After arriving in London, Rose accepted an invitation for tea with Thomas Carlyle, the eminent Scottish writer and historian whose essay “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question” assailed the notion of racial equality and argued that emancipation in the British West Indies had been an economic disaster. He viewed the American Civil War as an unnecessary conflict, dismissing it as “a smoky chimney which had taken fire,” and she was counting on him to be an early ally in her mission.
From her boardinghouse in Mayfair she took a hansom cab to Chelsea, taking in the tidy, flag-studded streets and sun-stippled views of the Thames, the heavy smells of shipping and tar. Carlyle lived in a redbrick house at 5 Cheyne Row, thickly corniced and wainscoted to the ceiling, each crevice and shelf toppling with books. He was taller than Rose had expected, with a slight, sinewy figure and grizzled hair. He greeted her wearing a dressing gown and slippers, and his brogue seemed to soften with each sentence he spoke.
He raised his cup to his lips and asked, “What sort of looking animal is Lincoln?”
As she launched into a detailed description of “the beanpole,” Carlyle rose abruptly, shook himself like a great dog, and declared “the flat nosed Negro of Haiti and Abraham Lincoln, the rail splitter of the United States, as a worthy pair to stand side by side in history.”
Rose murmured her agreement. Carlyle, appeased, sat down again and asked for a description of Jefferson Davis. He clamped his fingers over his eyes. “I see him,” he murmured. “God has made the situation for the man.”
For hours they spoke about the “crimes and imbecility of the North” (in Rose’s words), and at midnight he walked her to the door. They bowed toward each other.
“I will do anything for your country,” he said.
“An article or few words from you, sir, will carry weight and would be deeply gratifying to our President and our people.”
Carlyle promised to consider it.
One of Rose’s most pressing concerns was finding a publisher for her memoir, which she was certain would rouse interest in the Southern cause. She met with Richard Bentley, “Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty,” as he preferred to be called, who offered her a contract stipulating that she split the profits for all sales in Great Britain, on the Continent, and in the United States. Rose agreed, reserving for herself the right of publication within the Confederate states, and dedicated the book to “the brave soldiers who have fought and bled in this, our glorious struggle for freedom.”
The book attracted widespread attention, in both Europe and America. The Southern-sympathizing Standard gleefully recounted Rose’s unflattering portraits of Mary Todd Lincoln and observed, “Men may not war on women, but short of death—actual or social—women may, and habitually do, make war upon each other.” The Morning Post, which supported the Confederacy even as it denounced slavery, spent most of its review critiquing Rose rather than her work: “She boasts that she made herself as obnoxious as any man to the masters of the situation by her acts; and her words, as she reports them, leave nothing to be desired as to the rancour of her tongue. She unsexes herself, and then abuses her captors for want of observance and consideration of her sex.” Back in the United States, the New York Times said exactly what Rose had expected, calling the book “as bitter as a woman’s hate can make it” and concluding that “many may wonder, not that she was treated with such severity, but that she got off so easily.”
She paid equal attention to war reports from abroad, despairing over the news of the Confederates’ defeat at Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga. Hoping that the Northern press had exaggerated the details—the capture of eight thousand rebel soldiers, in particular—she begged her friend, the Confederate politician Alexander Boteler, for a more impartial version. “All the accounts come through the Yankee press,” she wrote. “The effect is most depressing. . . . My friend you know not the importance of sending correct information, which can be used so as to counteract the Yankee accounts. I believe that all classes here except the Abolitionists sympathize with us and are only held back from recognizing us for fear of war with the United States.”
She closed by saying she wished she could write more freely but feared her letters would be intercepted. Perhaps he might use her name and get a cipher from Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate secretary of state, so they could correspond without the burden of self-censorship. She promised to write from Paris, where she presumed the “educated and thinking” classes would be on their side.
Rose and Little Rose left London on December 12, taking the Dover, Chatham, & Kent Railway, passing the magnificent cathedral of Canterbury, watching the smoke and murk of the city recede in the distance. The train arrived in Dover in time for them to catch the 9:40 a.m. ferry to Calais, a ninety-minute crossing and the quickest Rose could find. She hoped to minimize her chances of seasickness—“the greatest evil,” she wrote, “to which poor human nature can be exposed”—but found herself at once crouching on the deck, face in hands, the crew gathered around laughing at her, all of them fortunate enough to avoid paying “the same tribute to Neptune.” It felt as if days had passed before Little Rose touched her shoulder. “O, Mama,” she said in her sweet twang, “here is our flag.” Rose raised her head and there it was: the Stars and Bars, flying from a sleek little ship bobbing along the shoreline. Her daughter danced from foot to foot, pulling at her hand to hurry her along.
Rose checked in at the Grand Hotel on the rue Scribe in central Paris and spent the next ten days sightseeing with Little Rose. They gaped at the Campana Collection in the Louvre and took carriage rides around the Bois de Boulogne, which had been the royal hunting forest before Napoléon III transformed it into a public park. On one excursion they spotted the emperor himself, skating on the Grand Lac with his wife, the Spanish-born empress Eugénie, clad entirely in black, from her petticoats to her cuffs to the heron’s plume on her hat. “She fell 4 times,” Rose noted. “Ill-natured people sayed [sic] it was to show her feet, which are pretty. . . . When she fell no white was visible.”
On Christmas Eve she took Little Rose to visit the Pensionnat du Sacré-Coeur, a convent on rue de Varenne that operated a Catholic boarding school. Her daughter fell silent, hiding her face in the folds of Rose’s skirts; there was no sign at all of the bold little rebel who had helped Rose smuggle information and talked back to prison guards. Rose tried to console her daughter: she’d meet students from all over the world, learn to speak French, receive her First Holy Communion. But Little Rose wept at the thought of being separated from her mother. “My little one is very shy,” Rose wrote, “and she does not like the idea of being placed here. Nevertheless it is to be her destiny.” She wished for her daughter the rigorous formal schooling she’d never had herself.
With that settled, Rose resumed her business, meeting with Confederate diplomats James Mason and John Slidell. An old Washington neighbor left his calling card at her hotel. She scanned the papers (the damned Yankee press, again) for developments back home, reading of Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which pardoned those who “directly or by implication, participated in the existing rebellion” if they took an oath to the Union. He also issued his annual message to Congress, crowing that public opinion at home and abroad was favorable and that “the crisis which threatened to divide the friends of the Union is past.” The New York Times reprinted gloomy excerpts from the Richmond Whig: “Why is the attitude of European Powers—England especially—now inimical to us? Because the superior diplomacy of the United States has made it appear that it is in their interest to be so.”
She compiled a twelve-page letter to Jefferson Davis, acknowledging her “dismal” mood but assuring him she still believed she could “do some good.” She would not leave Paris until she’d pleaded the Confederate cause to the emperor of France himself.