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

by Amanda Foreman

  Bulloch was polite to Maury, but clearly regarded him as an added burden. Apart from the financial headache of yet another agent seeking pay and expenses, he feared that every new Confederate operation threatened the security of his own. Just before Maury’s arrival, Bulloch had informed Richmond via a secure channel that sneaking the ships past the British authorities would be difficult, and “will require to be conducted with such caution and secrecy that I fear to mention the plan even in this way.” The chief British ports had received orders to prevent the departure of any other Alabamas. Hampered by one of the worst winters in many years, the builders had put up temporary sheds and were using expensive gaslight in order to work around the clock. Even so, construction was coming along slowly.28 “Have tried very hard to hasten the completion, but insurmountable difficulties have occurred,” Bulloch wrote in code, trusting that the cipher had not been broken by Federal agents. “No armoured ships for Admiralty have ever been completed in time specified; whole character of work new, and builders cannot make close calculations; great labour and unexpected time required to bend armour-plates; and the most important part of the work, the riveting, is far more tedious than anticipated.”29

  The first attempt to solve the Confederates’ debt crisis was made by James Spence and William Schaw Lindsay, MP. Spence had at last achieved his wish and been appointed the South’s financial agent for Europe. Eager to untangle the Confederates’ wayward affairs, he and Lindsay came up with the ingenious idea of floating cotton bonds on the London market, sidestepping the fact that two-thirds of the Confederacy’s wealth was tied up in slaves and land. As long as the Southern government could guarantee the flow of cotton to England, it would be a cheap way of raising money. Mason enthusiastically endorsed the idea. But Spence was outmaneuvered by John Slidell and Caleb Huse, who championed an alternative loan proposal by the French banker Frédéric Emile, Baron d’Erlanger. There were several reasons why Slidell preferred to work with the Frenchman. Erlanger et Cie was one of the great European banking houses, similar to Rothschilds and Barings, and had lent money to the French government. Moreover, the baron was desperately in love with Slidell’s daughter, the beautiful Mathilda. He had been introduced to her during a business trip to New Orleans and had never recovered from the meeting. (The two were married in October 1864).30

  Spence and Slidell fought over the Erlanger proposal throughout January 1863. The baron was amazed to have his dealings questioned by a provincial businessman and flicked Spence’s questions aside. Such treatment only incensed Spence all the more: he refused “to be treated with something like polite contempt,” he told Mason. “I am not the man to take it easily.” He had no choice. The Confederate secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin, did not like the terms of the Erlanger loan, particularly the 5 percent commission, but he was anxious to drag the emperor into closer ties with the Confederacy. On January 29, the Confederate Congress voted to approve the Erlanger loan.31

  The real threat to Bulloch’s ironclad rams, however, was not the lack of funds but Federal infiltration of his inner circle. The U.S. consuls, Thomas Haines Dudley and Freeman Morse, had finally succeeded in placing an agent close to the Confederates’ center of operations.32 Soon Morse and Dudley were able to relay precise descriptions of the blockade runners leaving England, making it easier for the ships to be intercepted.18.3 33 One capture resulted in the loss of the sorely needed provisions Maury had bought for his family.34 Another netted the North a large cache of documents, which on inspection turned out to be two months’ worth of official correspondence between Richmond and the Confederates in England. Among the revelations was James Spence’s employment by the South, which ruined his cover as a disinterested advocate.

  The consuls also exposed the Cunard shipping line as the secret carrier of Confederate dispatches between Nassau and England; they even uncovered how the Alabama was able to send and receive messages. “It has all the time been a mystery to me how Capt. Semmes could get his letters and papers,” wrote the agent known only as WFGA. The system turned out to be quite simple. The lighthouse keeper on the Hole in the Wall, at the south end of the Abacos Islands in the Bahamas, was being paid to act as a go-between: every two weeks, the Alabama would sail by and exchanges would be made.35 The Confederate operations might have been completely compromised were it not for the parsimonious attitude of the U.S. State Department. Espionage was an expensive game, and the two consuls were always running out of money. Seward had not increased their budget for some time, his estimation of their work having been colored by one or two blunders that had undermined their credibility.

  “Think British Government will prevent iron ships leaving,” Bulloch informed Richmond on February 3, “and am much perplexed; object of armoured ships too evident for disguise.”36 The only Confederate project that had not been compromised was Matthew Maury’s. Using privately financed cotton bonds, he had bought a Scottish steamer called the Japan, which could be easily converted into a fighting ship. A colleague in the Royal Danish Navy was generously helping to oversee the construction on the Clyde. But Northern agents heard rumors about the ship once Maury began to assemble a crew and arrange for the delivery of guns and supplies. He needed fifty seamen and twenty-one officers. There were nine Confederate naval officers scattered around London, living in boardinghouses under assumed names. Maury used his rank to commandeer them for the Japan. That still left eleven vacancies that had to be filled with British officers. It was hardly ideal for the Confederates to be in the minority on their own cruiser, but the imminent threat of exposure left him with no other choice.

  Maury was finalizing the last details for the Japan’s departure when permission to sell cotton bonds through the Erlanger banking house finally arrived from Richmond. Erlanger issued the prospectus on March 18. The public’s response was little short of frenzied, which made Spence’s objections look self-serving. By the third day more than $16 million worth of bonds had been sold.37 In his report, James Mason admitted that there had been “a strong opinion in moneyed circles of the City that the enterprise was a hazardous one, and likely to fail in the market.” But the Confederates had managed to overcome the City’s skepticism by touting the loan as a risk-free investment. Mason assured subscribers that no matter which side won the war, the bonds would always have to be honored.38

  “Cotton is King at last,” crowed Mason.39 “It is financial recognition of our independence,” John Slidell declared to Richmond.40 His sentiments were echoed in London. Confederate sympathizers raised the issue of recognition in the House of Lords on March 23, but Russell made a forceful speech that put an end to the debate before it had even properly started. Charles Francis Adams was surprised and thought it the best Russell had given on the war.41 He did not know, of course, that Sumner was sending hysterical letters to the Duchess of Argyll and other English friends warning them to be prepared for Northern privateers preying on English ships, or that Lord Lyons had advised Russell to treat the Confederate activities in England as a real threat to peace.42 “The outcry in America about the Oreto and the Alabama is much exaggerated,” Russell replied to Lyons, “but I must feel that her roaming the ocean with English guns and English sailors to burn, sink and destroy the ships of a friendly nation, is a scandal and a reproach. I don’t know very well what we can do.”43 After Richard Cobden bluntly spelled out the danger of being a passive observer, Russell decided that the House of Commons should debate whether the current Foreign Enlistment Act needed to be strengthened.

  Russell asked Charles Francis Adams what he wanted the government to say in the debate, to which Adams replied they “should declare their disapproval of the fitting out of such ships of war to prey on American commerce.” Russell thought this was eminently sensible and relayed the message to Palmerston just before the Commons discussion on March 27, 1863. The House knew that Lairds had built the Alabama and was in the process of building more like her. “I think you can have no difficulty in declaring this evening,” Russ
ell wrote to Lord Palmerston, “that the Government disapprove of all such attempts to elude our law.”44

  “The government itself is getting alarmed,” Freeman Morse wrote excitedly to Seward on the morning of the debate. “This country is now thoroughly agitated on what they call the American question.”45 The debate began with William Forster asking the government whether new laws were required to prevent the Confederates from building their warships in Britain. There should have been no difficulty, except that no one had counted on John Bright’s appearing in the Commons. Adams had tried to dissuade him from speaking, knowing how Bright’s “help” often had the opposite effect. The night before, Bright had enjoyed a standing ovation at a trade union meeting when he roundly denounced the “privileged class” for being foes of freedom. Still intoxicated by the cheers of his audience, he gave a similar-sounding speech to the House, forgetting that his listeners were members of this afflicted class. They should have “looked in the faces of three thousand of the most intelligent of the artisan classes in London, as I did,” he told an indignant House, “and heard their cheers, and seen their sympathy for [America].”46 Bright was answered by John Laird, who had spent the evening hearing himself denounced as a cheat and warmonger. After pointing out that his firm had been approached by both the North and the South at the beginning of the war, “I have only to say that I would rather be handed down to posterity as the builder of a dozen Alabamas, than as the man who applies himself deliberately to set class against class,” he bellowed, to the accompaniment of cheers from both sides of the House.47

  In addition to dragging the shipbuilding question into the trenches of class war, Bright also challenged Palmerston to apologize to the Americans. That promptly killed any hope that the House would vote to strengthen the Foreign Enlistment Act. Rather than voicing his disapproval of Confederate evasions of the law, Palmerston declared he would never amend Britain’s laws simply to satisfy international pressure.48 Seizing this as their cue, Confederate sympathizers introduced a new subject in the debate: the U.S. Navy’s harassment of British merchant ships. Adams believed that Bright had provided Palmerston with an excuse to avoid strengthening the act. “Had he been really well disposed he never could have written me the private note which caused our differences last year,” he wrote bitterly.49

  Furious that John Bright’s blundering speech had thwarted the government’s attempt to strengthen the Foreign Enlistment Act, Russell ordered his staff to treat seriously all allegations against suspect ships. It was not long before the government had details of several Confederate vessels. Matthew Maury’s Japan on the Clyde was one of the first to be unmasked. Maury learned from a report in the newspapers that that project was out in the open. He immediately sent orders for the cruiser to leave England whatever her condition. The crew and stores were to sail on a separate ship and rendezvous in neutral waters. A messenger delivered a cryptic note to the lodgings where James Morgan had been hiding since his arrival in England. He was ordered to proceed with the utmost care to a house on Little St. James’s Street, where a “Mr. Grigson” would give him further instructions. Morgan hurried through the streets, hoping that he was not being followed. At the house he found half a dozen nervous Confederate officers. They jumped every time there was a knock at the door, fearing it was Consul Morse with the police. Nobody dared leave the house until well after sunset.

  At half-past nine that evening [wrote Morgan] we all proceeded to a railway station where we took a train for White Haven, a little seaport about an hour’s ride from London. There we went to a small inn, where we met Commander Maury, Dr. Wheeden, and Paymaster Curtis, and were soon joined by others—all strangers to me. We waited at the inn for about a couple of hours; there was little, if any, conversation, as we were all too anxious and were all thinking about the same thing. In those two hours it was to be decided whether our expedition was to be a success or a failure. If Mr. Adams, the American Minister, was going to get in his fine work and balk us, now was his last opportunity.50

  The Foreign Office had already issued instructions to detain Morgan’s vessel. But by some mysterious chance, the telegram remained in an out-box until after the port’s telegraph station closed for the day. The delay enabled the Japan to escape in the early hours of April 1, 1863.51 Eight days after leaving England, off the coast of Brittany, Matthew Maury’s cousin Commander William Lewis Maury hoisted aloft the Confederate flag, and the Japan began its service as CSS Georgia.

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  The appearance on the high seas of a third Confederate commerce raider ratcheted up the already high tension between the United States and Royal navies. The U.S. blockading squadron at Mobile, for example—which was still smarting from the embarrassment of having allowed CSS Florida to escape—started firing live rounds at passing Royal Navy vessels, each time claiming to have mistaken the unambiguous appearance of a British warship for a civilian blockade runner.18.4 Conversely, British frigates patrolling the Caribbean were as unhelpful as possible toward the U.S. vessels trying to chase down blockade runners.

  Admiral Milne, commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy’s operations in North America and the West Indies, was annoyed by his officers’ failure to maintain a strictly neutral stance. He despised the blockade runners and had ordered the fleet to refrain from giving them any assistance. Sometimes the so-called offense against the United States was simply tactless behavior, such as the fraternization between British crews and CSS Alabama when she sailed through Jamaican waters in January. But at other times, Milne detected more than a hint of partisanship. In February he removed HMS Petrel from Charleston after Captain George W. Watson and his officers became far too friendly with the blockaded townspeople.53 The last straw was a clearly biased report by Watson about the weakness of the blockading fleet. Milne upbraided him for “mixing himself so conspicuously and unnecessarily with the Confederate authorities,” and ordered Watson to a remote part of the Caribbean. “I cannot trust him either at Nassau or on the American coast,” Milne complained on March 20 to Sir Frederick Grey of the Admiralty.54 Milne also punished the captain of HMS Vesuvius, who had agreed to transport $155,000 in specie past the blockade at Mobile because, allegedly, it was interest owed to bondholders in Britain. (Fearful of the reaction in Washington, Lyons promptly dismissed the British consul who had arranged it.)

  Milne made it his general rule to adopt a lenient approach regarding complaints about American harassment of “innocent” cargo ships. He also held firm even when the U.S. Navy widened its net to include merchant ships sailing between the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico. The chief destination of these ships was Matamoros, a miserable, drought-ridden town on the Mexican border about thirty miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande. Powdery white dust covered every surface in Matamoros, including the hair and clothes of the inhabitants, making them look like the walking dead. The town would have dissolved back into the scrubland were it not directly across the river from Brownsville, Texas, another miserable little town whose existence was saved by the Civil War.

  These two places, more than fifteen hundred miles from Richmond, were the only open gates into the Confederacy. The narrow, winding Rio Grande was a neutral river, and so, according to international law, it could not be blockaded. At first the North paid little attention to Matamoros. It was situated in a barren waste that spread for hundreds of miles; there were no port facilities or roads, and its only connection to Brownsville was a rickety ferryboat. But even with these obstacles, cotton sellers were prepared to risk their lives hauling long wagon trains across the Texas plains and over the river. By early 1863, nearly two hundred ships a month were calling at Matamoros, bringing supplies to the Confederacy and leaving with cotton.

  Although he could not admit it publicly, Russell was anxious for the sake of the British cotton industry that this tiny chink in the blockade should stay open. He ordered Lyons to protest the U.S. Navy’s habit of seizing any British ship heading toward Mexico. There was no way of proving wheth
er the guns and matériel were destined for the South or for the beleaguered Mexican government, whose twelve-month resistance against a French invasion force was showing signs of fatigue. But Milne was loath to interfere with the practices of the U.S. Navy; HMS Phaeton was already cruising the gulf as a friendly reminder of British neutrality. The only help that Milne was prepared to give to British merchantmen was the advice to anchor on the Mexican side of the Gulf, where the U.S. Navy was powerless to molest them.

  The fate of several British merchant ships was already worrying the Foreign Office—and the readers of The Times—when U.S. admiral Charles Wilkes once again exercised his uncanny ability to create an international crisis. Learning that a British-owned merchant ship called the Peterhoff was leaving the Danish island of St. Thomas to sail to Matamoros, Wilkes ordered USS Vanderbilt to stop her as soon as she left the harbor. As the Vanderbilt approached, one of the Peterhoff’s passengers was observed throwing a large packet into the water. Her captain was nowhere to be seen, since he was busy burning papers in his cabin. The captured ship was brought to Key West in Florida on March 10, 1863, where the British vice consul said that the vessel could not possibly have been involved in anything so low as blockade running since Captain Stephen Jarman was a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve. Moreover, she had been transporting the Lloyd’s insurance agent for Matamoros and a bag of mail from the Post Office. The return of the mail became an instant cause célèbre in England. The poisonous combination of Charles Wilkes and British property provoked Trent-like hysteria, with the press insisting that national honor was at stake.55

  Ill.35 Punch warns the United States not to irritate the British lion, May 1863.

  Lyons warned Russell that the mood of the Northerners was just as violent.56 Whatever their disagreements over the war and the merits of abolition, they were united by their resentment toward Britain. “Everybody is furious with England and with everybody and everything English,” Lyons wrote sadly.57 The Northern press was claiming that the British were building a navy for the Confederates, supplying their armies, lending them money, and providing moral if not actual support to the Alabama, the Florida, and the Georgia. Lyons telegraphed Admiral Milne to make his fleet battle-ready—once again, the signal for war would be “Could you forward a letter for me to Antigua?”58 Milne complied, though he was fearful that putting his ships on alert would provoke the very collision he was laboring so hard to prevent.