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

by Amanda Foreman

  Mann and De Leon tried to distract Yancey with busywork while they negotiated a secret deal with Paul Julius de Reuter’s telegraph agency. Shortly before Bull Run, Reuter had personally approached both the U.S. legation and the Southerners for the exclusive right to distribute their official reports from America. Benjamin Moran had indignantly rebuffed him, but the Southerners knew there was great potential in the deal, since many English and European newspapers relied on Reuter’s telegrams for their American news.37 Moran soon rued his mistake; Reuter “is against us,” he grumbled in his diary. “He systematically prostitutes the monopoly he holds to depreciate the Union … there is no way to remedy the business but by buying the fellow up. This I would not do.”38 The sudden alteration from a pro-Northern to a pro-Southern tone made the U.S. consul in Leith wonder if the Scottish editors had been bribed. They “exaggerate as might be expected all the little mistakes of our Northern Army into a mountain,” he protested. “No sheet in South Carolina could serve them better.”39

  William Yancey was also resentful of the patronizing way he was treated by the four purchasing agents who were buying arms for the South.40 It was his friendship with John Laird, MP, Yancey liked to point out, that had opened the door to the largest shipbuilding firm in Liverpool. In many ways, the Confederate cabinet regarded weaponry as of greater importance than diplomacy.41 Before the war, the North had manufactured 97 percent of the country’s weapons.42 The Confederacy had declared its independence with a mere 160,000 firearms and limited means of manufacturing any more. Only one factory in the entire South, the Tredegar Ironworks in Richmond, was capable of producing artillery. There was not enough time for the chief of the Ordnance Bureau, Major Josiah Gorgas, to develop the iron mines, erect the foundries, and build the factories required to equip a modern army. The soft-spoken Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, found his department in an equally deprived state. The Confederate navy had no warships and only two naval dockyards, in Pensacola, Florida, and Norfolk, Virginia. Its three hundred officers were on shore leave until Mallory could provide them with vessels. From the outset, Mallory accepted that he could not construct an entire navy; the best he could hope for, and perhaps all he really needed, was a few raiders to attack Northern merchant ships, and a small fleet of ironclad warships to attack the Federal blockade.43

  The two Confederate agents selected by Gorgas and Mallory to run the international war effort were a far cry from the amateurs in charge of Southern diplomacy. Caleb Huse, the purchasing agent for the army, and James Dunwoody Bulloch, whom Mallory assigned to acquire ships for the navy, were men of the highest integrity and resourcefulness. Both had family and business connections in the North, but it was to the Confederacy’s immeasurable good fortune that their hearts belonged to the South. Major Huse was an artillery officer who had spent six months in Europe, courtesy of the U.S. Army, studying the armaments industry.44 The forty-year-old Bulloch was a former naval officer who had been working for a Northern mail company at the start of the war. He had not seen his native Georgia for ten years, but, he wrote, “my heart and my head were with the South.”45 He was about to sail his mail ship out of New Orleans when the guns at Fort Sumter began firing. In the face of bitter Southern opposition, Bulloch scrupulously insisted on returning the vessel to its rightful owners in New York. Only then did he offer his services to the Confederacy.

  When Huse arrived in England in April, he had discovered that Northern agents had almost stripped the country of surplus arms. They were paying cash in advance, as though part of their mission was to prevent guns from reaching the Confederacy. Huse had come with limited funds; Edwin De Leon lent him $10,000 of his own money, but it was not nearly enough to outbid the Federal agents.46 Huse was rescued by Charles Prioleau, the director of the merchant shipping firm Fraser, Trenholm and Co. in Liverpool, who agreed to advance him the payments for his weapons. Prioleau was from Charleston, a fact he proudly advertised by fixing the “bonnie blue” star of South Carolina above his front door. Moreover, his firm was the British arm of a large Charleston firm called John Fraser and Co. There was already an agreement in place between the Confederacy and Fraser, Trenholm for the company to act as the South’s financial agents in Europe. But Prioleau was going much further by giving credit to Huse without a guarantee in place.

  He did the same for James Bulloch when the naval agent arrived the following month in a similar condition. Bulloch had no difficulty finding Fraser, Trenholm’s Liverpool headquarters, which took up an entire three-story building near the docks.47 Although he took the precaution of using the back door, Bulloch was spotted by Federal spies who had been waiting for him. The Union report compiled on him had provided an extremely detailed description of his features; he was a “very dark, sallow man with black hair and eyes, whiskers down each cheek but shaved clean off his chin and … about 5’8" high.”48 For the first few days, Bulloch continued to creep about the city, until he read in the local newspapers the precise details of his mission. The information was all there, from the number of ships he was seeking to his means of paying for them. It was, Bulloch wrote in astonishment, “as if the particulars had been furnished direct from the Treasury Department or from the pages of my instructions.”49

  The man behind the exposure was the flamboyant American diplomat Henry Sanford, who had introduced William Howard Russell to Seward in March. Shortly thereafter, he had left Washington to take up the post of minister to Belgium. Sanford inspired contradictory reactions in people. Charles Sumner was one of his most loyal supporters; Charles Francis Adams had loathed him from the moment they met. Sanford was not awed by the Adams name; he himself was wealthy and well connected, had studied abroad, could speak several languages, and, although he was only thirty-eight, had served in numerous legations including those at St. Petersburg and Paris. In his own mind he was an ingenious sophisticate, a ladies’ man, and a puppeteer. To others, such as Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, Sanford might have been tolerable were it not for his insatiable desire “to be busy and fussy, to show pomp and power.”50

  Seward had diverted Sanford to Paris to serve as the interim minister until William L. Dayton could settle his affairs at home. But he expected Sanford to perform many roles and to travel widely. At one time, Seward entertained serious hopes that Garibaldi would agree to lead the Union war effort, since he had briefly lived in the United States during his exile in the 1850s, and one of Sanford’s tasks was to persuade Garibaldi to accept Seward’s offer. (Garibaldi told Sanford he was not interested unless abolition became the main objective of the war and he was made supreme commander of all U.S. forces.) Sanford’s most important mission was to counteract Confederate activity in Europe “by all proper means.”51 Sanford took these words literally, and from the moment he arrived in Europe focused his formidable energy on creating a surveillance network that stretched from London to Belgium. He wanted every rebel to have at least one Federal operative dogging his footsteps.52

  Sanford knew even before Huse and Bulloch that two more Confederate agents were on their way. One of them, navy lieutenant James North, had orders to buy or commission two armored warships for the Confederacy. The other, Major Edward Anderson, would be working with Caleb Huse.53 They landed at Liverpool on June 25, by which time Sanford had hired a private detective of murky reputation named Ignatius Pollaky. Sanford told Seward that Pollaky operated his own agency and “knows his business.” Together they were going to destroy the Confederate network from the inside. “How it will be done,” wrote Sanford on July 4, “whether through a pretty mistress or a spying landlord is nobody’s business; … but I lay … stress on getting … full accounts of their operations here.… I go on the doctrine that in war as in love everything is fair that will lead to success.”54 Letters and telegrams could be copied, messages intercepted, informants bribed, or perhaps the odd accident might befall an unlucky Confederate agent. One of Sanford’s ideas involved paying postmen a pound a week to reveal
the frequency and origin of every letter received by the Confederates.55

  An English arms manufacturer tipped off the Confederates to the fact that they were under surveillance. “My attention was brought to these people by Mr. Isaacs who came over to my quarters one morning and asked me if I knew I was being watched,” wrote Edward Anderson. “Come with me to your window then, said he, and I will point out to you a shadow that never loses sight of you—at the same time directing my notice to a rough looking fellow standing across the street on the corner.” Anderson immediately went down and tried to embarrass the detective by asking for street directions, which he gave rather awkwardly.

  He was a plain, countrified looking man, roughly clad and by no means bearing about him the appearance of a detective officer. Subsequently, when I came to know him better I was impressed with the effect produced by dress, for when I met my man on the following day, he was accoutred in a neat suit of black clothing like a gentleman, and on subsequent occasions in different costumes … sometimes with moustache and whiskers and again clean shaved. I never failed however to recognize my shadow. Assisting him were one or two others.56

  On another occasion, while returning on the night train from Paris, Anderson shared a carriage with one of his shadows. “We had some little talk together,” he recorded in his diary, “but neither of us learned much of the other.”57 He was not alone in having such face-to-face encounters. Suspicious figures seemed to loiter in every doorway. “They have agents employed for no other purpose,” commented Caleb Huse.58 Sanford intended to keep all the Confederates under surveillance, but he realized that James Bulloch had to be the chief target. “He is the most dangerous man the South have here and fully up to his business,” he told Seward. “I am disbursing at the rate of £150 a month on this one man which will give you an idea of the importance I attach to his movements.” He hoped that Bulloch might try to slip off to the Continent, where it would be relatively easy to have him arrested for failing to carry the proper documentation. “Of course, no one official would appear in the matter,” he assured Seward.59 Sanford was less concerned about Lieutenant North, whose contribution to the Southern war effort puzzled the detectives. North appeared to be working on his own, but what he was doing, apart from costing Sanford money in espionage expenses, remained a mystery. He seemed to spend a great deal of time moping and, from the look of his intercepted mail, complaining.

  Sanford’s fears about Bulloch had been prescient. The Confederate agent knew that the real threat to his operations was not from the spies (who were irritating), but from the legal obstacles created by the Foreign Enlistment Act. Before he set about any naval business, Bulloch obtained expert legal opinion on what the act allowed and disallowed, hoping to uncover any loopholes. To his surprise, he discovered it would be relatively easy to circumvent the rules: the act forbade a belligerent nation from outfitting or equipping warlike vessels in British waters, but there was nothing to prevent the construction of a ship with an unusual design. A vessel could be built in Britain with gun ports, for example, but it could not leave with any guns on board; it could have a magazine to store gunpowder, but would not be allowed to set sail with the powder present.

  Bulloch went to work as soon as he received his legal advice. Within a few weeks he had made two contracts, one for a gunboat and the other for a top-of-the-line warship with copper-plated bunkers and enough storage space to hold a year’s worth of spare parts. For the first, Bulloch used an intermediary to hide the involvement of the Confederacy and invented some Italian owners who were expecting delivery in eight months’ time.60 To give authenticity to the Italian claim, the vessel was called the Oreto for the time being. But the other ship did not require the same subterfuge, since it was being built by Laird and Sons, the Liverpool company owned by Yancey’s friend John Laird. With a nod and a wink, Lairds accepted the explanation that the modifications were innocent. This vessel, Project No. 290 on Lairds’ books, was going to cost a staggering £47,500, to be paid in five installments.61

  With the first part of his mission now fulfilled, Bulloch turned his attention to helping Caleb Huse buy munitions. The victory at Bull Run lent urgency to their mission. “We want arms,” implored LeRoy Walker, the Confederate secretary of war, “and must have them if they are to be had … the enemy is daily augmenting his supplies.”62 By the end of August, the agents had amassed so considerable a quantity of supplies that their most pressing problem was the threat of discovery by the authorities.63 Now the Confederates found themselves stymied by the neutrality proclamation. Bulloch was unable to persuade any shipping owner to break the blockade. Finally, after much negotiation, Bulloch and Anderson made a deal with Fraser, Trenholm to rent space on the Bermuda, one of the company’s fastest steamers, which was docked at Hartlepool on the east coast and already slated for use during the cotton season, when the blockade would be tested in earnest.

  Henry Sanford knew about the Bermuda and had a plan that involved the U.S. Navy pouncing on her as soon as she reached the open sea “no matter what her papers.” “We can discuss the matter with the English afterwards,” he asserted confidently.64 Seward ignored his suggestion, and Lord Russell turned down Charles Francis Adams’s request to detain the Bermuda, since the minister was unable to show that she was anything other than a private ship on a private commercial venture. The officials in Hartlepool had observed her loading, and even noted that arms and ammunition were being “packed to resemble earthenware.”65 But there was no legal reason for her detention and the vessel sailed away on August 22, despite the fact that everyone concerned knew her real purpose and destination.

  Fraser, Trenholm and Co. had great hopes for the Bermuda. Every Southerner, not to mention every British merchant with a half-decent cargo ship, believed that the blockade was a fiction. Latest estimates put the entire U.S. Navy blockading fleet at forty-two steamships. The Southern coastline extended over 3,500 miles, from the tip of Virginia to the banks of the Rio Grande in Texas, and included hundreds of ports, bays, and inlets. Almost two hundred navigable rivers fed into the sea; many harbors had several entrances and numerous channels for hiding ships. Much of the South lay behind enormous sandbars that acted like a double coastline, allowing ships to sail from port to port without ever having to go out onto the open sea. When these considerations were added to the poor condition of the U.S. Navy, it seemed incomprehensible to Southerners that any country, let alone Britain, would accept that the blockade met the main legal requirement for its international recognition, namely, that it was real and being enforced on a daily basis. They were hoping that the Royal Navy would sweep away the miserable little wooden ships stifling the South’s commerce and declare the ports once again open to the world.

  Ordered by the Foreign Office to keep a record of blockade activity, the various British consuls responded by saying there really wasn’t any. Phrases such as “totally inefficient” and “totally ineffective” appeared with regularity.66 Yet the picture conveyed by the statistics was misleading. The South was not one vast open harbor, ready to receive and distribute all the goods that Europe cared to ship. If that had been the case, New York would never have been so vital a trade partner. Only ten Southern ports were deep enough for transatlantic shipping; and just five of those (Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans, Savannah, and Wilmington) were adequately provided with road and rail links.67 The U.S. ships merely needed to be well placed rather than omnipresent. The Union Blockade Board, instituted by the secretary of the navy in June, was already at work analyzing the Confederacy’s strategic weaknesses.

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  Two days after the departure of the Bermuda, Anthony Trollope and his wife, Rose, set sail for Boston. They arrived on September 5, after a brief stop in Halifax, beating the Bermuda to America by two weeks. Trollope had long wanted to visit the United States in order to write a travel book. It would be a break from writing fiction and perhaps, he hoped, might even put an end to the notoriety attached to the Trollope name. His mo
ther had intended to be amusing rather than offensive in her Domestic Manners of the Americans, but the book had caused such damage to Anglo-American relations that Trollope had often thought, “If I could do anything to mitigate the soreness, if I could in any small degree add to the good feeling which should exist between two nations which ought to love each other so well … I should.”68

  Boston literary circles welcomed the Trollopes with warmth that belied the harsh statements against Britain in the press. The only sharpness they encountered was directed at Rose; people often asked her if she regretted writing Domestic Manners, to which she patiently replied that she was not her mother-in-law. Trollope had the occasional argument over Britain’s neutrality. Bostonians, in common with the rest of the North, believed that England’s greed for cotton was the real reason it had granted belligerency to the South.

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  But no one abused Trollope with the freedom or viciousness with which Washingtonians insulted William Howard Russell. Every obstruction was now thrown in Russell’s way. Although General McClellan was unfailingly polite to him and never turned down his request for a pass, Russell found that the guards and sentries took a mean delight in turning him away. He did not know when his punishment would end, and while it continued, he was useless as a war correspondent.

  Frank Vizetelly had no such impediments and was able to witness the rehabilitation of the 79th Highlanders when he visited them on September 11. Among them, Ebenezer Wells had been promoted to wagon master, a change that increased the young man’s chances of survival but kept him on the move all day long. During one grueling marathon, his raw and bloody feet swelled out of their boots. “After cutting my boots here and there,” he wrote, “I was obliged to throw them away and marched the last six miles on a stony road, nearly barefoot.”69 The 79th Highlanders were now deemed trustworthy enough to participate in a reconnaissance mission on a Confederate outpost near Lewinsville, a small town less than thirteen miles from Washington.