LONDON

On the Scent

MARCH 3

EVEN FROM HIS DISTANT VANTAGE, JOHN DELANE, EDITOR OF THE Times of London, sensed that political conflict in America had reached an intensity that could erupt in violence. This would, of course, constitute a very good story for his readers, who might take a certain pleasure in seeing England’s wayward offspring bruised by a rebellion of their own.

He decided it was time to dispatch the paper’s celebrated reporter, Sir William Howard Russell, to America to serve as its special correspondent “in observing the rupture between the Southern States and the rest of the Union, consequent upon the election of Mr. Lincoln and the advent of the Republicans to power.” Russell was well known around the world, especially for his reporting on the Crimean War, which brought to life for readers the doomed British attack that inspired Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Delane’s instincts had first been piqued several weeks earlier when he initially suggested the assignment to Russell, but the correspondent did not immediately accept. His wife’s health was fragile, his children were growing fast, and over the prior seven years he had been, as he put it, “constantly in exile in the Crimea, Russia, India, and Italy.” He had settled into a happy domestic rhythm. “My life was at that time very pleasant,” he wrote. At his social club, the Garrick, he consorted with the likes of Thackeray, Dickens, and Trollope. He knew little about the unfolding crisis in America, though he had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and portions of speeches by various Southern firebrands that had been reprinted in the London press. One evening, at the Garrick, he told Thackeray of his reluctance to take on the assignment. “You must go,” Thackeray told him. “It will be a great opportunity! As to waiting till you understand the political questions, you will never do it here! You must go out and see them at work on the spot.”

Russell accepted, and on Sunday, March 3, sailed from Queensland, Ireland, aboard the steamship Arabia. His fellow passengers included several wealthy Southerners, among them a former member of the U.S. Legation in St. Petersburg, Russia, who had quit to ally himself with the Confederacy, and a U.S. Army colonel, Robert S. Garnett of Virginia, who planned to resign his own commission and then join the Confederate army. The colonel proved to be a living primer on that mythic creature, the Southern planter. “He laughed to scorn the doctrine that all men were born equal in the sense of all men having equal rights,” Russell wrote in his diary. “Some were born to be slaves—others to follow useful mechanical arts—the rest were born to rule and to own their fellow men.” To Colonel Garnett, slavery was anything but evil. “Divine institution”—the colonel declared—“an Abolitionist opposes the laws of God himself!” He loathed Yankees. “I would die a hundred times to keep them out!” As it happened, a centile of his wish would be fulfilled five months later when he became the first Confederate general killed in the coming war.

The Arabia was considered one of the fastest ships afloat, but the voyage still took fourteen days, during which Russell’s conversations with the Southerners aboard (including another planter, from Louisiana, who owned five hundred slaves) and the arrival of a large shipment of newspapers delivered by pilot boat had given him a thorough education in the unfolding crisis. As best he could tell, it distilled to a single question: Who had a right to possess two federal properties, Fort Pickens in Florida, and Fort Sumter in South Carolina?

“Under the circumstances every one is asking what the Government is going to do,” Russell wrote in his diary. “The Southern people have declared they will resist any attempt to supply or reinforce the garrisons and in Charleston, at least, have shown they mean to keep their word. It is a very strange situation. The Federal Government, afraid to speak and unable to act, is leaving its soldiers to do as they please.”