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

by Amanda Foreman

  Vizetelly’s triumphant reporting of the Union’s repulse contributed to the sour mood in Washington. The secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, was an avid reader of the English press, particularly those journals that were sympathetic to the South. Stanton would shut his office door, settle down on the sofa, and spend the afternoon discovering from Britain’s finest journalists why the North deserved no pity and why he, especially, was the worst sort of bungler. According to one of his clerks, it was almost a form of relaxation for him.6

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  Contrary to Stanton’s belief that all of England sympathized with the South, support for the North was growing. The London consul, Freeman H. Morse, whose duties had expanded to include propaganda and public agitation, told Seward that there had been a “revolution” since Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.7 Despite the initial skepticism toward the Proclamation and the best efforts of The Times to portray it as a cynical ploy to encourage race riots—or at the very least force Southern soldiers to return to their homes to protect their families—the message that the war had a moral purpose seemed to be reaching the British public.

  Among the initial signs was a rise in pamphlets and books putting forward the case for the North. James Spence’s seemingly unassailable arguments in The American Union for recognition of the South were picked apart to devastating effect by the economist John Elliot Cairnes in his book The Slave Power, which appeared in the autumn of 1862 and went through several editions after the Emancipation Proclamation. Cairnes was followed by the actress Fanny Kemble, who published her diary, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838 – 1839, written during her exile on her former husband’s slave plantation in Georgia, and William Howard Russell, whose account of his stay in America, entitled My Diary North and South, verified many of her observations.8 The Spectator journalist Edward Dicey also wrote a travelogue—Six Months in the Federal States—that tried to correct many of the distortions and caricatures of Northern culture that pro-Southern journalists had propagated. An increase in the number of volunteers calling at the legation reflected the changing perception of the war. “Applications for service in our army strangely fluctuate,” wrote Benjamin Moran in his diary on January 14, 1863. “For some time past they have been but few. Since the announcement of the President’s determination to adhere to his emancipation policy they have again become numerous and today we have had a French and British officer seeking employment.”9 Moran was surprised by the wide range of motives and financial circumstances of these would-be volunteers; as far as he could tell, some were genuine idealists, but others were simply looking for an escape from their daily existence. Another surprise was waiting for him when he went to church. The vicar had never mentioned the war before, but on this Sunday he announced during prayers, “Our hearts in this great contest are with the North,” which was answered with a deep “Amen” from the congregation.10

  “Emancipation Meetings continue to be held in London every week, sometimes four or five a week at some of which two and three thousand people have been present and in a majority of cases unanimously with the North. Other portions of the country are following the example of this city and holding meetings with about the same result,” Consul Morse reported to Seward.11 James Spence spoke passionately at an antislavery meeting in Liverpool, but to his surprise he failed to convince a mixed audience of merchants and tradespeople that the South would also abolish slavery as soon as it won independence.12 The public was far more interested in hearing from President Lincoln than from Spence. Encouraged by Charles Sumner, Lincoln had written an eloquent letter to the “Workingmen of Manchester” thanking the cotton workers for their patience and sacrifice. “Whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own,” declared the president, “the peace and friendship which now exist between the two nations will be … perpetual.”13

  Morse was being helped by Peter Sinclair, a formidable and energetic Scotsman who had spent the past six years building a Canadian-American temperance organization called Bands of Hope. Sinclair had lately returned to England with the specific intention of giving his aid to the North. “Mr. Sinclair has been laying facts, figures and arguments before a committee of the old Emancipation Society, one of the most influential organizations in England,” Morse informed Seward in January. Even though some veteran campaigners like Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury remained unconvinced (much to Henry Hotze’s glee), Sinclair had been remarkably successful in convincing a wide range of individuals—including “merchants, bankers, lawyers, literary men, etc.”—that abolition was possible only in a united America. The hitherto pacifist British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society changed its stance and became actively involved in the counterpropaganda war, secretly supplying Moran with information about Confederate activities in the financial markets.14 Sinclair was also the leading organizer of the Emancipation Society’s massive demonstration at Exeter Hall on January 29. Henry Adams managed to secure a seat at the meeting and was thoroughly uplifted by the experience. The politicians, Henry told his brother afterward, were going to have to listen to their constituents or risk being “thrown over.”18.2

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  Henry Adams had cheered up considerably since September, when the powerfully connected Richard Monckton Milnes made the improvement of the twenty-five-year-old’s social life his pet project.15 But his father continued to be tormented by doubts and anxieties; Charles Francis Adams felt especially angry toward Seward. It was not only the dispatches publication fiasco. On January 28, the legation received a telegram from the vacationing secretary of the legation, Charles Wilson, announcing his imminent arrival in London. Benjamin Moran was in despair. Adams was horrified. Both had assumed that Wilson would never return from his government-funded vacation in Chicago. Neither could stand working with the uncouth and obnoxious secretary, whose only reason for being at the legation arose from a serpentine bargain between Seward and Lincoln over patronage. Without consulting or explaining his thoughts to Moran, Adams decided that the best way to keep Wilson at a distance—without its looking like a direct snub—was to exclude both legation secretaries from all social functions. Moran was crushed when he discovered that the Adamses were entertaining behind his back. “This is a deliberate slight,” he raged in his diary. “All other Ministers invite their secretaries to their state dinners; but it seems to be a pleasure to ours to degrade his by acts of omission.”16 Charles Francis Adams was far too preoccupied to notice Moran’s wounded dignity. A thick yellow fog had descended on London, quite different from the usual kind at that time of year. It made the day seem like endless night, and the world outside even more claustrophobic than the world within. The sense of being trapped exacerbated Adams’s fears; he was dreading the opening of Parliament on February 5 and could think of little else.

  As it happened, although several speakers referred at length to the American war, there were no clarion calls for immediate recognition of the South, no hints from the government about a change in policy. The issue was certainly alive: in the Lords, the Earl of Carnarvon asked Lord Russell to explain Britain’s position on the fate of Her Majesty’s subjects currently held without trial in Northern prisons.17 But America did not seem to resonate in Parliament as it had before Christmas. Adams mentally thanked the Poles for their revolution on January 22, 1863, which was keeping the House distracted.

  Adams was also nervous about his meeting with Lord Russell on February 7, the first since the publication of his uncomplimentary dispatches, and he expected some sort of rebuke or coldness. “I was a little prepared to find him rather more reserved than heretofore,” Adams wrote in his diary. “In his place I think I should have been so. But so far as I could see there was no difference.” (Adams might have felt differently toward Russell had he known of the foreign secretary’s strenuous efforts to unite the cabinet behind his mediation plan.) The fog dissipated, “yet I felt rather sad,” Adams confessed in his diary. “The unsettled condition of our public affairs and the doub
t that overhangs the future both financially and morally cast a shadow upon everything.”18 When he did venture out, Adams was not particularly sociable. Even dinner at the Argylls’ was a chore for him, though he liked them as a rule. “The Duchess is an interesting woman, but she is not very easy in conversation. She labors at starting subjects without knowing how to keep them going. He is much in the same way,” he complained on February 11, forgetting that a conversation requires two willing partners.19

  Nearly three weeks later, Adams came face to face with Lord Palmerston at a royal levee. The two had not spoken to each other since the “Butler letters” the previous June. “Of course I was called to decide something, so I made a formal bow and put out my hand.” To Adams’s relief, “He bowed in return and took my hand so that no perceptible difficulty took place. Most of the other Cabinet members treated me with great cordiality.”20 Adams was still trying to make sense of the encounter when he received an invitation from Lady Palmerston, the first in over a year. “This was certainly a change,” he wrote in puzzlement, unaware that Benjamin Moran had left his card at Cambridge House. The dictates of diplomatic protocol obliged Lady Palmerston to respond to the gesture by inviting the assistant secretary to her next party, which she could not do without also including the senior members of the legation. But it cannot be said that Adams made the most of the opportunity. Afterward he wrote, “The same old crowd and the same people whom I did not know.”21 Although Adams often spoke as though he cared nothing for social advancement, Benjamin Moran was not fooled: “One of the leading characteristics, if not the leading one of English society,” he wrote in his diary, “is its perfect exclusiveness. To get through this barrier is almost impossible. Americans who try it once and fail, generally stop; but not the Adamses. Their desire to get thro’ the charmed wall and into the circle is a disease … altho’ they are constantly pretending they are indifferent to it.”22

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  The Confederate commissioner James Mason had never seen the inside of Cambridge House and was thus denied the luxury of being bored by the Palmerstons’ parties. During the past twelve months, Mason’s most intimate encounter with the higher echelons of government had been the thirty minutes he had spent in Lord Russell’s office shortly after his arrival. On the other hand, Mason could boast that he had seen the Egyptian Hall of Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor in the City of London, many more times than Adams, since the South enjoyed strong support from financial institutions with historic ties to the cotton industry.

  The Lord Mayor’s banquet on February 11, 1863, came just at the right time for Mason. Russell had become more elusive than ever. Mason did not know what to make of this “strange contumacy from such a quarter.” To make sure his correspondence was not falling victim to Federal skulduggery, he had had his secretary personally deliver the last Confederate letter to the Foreign Office. That had been more than a month ago. The banquet at Mansion House appeared to confirm Mason’s belief that the foreign secretary was out of step with the rest of the country. “When my name was announced by the Mayor, it was received with a storm of applause,” Mason wrote in his diary. When he was unexpectedly invited to address the hall, almost every sentence he spoke elicited loud cheers, especially when he referred to the commercial ties between the City and the South, and he thought he had acquitted himself rather well. One of James Spence’s friends had been among the guests and was convinced that he had witnessed a momentous event. “My dear Spence,” he wrote the next day,

  Ill.34 Great emancipation meeting held at Exeter Hall, March 1863.

  I was at the Mansion House last night and heard the Lord Mayor virtually recognize the South in the quietest and most inoffensive way that could be imagined.… As I came out I rubbed shoulders with Captain Tinker, Grinnell’s partner and I said, jocularly, “Well, you see the Lord Mayor has been and gone and done it.” He laughingly replied, “Oh yes, it’s all over now.” Depend on it, this expression of opinion from the heart of England’s middle classes must tell. It will reverberate thro’ the land and find an echo.23

  The only Southerner in England who did not rejoice after the Lord Mayor’s banquet was Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury, who thought Mason was wasting his time. “Many of our friends here have mistaken British admiration of Southern ‘pluck,’ and newspaper spite at Yankee insolence as Southern sympathy. No such thing,” Maury had written to a friend in late January. He was adamant: “There is no love for the South here. In its American policy the British Government fairly represents the people.… There is no hope for recognition here, therefore I say withdraw Mason.” After the banquet Maury wrote: “We are gaining ground here, it is true, but before we can expect any aid or comfort we must show our ability to get along without it—then it will be offered right and left.”24

  Matthew Maury would have been a much better Southern commissioner than William Yancey or James Mason. He was one of the Confederacy’s few international heroes, having received six honorary knight-hoods, a clutch of medals and seals, and membership in several royal societies for his contribution to the study of oceanography. Maury’s research of sea charts and weather patterns had led him to uncover the hidden pathways of the sea, taking the guesswork out of trade routes and opening the oceans to further exploration. It was Maury’s discovery of the North Atlantic shelf that had emboldened Cyrus Field to lay his ill-fated telegraph cable in 1858.

  But in America, Maury’s blunt and often captious behavior had made him as many enemies as admirers. The navy pushed him into retirement, although it relented and made him a commander after he fought to be readmitted. When the war began, Maury was fifty-five years old, happily married, and the father of nine children, having run the Naval Observatory in Washington for nearly seventeen years. But on April 20, 1861, though he neither owned slaves nor approved of slavery, Maury chose his native state of Virginia over his loyalty to the federal government. He walked out of the observatory for the last time with tears streaming down his face, leaving on the desk his sword, his naval uniform, and a letter of resignation to Abraham Lincoln.

  Maury soon discovered that old quarrels had not died with the new Confederacy. It was unfortunate that his future ended up in the hands of three of his greatest rivals: Jefferson Davis, Judah P. Benjamin, and Stephen Mallory. Maury’s pioneering work on torpedoes and mines received scant official support. When he received his orders in August 1862 to go on a purchasing mission to London, Maury assumed it was an attempt to consign him to oblivion.25 He knew there was already a clutch of agents in England competing with one another for scarce resources. After long, anguished discussions with his wife, Ann, the Maurys agreed that their youngest child, thirteen-year-old Matthew Jr., known as Brave, would accompany him to England. The rest of the family would try to live quietly in northern Virginia.

  Maury and young Brave traveled to Charleston to wait for room to become available on a steamer running the blockade. As the weeks passed, Maury became a frequent guest at Ashley Hall, home of George A. Trenholm. Built in the Regency style according to Southern taste, the house was a skillful combination of intimidation and opulence. Few families could maintain such an establishment at those times, but the blockade had transformed Trenholm from the chairman of a middle-sized shipping firm into the wealthiest man in the South. Life at Ashley Hall was not only untouched by the war, it was better than ever. Dinner guests were treated to delicacies that had not been seen elsewhere in Charleston since 1861. Maury hardly noticed seventeen-year-old James Morgan at other end of Trenholm’s dinner table, looking uncomfortably hot in his woolen naval uniform. A random series of events had brought Morgan to Trenholm’s door. Since helping his English friend Francis Dawson, escape the overenthusiastic nursing of some female volunteers, Morgan had been transferred from one ship to another. His current posting was on a little ironclad still in dry dock. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, Morgan had taken to roaming aimlessly around Charleston until Trenholm took him under his wing. On the sult
ry night that brought Maury and Morgan together for the first time, Trenholm turned to the youth and “asked me if I would like to go abroad and join a cruiser,” recalled Morgan. “On being assured that I would give anything to have the chance, he returned to Commodore Maury and resumed his conversation about the peculiarities of the ‘Gulf Stream.’ ” The next morning, Morgan received orders from the secretary of the navy to accompany Maury to London. There, he was to report to James Bulloch for further instructions.26

  Maury’s worst fears about his mission were confirmed when he arrived in England in late November 1862. The Confederates were low on funds and had been surviving on credit since the previous summer. Caleb Huse had warehouses full of precious guns, medicines, blankets, and shoes for Lee’s army that he could not afford to ship. James Bulloch himself had two half-completed ironclad rams at the Lairds shipyard in Liverpool, costing £94,000 each, that would never leave dry dock if he did not pay up in time. In Scotland, two agents for the Confederate navy, one of them the hapless James North, were in an equally perilous relationship with the shipwrights on the Clyde. If these ships could be let loose upon the Federal navy, they would, in Bulloch’s words, “sweep away the entire blockading fleet of the enemy.”27 The modifications he had suggested would enable his cruisers to fight in any waters. Mobile, heavily gunned, and armed with menacing iron rams, they were a new breed of fighting machine. But in the meantime, Bulloch had until March to come up with the final installment.