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

by Amanda Foreman

  General McClellan was embarrassed that Joe Johnston, whose timely arrival at Bull Run had caused the Federals to flee, had now succeeded in moving to a new, unknown position. The Confederate’s actions led McClellan to alter his plans and adopt a far more radical strategy involving the transportation by sea of a hundred thousand soldiers, plus supplies, horses, and equipment, to Fortress Monroe on the tip of the Virginia peninsula. From there, the army would march seventy miles east to capture Richmond. The first troops began to be shipped out from Alexandria on March 17. Edward Dicey was able to join a group of observers that included Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had become a great friend, but Russell was once again forced to stay behind. On March 24, he wrote in his diary, “One of the saddest days I have had in all my life, and Heaven knows I have had some sad ones, too.”39 Russell was referring to an article in the New York Herald that accused him of having speculated on the stock exchange using information obtained from the British legation during the Trent affair. The paper printed a copy of a telegram sent by Russell to his friend the lobbyist Sam Ward that appeared to support the allegation. But it was false. All Russell had done was telegraph Ward in New York ahead of the official announcement that the commissioners were being released. This was perhaps unwise, yet Russell claimed that the news was all over Washington by the time he sent the notice. Ward had a copy of the real, undoctored telegram, which proved Russell’s innocence of any financial dealings, but no newspaper would print his explanation.

  Russell was mortified by the slur on his character, especially after Lord Lyons let it be known that he regarded the telegram as a gross breach of trust. Not surprisingly, Francis Lawley sympathized with Russell’s predicament and tried to smooth his relations with the legation. Russell found Lawley’s earnest attempts to help almost as humiliating as the original slander. It was not comfortable to be told to stay “as far as you can, from the British legation, during the next five or six weeks” and to refrain “from any step which, however remotely, has the appearance of a desire to push yourself into the old relations.” Although the attachés claimed they believed Russell’s protestation of innocence, he feared they would never fully trust him again. He was lonely and fed up. His friend William W. Glenn, a Southern journalist, offered to provide him with safe passage to the Confederacy. Russell was tempted, but decided he could not, “with honour or propriety go South immediately after so long a residence among the Northern armies.”

  Lord Lyons forgave Russell and, at the end of March, invited him back to the legation for dinner. Russell was doubly grateful, not only for the rehabilitation of his character, but also because it gave him the opportunity to corner Edwin Stanton and embarrass him into writing out a pass then and there. Stanton was, however, determined to confine Russell to Washington even if it meant revoking the pass of every war correspondent in the country. On April 2, 1862, the War Department announced that it would no longer recognize press passes, and all reporters currently following the army in Virginia were to return to Washington or be arrested.40 After two days of uproar, the department clarified its stand so that only foreign journalists were affected. Russell wrote to Stanton on the second, pleading with him to reconsider: “I can not conceive Sir, the object of such conduct.” What, he asked, was the “cause for the change on your part towards me.”41 Stanton never replied. By now Russell had written to Lincoln, four generals, Seward, Sumner, and “innumerable Senators,” all without success.

  “In the South,” Russell wrote ruefully, “the press threatened me with tar and feathers … the Northern papers recommended expulsion, ducking, riding rails, and other cognate modes of insuring a moral conviction of error.” He would not have allowed himself to be cowed by these threats, but he accepted defeat “when to the press and populace of the United States, the President and the Government of Washington added their power.” Sam Ward tried hard to dissuade Russell from leaving, and he complained to Seward that Stanton had “tomahawked” the North’s most valuable foreign asset.42 The secretary of state paid scant attention to Russell’s departure. Stanton’s appalling blunder of driving away the world’s most famous war correspondent would only become clear later on when the North had no foreign journalists reporting from its side.

  Russell set sail for England on April 9 on board the China. “I saw the shores receding into a dim gray fog,” he wrote; “our good ship pointing thank Heaven, towards Europe.”43 His wife and children had not seen him in more than a year, his financial affairs were in a deplorable state, and his career, so it seemed to him, was crumbling. Russell used his final dispatch from New York, on April 3, to explain to readers why he was abandoning his assignment. They were probably more forgiving than his employers, John Delane and Mowbray Morris, who both sent frantic letters begging him to continue at his post. “It is lamentable that at such a time we should be practically unrepresented,” grumbled Delane, since J. C. Bancroft Davis had also resigned, on grounds of ill health. The Times did agree to reimburse the £1,340 that Russell had paid out of his own pocket while in America, but took nearly two years to verify every receipt and expense.44

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  Years later, Lord Lyons told William Howard Russell that his presence in Washington during the first year of the war had greatly enlivened the British legation and that the capital was a duller place after he left. Lyons’s irritation with Russell over the telegram scandal had had less to do with the offense than with its timing. Lyons was in the middle of secret negotiations with Seward on a joint slave-trade treaty when the New York Herald published its accusation against Russell. Lyons could not afford to have the legation dragged into a disreputable row when so much depended on discretion and staying out of the public eye.

  Lyons had always believed that an antislavery treaty between the two countries was impossible. Only three years before, the mere possibility that the Royal Navy might try to stop an American vessel to search for slaves was sufficient to provoke threats of war. Britain had backed down, and the slave trade had flourished. There was scant hope in London that the Lincoln administration would have congressional support to revisit so contentious an issue. In May 1861, Seward had tried to skirt Congress by offering to sign a secret memorandum allowing the Royal Navy to stop and search suspected American slavers. But since the offer had coincided with his menacing dispatches to Adams, Lyons and Lord Russell had agreed that Seward’s word was “worth little or nothing” when it came to Anglo-American relations.45 They had misjudged the sincerity of Seward’s intentions, however. The secret memorandum idea was no trick on his part, even if he had not thought through the impact on the public if a Royal Navy vessel sailed into New York Harbor with a captured slaver in tow.

  The slave trade issue was revived when Captain Nathaniel Gordon was sentenced to death on February 7 by a New York court for the crime of participating in the Atlantic slave trade. It was the first successful prosecution of a slave trader in forty-four years, and the outcry for Lincoln to pardon Gordon was considerable, though not deafening. Lord Lyons wondered whether this was a sign that he should speak to Seward about a treaty. Slave trading was on the increase again, since blockade duty had taken away U.S. Navy ships that had been patrolling the west coast of Africa.46 The only practical way to stop it was to give Royal Navy ships the right to challenge slavers flying the American flag.

  With relations between the British legation and the U.S. State Department still in a honeymoon period after the Trent affair, Lyons suggested to Lord Russell that they revive the slave trade question while Seward was still “in the mood.”10.2 47 As it turned out, Seward had also been toying with the idea of resurrecting negotiations, but neither Lyons nor Seward had given the issue as much attention as Lord Russell had. On February 28, 1862, he surprised Lyons with a printed draft of a slave trade treaty, with all the provisions and exclusions that the Americans might demand already included. Russell also gave Lyons discretionary power on any changes, so that momentum would not be lost. Seward’s reaction to the document would sho
w him in his best light, as a gifted politician whose creative manipulation of people and issues could bring about results that were otherwise unobtainable.

  Seward liked the proposed treaty and was determined to have it ratified. His abhorrence of the Atlantic slave trade became evident to the journalist Edward Dicey, who went to dinner at his house on March 22, when the secret negotiations were under way. It was another of Seward’s foreign military dinners: Colonel De Courcy, General Blenker and his aide de camp, Prince Felix Salm-Salm of Prussia, were also present. Poor Fanny Seward had taken a violent dislike to De Courcy: “He appeared very well as long as he kept still and did not say much at the dinner table,” she wrote. “But after dinner his brilliant capability of making himself disagreeable showed forth with undimmed luster. Added to being ill bred, awkward, and a terrible stare-er, he has the distinction of one of the most ugly and repulsive of faces.” Dicey was also falling in Fanny’s estimation until she scrambled her knitting and he sat on the floor to help her untangle the mess.48 After dinner, Dicey stayed behind after the others had left and discussed the slave trade with Seward. The journalist did not pick up that the secretary of state was speaking in the past tense: “The Republican Administration would have merited the condemnation of every honest man if whatever else it had left undone, it had not put a stop to the Slave Trade.”49

  The “whatever else” referred to Lincoln’s failed attempt to win support from the border states for a gradual emancipation bill.50 In January, Carl Schurz, the U.S. minister in Spain, had visited the White House to discuss the reasons for the North’s unpopularity in Europe. After being told by Schurz that it was a mistake to hide the antislavery aims of the war, Lincoln replied to him:

  “You may be right. Probably you are. I have been thinking so myself. I cannot imagine that any European power would dare to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy if it becomes clear that the Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom.” Then he explained to me that, while a distinct anti-slavery policy would remove the foreign danger … he was in doubt as to whether public opinion at home was yet sufficiently prepared for it. He was anxious to unite, and keep united, all the forces of Northern society and of the Union element in the South, especially the Border States, in the war for the Union. Would not the cry of “abolition war” such as might be occasioned by a distinct anti-slavery policy, tend to disunite those forces and thus weaken the Union cause? This was the doubt that troubled him, and it troubled him very much.51

  The objections of the border states to any form of emancipation within their own state lines forced Lincoln to go far more slowly than he wished. To avoid the same difficulties as Lincoln, Seward asked Lyons to play an elaborate game of subterfuge with him. In a brilliant political maneuver, he used the border states’ traditional antipathy toward England to trick them into supporting the slave trade proposal. He altered the wording of the draft so that the proposal came from the United States to Great Britain, rather than the reverse. Then he added a ten-year limit to the treaty and asked Lyons to make objections to it at first, only to allow himself to be publicly beaten down by the force of Seward’s arguments. “Mr. Seward’s long experience of the Senate, and his well-known tact in dealing with that Body, gives his opinion on such a point so much weight,” explained Lyons to the Foreign Office on March 31, “that I naturally thought it prudent to be guided by it.” Lord Russell responded drily that credit for the treaty was “immaterial” to Her Majesty’s government so long as the slave trade was suppressed.52 Lyons dutifully performed his role as directed by Seward, and grudgingly “changed” his mind after a testy exchange of notes.

  Lincoln’s cabinet was unanimous in its congratulation of Seward—with the exception of Gideon Welles, who would not be dissuaded that Britain had an ulterior motive in agreeing to the treaty. “Yesterday was the anniversary of my arrival three years ago at Washington,” Lord Lyons wrote to Lord Russell on April 8. “I celebrated it by signing the Treaty for the Suppression of the Slave Trade.”53 Nothing, except permission to go home, could have given him greater satisfaction. “Weary years they have been in many respects,” he wrote, but the treaty made them seem worth the sacrifice. April was a good month for the abolitionists; a week later, on the sixteenth, President Lincoln signed into law a bill abolishing slavery in Washington. (Sumner had accused him of being the largest slave owner in America for his delay in freeing the three thousand slaves in and around the capital.) At the beginning of the war “it was the fashion amongst English critics,” wrote Edward Dicey, “to state that the whole Secession question had no direct bearing on nor immediate connection with the issue of slavery. As to the letter, there was some truth in this assertion; as to the spirit, there was none.” Finally, one year after the Federal evacuation of Fort Sumter, the “letter” and the “spirit” of the “Secession question” were converging.

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  10.1 William Yancey arrived back in New Orleans thoroughly disheartened by his mission. Cotton was a false god, he announced to the crowd that had gathered to greet him. The Queen favored the North, and Lord Palmerston was not interested in aiding the South. “Gladstone we can manage, but the feeling against slavery in England is so strong that no public man there dares extend a hand to help us. We have got to fight the Washington Government alone.”2

  10.2 One of the biggest areas of contention between Lyons and Seward had recently been removed when the U.S. War Department assumed responsibility for political arrests. “I think it is well that the arrests should be withdrawn from Seward,” Lord Lyons had written on February 18; “he certainly took delight in making them, and, I may say, playing with the whole matter. He is not at all a cruel or vindictive man, but he likes all things which make him feel that he has power.”

  ELEVEN

  Five Miles from Richmond

  Shiloh—Fall of the Crescent City—The “Woman Order”—Vizetelly’s change of heart—The Seven Days’ Battles—“Percy, old boy!”—Lord Edward is duped—General Lee takes the field—McClellan retreats—“This is Butler’s doing”

  Lyons and Seward were quietly congratulating each other over the success of the slave trade treaty when the North won its first major military victory of the war on April 7, 1862, at the Battle of Shiloh. The battle, which took place on Tennessee’s southern border, was a first on several counts. It was the first time Americans witnessed the mass slaughter that comes with large-scale combat. It was also the first intimation that no single battle, no matter how terrible, would end the war; and for young Henry Morton Stanley of the Dixie Grays, it was “the first time that Glory sickened me with its repulsive aspect, and made me suspect it was a glittering lie.”1

  More than a hundred thousand soldiers fought in the two-day battle. Stanley’s side was led by General Albert Sidney Johnston—who was regarded by his Northern opponents as the ablest general in the Confederacy—and by Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter and Bull Run. They had hoped to launch a surprise attack against General Grant while he rested his army of forty thousand men along the wooded ravines of the Tennessee River at Pittsburg Landing. “Shiloh,” which means “place of peace” in Hebrew, was a small Methodist church where Brigadier General William T. Sherman’s division had set up camp.

  Map.8 Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing, April 6–7, 1862

  Click here to view a larger image.

  Johnston had chosen to attack Grant at Pittsburg Landing because he knew that an additional 25,000 reinforcements under General Don Carlos Buell were coming from Nashville. Once the two armies combined, Grant’s numerical superiority would be overwhelming, and Johnston had no doubt that capturing the strategic railroad junctions at Corinth, which was only twenty-two miles from Pittsburg Landing, would be their next object. Johnston’s own army was 44,000 strong, but he hoped that General Van Dorn and the survivors of Pea Ridge would arrive in time to give him additional support.

  The plan, drawn up by Beauregard, was modeled on Napoleon’s str
ategy during the Waterloo campaign, where he had divided his forces to pick off the allies one by one. Historic plans rarely translate well, and those of the defeated even less so; yet the first day of the battle, April 6, began promisingly for the Confederates. Grant was taken by surprise. Sherman’s troops were sitting by their tents eating their breakfast in the warm morning sun when the rebels came yelling and whooping out of the woods. “Stand by, Gentlemen,” Stanley’s captain had ordered while they gathered in formation. The boy standing next to Stanley stopped down to pick a small posy of violets. “They are a sign of peace,” he told Stanley. “Perhaps they won’t shoot me if they see me wearing such flowers.” Impulsively, Stanley also stuck a sprig in his cap. Once they charged, “We had no individuality at this moment.… My nerves tingled, my pulses beat double quick, my heart throbbed loudly, and almost painfully,” Stanley recalled. The rebel yell jerked him out of his fear. “The wave after wave of human voices, louder than all other battle-sounds together, penetrated to every sense.” He remembered he was not alone but surrounded by four hundred other companies. “I rejoiced in the shouting like the rest.”2