoke threats of war. Britain had backed down, and the slave trade had flourished. There was scant hope in London that the Lincoln administration would have congressional support to revisit so contentious an issue. In May 1861, Seward had tried to skirt Congress by offering to sign a secret memorandum allowing the Royal Navy to stop and search suspected American slavers. But since the offer had coincided with his menacing dispatches to Adams, Lyons and Lord Russell had agreed that Seward’s word was “worth little or nothing” when it came to Anglo-American relations.45 They had misjudged the sincerity of Seward’s intentions, however. The secret memorandum idea was no trick on his part, even if he had not thought through the impact on the public if a Royal Navy vessel sailed into New York Harbor with a captured slaver in tow.
The slave trade issue was revived when Captain Nathaniel Gordon was sentenced to death on February 7 by a New York court for the crime of participating in the Atlantic slave trade. It was the first successful prosecution of a slave trader in forty-four years, and the outcry for Lincoln to pardon Gordon was considerable, though not deafening. Lord Lyons wondered whether this was a sign that he should speak to Seward about a treaty. Slave trading was on the increase again, since blockade duty had taken away U.S. Navy ships that had been patrolling the west coast of Africa.46 The only practical way to stop it was to give Royal Navy ships the right to challenge slavers flying the American flag.
With relations between the British legation and the U.S. State Department still in a honeymoon period after the Trent affair, Lyons suggested to Lord Russell that they revive the slave trade question while Seward was still “in the mood.”10.2 47 As it turned out, Seward had also been toying with the idea of resurrecting negotiations, but neither Lyons nor Seward had given the issue as much attention as Lord Russell had. On February 28, 1862, he surprised Lyons with a printed draft of a slave trade treaty, with all the provisions and exclusions that the Americans might demand already included. Russell also gave Lyons discretionary power on any changes, so that momentum would not be lost. Seward’s reaction to the document would show him in his best light, as a gifted politician whose creative manipulation of people and issues could bring about results that were otherwise unobtainable.
Seward liked the proposed treaty and was determined to have it ratified. His abhorrence of the Atlantic slave trade became evident to the journalist Edward Dicey, who went to dinner at his house on March 22, when the secret negotiations were under way. It was another of Seward’s foreign military dinners: Colonel De Courcy, General Blenker and his aide de camp, Prince Felix Salm-Salm of Prussia, were also present. Poor Fanny Seward had taken a violent dislike to De Courcy: “He appeared very well as long as he kept still and did not say much at the dinner table,” she wrote. “But after dinner his brilliant capability of making himself disagreeable showed forth with undimmed luster. Added to being ill bred, awkward, and a terrible stare-er, he has the distinction of one of the most ugly and repulsive of faces.” Dicey was also falling in Fanny’s estimation until she scrambled her knitting and he sat on the floor to help her untangle the mess.48 After dinner, Dicey stayed behind after the others had left and discussed the slave trade with Seward. The journalist did not pick up that the secretary of state was speaking in the past tense: “The Republican Administration would have merited the condemnation of every honest man if whatever else it had left undone, it had not put a stop to the Slave Trade.”49
The “whatever else” referred to Lincoln’s failed attempt to win support from the border states for a gradual emancipation bill.50 In January, Carl Schurz, the U.S. minister in Spain, had visited the White House to discuss the reasons for the North’s unpopularity in Europe. After being told by Schurz that it was a mistake to hide the antislavery aims of the war, Lincoln replied to him:
“You may be right. Probably you are. I have been thinking so myself. I cannot imagine that any European power would dare to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy if it becomes clear that the Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom.” Then he explained to me that, while a distinct anti-slavery policy would remove the foreign danger … he was in doubt as to whether public opinion at home was yet sufficiently prepared for it. He was anxious to unite, and keep united, all the forces of Northern society and of the Union element in the South, especially the Border States, in the war for the Union. Would not the cry of “abolition war” such as might be occasioned by a distinct anti-slavery policy, tend to disunite those forces and thus weaken the Union cause? This was the doubt that troubled him, and it troubled him very much.51
The objections of the border states to any form of emancipation within their own state lines forced Lincoln to go far more slowly than he wished. To avoid the same difficulties as Lincoln, Seward asked Lyons to play an elaborate game of subterfuge with him. In a brilliant political maneuver, he used the border states’ traditional antipathy toward England to trick them into supporting the slave trade proposal. He altered the wording of the draft so that the proposal came from the United States to Great Britain, rather than the reverse. Then he added a ten-year limit to the treaty and asked Lyons to make objections to it at first, only to allow himself to be publicly beaten down by the force of Seward’s arguments. “Mr. Seward’s long experience of the Senate, and his well-known tact in dealing with that Body, gives his opinion on such a point so much weight,” explained Lyons to the Foreign Office on March 31, “that I naturally thought it prudent to be guided by it.” Lord Russell responded drily that credit for the treaty was “immaterial” to Her Majesty’s government so long as the slave trade was suppressed.52 Lyons dutifully performed his role as directed by Seward, and grudgingly “changed” his mind after a testy exchange of notes.
Lincoln’s cabinet was unanimous in its congratulation of Seward—with the exception of Gideon Welles, who would not be dissuaded that Britain had an ulterior motive in agreeing to the treaty. “Yesterday was the anniversary of my arrival three years ago at Washington,” Lord Lyons wrote to Lord Russell on April 8. “I celebrated it by signing the Treaty for the Suppression of the Slave Trade.”53 Nothing, except permission to go home, could have given him greater satisfaction. “Weary years they have been in many respects,” he wrote, but the treaty made them seem worth the sacrifice. April was a good month for the abolitionists; a week later, on the sixteenth, President Lincoln signed into law a bill abolishing slavery in Washington. (Sumner had accused him of being the largest slave owner in America for his delay in freeing the three thousand slaves in and around the capital.) At the beginning of the war “it was the fashion amongst English critics,” wrote Edward Dicey, “to state that the whole Secession question had no direct bearing on nor immediate connection with the issue of slavery. As to the letter, there was some truth in this assertion; as to the spirit, there was none.” Finally, one year after the Federal evacuation of Fort Sumter, the “letter” and the “spirit” of the “Secession question” were converging.
10.1 William Yancey arrived back in New Orleans thoroughly disheartened by his mission. Cotton was a false god, he announced to the crowd that had gathered to greet him. The Queen favored the North, and Lord Palmerston was not interested in aiding the South. “Gladstone we can manage, but the feeling against slavery in England is so strong that no public man there dares extend a hand to help us. We have got to fight the Washington Government alone.”2
10.2 One of the biggest areas of contention between Lyons and Seward had recently been removed when the U.S. War Department assumed responsibility for political arrests. “I think it is well that the arrests should be withdrawn from Seward,” Lord Lyons had written on February 18; “he certainly took delight in making them, and, I may say, playing with the whole matter. He is not at all a cruel or vindictive man, but he likes all things which make him feel that he has power.”