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

by Amanda Foreman

  Five days later, on November 7, the Fingal set sail for the South during a tropical storm. After five nights of hurricane-force wind, the weather calmed, and the Confederates were glad to realize they were only 140 miles from Savannah. “The night closed in upon us bright and clear, with the moon shining sweetly down upon us,” wrote Anderson. “Everyone was on the alert.” The moment of reckoning had come. It was not long before they caught sight of a Federal ship bobbing on the water. “The silence of the dead was preserved on board our vessel,” Anderson continued. “In my anxiety as I stood beside the helmsman, I could hear the throbbing of my heart.” As dawn approached, the heavy night dew condensed into a thick, wet fog. Suddenly, one of the caged cockerels began its morning crow. A dozen hands reached frantically into the coop. The creature was strangled and thrown overboard. A second cockerel awoke, and then a third, forcing the crew to pitch the whole cage into the sea. It was too late for secrecy now. The Fingal raced toward the harbor, somehow managing to elude the steam frigate that guarded the entrance. At last, wrote Anderson on November 12, “everything had come about just as I had dreamed of.”45 Thousands lined the quayside to cheer the Fingal’s entry into Savannah.46

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  Anderson and Bulloch’s arrival in Richmond, however, was overshadowed by the Federal capture of Port Royal in South Carolina on November 7. The South had lost the only good harbor between Charleston and Savannah, while the North gained a second base on the Confederate coast that could provide fuel and supplies to the blockading fleets. The battle had brought together the largest U.S. battle fleet ever assembled up to that time. Seventy-seven vessels carrying 12,000 troops had set sail on November 1 from the recently captured Cape Hatteras. Ebenezer Wells and the reinstated 79th were among the three regiments on board USS Vanderbilt.

  The expedition began smoothly enough, but by nightfall the wind had picked up and the flotilla began to lose its cohesion. The next day a fierce gale assaulted the Union convoy. A supply ship went down with all hands; another jettisoned its guns in a frantic attempt to stay afloat. On the Vanderbilt, the terrified soldiers and animals howled in unison. As the storm continued to rage, the horses were driven into such a frenzy that a dozen were able to struggle free and went careering about the ship. Unable to capture or subdue them, Wells was forced to kill the animals by slitting their throats. Their blood spilled out across the deck and down through every crack and crevice, traumatizing the already shattered soldiers. When the battered fleet reassembled outside the sandbank off Port Royal on November 7, the 79th Highlanders were too sick and exhausted by their journey, recorded Wells, to care whether they were in the South or in Hell.

  The uplifting sight of artillery shells smashing through the Confederate defenses at Port Royal brought the soldiers back to life. “We took them on completely by surprise,” recorded Wells. In less than a day, the two forts guarding the entrance to the port were bombarded into submission. The Federals followed up their victory by sweeping inland and seizing the town of Beaufort. “The soldiers and inhabitants all left in a hurry so much so that when we landed some of us had the satisfaction of sitting down to unfinished breakfasts and finishing them,” Wells wrote. Afterward he and his friends made a thorough inspection of the empty plantations, riding around in the owners’ carriages and generally helping themselves to anything of interest.47

  Southerners, observed Anderson, “were frightened to death by the capture of Port Royal” and looking for someone to blame.48 At the Confederate War Department, he learned that President Davis was considered in some quarters to be the main culprit because of his constant meddling and countermanding of orders. Leroy Walker had resigned as secretary of war in September, and the new secretary, Judah P. Benjamin, had no qualification for the post other than his loyalty to Davis.

  In Benjamin’s defense, he had inherited a badly organized and unhappy department. Boredom and disease were sapping the strength of the Confederate armies. Sam Hill’s regiment, the 6th Louisiana Volunteers, was losing half a dozen men a month.49 “Our hospital tents are full of sick; I am always busy,” wrote Mary Sophia Hill from their camp in northern Virginia after yet another healthy young man died from typhus. One of her dying charges asked for a letter to be written to his mother in England, giving “an account of his death, and his reason for joining the Southern army.” It was done as he requested, although she thought the letter contained little to comfort the young man’s mother. Some of Mary Sophia’s friends urged her to leave the camp for her own safety. “But I will risk it,” she wrote on November 13. “I am determined to keep my brother in view, and I have no other means of protection.”50 Sam was always losing something, his blanket one day, his belt and cartridge box the next. He had no idea how to forage for himself and remained dependent on the food parcels sent to Mary by their friends in New Orleans.

  The Southern press demanded to know why their troops were so poorly supplied. “We are credibly informed,” expostulated the Richmond Examiner, “that there has not been a day within the past two months when full rations were served to the army. There has been great and almost constant want of candles and soap; sometimes and for the past ten days allegedly no sugar or rice.”51 Judah Benjamin was valiantly trying to reorganize the sclerotic relationship between the army and the commissary, but neither department was willing to compromise or take responsibility for mistakes. Yet he was also guilty of shortsightedness, as Edward Anderson discovered when he tried to interest him and Mallory in running a joint operation to improve the flow of supplies from England. Believing that Mason and Slidell would soon be in Europe, Benjamin thought there was no need to take action against a blockade that would not be around for much longer. Mallory also regarded the blockade as merely a stumbling block rather than a threat to the South’s existence. “Mallory met my suggestions with evident discourtesy,” Anderson recorded, “and yet he knew nothing whatever of the details of my arrangements.”52 Benjamin failed to understand the importance of Anderson and his ideas, and although the agent begged to be sent back to London, he allowed Anderson to be reassigned to General Robert E. Lee’s staff. Anderson spent the rest of the war commanding the forts and batteries around Savannah, his expertise and brilliance wasted.

  James Bulloch fared somewhat better than Anderson, suggesting to Mallory that they use the Fingal to ship cotton to England and take the profits to pay for supplies brought back on the return journey. But once the Fingal was loaded with cotton and made ready to go, Bulloch realized that she was too slow to outrun the blockading fleet. Rather than allowing him to transfer the cargo to a faster vessel, Mallory lost confidence in the idea and ordered Bulloch to return to London on a civilian blockade runner. Like Benjamin, Mallory decided that the shipping business was a distraction from far more pressing matters; the privateering scheme had failed to attract many volunteers, and for the moment all he had was the Sumter and the Nashville, neither of which would stand up against an actual naval vessel. On reflection, Mallory thought it was just as well that the new Confederate commissioners had traveled on a private vessel rather than the easily identifiable Nashville.

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  The three U.S. warships dispatched by Secretary Welles had searched in vain for the arriving Confederate commissioners Mason and Slidell. One of the vessels, the James Adger, limped into Southampton on November 2 after being damaged in a storm off the coast of Ireland. The Adger’s unexpected arrival led Henry Sanford to consider using it against a Confederate cargo ship called the Gladiator, which was about to set sail from a London dockyard. Sanford’s plan was complicated and probably illegal: he thought that if he could bribe the Gladiator’s pilot to steer the ship into a mud bank on the Thames, the Adger could seize the cargo and the crew and steam away before the authorities had time to react.

  Sanford hurried to the U.S. legation to share his idea, expecting some resistance from Adams but not the furious tirade that greeted him. Adams interrupted Sanford in midflow to reveal that his spy system was being shut down.
“Whilst he was quietly sitting on the other side of the channel without any responsibility for the acts of the worthless people whom he was employing,” Adams told him, “the odium of their dirty conduct was inevitably fastened upon me.” But no more: he had obtained Seward’s agreement that from now on Sanford would have to confine his activities to Belgium, where he belonged. Shocked and bewildered, Sanford first protested, then pleaded, and finally tried bargaining with Adams, but the minister cut him off by rising from his chair. Mortified, Sanford followed suit, saying goodbye with as much dignity as he could muster; “but,” wrote Adams, “I imagine he will never forgive me.”53 Benjamin Moran had always envied Sanford, and his humiliation felt like justice served: “One million of dollars were placed at this man’s disposal for Gov’t purposes and it has been greatly squandered to our injury,” Moran wrote in his diary. “With one half of what he threw away in odious espionage I could have bought the British Press … every newspaper writer in London can be purchased, from those of The Times down.… I do not mean to say that each would openly take cash; but each will take a consideration suitable to his taste.”54

  Adams was still uncertain whether Sanford had left for good when a polite summons arrived from Lord Palmerston on November 12. Regardless of its tone, the request for an immediate meeting suggested trouble. Adams was filled with trepidation as he made his way to Cambridge House at 94 Piccadilly through another London fog. He had never been there during the day, but the yellow gloom that shrouded the city made the difference seem slight. Flaming pyres only partially illuminated the forecourt. Inside, gaslights threw off as much smoke as light.7.2 Palmerston was waiting for him in a library that was untenably dark by American standards. He was alone, and “at once opened on the subject then evidently weighing on his mind”: the government knew the true purpose of the James Adger.55 For a moment Adams thought that Sanford had carried out his plan, but as Palmerston talked it became clear that his concern had nothing to do with the Gladiator.

  The British government, he said, had learned that the North was hunting for the Confederate commissioners Mason and Slidell, though its latest information on the duo was sketchy and contradictory. The Foreign Office could not be certain, but their reports suggested that the Confederates were traveling on a British mail ship, and that the Adger had been sent to intercept her. Palmerston was less concerned about the Adger’s right to seize the rebels—although he did consult the law officers on the question—than the obvious threat such an act posed to national honor, since an attack on a British ship could not pass unchallenged. The Confederates could send an entire fleet of commissioners to England, he informed Adams gravely, without its having the slightest effect on the British government’s actions. The North would do better to leave all British ships alone. Offended by Palmerston’s assumption that the United States would stoop to waylaying British mail packets, Adams explained rather huffily that the Adger had been chasing a rebel cruiser called the Nashville. Having failed to find her, the captain was waiting for the departure of the Gladiator, which—he labored the point—was laden with arms and munitions for the South. Palmerston refused to be drawn in and responded with the candid assertion that the North might eventually crush Southern resistance, “but that would not be restoring the Union.”

  After the meeting, Adams’s relief that it had nothing to do with Sanford was tempered by his indignation at Palmerston’s accusations. A week later, on the twenty-first, the Adger’s prey, the Nashville, sailed into Southampton with a Confederate flag brazenly flying from its mast. Although the Confederate commissioners were not on board, there were thirty prisoners from a Northern clipper called the Harvey Birch, which the Nashville had captured and burned in the English Channel. Lord Russell promptly sent orders that she was not to receive any military supplies or fittings. Her arrival was embarrassing and obviously provocative to the North. Charles Francis Adams demanded the arrest of Captain Pegram on the charge of piracy. Pegram responded with a letter to The Times pointing out that he was a regularly commissioned officer of the Confederate navy and therefore not a pirate. The locals in Southampton preferred Adams’s version and treated Pegram like a swashbuckling hero.

  Russell naturally refused Adams’s request, since the Nashville was a bona fide ship of war belonging to a recognized belligerent, but he did agree to keep her under surveillance in case the Confederates attempted to smuggle guns on board.56 The torrent of correspondence between the legation and Whitehall was now so great that Henry Adams and the two secretaries were overwhelmed by the drudgery of copying and archiving each and every letter. Benjamin Moran’s tirades and twitterings made life in the office almost intolerable for Henry, who struggled “to resist complete nervous depression” resulting from the prolonged exposure.57 On the morning of the twenty-seventh, the subject of Moran’s ire was Lord Russell’s latest response, which he characterized as unforgivably “hostile.” The embittered secretary cursed Russell and Palmerston “for playing into the hands of the rebels.” The prime minister had hated America since the War of 1812, contended Moran, and “has deliberately determined to force us into war.”58 He believed it was only a matter of time before Palmerston found some pretext to unleash his designs.

  The moment came sooner than Moran expected. At precisely half past twelve, a messenger called with another telegram from the U.S. consul in Southampton. This time it was not about the Nashville. A ship from St. Thomas had arrived, bearing the astonishing news that Mason and Slidell had been captured off the coast of Cuba. They had been traveling on the Trent, a British mail packet bound for St. Thomas, when USS San Jacinto under Captain Charles Wilkes forcibly stopped the vessel and took the commissioners prisoner. The jaded occupants of the U.S. legation began cheering, even though, Henry Adams admitted, they knew it meant “not merely diplomatic rupture—but a declaration of war.” His opinion was echoed around the country: “Have these Yankees then gone completely crazy to carry out this mad coup with the Confederate Commissioners?” Friedrich Engels asked Karl Marx, whose prodigious journalistic output from his home in Manchester included weekly articles about the Civil War. “To take political prisoners by force, on a foreign ship, is the clearest casus belli there can be. The fellows must be sheer fools to land themselves in war with England.”59

  Charles Francis Adams was not at the legation to hear the news. He had accepted an invitation from Richard Monckton Milnes to join a large house party at Fryston Hall in Yorkshire. Neither Charles Francis nor Abigail had experienced life in a grand country house before; Fryston’s “somewhat ancient” decoration and total lack of modern conveniences confirmed their prejudices about the superiority of New England to Olde England. The wet weather forced the guests to huddle together in Milnes’s library, whose relatively efficient fireplace made it also double as the breakfast room. By the twenty-seventh, the guests had become restless. Unable to stand the confinement any longer, the group—which included the MP William Forster, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, and Austen Henry Layard, the excavator of the ancient city of Nineveh (who had recently put away his tools to become Lord Russell’s undersecretary for foreign affairs)—accepted Milnes’s invitation to brave the rain for a visit to the ruins of Pomfret Castle.

  A messenger bearing Moran’s telegram from London tracked Adams down at the ruins. The minister would always remember standing in the persistent drizzle making polite conversation with his fellow guests while in his hand he clutched the news about the Trent. “We had a very dark and muddy walk home,” he recorded. William Forster accompanied him, but Adams did not reveal the contents of the telegram, Forster told his wife, until “as we got in, Adams said, in his cool, quiet way ‘I have got stirring news.’ ” Forster continued: “I think he is as much grieved as I am, and does not think a hundred Masons and Slidells would be worth the effect on us.” The news had spread by dinner, making it a torturous affair. No one knew what to say, and Forster’s attempts to make conversation were so ham-fisted that Adams could not help commenting in
his diary: “He is no courtier.” In the end, it was left to a local manufacturer who had been invited to make up the numbers to fill the void, which he did at great length in a diatribe addressed solely to Adams on the iniquities of the Morrill Tariff.60

  The next morning, Layard and Forster went to London immediately after breakfast. Adams thought it best to travel by a different train and left at noon. Milnes and his wife were so warm and earnest at the parting that Adams felt rather emotional; it seemed at that moment as though no one in England had ever been so kind to him. He arrived at the legation in the evening to find Henry, Moran, and Wilson overexcited and once again making inappropriate comments to a crowd of visitors. A note from Lord Russell was waiting on Adams’s desk. The hour was late, he realized with a tinge of relief. The meeting would have to wait until tomorrow, giving him a little more time to prepare.

  “There was a shade more of gravity visible in his manner, but no ill will,” Adams wrote after the interview on the twenty-ninth. He had decided to be frank with the foreign secretary. “Not a word had been whispered to me about such a project,” he confessed. This seemed to reassure Russell, who then asked whether the Adger had received orders respecting British vessels. Adams replied no, not as far as he knew. There was nothing more to be said by either man. “The conference lasted perhaps ten minutes,” Adams recorded. He could not imagine Seward being as civil in similar circumstances. But he was under no illusions that Lord Russell’s politeness signified an unwillingness to retaliate. During the carriage journey home, Adams wondered if this had been his final visit to the Foreign Office: “On the whole, I scarcely remember a day of greater strain in my life.”61 The press, he saw, was urging the government to stand up for British rights. Even liberal papers like the Manchester Guardian accused the American government of testing “the truth of the adage that it takes two to make a quarrel.”62