The truth cannot be hidden—A late success for Bulloch—Hysteria over Canada—Arrival of Davis’s envoy—A hard line—Lord Lyons retires (temporarily)
Lord Lyons had been miserable for much of the journey home. Almost worse than the headaches was the persistent feeling that he had failed. He feared that he had ruined his prospects by leaving Washington and doubted that the relationship of mutual respect he had built laboriously between the legation and the State Department would survive his absence. Lyons’s former attachés were also anxious about their chief’s legacy undone. The “Buccaneers,” as they had once styled themselves, had complained constantly of overwork while they were there, but their new assignments made them miss the camaraderie of the legation. “When we were very jolly in the evening we always used to sing, ‘yonder lies the whiskey bottle empty on the shelf,’ ” sighed Malet.1
Lyons looked so ravaged when he arrived at the Foreign Office on Christmas Eve 1864 that Lord Russell was startled. He promised Lyons that his post in Washington would remain open until either his health was restored or he chose to give it up of his own volition. This reassurance lifted a great weight off Lyons; for the first time in many weeks he did not feel as though he had thrown away his career in a moment of weakness. A few days after the interview, Lyons composed his final report on American affairs, and wrote letters of recommendation for his long-suffering staff. There was much he regretted about the war, but it had served a purpose, he told Russell. Amid all the horrors and iniquities “there appears to be one gleam of consolation,” he thought, for “slavery seems to be doomed.”2
The Southern Independence Association was delighted that the South was finally coming around to Britain’s way of thinking, and they composed a congratulatory address to President Davis on his boldness. To many people, however, the idea seemed far-fetched: nothing but sheer desperation would make them relinquish “the services” of their slaves, Lord Palmerston told John Delane, the editor of The Times, “but one can hardly believe that the South [sic] men have been so pressed and exhausted.” Delane was inclined to agree, until he learned that General Sherman had reached the outskirts of Savannah. “The American news is a heavy blow to us as well as to the South. It has changed at once the whole face of things,” Delane wrote to his deputy editor on December 25. “I have told Chenery to write upon it.” The next day, he sent another note: “I am still sore vexed about Sherman, but Chenery did his best to attenuate the mischief.”3 James Spence also tried to play down the news, telling Lord Wharncliffe on January 5, 1865, to look out for his article in The Times: “You will find I do not attempt to deny the Federal success in Tennessee or the danger of Savannah, which I assume to be likely to fall [the news of Christmas Eve had not yet reached Britain], but I hope to show that public opinion overestimates the importance of the events and that upon the whole the year’s campaign is a failure on the part of the Federals.” Spence disliked writing such obvious propaganda for the South, “but then,” he reasoned, “it is at such a time—the hour of need—that a friend is of value. When the South is victorious they can do without one’s aid.”4
The fall of Savannah was not the only disaster that James Spence was trying to present in a more favorable light. His Confederate prisoners’ bazaar had inspired the London office of the U.S. Sanitary Commission to publish a pamphlet on Southern prison conditions.5 Neither Spence nor Wharncliffe had stopped to consider whether highlighting the plight of Confederate prisoners might backfire if anyone queried the South’s own record, though their campaign had worked so well at first that Mrs. Adams asked Charles Francis Jr. whether it was official policy to mistreat Confederate prisoners.6 Lord Wharncliffe tried to calm the public outcry by forwarding letters to the press from English volunteers who had suffered in Federal prisons, but it was too late to reverse the damage.36.1 7 Families with relatives in Southern prisons, including Dr. Livingstone, began to insist that as British subjects they should be released at once under the prisoner exchange system.8 Another father with a missing son in the Union army, Thomas Smelt, wrote directly to Abraham Lincoln, begging him “as a parent from a parent, that my son may be sent back to me, he has surely fought well and suffered much for your cause and deserves so much.”9
James Spence did not realize how badly the Southern cause had suffered until The Times began to turn down his propaganda articles without explanation. After being met with silence for more than a week Spence conceded that his influence with the paper was at an end. “I doubt if they will insert anything more on the subject,” he wrote to Lord Wharncliffe on January 16. “I see but one thing now that can save the South and that is arming the negroes. Tho, I have always expected they would do it, I am growing fearful lest they invited those fatal words—‘too late.’ ”10
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James Bulloch did not accept that time had run out on the Confederacy, especially since—after the disappointments of the previous year—he was experiencing a late surge of success.11 The Ajax, one of two river steamers he had commissioned to defend the entrance to Wilmington, sailed from Glasgow undetected in the second week of January. “It is quite impossible to predict what may have transpired when you reach Nassau,” Bulloch told the captain of the vessel, Lieutenant John Low. “Should [Wilmington] have been taken by the enemy … you will then proceed with the ship to Charleston, SC.… You may find Charleston itself closed to you, in which case there will remain no port on the Atlantic coast of the Confederate States into which you can take the Ajax.” But even then Bulloch wanted Low to find a way to use the ship against the North: at the very least she could bring cotton out from Texas or Florida.12
He was already thinking of weapons other than cruisers to send across the Atlantic. His two remaining blockade runners, for example, were useless for fighting but could easily be deployed as rocket launchers against fishing towns in New England.13 Bulloch had also managed to buy back one of the French ironclads that had been sold after the emperor ordered the secret construction program to end.36.2 The cruiser, which he had decided to christen the Stonewall, was coming from Copenhagen, and Bulloch had arranged for a ship with a crew and arms to meet her in neutral waters. After waiting two weeks for news that the transfer had taken place, Henry Hotze suggested to Bulloch on January 25 that they should go ahead and announce the existence of CSS Stonewall. It would, he argued, cause panic on the East Coast and force the U.S. Navy to send ironclads to New York, opening the way for the Stonewall when she reached Wilmington.14 Hotze’s Index had been heavily advertising the Shenandoah’s last known captures for that very reason, unaware that the raider was now anchored at Port Phillip Bay, four miles from Melbourne, bereft of coal and in serious need of refurbishment. The Australians were delighted to be front-row spectators for a change, and thousands were visiting the Bay in the hope that the notorious Captain Semmes of the Alabama was the new commander of the Shenandoah.15
The diehards had no trouble accepting Hotze’s propaganda. His own staff believed him. John Thompson wrote in his diary: “Am told we shall soon hear something of importance. I think it refers to an ironclad from Europe to attack Boston and New York.”16 The shipping owner Alexander Collie ridiculed James Spence for being “blue.” “We might be prepared to hear of Wilmington and Charleston being captured, and of Richmond being evacuated,” Collie wrote to Wharncliffe on January 23, “but, in spite of it all, the South will wear the North out and gain its independence.” In the meantime, he was expecting his steamers to begin taking “three or four cargoes monthly for the next four months.”17
The Stonewall was in greater danger than either Bulloch or Hotze knew. Her arrival at Quiberon Bay, on the south coast of Brittany, on January 24 was telegraphed to the U.S. minister in Paris. William Dayton was no longer in charge of the U.S. legation in France, having died under mysterious circumstances in December; John Bigelow, the consul in Paris, had been promoted to his place. A man of far greater intelligence and vigor than Dayton, Bigelow almost succeeded in scuttling the mission by his protests to the French authorities. But one of the worst storms in recent memory ultimately achieved his work for him; on January 29, only a day after the Stonewall sailed from Quiberon, the ship’s bridge was smashed to pieces by giant waves. Unable to sail on to Wilmington, Captain Page took the damaged vessel to Ferrol, on the Spanish coast, and waited for repairs. Twenty-four hours later, Europe learned that the Federals had captured Wilmington’s only defense, Fort Fisher.
“Glorious news reached us today,” Benjamin Moran wrote in his diary on January 30, 1865. “The rebels are tired and will come back [into the Union] soon.” Bulloch pressed on, however, and sent an engineer to Ferrol to oversee the Stonewall’s repairs. “The fall of Fort Fisher seriously deranges our plans for sending supplies, but all of us who are charged with such duties will speedily consult and make new and suitable arrangements,” he promised Mallory.18 Mason was also defiant, telling Benjamin that the Southerners in England approved of the Confederate Congress’s declaration on December 13, 1864, to fight on “at whatever cost or hazard.”19
The Economist criticized the public’s overreaction to the news of Fort Fisher, since the South “still [has] large armies in the field, they have still the ablest generals of the Republic in their ranks,” but most other papers now declared the Confederacy to be without hope.20 It was common knowledge that the South would not be able to survive without its imports. During the past four years, 60 percent of the Confederacy’s rifles had come through the blockade, 75 percent of her saltpeter, and 30 percent of her lead, and, particularly after 1862, the blockade runners had become the South’s lifeline.21 Consul Thomas Dudley in Liverpool had recently completed his statistics for 1864 and amassed evidence against 113 steamships and 304 sailing vessels. Despite the U.S. Navy’s efforts, the South had managed to export 124,700 bales of cotton in return for meat, shoes, arms, medicines, and all the other necessities of war. A total of 303 steamships had successfully run into Wilmington during the war, more than twice the number that reached Charleston.22 The port had become indispensible to the Confederacy. On February 15, Consul Dudley reported that the blockade-running business had died almost overnight.
It had taken four years and seven hundred U.S. ships at a cost of $567 million to close every Southern port. During that time, there had been 6,316 attempts and 5,389 runs past the blockade. The average capture rate for the whole war was only 30 percent, but this figure hides the increasing success of the Federal navy over time. In 1861, roughly nine out of ten blockade runners reached their destinations, but by 1865 the number was only one in two. Although criticized as inept at the time, it is now clear that the blockade played a vital role in the Northern war effort. Guns, meat, and shoes could be shipped in on the blockade runners, but not the heavy cargoes such as iron rails, telegraph poles, and train carriages that the South needed in order to move its armies, feed its people, communicate over long distances, and transport supplies. These hammer blows to the South cost only 10 percent of the total expenditure of the war; except for Rose Greenhow and a few others, almost no one was killed; and a mere 132,000 sailors were employed by the Federal navy compared to 2.8 million soldiers in the army.23
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Mrs. Adams, Henry, Mary, and Brooks left London on February 1 to begin a tour of the Continent. The family had given up the house in Ealing in the expectation that Charles Francis Adams would follow them soon, assuming that Seward would grant his request and appoint a successor. They also were hoping for a visit from Charles Francis Jr., who had surprised them by becoming the colonel of his regiment and proposing marriage to Mary Hone Ogden in the same month.
“Neither Henry nor Brooks Adams had the decency to bid me goodbye,” Moran raged in his diary. “I didn’t expect so much civility from the boy, but I did from Henry.” He was equally incensed with his new assistant secretary, Dennis Alward, for ingratiating himself so easily into Adams’s favor. “Mr. Adams is very civil, but it is the smile of the ogre,” he wrote. The minister had wounded Moran to the quick by inviting Alward to ride in his carriage, and, at a reception given by the Countess of Waldegrave, he had taken “special pains to introduce Mr. Alward to everybody and equal pains not to introduce me at all.”24
Parliament resumed business on February 7. “I have no reason to anticipate any modification in the policy of the ministry toward us,” wrote Mason to Judah Benjamin. “Still, as we have a large body of earnest friends and sympathizers in both houses, it may be that something will arise during the session of which advantage can be taken.”25 The “something” was the universal consternation over Congress’s repeal of the two treaties with Canada, particularly the Rush-Bagot Treaty, which limited the naval power on the Great Lakes. The hysteria over the issue in Parliament alarmed Adams, who warned Seward on February 9: “The insurgent emissaries and their friends are busy fanning the notion that this is a prelude to war the moment our domestic difficulties are over.” With uncharacteristic force, he charged the secretary of state to remember that the future of Anglo-American relations lay in his hands.26
Ill.59 Punch depicts Lincoln advising restraint on the move to punish Canada by ending the free trade treaty, February 1865.
All of Adams’s meetings with Lord Russell since December had been very satisfying. The foreign secretary had taken care to explain the government’s position regarding the Confederate operations in Canada and what steps had been taken to prevent them. They had both agreed that the two countries had survived far worse aggravations. “We had heretofore passed through so many troubles during this war,” Russell told Adams, “so we might safely get over this one.”27 But in late January, Russell’s tone had become anxious; he requested clarification on twelve U.S. steam launches under construction in British dockyards, and whether they were for military or civilian use. Adams realized that the government’s concern was whether they would be used not against the South, but on the Great Lakes against the British. Palmerston was genuinely alarmed. “There is something mysterious about these launches,” he wrote to Russell. “Could they have not got them sooner, more cheaply and as good in their own dockyards? What they are really meant for one cannot say. Their size is quite enough for carrying guns, and it is probable they are destined to cover the landing of troops on our shores in the Lakes.”28
The British cabinet agreed that Quebec should be fortified as quickly as possible; the navy’s budget was increased, and the Queen was warned on February 12 that the country was preparing for war. Her private secretary, Lieutenant General Charles Grey, argued unsuccessfully for a preemptive strike.36.3 29 Although the Queen deprecated the idea, she shared Grey’s anxiety, acknowledging in her diary “the impossibility of our being able to hold Canada, but we must struggle for it.”30 Lord Lyons was summoned to the palace to give his assessment of the United States’ intentions. Still in the grip of mental exhaustion and in great pain from his neuralgia, he could not help sounding bleak. Lyons “seemed bitterly disgusted with his post at Washington and with the dreadful people he has had to deal with—so insincere and ungentlemanlike,” the Queen recorded after the interview. “He thinks the position a dangerous one, but does not believe in a war [between the United States and] us, at least he hopes it may not come to it.”31
Lord Russell had been sincere when he told Adams in December that responsibility for preventing an Anglo-American war rested on the two of them finding “a safe issue from this, as we had from so many other troubles that had sprung up during this war.”32 In mid-February, he decided to send a protest to the Confederate government over its blatant abuse of British neutrality. Unlike the previous remonstrance sent in 1864, this one would be sent to Washington with a request that the U.S. government pass the letter on to Richmond. Russell showed the document to Charles Francis Adams. Addressed to Mason, Slidell, and Mann, it complained that Confederate acts in Britain and Canada had showed “a gross disregard of her Majesty’s character as a neutral power, and a desire to involve her Majesty in hostilities.”33
Adams was astonished by the passion in Russell’s voice; “he read it over slowly and deliberately,” the minister recorded in his diary. During the subsequent conversation, Russell agreed with Adams “that it looked ill” when Canadian and English juries repeatedly acquitted Confederate offenders. “People here now took sides, almost as vehemently on our questions as we did ourselves. It was to be regretted, but there was no help for it,” Russell had argued, which received the blunt riposte from Adams that if Britain had become embroiled in the Prussian-Danish war, “in two months, Prussia would have been fitting out fast steamers in the port of New York, and we should not have been able to stop them. His Lordship candidly enough admitted that the idea had occurred to him.”34 “This conference was one of a most friendly character,” Adams wrote to Seward, “and convinced me that whatever might be the desires of the French emperor, nothing but the grossest mismanagement on our part would effect any change in the established policy of this ministry towards us.” Over the next few days, Adams repeated his warnings with greater vehemence.35
Adams wondered whether Seward was even bothering to read his reports, since the secretary of state rarely responded to specific points and had ignored Adams’s request to leave London.36
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The news that the U.S. Congress had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, had an even greater effect on British public opinion than the North’s recent military victories. No amount of sneering by Henry Hotze in the Index could diminish the moral grandeur of emancipation. He had been counting on the memoirs of Fitzgerald Ross and of Belle Boyd to create a sensation—and a diversion—but neither book was ready for publication. “I can do no better though I have tried very hard,” Ross explained to his publishers. “Is it the general experience of authors that the preface is the most difficult part of the book to write?”37 Belle Boyd was being helped with her book by the writer George Augustus Sala, who may also have become her lover; if he did, the affair was suddenly complicated by the return of Belle’s husband, Sam Hardinge, who had been released without explanation from Fort Delaware on February 8 and had arrived in London with his health completely broken down.36.4 Belle included Hardinge’s prison diary in her memoirs, but there is no record of what happened to him once he reached England; he simply disappeared and was never mentioned again. She was similarly tight-lipped about the birth date of her daughter, Grace.39
James Mason was in Paris with Mann and Slidell composing a joint response to Lord Russell’s protest when Duncan Kenner arrived on February 24.40 The commissioners could not believe that the South they remembered would genuinely consider emancipation; to them, slavery was the core of Southern identity.41 Yet Mason had recently received a letter from his eldest son, Lieutenant James M. Mason, Jr., who fully embraced the idea of offering freedom to the slaves in return for their fighting for the Confederacy: “With proper discipline they will fight as well as any mercenaries,” he insisted. His regiment, the 42nd Virginia Infantry, had almost starved while fighting General Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, and it was hardly better off in Petersburg. He doubted any of them could survive another winter of such suffering: “If the North continues her present energy, the long night of ruin, misery and agony will surely come unless indeed, you in Europe, do something for our aid.”42
Kenner had risked his life to deliver Davis’s proposal of emancipation in return for recognition, and it did not matter to him whether the commissioners were relieved or outraged.43 Slidell realized that they had no choice, and on March 4 he had an interview with the emperor, who repeated his condolences and sent the commissioner on his way. But Mason still could not bring himself to accept the truth; he accompanied Kenner to London and tried to keep him distracted with business arrangements for the Confederate cotton loan. Kenner could not be deflected from his real purpose for long, however, and he insisted that Mason arrange the meeting with Lord Palmerston.
The Confederate commissioner reluctantly complied, but had one more trick up his sleeve. At the last minute he succeeded in persuading Kenner to step aside and allow him to make the representation, on the grounds that the mission required the skills of an experienced diplomat. Mason met with Lord Palmerston on March 14, 1865. By his own account, he prevaricated for almost twenty minutes before finally asking whether “there was some latent, undisclosed obstacle on the part of Great Britain to recognition.” Palmerston had already divined the real purpose of the conversation and replied without hesitating that slavery had never been the obstacle. Mason was elated until he recounted the conversation to a friend, Lord Donoughmore, who told him that Palmerston had said this precisely to forestall a last-minute appeal from the South: slavery had always been the chief impediment to recognition. The South had squandered her only chance of achieving it by not emancipating the slaves in 1863, when Lee was the undisputed victor on the battlefield. For a brief moment, Mason feared that he had been responsible for ruining the South’s last hope of survival, and wanted to see Palmerston again so he could be much clearer this time, but Donoughmore assured him that “the [opportunity] had gone by now, especially that our fortunes seemed more adverse than ever.”36.5 44
Hotze informed his editorial staff that “the Confederate funds in Europe were in a state of bankruptcy … and the Index would probably be discontinued in two or three months.” “This greatly disconcerted me,” wrote his deputy John Thompson, “as I am at a loss to know how to live when my salary is cut off.”45 The Confederates in London were further demoralized by the debate in the Commons on the night of the fourteenth about the proposed cost of Canada’s defenses. Benjamin Moran observed the proceedings from the Strangers’ Gallery, expecting to hear the North denounced or the South eulogized. To his surprise, Southern recognition was not even mentioned, and “the marked feature was the tone of respect towards the US, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward. This was in wonderful contrast to the jeers, the sneers and the disrespect common in that House on all occasions when these names were mentioned two and three years ago.… Forster made a speech that amounted to eloquence. I didn’t think he had it in him.”46
The revolution in British attitudes toward the North and South was also apparent in the Foreign Office’s approach to persons who had run afoul of the U.S. authorities, as Mary Sophia Hill found to her disappointment. “I should like my trial denounced,” she had written to Lord Wharncliffe in February.47 Mary had written in a similar vein to Lord Russell: “I have come to this country for the purpose of carrying my case personally to your Lordship, and to ask for justice to be done me, and though but a humble individual, I feel assured not all is in vain. England’s flag protects her subjects, wherever they may be scattered.”48 But he did not feel inclined “to ask for justice,” and after reviewing all the documents in Mary’s case, neither did Russell’s legal advisers. “Her whole story is, moreover, extremely improbable,” insisted the attorney general on March 18:
It is not true, as she says, that she was acquitted; she was found guilty, and banished. It is certainly not improbable that she may have been rudely treated by the United States authorities; but the British Consul and Lord Lyons appear to have done all that was in their power to save her from the consequences of her own (to say the least) very imprudent acts. We are clearly of opinion, that there is no ground for your Lordship’s interference in this matter.49
Robert Burley encountered a similar response to his requests regarding his son Bennet, the Confederate guerrilla in Canada. Frightened by the execution of John Yates Beall, Bennet’s friend and coconspirator, Burley Sr. had enlisted the help of his local MP, Robert Dalglish, as well as MP William Forster, to take up the case with the Foreign Office and the American legation.50 (Fitzgerald Ross became concerned for Colonel Grenfell and asked his publisher to remove all references to his friend from his memoir.) He also made a heartfelt appeal to Lord Russell to save his son. The foreign secretary scribbled on the back of Burley’s letter: “Inform him a copy of his letter will be sent to Washington with instructions to do the best for his son.”51 Translated, it meant the government would not contest the charges.
Russell was so anxious about the apparent rise in Northern hostility toward England that he asked Lord Lyons to cut short his recuperation and return immediately to Washington. But to his surprise, instead of dutifully agreeing, Lyons resigned from the diplomatic service. “Lord Russell has been extremely kind to me, and so indeed has every one,” Lyons wrote to his former secretary of the legation, William Stuart. Seward’s subsequent letter especially moved him: “I accept your farewell with sincere sorrow,” the secretary of state wrote on March 20. “But I reconcile myself to it because it is a condition of restoration of your health.” Seward promised that Anglo-American relations would prosper after the war, although it saddened him that Lyons would not be around to enjoy the moment when the two countries “are reconciled and become better friends than ever.… But God disposes.” It was bittersweet for Lyons to read these words. “I confess that I do not feel so much relief or even pleasure as might have been expected,” he told Stuart. “I seriously thought of offering to go back immediately when I heard the decision of the Cabinet.” That decision was the appointment of Sir Frederick Bruce, the former minister to China, as the new head of the Washington legation. It was not Bruce that troubled Lyons but the reality of being replaced. He even missed “my Washington Mission.” In Lyons’s reply to Seward, he reflected on “the friendly and unconstrained terms on which we were” and how much good they had produced. “I am most anxious that my successor’s intercourse with you should be placed at once on the same footing.”52
“You are about to proceed to Washington at a very critical period,” Russell informed Sir Frederick Bruce on March 24, 1865.53 He warned Bruce on no account to mention the Alabama or allow Seward to speak to him about reparations for the Confederate cruisers built in Britain. If Seward brought up the Confederate cruisers, Bruce was to declare the subject beyond his remit.54 That night, Benjamin Moran encountered Lyons and Bruce together at the French embassy ball. Lyons smiled wryly when Moran asked how he had enjoyed Washington, and he replied with monumental understatement that “he had had a very satisfactory time in the US, although rather hard worked.”55
Charles Francis Adams was amused by the government’s “singular panic in regard to what will be done by us, after restoration [of the Union]. A week or two since you could not drive the notion out of their heads that we were not about to pounce at once upon Canada.”56 But Adams took the greater satisfaction from seeing the humiliation of his former adversaries:
One thing seems for the present to be settled. That is, that no hope is left for any aid to the rebel cause. England will initiate nothing to help them in their critical moment.… The voluminous intrigues of the rebel emissaries have been completely baffled, their sanguine anticipations utterly disappointed. They have spent floods of money in directing the press, in securing aid from adventurers of all sorts, and in enlisting the services of ship and cannon builders with all their immense and powerful following, and it has been all in vain. So far as any efforts of theirs are concerned, we might enter Richmond tomorrow. This act of the drama is over.57
36.1 One letter came from police constable Joseph Taylor, late of Company F, 5th Louisiana, who wrote to Lord Wharncliffe on January 5: “As one who has opposed the Northern Armies from Cedar Mountain fight which took place in August 1862 up to the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863, and taken prisoner the day after that great Battle had terminated, I think it my duty to make this humble protest against the assertion of Mr. Seward that the prisoners taken by the Federals are so well treated that they are suffering no privations.” Another English recipient of Lord Lyons’s aid, Captain Hampson of the 13th Louisiana Regiment, wrote: “Looking in today’s Standard, I wish so far as lies in my power to corroborate [Taylor’s] statement in regard to the treatment of Confederate prisoners by the Federals. I have had personal experience of their kindness (!) to their fellow being whilst in their hands and prisoner.”
36.2 In late December, Bulloch triumphantly informed Mallory that he was on the verge of a significant breakthrough. He had always assumed that the French-made cruisers were lost to them. After the emperor had ordered their sale, one had been bought by the Prussians, the other by the Danes, to be deployed at sea against each other, but the contest never took place, because the Danes were defeated before they received the ship and it became clear to Lucien Arman, the ship’s builder, that the Danes had no use for his expensive vessel when it finally arrived in Copenhagen. Rather than insisting on the sale, Arman devised an outrageous plan to sabotage the ship during her trials, thereby providing the unsuspecting Danes with a legal excuse to break the contract. He already knew, of course, of a buyer who would pay twice the amount he had agreed with the Danes for such a powerful ship. Bulloch agreed to pay an exorbitant 455,000 francs for the return of the vessel.
36.3 A short time later, the Duke of Somerset received a parcel containing the plans of the U.S. Navy’s latest ships and their torpedoes. They had been secretly obtained by the master shipbuilder Donald McKay, who resided in New York but whose heart and family remained in Nova Scotia.
36.4 Sala had reported on the war for the Daily Telegraph and was, like Lawley, completely pro-Southern. In the introduction he provided for Belle’s memoir, Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, he claimed that she possessed scandalous information about members of Lincoln’s administration. Whether or not this was really the case, he helped her to draft a threatening letter to Lincoln on January 24 in which she offered to suppress her memoir if Hardinge was released by the beginning of March. “I think it well for you and me to come to some definite understanding,” Belle had written boldly.38
36.5 The former Confederate secretary of state, Robert M. T. Hunter, stated the conundrum in stark terms on March 7, 1865, during the Confederate Senate debate on whether to use slave soldiers. “To arm the negroes is to give them freedom,” he told the chamber. “If we are right in passing this measure, then we were wrong in denying to the old Government the right to interfere with the institution of slavery.” He, for one, was not prepared to be a hypocrite. But the majority of the Senate chose survival over principle. They all knew that General Lee was desperate to have the negro recruits for his army. A week later, on March 13, the Confederate House of Representatives followed suit after a raucous and bitter debate.