Time for a vacation—The Alabama—The Irish—Confederate woes in Europe—The Liberal government clings to power
“They are wearing out, down there,” Henry Adams wrote to his brother Charles Francis Jr. after The Times published Francis Lawley’s reports from Tennessee. “He says it took him forty hours to go by rail the hundred and thirty miles from Atlanta to Chattanooga, in the filthiest, meanest cars he ever saw.”1 The effects of the Federal blockade were far worse than Henry knew. The Confederate government cupboards were practically bare: in recent months the purchasing orders for its agent James Bulloch in Liverpool had broadened from military supplies to include such ordinary items as “one dozen erasers,” “two dozen memorandum books of different sizes, and 12 dozen best lead pencils.”2
Francis Lawley was feeling worn out himself. After three years of reporting from the field, he had decided to take a leave of absence in the New Year. He stayed in the Confederate capital over Christmas while his friends Frank Vizetelly and Fitzgerald Ross went to the headquarters of Confederate general Jeb Stuart near Orange Court House in Virginia. The celebrations were not as jolly as those of the previous Christmas, though Stuart chivalrously lent them his own tent, and Ross was delighted to meet Stuart’s new assistant inspector general of the cavalry corps, Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell. After their visit, Ross wrote that the English cavalry officer had “told us some capital stories of his various adventures.… The Colonel … has only lately been transferred to this army, and looks back with regret to the stirring and fighting time when he was with [General John Hunt] Morgan in the West … [they] adored their ‘fighting old Colonel,’ and would have followed him anywhere.”3
Grenfell had failed to achieve the same popularity among Stuart’s men. When the Englishman had resurfaced in Richmond after his mysterious disappearance from Bragg’s army, his value as an expert cavalryman convinced the Confederate authorities not to prosecute him for his original crime of helping a slave to escape, or for having jumped bail ahead of his trial. But Grenfell’s placement on Stuart’s staff in September caused fierce resentment among the tight-knit group. By the time Ross met Grenfell, the colonel had become so fed up with his treatment that he was on the verge of joining forces again with General Morgan. The Kentucky raider’s recent escape from a Federal prison in Ohio had raised his reputation in the South still higher, and hundreds of volunteers were answering his invitation to form a new guerrilla outfit.4
After Christmas, Ross and Vizetelly returned to Richmond to say goodbye to Lawley. Though his spirits were waning, those of Richmond society were not; amateur theatricals were the craze that winter. Vizetelly had been the mainstay of every production—painting scenery, rehearsing songs, adapting parts, and sometimes even acting. On January 12, 1864, he performed in a comedy before a select audience that included President Davis and General Stuart. Vizetelly’s part “was to dandle and stifle the cries of a screaming baby,” wrote the diarist Mary Chesnut, while three soldiers behind a curtain simulated the child’s cries. “When Mr. Vizetelly had exhausted all known methods of quieting an infant (in vain), his despair was comic. He threw the baby on a chair and sat on it,” prompting great roars of laughter.5
Two weeks after Lawley left for England, Vizetelly realized that he, too, was exhausted and should return home to rest before the fighting resumed in the spring. In his last dispatch from the South, Vizetelly admitted that his two years in the Confederacy had affected him more than any other assignment; “every soldier of the army of Northern Virginia was a comrade. We had marched many weary miles together, and I had shared in some of their dangers,” he wrote. “This brought me nearer to them than years of ordinary contact could have done.” As he rode away from Jeb Stuart’s camp in late January, Vizetelly stopped to look back at the little gathering of tents, suddenly afraid for “the many friends who were lying there, some of whom would breathe their last in the first glad sunshine of [the] coming spring.”6
Ill.48 Winter quarters of Jeb Stuart’s cavalry, by Frank Vizetelly, who sketches himself on the left.
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As Lawley and Vizetelly made their separate journeys across the Atlantic, each having run the blockade at Wilmington, news of CSS Alabama’s latest raids on Northern ships was spreading. Captain Raphael Semmes daily expected to see a Federal fleet bearing down on the Alabama, but none came. “My ship had been constantly reported, and any one of his clerks could have plotted my track … so as to show [Gideon Welles] where I was bound.” Instead, laughed Semmes, the U.S. navy secretary played an endless and unwinnable game of chase. All Semmes had to do was estimate how long it would take for intelligence of his whereabouts to reach Washington and make sure he left ahead of his pursuers.7
Since the Confederate commerce raider’s launch in 1862, Semmes had burned or released on bond forty-two vessels, sunk the gunboat USS Hatteras at Galveston, and converted one captured vessel into a satellite raider (the Tuscaloosa would have a short career of six months and take only one prize). But by the summer of 1863 the Alabama and its crew were showing signs of battle fatigue. Still searching for prey, Semmes sailed down to Cape Town, South Africa, where to his surprise and relief he and his crew were fêted as heroes. Nothing so exciting or glamorous had visited Cape Town for a very long time, and the residents of this lonely outpost of the British Empire could hardly believe their good fortune. They were so welcoming—inviting the Southerners on big game and ostrich hunts—that twenty-one sailors deserted, leaving Semmes with a serious shortage of men. After much scraping around, his executive officer, 1st Lieutenant John McIntosh Kell, was able to find only eleven replacements. Fortunately, two Prussian naval officers who had been shipwrecked near Cape Town also joined as master’s mates.8 The appearance of the gunboat USS Vanderbilt off the Cape put an end to the Alabama crew’s two-month respite from their harsh life at sea. At midnight on September 24, the ship set sail during a heavy gale for the fertile hunting grounds of the Far East, where Semmes knew he was not expected.27.1
An article entitled “Our Cruise” in the Southern African Mail by George Townley Fullam, one of the English officers on board the Alabama, eventually reached England in the autumn. Fullam described the ship’s adventures, from her narrow escape from Liverpool harbor in July 1862 to her glorious entry into Cape Town twelve months later. Embarrassingly for the British government, Fullam claimed that someone in Her Majesty’s Customs had alerted the Confederates to the Alabama’s pending seizure, allowing her to get away in time. Not surprisingly, the U.S. legation was incensed by this revelation. Charles Francis Adams ordered the article to be printed as a pamphlet and for a copy to be sent to Lord Russell with a strongly worded complaint attached.
Although Russell insisted to Adams that the British government could not be held responsible for the depredations of the Alabama, privately he was worried that the United States might carry out its threat—first made by Seward and Adams in 1862—to sue Britain for damages after the war.10 Russell discussed with the law officers whether they should bar the raider from all British ports around the world, but in their opinion such a move could be interpreted as an admission of guilt regarding the Alabama’s escape. Russell was relieved when an alleged violation of British neutrality at Queenstown, Ireland—involving USS Kearsarge and sixteen Irish stowaways—for once reversed the direction of complaints, giving him the opportunity to play the injured party with the U.S. legation.27.2
Ill.49 The Union and the Confederacy both rail at a determinedly calm John Bull, Punch, November 1863.
The British government was fully aware that large numbers of Irishmen were enlisting in the Federal army; Consul Archibald had observed the crowds at Castle Garden, the immigration depot on the southernmost tip of Manhattan, and estimated that every week, 150 Irish laborers were stepping off the boat and into the arms of recruiters.11 A Home Office clerk compiling passenger statistics first spotted the phenomenon in April 1863, when he noticed a sharp increase—it had almost tripled since 1862—in the number of single male travelers. After carefully reviewing all the statistics from the past three years, the Home Office discovered that the actual increase in the emigration of unmarried Irishmen was roughly ten thousand a year (a figure the government decided it could accept without too much heartache).12
The Confederate government was also concerned about the vast influx of Irish immigrants to the North, and in August 1863 sent its propagandist in France, Edwin De Leon, to Ireland, where he diligently spent several weeks publishing articles about the horrors of the war. James Mason followed in September, but his findings confirmed their worst fears. The Irish were so poor after two failed harvests, Mason wrote to the Confederate secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin, on September 4, 1863, “that the temptation of a little ready money and promise of good wages would lead them to go anywhere.”13 But the draft riots in New York in mid-July had given Benjamin hope that it was not too late to stem the tide. The accusation that the U.S. government was throwing its Irish immigrants into the slaughtering pen was gaining credibility following the near obliteration of the Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg. Benjamin dispatched to Ireland two more agents, Lieutenant James Capston, a former Dubliner, and Father John Bannon of Vicksburg, with orders to discourage Irish immigration using all means at their disposal.
The exposure of the stowaways on the Kearsarge had been Lieutenant Capston’s first success. But he could not uncover any proof for the Home Office that Captain Winslow had acted deliberately, nor did he find evidence of official Federal recruiting in Ireland. (The U.S. government had no need to send over agents when there were plenty of unscrupulous entrepreneurs ready to assume the risk themselves in return for a large cut of the bounty paid for volunteers.) Capston and Bannon soon gave up that particular line of attack and concentrated instead on spreading anti-Northern propaganda. The two Confederate agents tried to tap into Irish nationalist sentiment by comparing the South’s fight for independence with Ireland’s. They distributed thousands of handbills warning potential emigrants that they would end up as cannon fodder if they went to the North. Father Bannon used his church connections to ensure that the injustices endured by the Irish community in the North were broadcast from the pulpit. Although emigration continued apace, the agents successfully rubbed off any glamour in volunteering for the North.
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The danger of having their arms shipments seized by the U.S. Navy and their commerce raiders impounded by the government had driven the Confederates’ activities in Britain underground. “The cheapest and most favorable market, that of England, was well nigh closed to the Confederacy, while the United States were permitted to buy and ship what they liked, without hindrance, and at the ordinary current prices,” complained James Bulloch in his memoirs.14 Matthew Fontaine Maury had hoped to launch a second Confederate cruiser, CSS Rappahannock, but he was forced to send the vessel from Sheerness, Kent, on November 24, 1863, with its hull and boilers still needing work simply to prevent its seizure by the authorities. The cruiser just managed to reach Calais, where it had remained since December, awaiting repairs.
The blockade was also drastically inhibiting the South’s communications. Rose Greenhow had been in Paris since December, trying to arrange an interview with Emperor Napoleon III: “I would write you many interesting particulars,” she wrote to a friend in Virginia, “but the publication of the late intercepted letters is a good warning to me to be careful. If you will get from Mr. Benjamin a cipher and use my name as the key, I can then tell you many things.”15 The “intercepted letters” were those from CSS Robert E. Lee, which had been caught on November 9, 1863, on its twenty-first trip between Wilmington and Nassau. The U.S. Navy also captured the Confederate Ordnance Department’s two remaining supply ships the same night, but the real prize was the Lee. On board were two lieutenants from the Royal Artillery, the Belgian consul, and a mailbag containing dispatches from James Mason for the Richmond cabinet.16 The mailbag also included the private correspondence of his colleague Edwin De Leon, which revealed every aspect of his propaganda campaign—from his attempts to bribe French journalists to his methods of spreading disinformation. But by the time De Leon’s letters appeared in the New York and London press, the disgraced agent was already on his way back to the South, having been dismissed by Jefferson Davis not for the exposure, but for criticizing Judah Benjamin, who had taken the side of John Slidell in the acrimonious relations between the two agents.
Slidell had refused to work with De Leon after he learned that the propaganda agent had opened and read Confederate dispatches intended for him alone. Convinced that De Leon was after his position, Slidell tried to undermine him at every opportunity. He was equally hostile toward Rose Greenhow and discouraged his wife from helping her find a school for her daughter. (Eventually Rose accomplished the task on her own, placing little Rose in the Convent du Sacré Coeur, a Catholic boarding school with many foreigners among its two hundred girls.)17 Slidell’s suspicions about De Leon were groundless, but he was right to be fearful of interference from Rose: “I have come to the conclusion that we have nothing to hope from this side of the Channel,” she wrote to President Davis on January 2, 1864.18 The French mission was a waste of time and resources, she concluded: Slidell cared more about his social life than Confederate diplomacy, and Mason’s grasp of French was too poor for him to be effective in Europe. She advised Davis to recall Slidell and send Mason back to London before the work of two years withered on the vine.
Rose thought Louis-Napoleon’s sympathy was entirely mercenary: “They want tobacco now quite as much as the English want cotton … and I believe that if we were to stop the going out of either cotton or tobacco, it would have more effect than anything else.”19 Having failed to reach the emperor through friends or contacts, she audaciously wrote to him on January 11 requesting a meeting, and much to Slidell’s annoyance, she was granted an interview at the Tuileries on the twenty-second. The little drama was observed by the Maryland journalist W. W. Glenn, who, having spirited Lawley, Vizetelly, and a host of other British visitors across Southern lines, was now in Paris visiting a friend. Glenn’s own feelings about Rose were ambivalent—he had seen her once before in Mason’s company and thought her “a handsome woman, rouged and elaborately gotten up”—but he was still amused by Slidell’s consternation over her success with the emperor:
Slidell, the moment he heard she was to have an audience, was so afraid of the apparent influence of the woman … that she might injure him at Richmond by her letters, or on her return home, and thus perhaps effect his recall which he by no means desired, that he immediately went and left his card; and although he had declared she should not set … foot in his house or know his family, he sent Mrs. S. to call upon her too. When she went to have her interview, Mr. S. sent Eustis, his secretary of legation, with her to present her. She had them in fact all at her feet.20
Louis-Napoleon was not only charming and sympathetic—taking the Confederate heroine’s hand and gently seating her on a cushion next to him—but he also surprised her with the depth of his knowledge about the war. “Tell the President,” she recorded him as saying, “that I have thoughts on his military plans—he has not concentrated enough. The Yankees have also made true blunders. If instead of throwing all your strength upon Vicksburg you could have left that to its fate and strengthened Lee so as to have taken Washington, the war would have ended.” He continued to be charming even when she asked him directly whether he would recognize the Confederate States. “I wish to God I could,” Louis-Napoleon answered. “But I cannot do it without England.”21 At the end of their conversation, the emperor escorted Rose to the door and shook her hand. He seemed to be offering hope, and for a short while she was elated by the interview. She wrote in such glowing terms to Georgiana Walker in Bermuda that her friend recorded in her diary:
Mrs. G. is much delighted with her visit to Paris, & considers her mission to have been a successful one. She had an audience of the Emperor, & was treated with marked attention. She says she advocated our cause warmly & earnestly, & left not one point uncovered; that the Emperor received her as one directly from the President; & bade her tell the President that his sympathy was all with him, & that he should do all in his power to aid him. The Empress says, “His Majesty is not averse to interviews with beautiful escaped prisoners.” I have since heard that Mrs. Greenhow had attended a Ball at the Tuileries, & had supped in the room & perhaps at the table with their Majesties.22
But in reality the emperor had only uttered the same platitudes that Slidell had heard a dozen times before, and once Rose was able to reflect on the interview, she realized that she, too, had been fobbed off: “My belief is the stronger now that our only chance of recognition must now come from England and that, that is the place to which our efforts must be directed.” She returned to London on February 6, 1864. “I left my little one behind and my heart was heavy,” she wrote in her diary.23 James Bulloch, who had arrived in France on January 27, escorted her to the station, helped her onto the train, and deposited her in the carriage reserved for women traveling alone. Aware of the heavy burdens upon him, Rose was touched by his courtesy.
Bulloch was too discreet to unburden himself, but he was that day suffering “a greater pain and regret than I ever thought it possible to feel.”24 He had crossed the Channel in a last-ditch effort to save the rams, which were still being held at Lairds in Liverpool. Since they belonged to a French subject, M. Bravay, the emperor could, in theory, request their return to France. But Louis-Napoleon refused to intervene. Slidell assumed that the emperor was simply paying lip service to Northern demands, but Bulloch knew better. “There was a good deal said about the personal sympathy of the Emperor for the South; and his earnest desire that by some means or other we might get our ships out,” he wrote angrily after the war, but “the sympathy and hope were sheer mockery.”25
The day after Rose’s departure, on February 7, Bulloch sent a letter to Bravay authorizing him to sell the Lairds rams as quickly as possible. (It took several months, but after considerable haggling the Admiralty bought the ships for £180,000.) Bulloch’s distress was not only for the loss of the rams; Slidell had decided that the ship construction operation was jeopardizing his relationship with the emperor and ordered Bulloch to sell the unfinished ironclads in Bordeaux. Determined not to be thwarted, Bulloch pretended to acquiesce while he sought a broker who would agree to buy the vessels on paper only.
Even legitimate Confederate enterprises were buckling under pressure. The price of the Confederate cotton bond had dropped precipitously, from £70 to £34, after Grant’s victory at the Battle of Chattanooga and now fluctuated around the £50 mark. The cost of shipping supplies to the Confederacy and the increasing likelihood of capture were wiping out the profits of blockade running.26 For the first time since the war, the survival of Fraser, Trenholm and Co.—the Southern shipping firm and financial clearinghouse for the Confederacy in Europe—appeared to be in doubt. “Every consignment to us is closely scrutinized and anything at all suspicious would be seized at once,” Charles Prioleau in Liverpool explained to a would-be arms supplier. Nor could he extend further credit to the Confederate government, not even to purchase replacement blockade runners for the Ordnance Department. Prioleau calculated that if every available cotton bale arrived at Liverpool, the company would still be owed £70,000.
Six months earlier, the Confederate propaganda agent Henry Hotze had suggested to Benjamin that Richmond should assume control of all the Confederacy’s international dealings, from arms supplying to blockade running. Now he begged the secretary of state to do it before the market damned the Confederacy for good. “Prohibit the exportation of cotton, except for Government account,” he wrote. “Prohibit the importation of luxuries on any pretence, and import shoes and clothes as well for the citizens as the Army.” Most important of all, he urged him to void all contracts that had not been negotiated by Colin McRae, the South’s official purchasing agent.27 With cotton selling for more than 23 shillings a pound (five years before, it had been worth only 7 pence), there were vast profits awaiting the Confederate government if it could put an effective export system in place.
Hotze also wanted to be rid of the South’s official financial agent, Liverpool businessman James Spence, whose support for the abolition of slavery had become a burden and an embarrassment for the Confederates in England. The ardent supporter of Southern independence was roaring up and down the country in preparation for the opening of Parliament in February. Spence had studied the methods of the antislavery societies and was imitating them to good effect: publishing pamphlets before each meeting, preparing fact sheets for the local press, circulating petitions during the meeting, and creating local affiliates of his Southern Independence association.28 The aim, he told Lord Wharncliffe, the head of the Manchester affiliate, was to make it seem as though pro-Southern feeling was increasing, since nothing should be allowed to dampen the already fragile spirits “of our people who of late have had much to dismay them.” But all the good work had been ruined, in Hotze’s opinion, by the Association’s antislavery manifesto, which stated explicitly: “The Association will also devote itself … to a revision of the system of servile Labour, unhappily bequeathed to them by England, in accordance with the spirit of the age, so as to combine the gradual extinction of slavery with … the true civilisation of the negro race.”29 This, Hotze believed, was unacceptable and far outweighed Spence’s success in attracting four peers and nine MPs to the committee.
James Mason hastily wrote to Benjamin from France that he had been unable to prevent the antislavery manifesto: the Southern Independence Association represented the “views of Englishmen addressed to English people … it was in vain to combat their ‘sentiment.’ The so-called ‘antislavery’ feeling seems to have become with them a ‘sentiment’ akin to patriotism.”30 Mason’s defense was not enough to save Spence’s position as financial agent, and his operations were transferred to Colin McRae. But Benjamin was so flattering and apologetic in his letter of dismissal on January 11 that the Confederacy was able to retain the Liverpudlian’s goodwill. “As a man of the world,” Benjamin wrote, “I would meet you on the most cordial terms without the slightest reference to your views on this subject; but … ‘as a member of a government,’ it would be impossible for me to engage you in its service after the publication of your opinions.”31 It helped that Benjamin agreed to reimburse Spence for the money he had expended on propping up the South’s declining bonds.
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“It is a singular feature of this struggle in America that its merits should be debated at popular meetings held all over this kingdom,” Adams wrote to Seward shortly before the opening of Parliament. “The association of sympathizers with the Insurgents have of late been assiduously engaged in sending paid agents to deliver lectures in behalf of their cause at various places. This has given occasion to counter efforts. Frequently discussions are held by representatives of both sides. I very much doubt whether anything precisely similar ever took place before.”32
Adams knew that the Confederacy’s supporters were waiting for the new parliamentary session with great anticipation. The Liberal government appeared to be tottering toward collapse, and Palmerston had become mixed up in a bizarre divorce case.27.3 Seward had also contributed to the British government’s weakness. “That Solomon has … exercised his usual indiscretion,” raged Benjamin Moran on February 11, 1864, after Seward included in the official publication of the State Department’s correspondence for 1863 dispatches that were never sent to the Foreign Office, such as his provocative July letter on the Lairds rams.33 By playing fast and loose with the State Department record of official dispatches, Seward had made any British concession seem like weakness in the face of Northern threats.
Fortunately for the government, the Tories did not mind castigating Russell for his handling of the Northerners, but they had no desire to be seen as the defenders of slavery, or of rebellion.34 Nor were they by any means confident that their party had enough support in the House for a change of ministry.35 Confronted by the possibility of a change in government, Charles Francis Adams decided that he preferred Palmerston to survive. Adams still attended Lady Palmerston’s weekly parties with gritted teeth, but the sight of the eighty-year-old prime minister standing jauntily at the top of the grand staircase no longer oppressed him.
Adams’s usual cynicism about British politics was in partial abeyance owing to a happy family event. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., had at last taken his furlough and come to England. The term of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry had expired at the end of 1863, but Charles had encouraged his company to follow his example and reenlist. “They seem to think that I am a devil of a fellow,” he wrote. “These men don’t care for me personally. They think me cold, reserved and formal. They feel no affection for me, but they do believe in me, they have faith in my power of accomplishing results and in my integrity.”36
Benjamin Moran envied Charles Francis Jr.’s assured deportment. “He is a sturdy weather tanned man of about 30 years—stout and strong with a bald head; and is a good deal taller than either his father or his brother Henry [and] is coming to Europe to dip into English society,” he wrote in his diary. Moran’s hope that it would only be a little dip was soon dashed. “Mr. Adams can’t introduce his secretaries to their rights,” he thundered, “but he and his wife go out of their way to stuff their son into every possible house in London, when he really has no business there.”37 At a party given by Lady de Grey, Moran sidled up to a crowd that included the poet Robert Browning and the artist John Everett Millais. “When, Lo! Mrs. Adams appeared forcing her way through followed by the Captain at her apron string. I was disgusted,” he wrote. “She was in her element and talked as loud and vulgarly as ever. Holding her finger up and shaking it towards him, she said, ‘here Charley, here, here,’ and on his joining her presented him to Browning and Tom Hughes [the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays]…. I got out of the way and went down stairs.”38
Moran was outraged when “the Captain” failed to pay a visit to the legation offices. “He is pure Adams,” Moran wrote spitefully. But his opportunity for revenge on the family came sooner than he expected. Charles Francis Adams wished to take both his sons to the Queen’s levee on March 2. “This morning,” wrote Moran on March 1, “Mr. H. B. Adams came into the Legation and rather insolently insisted that he was entitled to outrank us at Court.” Henry ought to have known that Moran would not allow a threat to his rank as assistant secretary to pass unchallenged. As a mere private secretary, Henry had no official rank.
“I even questioned the propriety of his going to Court at all—to say nothing about his right,” recorded Moran. With extraordinary timing, Sir Edward Cust, the Queen’s Master of Ceremonies, called at the legation at the height of the argument and confirmed that the right of attendance was extended only to daughters of ministers, not to sons or private secretaries. Naturally, exceptions were allowed, but unofficial private secretaries such as Henry Adams would certainly be ranked behind the last attaché or assistant secretary. Moran had been waiting to hear this ever since Henry’s arrival. The look of triumph on the secretary’s face was too much for Henry, and he swore never to go to court again. “I don’t think anyone will regret that decision,” wrote Moran smugly.39
Shortly after the altercation with Moran, Henry and Charles Francis Jr. left for Paris, “a city for pleasure,” wrote Charles Francis Jr.40 The brothers took every advantage of their freedom. Charles recorded that they spent their last night drinking a beautiful Burgundy “and started for London smiling and happy with wine.” He was sober, though a little jaded, for his presentation at court on March 12. During the carriage ride, Charles further annoyed Moran by grumbling about the occasion. “This cant is abominable,” wrote Moran afterward. “If he didn’t know what he was going for, why in the name of decency did he go?”41 Henry was still smarting from the argument and stayed at home.
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Henry Hotze was pleased when he heard that the Reverend John Sella Martin and Andrew Jackson, both former slaves, had ended their lecture tours and were going home to America. Their presence had threatened to overshadow his successful infiltration of the down-market press. With sufficient funds, the South could be parlayed into a national cause, Hotze often told Benjamin:
The North has two papers, one 3-penny and one penny paper, which it subsidizes lavishly. We also have two, a 3-penny one and a penny one, and in respectability, standing, and influence no one would venture to institute even a comparison between the respective champions. We have moreover the advantage over the subsidized writers of the North that our cause is pleaded with the force of personal conviction and with the zeal of personal friendship and political sympathy.… In the neutral press, both daily and weekly, we have also important connections, equally honorable, while the North, beyond its own organs, has nothing. All this, I unhesitatingly declare, is due to the Index.42
Hotze was also looking for ways to dilute the impact of Henry Yates Thompson’s recent articles. Since his return from the battlefields of eastern Tennessee, Thompson had been writing for the Daily News and touring the country giving talks about his experiences in the North, somewhat to his family’s embarrassment. Leslie Stephen was another irritant, since he was unafraid to take on the South’s supporters at Cambridge and force them to defend their views on slavery. Neither man was an eccentric or a fanatic, and their opinions on the war could not easily be dismissed. Hotze hoped that Colonel Fremantle’s Three Months in the Southern States, which had been published just before Christmas, would become so popular that dissenting voices would be ignored.43 Still, even Fremantle’s book contained passages that upset Hotze. At James Mason’s request, Fremantle had removed passages that made the South seem foreign in English eyes, but he refused to take out his impressions of Southern slavery.44
Lawley’s arrival in England in February briefly revived Hotze’s hope of a propaganda coup. The journalist had been traveling for nearly three weeks, and the enforced rest had restored him to health. William Howard Russell saw him twice in the same week and noted that he was “in splendid fettle, grey but as clear and handsome as paint.” His eloquent reports of the Confederacy’s sufferings had won him a following of swooning females, but Russell was not deceived. Lawley, he wrote, was as “hard as nails.”45 However, Lawley could not afford to bring public attention to himself lest he alert his creditors. The best he could do for Hotze and the Confederates during the short time he dared spend in England was to speak privately to his former colleagues in Westminster. None of these meetings produced anything of substance, although his interview with Disraeli on February 19 had seemed promising at the time.46
At the beginning of March, Lawley passed through Paris on his way to Italy. Slidell reported to Benjamin that Lawley “had a long and very interesting interview with the Emperor. The Conversation turned entirely upon American affairs and was most satisfactory … the Emperor is prepared to take any action in our favor in concert with England, but adheres to his determination not to move without her cooperation.”47 The Times barely touched on American affairs while its special correspondent was away, and when it did, Hotze found the articles quite unsatisfactory. His impatience was shared by the managers of The Times. Mowbray Morris reluctantly granted Lawley an extra month’s vacation in return for his promise to be in Virginia before the start of the spring campaigns.48
On March 25, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., set sail back to the United States. The brothers had been surprised by how much they enjoyed each other’s company. Henry even accompanied him to Liverpool and waited on the tugboat as Charles Francis Jr.’s steamer pulled out of sight. “Henry nodded to me good-bye from the tug,” wrote Charles Francis Jr., “and I, with a bitter taste … in my mouth, was off for home.”49 His departure for America was followed a few days later by that of Rose Greenhow for France. Little Rose sobbed when her mother appeared at the convent. Her distress made Rose dread the inevitable parting. “I know I ought not to be miserable,” Rose wrote in her diary as she reflected on the decisions that had brought them to Europe, “and yet I am, and tears which I try to keep back flow down my cheek and blind me.”50 On April 2 she celebrated little Rose’s eleventh birthday with the one gift that her daughter craved above all: her undivided attention.
27.1 That same night, in the Kell household, far away in McIntosh County, Georgia, six-year-old Jonny Kell cried as his mother buried his little sister, Dot, near the house. Jonny’s younger brother, three-year-old Munroe, was too shocked to speak. Jonny frightened his mother by saying he wished to join “little Sissy” in heaven. Four days after her daughter’s death, Mrs. Kell was relieved to hear that Munroe had regained his words. “Jonny, you may have my marbles,” he said, “I don’t want them any more.” That evening he showed the classic signs of diphtheria. He was dead by the morning. “Oh God have mercy on my desolate broken heart,” wrote Lieutenant Kell’s despairing wife. “He has been gone so long, so long! Three long sad years.”9
27.2 Captain John Ancrum Winslow had been searching for James Morgan’s ship, the Georgia, when storm damage forced USS Kearsarge to put into Queenstown, Ireland, on November 3 for emergency repairs. While it was there, a local newspaper printed a story that the U.S. ship had come expressly to enlist volunteers. The following day the Kearsarge was surrounded by rowboats filled with men clamoring to be chosen. The Kearsarge set sail on November 5 with sixteen extra men. Winslow’s explanation of the incident failed to say how the sixteen climbed aboard unnoticed and managed to find such perfect hiding places on an unfamiliar ship.
27.3 The eighty-year-old premier had been cited as the guilty party in the divorce proceedings of Timothy O’Kane against his wife, Margaret, prompting the society joke: “She was Kane, but was he Able?” Benjamin Disraeli grumpily predicted that the case—though spurious—would do wonders for Palmerston’s popularity and no doubt give him a sweeping victory at the next election.