WASHINGTON

The Correspondent

APRIL 3

ON WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3, WILLIAM RUSSELL OF THE LONDON Times met with two of the Southern commissioners, Martin Crawford and John Forsyth. They chatted for over an hour, during which Russell became convinced that if the opinions they expressed were indeed representative of Southern thinking, there was little hope that the Union could be restored. “They have the idea they are ministers of a foreign power treating with Yankeedom,” Russell wrote in his diary, “and their indignation is moved by the refusal of [the] Government to negotiate with them, armed as they are with full authority to arrange all questions arising out of an amicable separation—such as the adjustment of Federal claims for property, forts, stores, public works, debts, land purchases, and the like.”

Two days later he met with the commissioners again, this time all three, the third being André Roman of Louisiana. A number of other secession-minded men were present as well, including Col. George E. Pickett, destined one day to lead an ill-fated charge at Gettysburg. They dined at Gautier’s, a French restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue run by Charles Gautier, a prominent restaurateur and confectioner who had catered Lincoln’s inaugural party. Gautier was known at Christmas to build a display of sweet concoctions that included a twelve-hundred-pound cake.

The commissioners and their Southern friends disparaged Lincoln and Seward and all Northerners, especially New Englanders, with a savagery that seemed out of alignment with what Russell believed to be the actual state of affairs in America. “Whether it be in consequence of some secret influence which slavery has upon the minds of men,” he wrote, “or that the aggression of the North upon their institutions had been of a nature to excite the deepest animosity and most vindictive hate, certain it is there is a degree of something like ferocity in the Southern mind toward New England which exceeds belief.”

In the course of the evening’s conversation, Russell heard much about the South’s obsession with honor, including a vehement defense of dueling. “The man who dares tamper with the honor of a white woman knows what he has to expect,” one guest said. “We shoot him down like a dog, and no jury in the South will ever find any man guilty of murder for punishing such a scoundrel.” The commissioners revealed an intractable belief that Northern men were cowards. As evidence, they cited the 1856 caning of Republican senator Charles Sumner, a fervent critic of slavery, in the Senate chamber and his refusal to challenge his attacker to a manly duel. Here their argument abandoned logical constraint: As they saw it the violence of the assault was Sumner’s fault, never mind that his assailant, Rep. Preston Brooks, struck first and from behind while Sumner was seated at his Senate desk, as Russell reminded them. The commissioners brushed this aside; Brooks, they said, struck “a slight blow at first and only inflicted the heavier strokes when irritated by the Senator’s cowardly demeanor.”

When the conversation turned to slavery, it seemed to Russell to slip all tethers to reality. “The gentlemen at table asserted that the white men in the slave States are physically superior to the men in the free States; and indulged in curious theories in morals and physics to which I was a stranger.”

THE EVENING REINFORCED RUSSELL’S growing conviction that Northerners had little understanding of their brethren below the Mason-Dixon Line. Southerners, he noted, routinely traveled North, but Northerners were far less likely to go South, in part out of a concern, he realized, for safety.

William Seward’s ignorance was particularly striking to Russell. The secretary dismissed Southerners as being “in every respect behind the age, with fashions, habits, level of thought, and modes of life, belonging to the worst part of the last century. But still he never has been there himself!”

Seward persisted in his belief that secession was a short-lived thing. Later, over dinner and whist, Seward told Russell, “When the Southern States see that we mean them no wrong—that we intend no violence to persons, rights, or things—that the Federal Government seeks only to fulfill obligations imposed on it in respect to the national property, they will see their mistake and one after another they will come back into the union.” This would happen soon, Seward forecast; he expected “that Secession will all be done and over in three months.”

Seward’s vision conflicted starkly with what Russell had learned from his contacts with Southern men in Washington. He decided it was time that he himself visit the South, and he began making arrangements to travel to the heart of the crisis, Charleston. “As matters look very threatening,” he wrote in his diary on April 6, “I must go South and see with my own eyes how affairs stand there before the two sections come to open rupture.”

To his imminent regret, he did not set off right away but rather lingered in Washington for another six days.