A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War

by Amanda Foreman

  Seward decided that he could not face the next leg of his tour unless he had sufficient company to keep him distracted. He set off in September with a large retinue that included a reluctant but loyal Adams and his twenty-five-year-old son, Charles Francis Jr.; the president of the New York City police board, General James Nye (and Nye’s daughter); his biographer George Baker; and his daughter, Fanny. But even surrounded by friends and family, Seward had to wrestle with his emotions. The signs of his inner struggle were evident in the copious cigars and glasses of brandy that he consumed during the long train journeys. Charles Francis Jr. never saw Seward visibly drunk, but he was sometimes sufficiently inebriated to lose control “and set his tongue going with dangerous volubility.” Throughout the northwestern states, thousands of people flocked to hear Seward speak. The public adulation heightened Seward’s already febrile emotions; his speeches became coarser and more strident. In Michigan on September 4, he marred a strong antislavery speech with racist asides about the feebleness of the African race. In Minnesota on September 22, he declared that Canada was destined to become part of the United States.

  Seward no doubt believed that it was more important to reach out to undecided voters with his populist message than to concern himself about the effect of his pronouncements in far-off places. The Prince of Wales’s tour of Canada was in midswing when Seward made his speech about its future as a United States territory. The unfortunate timing prompted the Canadian and British press to give his speech much greater attention and credence than it merited. When he sauntered into Governor Morgan’s house on the night of the dinner for the prince, Seward was apparently unaware of the huge offense he had caused. The occasion was already a difficult one for Seward; he had often discussed the idea of a royal visit with Lord Napier, but Seward had avoided the British legation after Napier’s departure, and barely knew Lyons. He felt more comfortable talking to the Duke of Newcastle, who gratifyingly remembered him from his visit to England. Seward started well, until the same urge to drink and talk crept over him. By the end of the meal, the duke was reeling from the encounter. “He fairly told me he should make use of insults to England to secure his own position in the States, and that I must not suppose he meant war. On the contrary he did not wish war with England and he was confident we should never go to war with the States—we dared not and could not afford it,” the duke reported later to the governor-general of Canada.

  Outraged by Seward’s effrontery, Newcastle did not mince his words in reply: “I then told him there was no fear of war except from a policy as he indicated, and that if he carried it out and touched our honor, he would, some fine morning, find he had embroiled his country in a disastrous conflict at the moment when he fancied he was bullying all before him.”52 Seward never gave another thought to the conversation. With the election less than a month away, all his energy was directed toward the campaign in New York.

  The royal party proceeded to Boston for more banquets, balls, and celebrations, and finally to Maine for one last hurrah. “During [Prince Edward’s] last day [in America] I was with the party & parted with him on the pier,” wrote Charles Sumner to his friend Evelyn Denison, speaker of the House of Commons. “At every station on the railway there was an immense crowd, headed by the local authorities, while our national flags were blended together. I remarked to Dr. Acland [the Radcliffe librarian at Oxford] that it seemed as if a young heir long absent was returning to take possession. ‘It is more than that,’ said he, affected almost to tears.”53

  Sumner believed that the two countries had arrived at a turning point in their relations. The prince was “carrying home an unwritten Treaty of Alliance and Amity between two great nations.”54 A similar feeling was evident in England. After reading his New York correspondent’s reports, Mowbray Morris, the managing editor of The Times, wrote that the royal tour “will do a great deal of good here. It will convince persons who know nothing of Americans except by very bad specimens, that Brother Jonathan [the United States] really has brotherly feelings towards John Bull [Britain].”55

  It was only later, when Lyons could reflect on the tour from the comfort of his Washington drawing room, that he realized its “wonderful success.” “I have now had time to talk quietly about it with men whose opinion is worth having,” he wrote, “and also to compare newspapers of various shades of politics.”56 He had seen nothing to make him wince, or even complain. During this period of political uncertainty, the American press had found in the ever-obliging Prince of Wales the one subject that did not stir controversy. Even the Anglophobic New York Herald announced “that henceforth the giant leaders of Liberty in the Old World and in the New are united in impulse and in aim for the perpetuation of Freedom and the elevation of man.”57

  But six weeks after the prince had sailed away to the strains of “God Save the Queen,” Lyons confided to the Duke of Newcastle that all their exertions might have been for naught. “It is difficult to believe that I am in the same country which appeared so prosperous, so contented, and one may say, so calm when we travelled through it,” he wrote. “The change is very great even since I wrote to you on the 29th October. Our friends are apparently going ahead on the road to ruin with their characteristic speed and energy.”58

  * * *

  2.1 From the outset, Abraham Lincoln promoted himself as representing the middle ground. He believed that whites were superior to blacks, but that this did not give one human being the right to deprive another of his liberty. “As God made us separate, we can leave one another alone, and do one another much good thereby.”

  2.2 The English were furious that U.S. sympathy for the Russians had extended to military aid, in the form of a steamship built for the Russian government by a private firm and revolvers supplied by Samuel Colt, as well as practical help from American doctors and engineers who volunteered their services.3

  2.3 According to a well-known anecdote, Russell was chatting to the Duchess of Inverness at a party one winter evening when he suddenly stood up, went over to the far corner, and began a conversation with the Duchess of Sutherland. A short time later, one of his friends asked him what on earth had happened. He had been sitting too close to the fire, Russell explained. “I hope,” the friend remarked, “that you told the Duchess of Inverness why you abandoned her.” After a pause he replied, “No, but I did tell the Duchess of Sutherland.”

  2.4 Small quantities of Australian wine were on display at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

  2.5 Lewis’s sardonic humor is best remembered in his quip “Life would be tolerable were it not for its amusements.”

  2.6 On hearing the news that Gladstone had joined the government, Charles Sumner claimed, with his customary humility, that he had always known Mr. Gladstone would join the Liberals. “Mr. Gladstone’s fame seems constantly ascending,” he wrote to the Duchess of Argyll. “When I first met him at Clifton, at a time when he was out of office and much abused, I predicted what has taken place, though I hardly thought it would come so soon.”12

  2.7 Shortly after Seward departed, a report arrived from China that the U.S. Navy commodore in command of the American squadron had come to the aid of the Royal Navy during a fierce battle to capture the Taku forts in northeastern China. The U.S. commodore explained his decision to join the fight by declaring “blood is thicker than water.” This unexpected display of Anglo-American solidarity lent a rosy glow to Seward’s visit. If the traditional enmity between the two navies could be overcome, then anything was possible—even a friendly White House under a Republican administration.

  2.8 John Adams and John Quincy Adams, the second and sixth presidents of the United States, also served as minister to the Court of St. James’s, from 1785 to 1788 and 1815 to 1817, respectively.

  2.9 The biggest Anglo-American controversy in the early months of 1860 had been the bare-knuckle prizefight between the Englishman Tom Sayers and the American John Heenan on April 17. Billed as the world’s first international boxing contest, the match dragg
ed on for thirty-seven rounds, until Heenan’s supporters broke into the ring. The contest was declared a draw, which led to the claim by furious supporters of Sayers that he had been robbed of his victory.

  THREE

  “The Cards

  Are in Our Hands!”

  Seven states secede—“Slaveownia”—Seward rises to the occasion—Bluster—Adams is offended—William Howard Russell at the White House—The April Fool’s Day memorandum—The Confederate cabinet—The fall of Fort Sumter—Lincoln declares a blockade—Southern confidence

  “It seems impossible that the South can be mad enough to dissolve the Union,” Lyons wrote to the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, after Lincoln was elected president on November 6, 1860. Yet South Carolina had already announced it would hold a special convention to decide whether to secede, and the news sent the price of shares tumbling on the New York Stock Exchange. The financial markets suffered another blow when a merchant vessel departed from Charleston, South Carolina, on November 17 with only the state flag flying from its mast. President Buchanan pleaded in vain with his proslavery cabinet to agree on a united response.

  Lord Lyons cursed the little pig from San Juan Island and its penchant for Farmer Cutlar’s potatoes. He wished he had been able to settle San Juan’s boundary dispute during the Prince of Wales’s visit. With the secession crisis gathering momentum and Buchanan growing increasingly feeble in the face of his colleagues, he doubted that the issue could be resolved before Lincoln’s inauguration. Lyons suspected that the Republicans would be far less inclined than the Democrats to agree on a compromise. He had noticed that the Republican Party as a whole—not just Seward—tended to pander to anti-British sentiment as a way of showing that its abolition platform was independent of foreign opinion. It was important not to give the Republicans a reason to complain, Lyons wrote to Lord John Russell, and he suggested that the government refrain from making any public statements about the current political turmoil in America.

  Lord John Russell received Lyons’s letter on December 18, the same day the South Carolina convention began its debate on the question of secession. The British cabinet had become increasingly concerned by the South’s reaction to Lincoln’s victory. Palmerston assumed it meant a second American Revolution was at hand. “There is no saying what attitude we may have to assume,” he wrote with concern to the Duke of Somerset, “not for the purpose of interfering in their quarrels, but to hold our own and to protect our Fellow subjects and their interests.”1 Lyons’s insistence that Britain stand aloof seemed eminently sensible. “I quite agree with Lord John Russell and Lord Lyons,” Palmerston stated in a memorandum for the cabinet. “Nothing would be more inadvisable than for us to interfere in the Dispute.”2 The law officers of the Crown assured Russell that the South Carolina ship flying its state flag could dock at Liverpool without any fuss. Customs officials there would treat the questionable flag as though it were a bit of holiday bunting, beneath anyone’s notice and certainly not a matter for official comment.3

  The imperative to stay out of America’s troubles was one of the few issues that united Palmerston’s fractious cabinet. The other was Giuseppe Garibaldi’s campaign to unite Italy. Here, too, the cabinet had agreed in July that the best course was to remain neutral and allow Garibaldi to fail or succeed on his own. Since setting out in the spring of 1860 to lead the Sicilian revolution against the Bourbon monarchy, Garibaldi had inspired hundreds of British volunteers to join his brigade. Dozens of officers had taken a leave of absence from the army in order to don the famous red shirt. Two ships from the navy’s Mediterranean squadron were almost emptied as sailors left en masse to form their own battery. Even the Duke of Somerset, Palmerston’s First Lord of the Admiralty, could not dissuade one of his own sons from running away to join the English battalion. The willingness of so many volunteers to help the Italians left the army and navy chiefs with little doubt that they would have a problem on their hands if war erupted in America, where both sides spoke English and the ties of friends and family were even stronger.

  —

  “We have the worst possible news from home,” the assistant secretary of the American legation, Benjamin Moran, wrote in his diary. A few days later he stood with the American minister, George Dallas, in front of a wall map of the United States, speculating with him as to which of the Southern states would go.4 “The American Union is defunct,” pronounced Moran after the next diplomatic bag revealed that South Carolina had voted to secede on December 20, 1860.

  Moran was relieved by the reaction of the British press to what it called the “cotton states.”5 The Times scoffed at the idea of secession: “South Carolina has as much right to secede from … the United States as Lancashire from England.”6 But The Economist was less sympathetic, calling South Carolina’s secession poetic justice since Americans were always bragging about their perfect democracy. The Illustrated London News was the worst, in Moran’s opinion, since it asked “our American Cousins” to let the cotton states go in order to avoid making the same mistake as Austria, which had almost bankrupted itself resisting the Italians’ desire for independence.7 Yet most newspapers followed the line of The Times. Words such as “sharp,” “ignoble,” and “unprincipled” were frequently used to describe South Carolina. Punch suggested that the seceding states could name their new country “Slaveownia.”8

  Ill.5 Punch tells the Southern planters that the days of slavery are numbered, December 1860.

  The boastful rhetoric of Southern politicians was also attacked in the press. Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas came in for particular censure for his arrogant speech to the Senate on December 6, 1860. The South would be able to dictate her own terms to the world, he declared, because “Cotton is King.… He waves his sceptre not only over these thirty-three states, but over the island of Great Britain.” Queen Victoria herself, Wigfall roared, must “bend the knee in fealty and acknowledge allegiance to that monarch.” The South could turn off the supply of cotton and cripple England in a single week. The cabinet feared Wigfall could be right and agreed with Palmerston “that no time should be lost in securing a supply of cotton from other quarters than America.”9

  —

  The South owed more than $200 million to the North, with most of the debt concentrated in New York, a city whose commercial ties with the cotton states were so close that some banks accepted slaves as collateral. The financial community was sent into a panic by the readiness of Southern businesses to use South Carolina’s self-declared independence as an excuse to repudiate their debts. The New York Post denounced the practice as treachery, declaring, “The city of New York belongs almost as much to the South as to the North.” The victims of the financial crisis were not only New Yorkers. In Britain, investors had almost $400 million in U.S. stocks, bonds, and securities; Benjamin Moran lost most of his savings in a matter of weeks. But the impact went deeper and wider in New York, and included victims such as Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, whose hard-won funds for her women’s medical college simply evaporated. Mayor Fernando Wood was so anxious about the state of the financial markets that he briefly entertained a proposal for New York to secede from the Union and become a “free city.”

  In late December, with Lincoln still in Illinois going through appointment lists and President Buchanan having retreated to his bedroom in the White House, Seward took the lead role in guiding the North’s response to the seceding states. Thurlow Weed’s prediction that Lincoln would “share” power—and the escalating crisis—had convinced Seward to put aside his hurt pride and agree to become secretary of state.10 His self-belief and ambition returned in full force once the decision was made: “I have advised Mr. L that I will not decline [the post],” Seward wrote to his wife on December 28. “It is inevitable. I will try to save freedom and my country.”11

  The Senate had appointed the “Committee of Thirteen,” and the House of Representatives the “Committee of Thirty-three,” to address Southern grievances. Seward not only dominate
d the Senate committee but also made sure that his supporters—particularly Charles Francis Adams—were among the thirty-three. Their work became all the more urgent after news reached Washington that the Southern states were seizing federal arsenals and forts. Seward’s strategy was to conciliate and delay for as long as possible. The South had been threatening to secede for years; he was convinced that if the hotheads could be contained, the moderates would gradually reassert control. He talked with such assurance that young Henry Adams felt he was in the presence of greatness.12 But to Charles Sumner, Seward’s willingness to guarantee the institution of slavery in order to save the Union was an insupportable betrayal of abolition principles. Sumner cornered Henry’s brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., when he visited the Senate and ranted at him like a “crazy man,” blaming “the compromisers, meaning Seward and my father.”13 As far as Sumner was concerned, his friendship with Adams was irreparably broken.

  Seward ignored Sumner’s ravings, confident that his conciliation plan would work given sufficient time. But in early January, two delegations from the New York business community were told by Southern leaders in Washington that a movement had started that could not be stopped. Mississippi voted to secede on January 9, Florida on the tenth. Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana followed in quick succession; their senators left Washington and went to Montgomery, Alabama, where a special convention was due to begin on February 4. Texas followed on February 1, 1861, the seventh state to secede from the Union. On the morning of the third, Seward paid a surprise call on Lord Lyons, to reassure him that the South would be back in the fold in less than three months. Lyons had been wondering for several weeks when either the old or the new administration would remember the existence of the diplomatic community. He did not discount the value of being able to talk privately with the incoming secretary of state, but everything else about the interview made Lyons dread his future relationship with Seward. He sent two reports of the meeting to Lord John Russell. In the official dispatch, which would be printed for public consumption in the parliamentary “Blue Book,” he gave a bland description that only hinted at the threats and preposterous claims Seward had leveled at him. Seward had, wrote Lyons with classic understatement, “unbounded confidence in his own skill in managing the American people.”