“Keep Your Courage Up”
BY APRIL 1862 a semblance of order had been restored to the British consulate in Richmond. Acting Consul Frederick Cridland was no longer besieged by dozens of fretful Britons demanding permits, money and safe passage home. Most had long since left Richmond, and Cridland was toiling less hard for his monthly wage of twenty-one pounds.
He had indeed received a letter from a Mr. John Scully on March 28, though it was a rather vague, poorly written correspondence with no mention of an imminent execution. Nevertheless, Cridland “sought and obtained an interview with the officer presiding at the Court Martial which had condemned Scully and became convinced that the evidence produced against him left no doubt of his guilt.”
The letter handed him by Father McMullen on Tuesday, April 1, was altogether more alarming. Not only had it been written by an educated, articulate man, but one under the sentence of death. Cridland, reluctant as he was to interfere “in the cases of persons who had evidently violated Her Majesty’s Proclamation,” nonetheless considered he would be failing in his duty as acting consul if he did not follow up the letter. Cridland had applied to see the prisoners the day he received the letter, but the request was refused. On Wednesday he tried again, with more insistence, and he was granted an appointment on Thursday, April 3, the day before the execution.
As the acting British consul strode to Castle Godwin, a mile and a half to the west laborers began erecting a gallows under a grove of oak trees on the Camp Lee Fair Grounds.
Cridland was shown to the cell occupied by Lewis and Scully, and introductions were made. Neither Lewis or Cridland made any reference to the letter that Lewis had written to the consul from Charleston nine months earlier asking for a pass to Richmond; in all likelihood Cridland never received the letter. The diplomat soon got down to business, explaining that he had discussed their case first with the court-martial officer, then with Gilmer. It wasn’t good. They’d repeated to Cridland the report of General Winder: that the two spies had been under surveillance from the moment they arrived in Richmond and that the detectives had judged “their movements very extraordinary and suspicious.” To sum up, declared Cridland in a pompous tone, “there is enough evidence against you to hang a hundred and eleven men.”
Lewis was flabbergasted at Cridland’s attitude and asked if he’d seen the evidence. The consul admitted that he hadn’t, though he had asked. The confession riled Lewis, who accused Cridland of not doing enough to help them. Cridland, impressed with the clarity of Lewis’s outburst, adopted a more conciliatory approach, and soon they were deep in conversation, reviewing in detail every circumstance that had brought Lewis and Scully to this woebegone moment.
“Keep your courage up” were the last words Cridland said to Lewis and Scully before departing. For their part, the two prisoners begged him to keep his word and seek an immediate interview with the Confederate government. They had less than twenty-four hours to live.
Cridland walked a few blocks west from Castle Godwin to the secretary of state’s office in the front part of the Treasury Building devising his strategy. There was no time to ask Lord Richard Lyons in Washington to intercede on the men’s behalf, nor did Cridland consider that he alone possessed the diplomatic weight to exert sufficient pressure on the Confederate government. He must tread carefully but firmly; diplomacy of the highest order was required. No threats, but perhaps he might employ one or two subtle hints apropos Her Majesty’s government and its relations with the South.
Judah Benjamin, the secretary of state, and George W. Randolph, the secretary of war, rose when Cridland was shown into the room by the chief clerk. Cridland expressed his gratitude for the extraordinary interview and then set out the nature of his call. He had come straight from Castle Godwin, where two British subjects, “John Scully and Pryce Lewis acknowledged to me that they had been employed as spies in Washington and paid as such by the Federal Government.” That point was indubitable, Cridland emphasized, adding that he was well aware of Her Majesty’s Proclamation of Neutrality in which the queen had warned all British subjects from interfering in the American conflict. That wasn’t the issue. What concerned Cridland was the revelation that “the prisoners had been tried and condemned to death at a moment when it was utterly impossible for either of them to obtain any evidence in their favor from Washington.” He, too, had requested to see the evidence against the two men, but this had been refused. Surely this went against all judicial protocol? Cridland would be happy “to write to Lord Lyons in order to obtain evidence should the execution be postponed,” but of course that was a decision to be made by the Confederate government.
The interview concluded with “no promise” from either Randolph or Benjamin. Cridland thanked the men for their time, and they in return were grateful that the matter had been brought to their attention.
To his friends, the fifty-year-old Judah Benjamin was “the brains of the Confederacy”; to his enemies he was “the hated Jew.” John Beauchamp Jones, who had worked as Benjamin’s clerk when he was secretary of war, despised his religion but respected his “intellect, education, and extensive reading, combined with natural abilities of a tolerably high order.”
When Cridland sat before him on the afternoon of Thursday, April 3, 1862, Benjamin had been secretary of state for a mere six days, having succeeded LeRoy Pope Walker. His replacement as secretary of war, George Randolph, was thus similarly inexperienced in his new position. While Randolph was considered a competent lawyer, Benjamin’s brilliance bordered on genius. He had been elected to the Senate in 1852, rapidly gaining a reputation as one of the Democratic Party’s most eloquent and powerful orators. The Southern Anti-Semites may have detested Benjamin, but he was a favorite with President Davis, who admired his blunt honesty and valued his cool judgment.
Benjamin enjoyed his work. Sixteen-hour days weren’t unusual, with or without a war, and the question of the two British prisoners must have appealed to his legal mind. Having been born in the West Indies to English parents, Benjamin was an Anglophile, but he, like everyone else in the Confederate government, was losing patience with the British.
In the months following Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of Neutrality, the British government had maintained a discreet distance on the “American war question” and made no attempt to lift the Union blockade of Southern ports. Not so the country’s press, which was overwhelmingly inimical to the North. The spectacular failure of the Union army at Bull Run in July 1861 was greeted with thinly veiled glee by most newspapers with the London Times describing it as a “cowardly rout, a miserable, causeless panic, and disgraceful to men in uniform.”
American papers in the North retaliated with splenetic attacks of their own. Harper’s Weekly told its readers to ignore the “short-sighted selfishness” of Britain, while reminding them that the London Times was “the exponent of that British public opinion which allowed George Third to hire Hessians to fight his battles against the sons of Englishmen.”*
The New York Times warned Britain that “a profound indignation is felt by the larger part of the American nation, and it is not likely to be allayed for years to come.” The insults traded across the Atlantic delighted those in the South. Mary Chesnut, the wife of a Confederate soldier and politician, told her diary on July 5, 1861, “The [London] Times reflects the sentiment of the English people. How we do cling to the idea of an alliance with England.”
Yet just a few weeks later, on August 26, Chestnut was rebuking William Russell, the Times’ august war correspondent, for his antislavery polemic. Russell was the most influential reporter of the day on either side of the Atlantic. Since March 1861 he had been traveling through the Southern and Eastern states, filing regular dispatches on what he found. Russell was an impartial observer; he admired the determination and courage of the Confederate army, while questioning similar attributes in the Northern forces; he liked the hospitality he encountered in the Southern states and felt intimidated by the hectoring that emanated from certain Union politicians. But what Russell detested above all else was the institution of slavery. Reaching one Southern plantation, he had found it run like “a hideous black harem.” How was it, Russell asked, that one could have anything but contempt for a man who “holds his head high and poses as the model of all human virtues to these poor women whom God and the laws have given him, [and] from the height of his awful majesty he scolds and thunders at them as if he never did wrong in his life?” Russell’s antislavery polemic touched a raw nerve with educated Southerners like Mary Chesnut, many of whom knew of the depravities practiced on plantations, but who had chosen to purge their consciousness of such thoughts. They didn’t take kindly to an outsider reminding them of the evil that lay among the tobacco plants and cotton fields.
As summer turned to autumn, the Confederacy’s desperation for British assistance deepened. Cotton hadn’t brought “England to its knees,” as one Southern paper had so confidently envisaged earlier in the year, and Northern newspapers seized every opportunity to remind the rebels of the fact. In September 1861 Harper’s Weekly reported that the viceroy of Egypt had notified the British government that the productive cotton capacity of the country would be “increased to an unlimited extent,” while “the Nicaraguan Embassador [sic] in London offers it free grant of land in Nicaragua to settlers who propose to raise cotton.”
President Davis resolved to send two more emissaries to London to plead with the British government once again to recognize the Confederate States as a sovereign nation. The men chosen were James Mason, former chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and John Slidell, a respected lawyer from New Orleans. Some considered Mason a curious envoy to send to England. The Virginian-born Mason was not a born diplomat, but he was a fierce proponent of slavery and a driving force behind the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, a bill that allowed slave owners to cross state lines in order to retrieve their goods.
On October 12, 1861, Slidell and Mason ran the Union blockade at Charleston, South Carolina, and reached Havana without incident. In the Cuban capital they boarded a British mail steamer, the Trent, bound for the English port of Southampton. The two diplomats traveled with secretaries, and Slidell was also accompanied by his wife, son and three daughters. As the purser of the Trent later related in a letter to the London Daily Telegraph, it wasn’t long after leaving Havana on November 8 that they observed ahead a large steamship in the narrowest part of the Bahama Channel. The vessel displayed no flag, explained the purser, and the first intimation of its nationality was “a round shot being fired across our bows and at the same moment by her showing American colours.” The British steamer held its course, and the next instant the American ship, the San Jacinto, “fired a shell from a swivel gun of large caliber on her forecastle, which passed within a few yards of the ship, bursting about a hundred yards to leeward.”
The Trent hove to, and within a few minutes “between twenty and thirty men, heavily armed, under the command of the first lieutenant,” boarded the ship. As Lieutenant Donald Fairfax stood on deck demanding to see the ship’s passenger list, he was confronted by the Trent’s skipper, Captain James Moir, who informed the American that this was a British vessel and his actions were tantamount to piracy. Fairfax eyed the captain and demanded a second time the manifest, saying he had reason to believe the ship carried two enemies of the U.S. government and his orders were to remove them. Moir again “indignantly refused” to cooperate, at which point, said the purser, “Mr. Slidell himself came forward … but appealed to the British flag, under which they were sailing, for protection.”
Fairfax ignored the petition and ordered the seizure of the two envoys and their secretaries. Slidell and Mason asked that they be permitted to pack a few belongings, a request that was granted. It was at the moment, related the purser, that “a most heart-rending scene took place between Mr. Slidell, his eldest daughter—a noble girl devoted to her father—and the lieutenant. It would require a far more able pen than mine to describe how with flashing eye and quivering lip she threw herself in the doorway of the cabin where her father was, resolved to defend him with her life, till on the order being given to the marines to advance, which they did with bayonets pointed at this poor defenceless girl, her father ended the painful scene by escaping from the cabin by a window, when he was immediately seized by the marines and hurried into the boat, calling out to Captain Moir, as he left, that he held him and his Government responsible for this outrage.”
Outrage was the word used in the Daily Telegraph’s headline of November 30 when it heard of the drama on the high seas. The Manchester Guardian declared that “the American government are determined to test to the utmost the truth of the adage that it takes two to make a quarrel,” and not one British newspaper deviated from the line that in boarding a British vessel, the American government had violated international law and abused Britain’s position of neutrality. The Northern newspapers saw it differently. Commodore Charles Wilkes, skipper of the San Jacinto, was a hero, a man to be exalted and promoted. Harper’s Weekly was of the opinion that “the arrest of the rebel Commissioners was fully justified … and that Commodore Wilkes would even have been justified in taking the Trent, and bringing her into the harbor of New York as a prize, for carrying rebel officers and dispatch.”
The New York Commercial Advertiser was one of the few Federal newspapers to quietly draw attention to the fact that “Wilkes has done the very thing in principle for which we went to war with England for doing. It is true that the right of search exists in a time of war, and rests in the belligerent; but this forcible seizure of political prisoners when under the protection of a neutral flag is unjustifiable and ought to be repudiated by the United States government.”
The “war” referred to by the Advertiser was the one of 1812 against Great Britain, a conflict in which the roots lay in part in America’s actions throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Britain had done its utmost to prevent all neutral countries trading with the French in the early years of the nineteenth century, issuing in 1807 an order compelling neutral vessels to submit to an inspection by its naval authorities. Any captain who failed to comply would have his vessel boarded and his cargo impounded. With its superior navy Britain was able to enforce the order, much to the fury of American seamen, who saw no reason why they could not continue to trade with France. But Britain justified its “Right of Search” on the fact that it was at war. To emphasize the point, the crew of a British naval vessel boarded the American ship Hercules in 1810 just before it left Sardinia for America, taking into captivity Lucien Bonaparte, younger brother of Napoleon. By 1812 the United States was unable to further tolerate British naval aggression. War was declared. Half a century later, another war appeared inevitable, though this time it was Britain complaining of American hostility.
On November 30 the British government sent Queen’s Messenger James Haworth-Leslie across the Atlantic to deliver Dispatch no. 444 to Lord Lyons in Washington. The dispatch contained the conditions Lyons was to set before the American government if it wished to avoid war. On the same day Britain began its preparations to send troops to Canada. The Blackburn Times reported that the Admiralty had telegrammed Portsmouth ordering “the fifty-one gun screw frigates Shannon and Euryalus, and the Stromboli, 6 guns, to be in readiness for immediate commission … an addition was made to the cargo of the transport Melbourne, viz., 2,500,000 rounds of small arms’ cartridges, 30,000 stand of arms, and accoutrements.”
A bellicose cartoon appeared in Punch on December 7 showing a burly but unarmed British sailor warning his pistol-toting American counterpart to “do what’s right, my son, or I’ll blow you out of the water.” But as the jingoism increased and the clamor for war intensified, one or two newspapers began to draw back. The Daily Telegraph, while it expressed outrage at the actions of the San Jacinto, also called on its compatriots for a period of reflection. “We are, indeed, too strong a nation to be hot-tempered … to draw that sword which cannot go up unbloody into its scabbard. All the horrors of war are aggravated when war is between men of one civilization and language … [and] let it be remembered that the officers of the San Jacinto must either have acted under orders from head-quarters or they officiously exceeded their orders, and in either case we must await explanation, if not repudiation.”
The Telegraph also probably knew what most informed members of the British establishment knew: that the British lion was a weary beast, weakened by recent conflicts in the Crimea and India. The roar was still there, and from a distance the lion looked as menacing as ever, but up close the coat had lost its shine and the claws their sharpness. The call to arms issued by the British government was a snarl, but in reality the wish was to resolve the crisis peacefully.
On the other side of the Atlantic similar moves were afoot to steer a way through the stormy diplomatic waters. President Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward allowed passions to cool on both sides, and Charles Adams, the United States’ minister to Britain, blamed their silence on the paucity of communication links between the two countries, though some encouraging news came from Alexander Galt, Canada’s minister of finance, who was in Washington and secured an interview with Lincoln. Galt reported that the president assured him the United States had no intention of attacking Canada, and as for the Trent affair, his only comment had been “Oh, that’ll be got along with.”
On December 18 Lord Lyons received the official dispatch from London sent nearly three weeks earlier. It was delivered by James Haworth-Leslie, who was in such haste to reach Washington that he hired a private train to bring him south from New York, having learned that the next regular service wasn’t until the following day. The dispatch instructed Lyons to obtain the release of the two Confederate envoys along with an apology from the U.S. government. He was to allow the Americans seven days’ grace. Also included in the instructions was an unofficial directive from Lord John Russell, Britain’s foreign secretary, explaining that while the freedom of Mason and Slidell was imperative, the apology was less so. In other words, America was being given a chance to save some face.
On December 19 Lyons met Seward and apprised him of the dispatch’s contents. Seward asked how long his government had to respond. Lyons concealed the seven-day deadline. On December 25 Lincoln and his cabinet agreed to release the two envoys and crafted a communiqué that was in places contradictory and disingenuous but defiant enough to please the American public. Though Commodore Wilkes had been justified in his actions, because the Confederates were contraband of war, he had broken international law by not bringing his booty into an American port for trial by a prize court. As a result, James Mason and John Slidell would be allowed to resume their passage to England. No apology was forthcoming.
The British were satisfied with the response, and Lyons commented that “the preparation for war … has prevented war.” With honor intact on both sides of the Atlantic, everyone was happy, except the Confederate States. A representative of Jefferson Davis’s government already in London, Henry Hotze, wrote that “the Trent affair has done us incalculable injury.” In particular, the revelation by the Trent’s purser that Slidell’s last words as he was taken from the ship were a reminder to Captain Moir that “he held him and his Government responsible for this outrage” proved to the British people that the two Confederates were agent provocateurs desirous of dragging Britain into their war. Hotze also reported the London Times’ view of Mason and Slidell (who finally reached the English capital on January 30) as “the most worthless booty it would be possible to extract from the jaws of the American lion … so we do sincerely hope that our countrymen will not give these fellows anything in the shape of an ovation.”
When news of the Trent’s violation had first reached Richmond, men and women from the grand drawing rooms of the palatial houses on Clay Street, to the barroom of the Monumental Hotel, eagerly anticipated the day, surely not far off, when Britain would declare war on the Union. Thus the news that a compromise had been reached distressed those in the Confederacy who had pinned their hopes on Britain. A front-page editorial in the Richmond Dispatch of March 12 declared that “Frenchmen fight for glory, Englishmen for gain. England will not recognize our independence or raise the blockade until it is in her interests so to do.” The paper returned to the attack on March 25, saying that the “controlling motive of the British government … through the abolition of slave labor in the south [is] to cripple and destroy the cotton culture in America as to make the world dependent for its manufactures upon the cotton productions of British colonies.”
Judah Benjamin was conscious of such Anglophobic sentiment; but he was also aware of the enduring resentment felt by many in the British Parliament toward the Federal government. In February the venerable Earl of Carnarvon had clashed with Lord Russell on the issue of the North’s attitude toward citizens of Great Britain. Carnarvon thought it preposterous that “three British subjects were at this moment detained in prison in the Federal States, where they had been between four and five months, on secret charges without a single allegation of any sort being made.” Russell countered that the U.S. government was engaged in a civil war and extreme measures were thus required, but he assured the Right Honorable Member that he would “always be ready to instruct Lord Lyons [the British ambassador to the United States] to bring the case under the consideration of the authorities of the United States Government.” The Earl of Carnarvon was not placated by Russell’s vapid statement. After all, they had been here before, had they not, only three months earlier, when two British subjects—a Mr. Patrick and a Mr. Rahming—had been held without charge for several weeks. In that instance, when Lord Lyons had complained to William Seward about the “irregular proceedings,” he had been informed that “the safety of the whole people has become, in the present emergency, the supreme law, and so long as the danger shall exist to all classes of society equally, the denizen and the citizen must cheerfully acquiesce in the measures which that law prescribes.”
Yet even if Benjamin saw the fate of Lewis and Scully as an opportunity to exploit British disquiet by contrasting Northern oppression with Southern goodwill, his overriding concern was whether correct legal procedure had been followed in the case of the two spies. For such a punctilious lawyer, this was the fundamental issue at stake, and it would govern his final recommendation to President Davis as to whether the men should live or die.
*The Principality of Hesse-Kassel (part of modern-day Germany) supplied many of its soldiers to King George III during the American War of Independence. Its ruler, Frederick II, was a cousin of the British monarch.