British reaction to Antietam—Gladstone’s Newcastle speech—Battle in the cabinet—The emperor proposes joint intervention—Russell turns tail
Britain did not receive word of Antietam until the very end of September. “I hope more than I dare express,” wrote Adams in his diary on the twenty-ninth. “For a fortnight my mind has been running so strongly on all this night and day, that it seems to almost threaten my life.” His son Charles Francis Jr., now Lieutenant Adams in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, had last written to the family to say that his regiment was joining the Army of the Potomac in Maryland. The following day, on the thirtieth, the legation heard that Lee’s advance had been stopped. “But [McClellan] failed to follow it up and let them escape,” raged Benjamin Moran.1 Adams was also disappointed. Nor were his fears allayed about his son. It was several more days before they received a letter from Charles Francis Jr. His regiment had sat on their horses in readiness while shells exploded on the surrounding hills, but McClellan never sent them into battle.
Reports of the terrific slaughter at Antietam shocked the nation; the 25,000 casualties on a single day seemed almost inconceivable, especially when compared to the 25,000 Britain suffered during the entire Crimean War.2 “The Federals in their turn have had a victory; and so it goes on; when will it end? Fanny Kemble says not until the South is coerced back into the Union,” wrote Henry Greville, reflecting the horror felt by many people at the thought that the war might continue for many months more.3 Five days later, on October 5, 1862, there was a second uproar in the press, this time over Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. As Seward had feared from the outset, the Proclamation was widely denounced as a cynical and desperate ploy. Charles Francis Adams understood its symbolic importance, but even pro-Northern supporters could not understand why Lincoln had allowed the border states to keep their slaves, unless the emancipation order was directed against the South rather than slavery itself. “Our people are very imperfectly acquainted with the powers of your Federal Government,” explained the antislavery crusader George Thompson to his American counterpart William Lloyd Garrison. “They know little or nothing of your constitution—its compromises, guarantees, limitations, obligations, etc. They are consequently unable to appreciate the difficulties of your president.”4
The Spectator declared itself to be disappointed with the Proclamation: “The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another,” it insisted, “but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”5 For the radical Richard Cobden, the moral contradiction proved that “the leaders in the Federal government are not equal to the occasion.”6 The Times went further and accused Lincoln of inciting the slaves in the South to kill their owners, imagining in graphic terms how the president “will appeal to the black blood of the African; he will whisper of the pleasures of spoil and of the gratification of yet fiercer instincts; and when blood begins to flow and shrieks come piercing through the darkness, Mr. Lincoln will wait till the rising flames tell that all is consummated, and he will rub his hands and think that revenge is sweet.”7
Ill.26 As the French and British governments ponder intervention, Punch argues the time is now.
Lord Palmerston reacted to the two announcements with a far cooler head than either Russell or Gladstone. All along he had been a proponent of mediation while the outcome of the war seemed obvious. But Lee’s check at Antietam, regardless of his miraculous escape across the Potomac, had revealed a serious weakness in the Confederate army. The prime minister’s confidence in the mediation plan was further shaken by a strong remonstrance from Lord Granville, the Liberal leader in the House of Lords, who argued in a letter to Russell on September 27 that any sort of interference in the war—no matter how good or charitable the intention—would only result in Britain becoming dragged into the conflict. “I return you Granville’s letter which contains much deserving of serious consideration,” Palmerston wrote to Russell on October 2. “The whole matter is full of difficulty, and can only be cleared up by some more decided events between the contending armies.”8
Ill.27 Punch portrays Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as a last desperate move.
Russell had come to the opposite conclusion. He wanted the cabinet meeting to discuss mediation brought forward by a week, from October 23 to the sixteenth. The news of Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation had convinced him that only Britain had the power to stop the humanitarian crisis unfolding in America. The answer to Granville’s objections, he thought, was to build an international alliance involving France and Russia to force the warring sides to agree to an armistice. “My only doubt is whether we and France should stir if Russia holds back,” he told Palmerston.9
Gladstone was also moved by his belief that a humanitarian crisis was at hand, though he saw two—the one in Lancashire as well as the one in Virginia. Unlike Russell and Palmerston, he did not think that the Confederates had suffered a significant setback at Antietam. “It has long been clear enough,” he wrote, “that secession is virtually an established fact.” When Gladstone talked about the undecided questions in America, he meant whether “Virginia must be divided, and probably Tennessee likewise.”10 He patiently brushed aside the Duchess of Sutherland’s objections, telling her that “Lincoln’s lawless proclamation” would be far more destructive to America than a separation between the states. When the duchess informed her son-in-law, the Duke of Argyll, about this latest twist to Gladstone’s view of the war, the duke sent him a blistering rebuke. “I would not interfere to stop [the war] on any account,” he wrote. “It is not our business to do so; and even short-sightedly, it is not our interest. Do you wish, if you could secure this result tomorrow, to see the great cotton system of the Southern States restored? Do you wish to see us almost entirely dependent on that system for the support of our Lancashire population? I do not.”11 The combination of his worries about Lancashire and his disgust with the Emancipation Proclamation pushed Gladstone over the edge. On October 7, the day after the Proclamation appeared in The Times, he went to Newcastle to attend a banquet in his honor. He had been thinking all day about “what I should say about Lancashire and America: for both these subjects are critical.”12 Gladstone later told his wife that the acoustics were terrible and he had struggled to make himself heard. It would have been better for him, perhaps, if he had not been heard at all. The words that caught everyone’s attention were these: “We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South, but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more difficult than either; they have made a nation.”
Gladstone’s startling announcement was telegraphed all over Europe almost before he had sat down. Ambrose Dudley Mann in Brussels wrote to Richmond that same night: “This clearly foreshadows our early recognition.”13 Thirty-four years later, Gladstone admitted that his speech was a mistake of “incredible grossness.” “I really, though most strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness to all America to recognize that the struggle was virtually at an end.” He hated to think of the damage he had caused, “because I have for the last five and twenty years received from the … people of America tokens of goodwill which could not fail to arouse my undying gratitude.”14.1 14 But at the time he was unrepentant, until Russell pointed out to him that he had created a controversy where none had existed.
Benjamin Moran worked himself up into one of his customary rages after he read the morning news on October 8. Adams was not sure what to think. He knew enough about British politics now to realize that it would be highly unusual for a change in cabinet policy to be announced in this way. The press seemed hesitant as well. When Adams saw William Forster four days later, he revealed that Seward had given him secret instructions that he was to withdraw from his post if recognition or intervention became government policy. Forster thought this was something the Foreign Office ought to know before it made any irretrievable decisions. But, Adams wondered, was this the Foreign Office at work, or just Gladstone? Feeling depressed, he cheered himself up with a trip to the theater to see Our American Cousin. “The piece has no literary merit whatever,” he wrote. “I laughed heartily and felt better for it.”16
It seemed to Adams that his question about the British cabinet’s intentions was answered a week later when Sir George Cornewall Lewis gave a speech in Hereford contradicting Gladstone’s claim that the South was an established nation. His speech received favorable comment in the North and caused uproar in the South. Gladstone’s “made a nation” remark was forgotten. Britain was the clear leader in Europe, complained the influential Richmond Enquirer: Lewis had extinguished the light and closed “the last prospect of European intervention.”17 At home, a relieved Adams decided that Gladstone had spoken only for himself in Newcastle and “had overshot the mark.”
After these two conflicting statements, there were no more public comments by any of the cabinet. But furious arguments were taking place behind the scenes. Gladstone and Lewis had long been rivals. Only one of them could become Palmerston’s heir, and each was conscious of the other’s near presence. Allowing his emotions to cloud his judgment was exactly what the aloof and scholarly Lewis expected of Gladstone. Russell, whenever he thought that the liberal Whig traditions of the house of Bedford were at stake, did the same, and this, Lewis knew, was their weak point.
Russell issued a memorandum to the cabinet on October 13 that laid out why they should intervene and settle the war. Lewis pounced on it and wrote a scathing countermemorandum on the seventeenth, pointing out that it was not a debating club that would be receiving the mediation proposal but “heated and violent partisans,” who would reject it in an instant. The South would not be grateful for the help, thought Lewis, and the North would swear vengeance on Britain.18
Many years later, Henry Adams decided that the real reason why the cabinet fell into such a muddle over the American question was because the English were, by habit, eccentric:
The English mind took naturally to rebellion—when foreign—and it felt particular confidence in the Southern Confederacy because of its combined attributes—foreign rebellion of English blood—which came nearer ideal eccentricity than could be reached by Poles, Hungarians, Italians or Frenchmen. All the English eccentrics rushed into the ranks of the rebel sympathizers, leaving few but well-balanced minds to attach themselves to the cause of the Union.… The “cranks” were all rebels.… The Church was rebel, but the dissenters were mostly with the Union. The universities were rebel, but the university men who enjoyed most public confidence—like Lord Granville, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Lord Stanley, Sir George Grey—took infinite pains to be neutral for fear of being thought eccentric. To most observers, as well as to The Times, the Morning Post, and the Standard, a vast majority of the English people seemed to follow the professional eccentrics; even the emotional philanthropists took that direction … and did so for no reason except their eccentricity; but the “canny” Scots and Yorkshiremen were cautious.19
Senior Tories also voiced their concerns after they discovered that Russell was on the verge of approaching the French with his intervention plan; the opposition still maintained its stance that Britain should avoid becoming entangled with either side. Lord Derby had no doubt, wrote Lord Clarendon, “we should only meet with an insolent rejection of our offer.”20 But Russell was no longer listening to his critics. He had already made overtures to the emperor via the British ambassador in Paris, Lord Cowley. However, the French cabinet was undergoing one of its periodic crises, and the foreign minister was clearing his desk for his successor. The Confederate commissioner in Paris, John Slidell, was in a state of nervous excitement. By now, he wrote to the Confederate secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin, on October 20, “I had hoped to have had it in my power to communicate something definite as to the Emperor’s intentions respecting our affairs.” Instead, everything seemed to be in confusion. Slidell’s informants were giving him conflicting accounts of the two countries’ intentions. All he knew for certain was that the emperor was their friend and that Lord Lyons most decidedly was not. Slidell ended his letter with the rueful admission: “I have no dispatches from you later than 15 April.”21
It was mortifying to James Mason to hear that John Slidell was having another interview with the emperor. The Confederates in England envied Slidell for his easy access to senior French politicians. “I have seen none but Lord Russell,” Mason admitted to his wife, and that was “now nearly a year ago.”22 Henry Hotze had to scavenge for news, seizing on scraps and tidbits from friends with “connections to high places” without ever quite knowing whether he was receiving supposition or fact. He was mesmerized by the unprecedented cabinet brawl over the recognition question. “This species of ex-parliamentary warfare was opened with the sparring between Mr. Roebuck and Lord Palmerston,” he wrote. “Since then it has grown more serious, and in the case of Mr. Gladstone and Sir George C. Lewis into almost open animosity.” In trying to divine the tea leaves, Hotze put great weight on the fact that Lord Lyons was still in London. He hoped it meant that the cabinet was teetering on the side of the South. He tried giving a gentle shove toward Southern recognition by encouraging his “allies in the London press” to increase their output. Some writers, including one at the Tory-leaning Herald, were even willing to let Hotze dictate their articles. There was, however, one person whom Hotze wished he could silence. “I almost dread the direction his friendship and devotion seem about to take,” he confessed. James Spence had been inspired by the Emancipation Proclamation and was now convinced that the South should issue one of her own. Hotze was furious with Spence for bringing the subject into public view again, but he was at a loss how to divert him.23 Mason was encountering a similar problem from his friends in the Tory Party, who were trying to extract a pledge from him that the South would renounce slavery.
Hotze’s fears that the slavery question might prevent recognition were allayed after he learned that the cabinet meeting and Lyons’s departure had again been delayed. This, he thought, was proof that intervention was imminent. In fact, the meeting of October 23 had not been so much delayed as sabotaged. Palmerston had become alarmed by Russell’s apparently blind enthusiasm for the mediation plan. “I am very much come back to our original view of the matter, that we must continue merely to be lookers-on till the war shall have taken a more decided turn,” he told Russell on October 22. Rather than argue with Russell face-to-face, Palmerston stayed away from the cabinet meeting, which meant that nothing official could be decided. The members who did turn up argued heatedly with Russell and Gladstone, both of whom were so shaken by the experience that each afterward wrote detailed defenses of his position. Russell was especially upset with Lewis, whose memorandum had made him look foolish. The document accused him of propositions “which I never thought of making,” Russell wrote grumpily to Palmerston.24 He was beginning to feel cornered. A visit from Charles Francis Adams on the same day as the aborted cabinet meeting only served to increase his discomfort.
Adams had finally given in to his anxiety over all this talk of Confederate recognition and possible intervention and had sought an official interview with Lord Russell. He waited restlessly on the day of the twenty-third, watching the hours tick by until it was time for him to leave for his three o’clock appointment. He was disappointed when he arrived at the Foreign Office to find several ambassadors lolling about the antechamber still waiting for their meetings. Seeing his pained look, one of them tried to cheer him up but soon relinquished the attempt. Adams did not see Russell until half past four. By then he had rehearsed his position so many times that he was able to put his question to Russell as effortlessly as an afterthought. They were speaking about Lord Lyons, who had called on Adams that morning, and Adams casually “expressed the hope that he might be going out for a long stay. I had indeed, been made of late quite fearful that it would be otherwise. If I had entirely trusted to the construction given by the public to a late speech, I should have begun to think of packing my carpet bag.” Just as casually, Russell replied that Gladstone had been misunderstood and that the cabinet’s position remained unchanged. They talked on, but Adams was so relieved he no longer felt the need to press the issue, except to remark that the North would not take kindly to Gladstone’s speech.25 Russell did not detain him, equally relieved that he had been able to lie while sticking to the letter of the truth.
Lord Lyons left for New York on October 25. “I have sent off Lyons without instructions,” Russell informed Palmerston, “at which he is much pleased.”26 Lyons had never ceased waging his discreet but determined campaign, speaking quietly to both senior Tories and Liberals about the folly of interfering in the war. He felt a profound sense of loyalty and gratitude to Russell, but he refused to acquiesce in a policy that he believed to be morally and practically wrong. The cancellation of the latest cabinet meeting signaled to him that the proposal had died. “I am quite satisfied with the course the government means to take at present with regard to American politics—which diminishes the annoyance of going back,” Lyons told his sister on the twenty-fourth. During their four months together they had talked frequently about his coming home, and he promised, “My object now will be to bring my mission to America to an end as soon as I can with credit and propriety.” They probably both knew that this was a vain hope.27
Lyons was also mistaken about Russell’s proposal. It was napping rather than dead or dying. John Slidell’s informant wrote on October 28, “I have just returned from Broadlands … and have also seen several leading political men in town. My impression is that little or no progress has been made as regards your question.”28 During the last week of October the memorandum war continued as more cabinet members felt compelled to state their positions. When Russell received George Grey’s letter on the twenty-eighth, he thanked him “for writing me a letter instead of printing a Memorandum,” and compared it to Lewis, “who sprang a mine on me.” But why, he asked, did people think inaction was morally superior to intervention? “If a friend were to cut his throat,” he wrote, “you would hardly like to confess, ‘he told me he was going to do it, but I said nothing as I thought he would not take my advice.’ ”29 Clarendon observed, “Johnny always loves to do something when to do nothing is prudent.”30 When Lord Lyons realized that Russell had not abandoned his plan, he sent him repeated warnings “that at this moment Foreign Intervention, short of force, could only make matters worse.”31
Russell was still feeling put upon when Lord Cowley sent him the news that the emperor had ordered his new foreign minister to approach Britain with a proposal of Anglo-French intervention. Russell was delighted. Once again he could be an angel of peace and prevent any further bloodshed in America. “Was there ever any war so horrible?” he asked Cowley rhetorically.32 Now he could call a new cabinet meeting and his plan would have to be discussed. Palmerston had the opposite reaction. If the North wished to waste the lives of thousands of emigrant Germans and Irishmen, it was not, he decided, England’s business to interfere. Moreover, his suspicion of anything French made him skeptical of the proposal. The French have no morals, he told Russell, and would probably agree to all kinds of egregious provisions for slavery. “The French Government are more free from the shackles of principle and of right and wrong on these matters, as on all others than we are,” he insisted.33
By November 7, rumors about the emperor’s proposal had leaked to the press. Adams’s spirits sank in proportion to the rise among Confederates. Russell was like a child anticipating a birthday. After reading that a mass meeting of cotton workers in Oldham had passed a resolution in favor of intervention, Russell could not help asking the mayor what had changed in the district. Nothing, the mayor replied; the gathering was small compared to previous American war meetings in Oldham, and it had been intentionally packed with Confederate supporters. (James Spence’s agents provocateurs, Aitken and Grimshaw, were so disheartened by their inability to form a genuine social movement that they ceased their activities shortly afterward.) But in London, James Mason was growing more optimistic. “The cotton famine,” he was pleased to report, “is looming up in fearful proportions.” He added that 700,000 workers were currently living off charity and that typhoid appeared to be on the rise. “The public mind is very much agitated and disturbed at the fearful prospect for the winter, and I am not without hope that it will produce its effects on the counsels of the Government,” he wrote.34
Ill.28 Punch’s characterization of Louis-Napoleon advocating a joint approach—Palmerston holding back, November 1862.
The effects were not as great as he believed: every economic indicator showed that the country was absorbing the cotton shock, and civic and church leaders were confident that mass unemployment in Lancashire could be alleviated if private individuals throughout the country donated sufficient funds to help the workers. Lord Derby set the example with a donation of £12,000, the largest ever given by one person to a particular cause at that time. He was the chairman of the Central Relief Fund that was overseeing the efforts of 143 committees to collect money and clothing. The workers were unemployed, but many were not sitting idle; Harriet Martineau and others were organizing schemes to help them learn new trades and skills. The sewing and cooking schools, she noted, were proving to be especially popular with the women.35
Charles Francis Adams had been so satisfied with Lord Russell’s explanation that he saw no reason to alter his holiday plans. He was in Tunbridge Wells with his family when the cabinet met on November 11 to debate the French proposal. Benjamin Moran was equally sanguine. “Lord Russell gave Mr. Adams assurances at their last interview that nothing would be done without notifying him,” Moran wrote in his diary on the eleventh. “I rest undisturbed … I infer the French proposal will be rejected.”36 But while he was pottering about the empty legation, there was open war in the British cabinet. George Cornewall Lewis and the Duke of Argyll were the leaders of the opposition to Russell and Gladstone. The week before, Lewis had sent around a second memorandum—this one over fifteen thousand words—that answered every single one of Russell’s and Gladstone’s arguments. He had also enlisted his son-in-law, the gifted lawyer William Vernon Harcourt, to write a companion piece for The Times under the pseudonym “Historicus.”
Russell’s ship was sinking, though he steadfastly remained at the helm. He opened the cabinet meeting by explaining his position once again. When he had finished, he turned expectantly to Palmerston. Russell’s desperate glare told him that retreat was impossible. The cornered prime minister made a few halfhearted comments about not letting Lancashire down. “I do not think his support was very sincere,” wrote Lewis; “it certainly was not hearty: The proposal was now thrown before the Cabinet, who proceeded to pick it to pieces. Everybody present threw a stone at it of great or less size, except Gladstone, who supported it, and the Chancellor and Cardwell, who expressed no opinion.”37 As they debated throughout the morning and into the following day, it became obvious to Lewis that Russell had been rather too forward with the French and feared the consequences of declining their offer. But he remained unmoved by Russell’s embarrassment or his dread of annoying France. Lewis scolded Russell for his unrealistic faith in the ability of outsiders to impose peace on America: “What would an eminent diplomatist from Vienna, or Berlin, or St. Petersburg know of the Chicago platform or the Crittenden compromise?” The idea of the Great Powers dictating the terms of agreement between the North and South was ludicrous.38 He continued to harry the foreign secretary until, in Gladstone’s words, “Lord Russell rather turned tail. He gave way without resolutely fighting out his battle.” Not surprisingly, Gladstone was disgusted with his colleagues. “But I hope,” he wrote to his wife, “[the French] may not take it as a positive refusal, or at any rate that they may themselves act in the matter. It will be clear that we concur with them, that the war should cease.”39
Russell hoped that his reply to the emperor on November 13 was open-ended and flattering enough to soften the awkward fact that his offer was being turned down. Napoleon was indeed annoyed with the foreign secretary, especially since the Russians had also been lukewarm about his proposal. But the emperor’s anger paled beside that of the Confederates, who still perceived Russell as their archnemesis. Henry Hotze’s self-confidence suffered a precipitate fall. He wondered whether his attempts to manipulate opinion had backfired. Worse still was the shock of discovering that the government had far greater control over the press than he had ever imagined. Once it was announced that the French proposal had been declined, Hotze could not find a newspaper willing to print his attack on Lord Russell, not even The Times.40
There is no single reason why the British cabinet voted against intervening in the war. Economically, it did not make sense to interfere; militarily, it would have meant committing Britain to war with the North and once again risking Canada and possibly the Caribbean for uncertain gains; politically, there was no support from either party or sufficient encouragement from the other Great Powers apart from France; and practically, the decision to intervene would have required a majority consensus from a cabinet that had never agreed on the meaning or significance of the war. But there is also an individual whose name is rarely mentioned and yet who deserves his place among the reasons, and that is Seward. From the beginning of the war, eighteen months earlier, Seward had threatened Britain to stay out of the conflict or face the consequences. His bluster and posturing had driven away a potential ally, but the message was heard. A few months after the cabinet discussion, William Harcourt joked to Lewis that it was “a little amusing that the whole wrath of the South and the imputation of being the real obstacle to Intervention should fall on Lord John. It only shows how little is known of the real history of affairs.… It reminds me of what Sir R. Walpole said: ‘don’t tell me of history; I know that can’t be true.’ ”41
When Charles Francis Adams returned from Tunbridge Wells in mid-November, he straightaway paid a visit to Russell’s house in Chesham Place. Naturally, they discussed Britain’s reply to the French emperor. Adams told him, “I hoped it would open the eyes of the [American] people to their mistake as to the disposition of the Emperor and make them more liberal to England.” Russell’s hearty assent to this was no doubt driven by a combination of guilt and embarrassment. Adams mistakenly thought it was due to the foreign secretary’s having scored a diplomatic coup. “His Lordship seemed a little elated by his paper and was more cordial than usual,” he wrote in his diary on November 15. “He alluded to the alleged audience granted to Mr. Slidell … and said that if the Queen had granted any such to Mr. Mason there would have been no end to the indignation in America. I said, yes.”
As November drew to a close, the public’s interest in the intervention question waned. In spite of himself, Russell was being credited with having behaved with propriety. Even some British Confederate sympathizers agreed with the government’s decision to remain neutral.42 Only the ever optimistic James Mason still believed that “events are maturing which must lead to some change in the attitude of England.”43
14.1 Two years after the conclusion of the war, in 1867, Gladstone admitted in a letter to the American author and abolitionist Charles Edwards Lester: “I had imbibed, conscientiously if erroneously, an opinion that 20 or 24 millions of the North would be happier, and would be stronger … without the South than with it, and also that the negroes would be much nearer to emancipation under a Southern Government than under the old system of the Union, that had not at that date [August 1862] been abandoned.… As far as regards the special or separate interest of England in the matter, I … had always contended that it was best for our interest that the Union should be kept entire.”15