Seward’s dinner was in full swing when the Europa sailed into Boston Harbor. Quietly and unobtrusively, Captain Conway Seymour boarded the Washington train for the last stage of his journey. He had been traveling for only a few hours when the train came to a shuddering halt in the dark countryside. Hearing that repairs would not take place until the morning, Seymour commandeered a horse and rode all night to Baltimore, where he succeeded in chartering a special train to Washington. Finally, a little before midnight on Wednesday, December 18, the white-faced and exhausted Queen’s messenger climbed the steps of Lord Lyons’s house.
The following day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Lyons presented himself at Seward’s office. (In one of those strange quirks of timing, on the other side of the Atlantic, Charles Francis Adams had his meeting with Lord Russell on the same day, at the same hour.) Everything, it seemed to him, depended upon his delivery. He had to persuade the secretary of state to bring his games to an end without provoking him into making some last desperate attempt at bravado. Lord Russell was confident in his minister, but his namesake, William Howard Russell, shuddered to think that peace depended on the shyest man in North America. “Lord Lyons is a very odd sort of man,” he wrote to the editor of The Times on December 20, “and not quite the person to deal with this crisis tho’ he is most diligent, clear headed and straight viewed. He is nervous and afraid of responsibility—and he has no personal influence in Washington because he never goes into American society tho’ he gives dinners very frequently.”64
Lyons was nervous, but he carried himself with surprising aplomb. Seward let him speak without interruption and then asked to know the truth: What would happen if the government refused or requested further discussion? “I told him that my instructions were positive and left me no discretion,” reported Lyons. Seward looked straight at him and begged for more time; he would never be able to bring around Lincoln’s cabinet, let alone the country, in only seven days. Lyons believed him and agreed to return in two days, at which point the clock would be started. He went home feeling that his mission was already lost; he sincerely doubted that two, ten, or twenty days would make a difference. Rear Admiral Milne was sent a coded telegram instructing him to be ready to transport the legation staff to Canada.
When Lyons returned to Seward on Saturday, December 21, he was met with a plea for a couple more days. Ordinarily Lyons never disobeyed orders, but he knew that Seward was in a corner. Lyons had received an assurance from Baron Mercier that France’s letter in support of Britain would be arriving any day. If Seward did not succeed in convincing the president’s cabinet, the United States would be fighting an Anglo-French alliance in the North and the Confederacy in the South. A new appointment was set for Monday the twenty-third at 10:00 A.M., but this had to be the final meeting, he told Seward. The official protest would be presented on Monday, and the United States would have seven days to respond. That afternoon, Lincoln told Senator Browning that Seward had asked Lyons to read the demands to him in two days’ time. The president had “an inkling of what they were,” reported Browning, unaware that Lincoln knew exactly what they were since Seward had been keeping him informed from the beginning. After Seward’s first meeting with Lyons, Lincoln had approached the editor of the Philadelphia Press for his help in “preparing the American people for the release of Mason and Slidell.”65 But Lincoln was being pulled in different directions; Sumner had also come by the White House to show him letters from John Bright and others that supported arbitration. Frustrated by his three-way conversation with Lyons, Lincoln asked Sumner why he could not speak to the minister himself. “If I could see Lord Lyons, I could show him in five minutes that I am heartily for peace,” he said.66 But Sumner would not allow it, saying without justification that a meeting between the president and a minister would be a breach of protocol. Sumner went further and not only extracted a promise from Lincoln to show him any correspondence before it was sent to Lord Lyons, but also set him up to defy Seward.
On the twenty-third, Lord Lyons went to the State Department for the third time, wondering if the meeting with Seward would be their last together. There was little for them to say to each other after he presented Lord Russell’s letter; but Lyons could not help feeling sorry for Seward. He knew that the secretary of state was carrying an immense burden. Lyons had tried to make the situation easier for him by granting the extra time; if the transatlantic cable had still been working, he would not have had the discretion, but as it was, Lyons boldly made the decision in his belief that Seward would do his utmost to prevent a war. “You will perhaps be surprised to find Mr. Seward on the side of peace,” Lyons explained to Lord Russell. But “ten months of office have dispelled many of his illusions … he no longer believes … in the ease with which the United States could crush rebellion with one hand, and chastise Europe with the other.” Lyons was optimistic that Seward had learned his lesson and would never again regard relations with England as “safe playthings to be used for the amusement of the American People.”67
Seward persuaded Lincoln to call a cabinet meeting for ten o’clock on Christmas morning. The secretary of state began by passing around copies of Lord Russell’s “seven-days” letter. As he talked, however, it became clear that the cabinet remained opposed to releasing the Confederate commissioners.68 Sumner, who was also present, spoke after Seward; he had come armed with letters from England. John Bright’s was particularly eloquent about the aristocratic mob screaming for war. Sumner outlined to the cabinet what he had previously told Lincoln: since capitulation was politically impossible, an offer to go to arbitration was the government’s only option. Otherwise Britain and probably France would break the blockade. The ironclad ships of the Royal Navy would smash the wooden U.S. fleet, the North would in turn be blockaded and its ports destroyed. The Confederacy, in the meantime, would sign a free trade agreement with England, “making the whole North American continent a manufacturing dependency of England.”69
Sumner was still speaking when the door opened and a messenger brought in the official French response to the crisis. The dispatch unambiguously denounced Wilkes’s act as a violation of international law. For a second, Seward was crestfallen, until he realized that his case had just been made for him. Edward Bates, the attorney general, was the first to see that Sumner’s proposal for arbitration was hardly less dangerous than retaining the commissioners. Bates recorded in his diary: “I … urged that to go to war with England is to abandon all hope of suppressing the rebellion.… The maritime superiority of Britain would sweep us from the Southern waters. Our trade would be utterly ruined and our treasury bankrupt. In short … we must not have war with England. There was great reluctance on the part of some of the members of the cabinet—and even the President himself—to acknowledge these obvious truths.”70 The situation was too galling, objected Salmon P. Chase, despite, or possibly because, the country was facing bankruptcy unless he could raise another loan. The markets had reacted almost as badly to the notion of arbitration as they had to that of the prisoners arriving in Fort Warren. Banks were nearly at the bottom of their reserves, government bonds were plummeting again, and gold was running high.71
The meeting adjourned at 2:00 P.M. with an agreement to reconvene the following day. Before he left, Lincoln turned to Seward and asked him to summarize his arguments on paper. The president would do the same for Sumner’s arbitration idea, and they would debate the two positions in the morning. Seward wrote all night; Lincoln made a half-hearted attempt before accepting that it was useless to delay the inevitable. When Senator Browning anxiously questioned him after dinner, Lincoln reassured him that there was not going to be a war with England.
By morning Seward had drafted a twenty-six-page response to Lord Lyons, which in effect dismissed the entire imbroglio as a consequence of Wilkes’s forgetting to take the San Jacinto to a prize court for adjudication. He hoped it answered all the cabinet’s objections, but he was too tired to judge. He left his house on Lafa
yette Square early and paid a surprise visit to Chase. If the secretary of the treasury could be persuaded, he thought, the others would follow his line. In fact, Chase, like Lincoln, had already begun to come around to Seward’s way of thinking. Seward showed him the letter and explained why his idea was so much better than Sumner’s. Rather than risk war by insisting on arbitration, they should pack the commissioners off to London and claim it as a victory for American neutral rights.72 Chase consoled himself with the thought that if that happened, revenge on England would only be postponed.
Emotions were running high in the Senate. A last-ditch attempt by Senator Hale to force a resolution against releasing the rebel commissioners prevented Sumner from attending the meeting on the twenty-sixth. His absence allowed Seward to explain his letter to a far less critical audience. Seward kept expecting Lincoln to offer his alternative, but the president said nothing, and after comparatively little discussion, the cabinet approved Seward’s proposal. He could hardly believe the sudden change of opinion. When the others had filed out, Seward turned to Lincoln and asked him why he had not made the case for arbitration. Because “I could not make an argument that would satisfy my own mind,” the president replied.73
The cabinet had agreed to say nothing of the matter until Lyons received Seward’s letter on the following morning, the twenty-seventh. That night, Sumner was in an ebullient mood when he attended a dinner given by William Howard Russell. After some diversionary talk about Prince Albert’s death, the discussion turned exclusively to the Trent. Even at this late stage, Russell told the group, he had not heard a single voice in favor of giving up the Southerners; the government would never be able to pull off something so unpopular. But Sumner corrected him. There was no need for the administration to do anything so drastic, he insisted. “At the very utmost,” he declared, “the Trent affair can only be a matter for mediation.” Russell assumed that he was hearing the official line, since Sumner was in “intimate rapport with the President.”74
The next day Russell was reading the Washington newspapers, which were still insisting that the rebels would never be given up, when he received a note from one of the secretaries at the British legation. “What a collapse!” he wrote, a trifle disappointed that it was back to business as usual. Sumner’s surprise was even greater. Not twenty-four hours ago, the president had been adamantly opposed to any such settlement. Sumner had already accepted Seward’s invitation to dinner that night. Begging off now would only call attention to his defeat.
Among the guests at Seward’s was Anthony Trollope, who was oblivious to the drama unfolding in front of him.75 Charles Sumner was unusually quiet and left the talking to Senator Crittenden, who made disparaging comments about Florence Nightingale to Trollope, no doubt unaware that the woman whose reputation he was trashing had recently donated her sanitation reports and hospital plans to the U.S. War Department.76 Seward played the genial host to the hilt; after dinner, he invited the four senators at the table to accompany him to his study. He bade them all sit down while he took out the dispatches from London and Paris. To these he added his twenty-six-page reply to Lord Russell, his dispatch to Charles Francis Adams, and his response to the French foreign minister. Sumner and the others then had to sit in silence while Seward read out every line.77
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A week later, on January 1, 1862, the two Confederate commissioners and their secretaries sailed for England on board the warship HMS Rinaldo. “[The Americans] are horribly out of humour,” Lyons wrote to Lord Russell on December 31. He did not think this was the end of the story, but for now they could put their faith in Seward. “For he must do his best to maintain peace, or he will have made the sacrifice … in vain.”78 Seward had triumphed, but only just, and only for the moment. His reply to Russell, which Seward had composed with his domestic audience firmly in mind, failed as a legal document or as a new elaboration of U.S. foreign policy, but it successfully appealed to Northern readers, especially the part where he claimed that because of the Trent case, Britain would never again attempt to impress American sailors (a practice last used in 1812).
Sumner tried to diminish Seward’s victory by claiming that the president had preferred arbitration but the need for a quick decision had forced him into a hasty act.79 There was perhaps some consolation to him in the vitriolic and bitter speeches that enlivened Congress during the first week of January. On the ninth, Sumner gave a long speech in the Senate that was meant to explain and justify the government’s decision. All the press, most of the president’s cabinet, nearly every senator, and all the foreign ministers—except Lord Lyons—went to hear the performance. Senator Sumner had dressed for the occasion. Afterward, he was remembered as much for his olive-green gloves and tailored suit as for what he said. It was notoriously hard to follow Sumner. “He works his adjectives so hard,” a journalist once commented, “that if they ever catch him alone, they will murder him.”80 He spoke for three and a half hours, flatly contradicting many of the arguments Seward had employed in his dispatch to Lord Russell.
The public’s response exceeded all Sumner’s expectations. There were tributes and editorials in the press. People who usually avoided him because of his abolition politics were eager to shake his hand.81 Sumner’s previous criticisms of Seward’s reckless diplomacy were repeated and turned into the reason for Britain’s “overreaction.” The remarkable courage and patriotism Seward had displayed in forcing the cabinet to make an unpopular decision were brushed aside.
Ill.13 Punch crows after the Union backs down, January 1862.
Lord Lyons knew what it was like to have one’s intentions maligned and efforts discounted, and he was among the few people in Washington who secretly applauded Seward for his bravery. The shy minister did not know it, but he, too, had gained an admirer on account of his behavior during the crisis. As “one who witnessed the difficulties of Lord Lyons’s position here, and how his pathway was strewn with broken glass,” wrote Adam Gurowski, the State Department’s chief translator, “[I] must feel for him the highest and most sincere consideration.… During the whole Trent affair, Lord Lyons’s conduct was discreet, delicate, and generous … a mind soured by human meanness is soothingly impressioned by such true nobleness in a diplomat and an Englishman.”82
* * *
8.1 It may have disappointed Northerners to know that the prisoners ate far better and had larger rooms than the regulars at Willard’s.
8.2 Gladstone was posturing for effect; Wilkes had clearly violated international law both by taking the Confederates off the ship and by acting as his own court of law in determining that they could be taken instead of going to a prize court, which alone had the authority to make such a ruling. The prize court would have set the Trent and the Confederates free, since people can’t be kidnapped willy-nilly off the high seas. Wilkes’s argument, that the Confederates were a living, breathing dispatch, which made them in legal terms “contraband of war,” would have been laughed out of court. But the likelihood is that Wilkes would have precipitated a crisis even if he had sailed to a prize court, because England would have demanded an apology from the United States for stopping a British mail ship without cause, and the apology would have become the sticking point.
8.3 Years later, Queen Victoria wrote of the memorandum: “This draft was the last the Beloved Prince ever wrote.”
NINE
The War Moves to England
Hard times in Lancashire—Burnside captures Roanoke—The sorrows of Lincoln—A victory at last—Mason and Slidell arrive in Europe—Dawson joins the Nashville—Southern propaganda—The debate in Parliament
“We are beginning the New Year under very poor prospects,” recorded a cotton spinner named John Ward from Clitheroe on January 1, 1862. Twenty-seven thousand workers in Lancashire had been fired and another 160,000 were, like him, surviving on short time. Families on his street were selling their furniture to buy food. “A war with America” would be the final straw, wrote Ward, “as we will get no c
otton.… Every one is anxious for the arrival of the next mail, which is expected every day.”1
In Liverpool, crowds gathered each morning on the quayside waiting for America’s response. The arrival of the Africa on January 2 caused brief excitement, but she carried only newspapers in her hold. The telegrapher Paul Julius de Reuter came to see Charles Francis Adams on Monday the sixth to ask if the minister would be so kind as to alert him the minute there was news. “He little imagines how entirely my government keeps me without information,” Adams wrote angrily.2 Two days later, it was Reuter who did Adams the kindness; his office had received an early telegram announcing the commissioners’ release. Weed came an hour later to confirm that it was all over London. Adams’s relief was tempered by his vexation at being the last to know.
Benjamin Moran rushed to St. James’s, the club of the diplomatic corps on Charles Street and probably the only club in London that would have him. For once he was the center of attention as two dozen minor diplomats and secretaries “sprang to their feet as if electrified,” he wrote. Several even shook his hand before running off to the telegraph office. “In a few minutes messages were flashing over the wires to all the Courts of Europe.” In the West End theaters, evening performances were already under way, but as soon as the curtains fell on the first act the news was announced, causing audiences to rise spontaneously and cheer.3 Within the British cabinet, however, reactions were rather more mixed: “The Admiralty is flat and dull, now there is to be no war,” the Duke of Somerset wrote sarcastically to his son, Lord Edward St. Maur.4
A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War Page 26
