NEW YORK

Russell, of the Times

MARCH 17–26

UP EARLY ON HIS FIRST DAY IN NEW YORK CITY, SUNDAY, MARCH 17, William Russell of the London Times was struck by how odd the city looked. “Abnormal,” he wrote. One of the first things he saw was a procession of forty or fifty Irishmen wearing green silk sashes and shamrocks in their hats marching to Sunday mass. The city otherwise seemed populated by domestics, whites and free Blacks alike, clothed in fancy suits and dresses, with Black women the fanciest of all. The streets, on the other hand, were still raggedly dressed in the late-winter garb that in all centuries would mar the city’s vistas. Dirty snow. Deceptively deep pockets of slush. Broadway, for example: Russell found it crowded with people despite “the piles of blackened snow by the kerbstones, and the sloughs of mud, and half frozen pools at the crossings.”

Worse than blackened snow was the prevalence on streets, tavern floors, and hotel carpets of expectorated chewing tobacco. American men seemed determined to mark every standing object with tobacco juice, despite the presence of innumerable spittoons left out for its collection. British visitors invariably found the habit appalling. Before Charles Dickens set out on his 1842 tour of America, he’d heard stories from other travelers about the country’s obsession with chewing tobacco but assumed their accounts were overblown. He found otherwise: “The thing itself is an exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be outdone,” he wrote in American Notes, his chronicle of the journey. He found tobacco spoor everywhere. “In all the public places of America this filthy custom is recognized. In the courts of law the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit incessantly.” The custom of chewing and spitting tobacco was “inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life.” Target spitting appeared to be a particular preoccupation, though one at which few men were adept, judging by the splatters of brown spit that marked the terrain in front of and around spittoons, fireplace hearths, and lamp posts. “I was surprised to observe,” Dickens wrote, “that even steady old chewers of great experience are not always good marksmen, which has rather inclined me to doubt that general proficiency with the rifle, of which we have heard so much in England.”

Twenty years later, Russell found that nothing had changed. He was particularly impressed by how this ubiquitous splatter of gnawed and saliva-infused tobacco had even made its way into the corridors of supposedly elegant hotels. “The tumult, the miscellaneous nature of the company, the heated, muggy rooms, not to speak of the great abominableness of the passages and halls, despite a most liberal provision of spittoons, conduce to render these institutions by no means agreeable to a European.”

By now, Russell was well known in America’s upper echelons. His reportage from far-flung theaters of war was routinely reprinted in newspapers throughout the country. Before the year was out, even Mary Chesnut in South Carolina would find herself expressing grudging respect for his work. “To me it is evident that Russell, the Times correspondent, tries to tell the truth, unpalatable as it is to us. Why should we expect a man who recorded so unflinchingly the wrongdoing in India to soften matters for our benefit—sensitive as we are to blame.” Though sometimes she had quibbles: “He describes slavery in Maryland but says that it has worse features further south,” she wrote in her public diary. “Yet his account of slavery in Maryland might stand as a perfectly accurate picture of it here. God knows, I am not inclined to condone it, come what may. It is very well done for a stranger who comes and in his haste unpacks his three p’s—pen, paper, and prejudices—and hurries through his work.”

After arriving in New York, Russell was courted by leading citizens who invited him for dinners, meetings, and simple conversation. At a breakfast gathering of New York editors he encountered such influential men as Charles A. Dana of the Republican-leaning New York Tribune and Henry Raymond of the New-York Times; Frederick Law Olmsted was present as well. At these sessions, conversation inevitably veered toward the secession crisis, but often with an unexpected inflection: Despite being far north of the Mason-Dixon Line, the city was an island of pro-South sentiment. Its banks, merchants, and shipping companies maintained close commercial ties with Southern planters and routinely issued credit secured by the planters’ holdings of enslaved Blacks. At a dinner hosted by a city banker, Russell heard the persistent view that the federal government had no authority to suppress secession; a former New York governor, Horatio Seymour, unabashedly declared that secession was a right. The proslavery New York Herald openly mocked Lincoln, Russell noted in his diary. “The Herald keeps up the courage and spirit of its Southern friends by giving the most florid accounts of their prospects and making continual attacks on Mr. Lincoln and his Government.”

He was struck by the Lincoln administration’s inability to influence events. “Everywhere the Southern leaders are forcing on a solution with decision and energy,” Russell wrote, “whilst the Government appears to be helplessly drifting with the current of events, having neither bow nor stern, neither keel nor deck, neither rudder, compass, sails, or steam.”

After a few days in the city Russell resolved that to really understand the crisis he needed to travel south and see things for himself. While paying a call on Horace Greeley, he revealed his intention. Greeley was delighted. “Be sure you examine the slave-pens,” Greeley told him. “They will be afraid to refuse you, and you can tell the truth.”

Russell set out on Monday, March 25, at six P.M. and, upon leaving his hotel, the Clarendon, immediately received further unhappy exposure to the city as his carriage dragged him “over the roughest and most execrable pavements through several miles of unsympathetic, gloomy, dirty streets, and crowded thoroughfares, over jaw-wrenching street-railway tracks, to a large wooden shed covered with inscriptions respecting routes and destinations.” He barely made his train, which likewise offered little in the way of comfort. Unlike the first-class coaches he was accustomed to in London, with their plush upholstery and cozy compartments, this car was one long box with a passage down the center and uncomfortable seats on either side. “The passengers were crowded as close as they could pack,” he wrote, “and as there was an immense iron stove in the center of the car, the heat and stuffiness became most trying.” He found a seat beside an American diplomat, Henry S. Sanford, Lincoln’s new minister to Belgium. When the train reached Philadelphia, Russell and Sanford, like Lincoln and Pinkerton before them, secured berths in a sleeping car, which Russell conceded to be “an American institution of considerable merit.”

In Washington, Sanford was met by his personal carriage and gave Russell a ride to his hotel, the Willard, now more than ever the center of city life. Its corridors were crowded with men seeking patronage jobs from the new administration; its writing room was packed, so much so that “the rustle of pens rose to a little breeze,” Russell wrote. The hotel restaurant served twenty-five hundred guests a day; its waiters “never cease shoving the chairs to and fro with a harsh screeching noise over the floor.” Tobacco stains marred this floor as well. The hotel, Russell wrote, “probably contains at the moment more scheming, plotting, planning heads, more aching and joyful hearts, than any building of the same size ever held in the world.”

Russell’s encounter with Sanford yielded more than just a ride to the hotel. Sanford invited him to dinner that night at his home, and there Russell met William Seward for the first time. Always adept at close observation of physiognomy, Russell seemed particularly captivated by Seward’s appearance and wrote a detailed description in his diary. “A well-formed and large head is placed on a long, slender neck, and projects over the chest in an argumentative kind of way, as if the keen eyes were seeking for an adversary; the mouth is remarkably flexible, large but well formed, the nose prominent and aquiline, the eyes secret, but penetrating, and lively with humor of some kind twinkling about them; the brow bold and broad, but not remarkably elevated; the white hair silvery and fine—a subtle, quick man, rejoicing in power, given to perorate and to oracular utterances, fond of badinage, bursting with the importance of state mysteries, and with the dignity of directing foreign policy of the greatest country—as all Americans think—in the world.”

Dinner conversation inevitably turned to secession. Seward declared himself to be skeptical that the movement would endure. “All through this conversation his tone was that of a man very sanguine and with a supreme contempt for those who thought there was anything serious in secession,” Russell wrote in his diary. He quoted Seward as saying, “Why, I myself, my brothers, and sisters, have been all secessionists—we seceded from home when we were young, but we all went back to it sooner or later. These States will all come back in the same way.”

Russell got the impression that Seward had never actually visited the South, but this did not stop the secretary from disparaging Southerners as being sixty or seventy years behind New York in terms of social and cultural development. As Seward saw it, “in the North all was life, enterprise, industry, mechanical skill,” Russell wrote. “In the South there was dependence on black labour, and an idle extravagance which was mistaken for elegant luxury—tumble-down old hackney-coaches, such as had not been seen north of the Potomac for half a century, harness never cleaned, ungroomed horses, bad cookery, imperfect education. No parallel could be drawn between them and the Northern States at all.”

Seward seemed remarkably detached from what Russell even in his short time in America had come to see as the true gravity of the crisis. The two federal forts on everyone’s mind, Pickens and Sumter, somehow had become flint points capable of igniting a civil war. Russell understood, however, that the true cause of the conflict, no matter how hard anyone tried to disguise it, was slavery. He called it a “curse” and likened it to a cancer whose inner damage was masked by the victim’s outward appearance of health. He marveled that the South seemed intent on staking its destiny on ground that the rest of the world had abandoned. “Never,” he wrote, “did a people enter a war so utterly destitute of any reason for waging it.”

Given Seward’s presumed influence, this encounter had been invaluable to Russell in providing a glimpse into why Lincoln seemed so ineffectual in confronting the secession crisis.

But it would soon bear even riper fruit—a meeting with Lincoln himself.