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

by Amanda Foreman

  Fitzgerald Ross recognized Vizetelly from Lawley’s description when the journalist showed up at the Mills House Hotel for dinner. According to Scheibert, “this hotel had the best service of any tavern” in the South. It charged the highest prices, too: $100 per person for a three-course meal.52 General Beauregard welcomed Vizetelly’s new friends when they called at his headquarters, and introduced them to the English officer on his staff. Henry Feilden was growing used to his role as Beauregard’s mouthpiece and cheerfully gave a tour of the preparations against the next phase of the Federal siege. The consuls observed with alarm that more gunships were sailing into the harbor. The city itself was obviously the next objective. The British consul, Henry Pinckney Walker, sent a message to the legation in Washington that somehow slipped through, beseeching Lord Lyons to send a British warship to rescue the “several thousand” British women and children who were in the direct line of fire.23.4 53

  At 10:45 P.M. on August 21, a note from Union general Quincy Adams Gillmore was delivered to Beauregard’s headquarters announcing the imminent bombardment of the city. He had neglected to sign it, so no one took the threat seriously. Three hours later, the shelling began. “At first I thought a meteor had fallen; but another awful rush and whirr right over the hotel and another explosion beyond, settled any doubts I might have had,” wrote Vizetelly. He threw on his clothes and ran down the stairs, fighting his way past hysterical businessmen. “One perspiring individual of portly dimensions was trotting to and fro with one boot on and the other in his hand, and this was nearly all the dress he could boast of.… Another, in a semi-state of nudity with a portion of his garments on his arm, barked the shins of everyone in his way in his efforts to drag an enormous trunk to the staircase.”54 Out in the street, women were running in all directions, their heads ducked, some carrying children in their arms. Many people were stampeding toward the station in the wild hope that a train would be waiting to convey them away. Vizetelly found Ross and Scheibert coolly standing around in the Mills House bar. He persuaded them to come with him down to the promenade, where they would have a better view of the bombardment. To their surprise, a large crowd had already gathered there. For an hour they stood out under the open canopy of stars, with Vizetelly and Ross taking bets as to whether the shells would fall short and land on their heads.55

  The next morning, General Beauregard sent a furious note to Gillmore demanding a halt to the firing until all the civilians could be evacuated. The British consul called on General Gillmore under a flag of truce with a similar request. The Federal commander granted a cease-fire of twenty-four hours before resuming the bombardment. After three weeks of continuous shelling, the excitement wore thin, and the three friends began to discuss their departure from Charleston. On September 14, Ross and Vizetelly bade farewell to Scheibert, who was returning to Prussia. “I fear our troubles have only begun,” Thomas Prioleau wrote to his cousin Charles Prioleau, the head of Fraser, Trenholm in Liverpool. “The fire brought against us is immense and incessant, yet we do not despair.”23.5 56

  Ill.45 Downtown Charleston under fire from Union forces, by Frank Vizetelly.

  * * *

  23.1 While Mayo was exploring Vicksburg, he was the subject of cheerful conversation at home. On July 11, 1863, the Medical Times and Gazette reported on the dinner held by the Southampton Medical Society: “Mr. Dayman spoke at length: ‘A son of one of their old associates, Mr. Mayo, of Winchester (hear, hear), was at that moment with the army in America.’ (A deeply-toned Voice: Yes, but on the wrong side—laughter.) “There were no wrongs on the side of Surgery.” (Hear.) (A Voice: I should prefer his being in the south. Another Voice: The north is more bracing, and laughter.) ‘Their young friend, Dr. Chas. Mayo, was with the army in North America.’—(A Voice: The right man in the right place, and laughter.) ‘He was gone out as a volunteer Surgeon, taking with him no prejudiced views of the supremacy of Military Surgery, but content to carry into the field the principles which had made his father.… Might their young friend do justice, not only to Hampshire, but also to England.’ (Applause.)”

  23.2 Adams had also canceled the legation’s Fourth of July celebration. The previous year’s dinner had been a desultory affair. He expected this year’s to be no better, and he feared a visit from the popular orator Henry Ward Beecher, brother of the author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was visiting England on a lecture tour. Beecher was arousing the British public, but for all the wrong reasons, telling a gathering of temperance campaigners, for example, that the North was losing because its army officers could not stay sober.

  23.3 The secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, had a strangely inflated idea of Lyons’s power. It was mortifying, he complained, “the extent Lord Lyons shapes and directs, through the Secretary of State, an erroneous policy to this government.” CSS Florida had recently sailed within sixty miles of New York, leaving a trail of burning ships and bruised egos in her wake. Welles sent six cruisers to chase after the elusive Captain Maffitt and his crew, but a false lead had led them up the East Coast toward Nantucket. This, too, was somehow Lord Lyons’s fault.44

  23.4 The British consul was exaggerating; the number was less than a thousand. Lyons’s chargé d’affaires, William Stuart, telegraphed Rear Admiral Milne for his advice. Milne replied in the negative. It would be unthinkable, he wrote, to send in a ship now and interfere with Federal naval plans.

  23.5 Francis Lawley’s optimistic reporting about the shelling of Charleston did not deceive William Howard Russell: “Such rubbish!” he wrote in his diary on September 28. “I really believe on the U.S. question the great John Bull has lost his head and is distracted by jealousy to such an extent that it has not only ceased to be just and generous but to be moderately reasonable.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Devouring the Young

  Rose Greenhow arrives in England—The British government vs. the rams—Commissioner Mason leaves his post—A new breed of volunteer—General Bragg’s justice

  With Rose Greenhow and her daughter on board, the blockade runner Phantom was the only ship to escape from Wilmington on the night of August 5, 1863. “We passed the Elizabeth and the Hebe, who had each got aground, but our anxiety was too great on our own account to bestow much thought upon our friends,” she wrote in her diary; “the Yankees threw up rockets, which revealed to us the fact that we were in the midst of five of the ‘blockaders.’ ” After rounding Cape Fear with the pursuers mercifully far behind, “Capt. Porter had a mattress spread upon deck, upon which I lay,” Rose continued in her diary, “watching the moon which had risen and was shining gloriously high in the Heavens, and pitying myself as the victim of that most unfortunate infirmity of seasickness.” Little Rose also felt wretched and “crouched by my side, amidst the cotton bales which crowded the deck.”1

  The Phantom sailed unmolested into St. George’s harbor, Bermuda, on August 10, 1863. Rose’s steamship to England was not leaving for three weeks, which gave her ample opportunity to study Major Walker’s shipping operation. “The entire trade of the island is Confederate,” she remarked. The willingness of the British authorities to ignore his activities was a reflection of Bermuda’s desperate plight before the war. A devout believer in “the wise and beneficial system of servile labor,” Rose hoped that the British now regretted their folly in abolishing slavery in 1833. Had it not been for the Confederate community on the island, all of whom shared her prejudices, she would have been miserable during her stay; living cheek by jowl with a free black population seemed unnatural and offensive to her. But in contrast to her treatment at Richmond, Rose was the center of attention in St. George. “She is one of the most beautiful women I ever saw,” gushed Georgiana Walker. “She knows this and like a sensible woman, does not pretend to think the contrary.”2 The fact that Rose was traveling on a diplomatic mission made her seem even more glamorous.

  Rose had expected to be in Liverpool by September 11 or 12 at the latest, and she was taken by surprise when the captain
announced that he was changing their destination. The Harriet Pinckney was a new Confederate steamer, he explained, and too precious to risk becoming “Yankee prey” on the return journey. They were heading south instead, to Falmouth on the coast of Cornwall. “This was unexpected to us all,” Rose wrote in her diary, “and everyone set to work to know where Falmouth was and what sort of a place.”3 The captain was being overly cautious; the closest threat to the Pinckney was USS Kearsarge, which was sailing around the Azores in the hope of finding one of the Confederate raiders.

  —

  Captain Maffitt would not have sailed the battle-scarred Florida into Brest, France, had he known that his arrival would attract the attention of Federal agents, putting in jeopardy the six Confederate raiders under construction at Nantes and Bordeaux.24.1 James Bulloch had moved his operations across the Channel after the detention of the Alexandra in the spring. The emperor had given his permission for the switch to France with the proviso that if the United States uncovered the existence of the Confederate ships, the authorities would deny all knowledge of the program.4 Lucien Arman, owner of the largest shipbuilding firm in the country, was building four Alabama-style raiders for Bulloch in Bordeaux and had also helped to arrange the contract for the two smaller ships at Nantes.

  The obliging Arman—whose wealth and position had grown in step with the emperor’s desire to modernize his navy—also introduced Bulloch to the brokerage firm of Bravay and Company. Monsieur Bravay agreed to buy the Confederate rams nearing completion at Lairds shipyard in Liverpool for a nominal sum (plus a large commission) and maintain that they were destined for his client, the pasha of Egypt. The intricate web of deception had been working well until the Florida sailed imprudently into Brest with its Confederate flag flying from the mast. The foreign minister, Drouyn de Lhuys, was furious, and proceeded to sit on Captain Maffitt’s request to use the port’s repair facilities for four days before reluctantly assenting on the condition that the visit be kept secret from the American legation.

  In London, the Florida’s arrival went almost unremarked amid the furors over the imminent departure of the Lairds rams. Charles Francis Adams had warned Lord Russell that their very existence presented the greatest threat to Anglo-American relations since the Trent affair. Two ram raiders could not, of course, win the war for the Confederacy, but they could threaten the Federal stranglehold on Charleston or Wilmington. Moreover, argued Adams, if the rams were allowed to leave, there would be nothing to prevent the Confederacy from building twenty more in Britain. War between America and England would be unavoidable if the government failed to clamp down on all Confederate violations of British neutrality; and this, he was convinced, would never happen under Lord Palmerston.

  —

  U.S. consul Thomas Haines Dudley in Liverpool had uncovered every aspect of the Confederates’ operations: how they recruited sailors, who paid them and when, how they procured supplies, and on which vessels the cargoes sailed. But he had failed to unearth a single piece of written evidence against the rams that could be presented in a court of law. The Lord Mayor of London warned the Home Office that it would be a waste of time sending government agents to investigate Lairds, since nothing would be found. But Lord Russell ignored the advice, which he believed to be tainted by the Lord Mayor’s pro-Southern bias, and sent the agents anyway. The hostility experienced by pro-Northerners in Liverpool could be overwhelming at times: “I have … done myself a great deal of damage,” complained one of Dudley’s informants.5

  The Duke of Argyll noticed Charles Francis Adams’s agitation when the U.S. minister and his family went to stay in Scotland in the middle of August. One morning after breakfast, Adams had a frank conversation with the duke about the probability that the North would declare war if the government allowed the rams to depart. He was surprised to discover that he was not the first to say so. “He said that he had received a letter from Sumner,” wrote Adams on August 28, 1863, “dwelling very strongly on the danger of war.” Adams was too circumspect to discuss Seward’s latest dispatch (the threatening and bombastic letter Lord Lyons had seen earlier in August), but he hinted that there were instructions he was deliberately holding back for the moment. Adams, however, had no way of knowing that Seward was actually quite sanguine about the rams. “The English Ministry are our friends,” Seward had recently admitted to the navy secretary, Gideon Welles. The very day Adams poured out his fears to the duke, Seward told Welles to cease worrying because “the armored vessels building in England will not be allowed to leave.”6 Adams’s continual fretting about the rams ruined the enjoyment of his visit to Inveraray Castle, and he left for London on August 31 thinking he would never see Scotland again. This, he decided, would not be a great loss: “Half of it is fit only for the habitation of the beasts and the birds. The other half has nothing especial to recommend it either.”7

  —

  Benjamin Moran was hysterical when Adams arrived back at the legation on September 3. One of the Lairds rams had actually been taken out for a test run, yet Lord Russell had replied to Adams’s latest protest with what seemed to him the usual empty assurances. The legation was reliving the escape of the Alabama. The effect on Adams was dramatic. He sent a warning to Russell that day, and a stronger one the next. On the fifth, having received nothing but a bland note in reply, he lost his temper. “This is war,” he wrote to Russell, war by stealth and deceit. If the government allowed the two rams to depart, to destroy New York and Boston at will, the United States would retaliate. If the circumstances were reversed, Adams declared, Britain would do the same. He would communicate his government’s response forthwith.8

  Adams assumed that Lord Palmerston was interfering—or, worse, restraining Lord Russell from responding properly. It would have been far better for his peace of mind and the future of Anglo-American relations had he been kept informed of the strenuous efforts of the Home and Foreign office clerks to find a legal way of stopping the rams. Since June, the government had been secretly conducting an international investigation into their true ownership. The British consul in Egypt had been ordered to pry the truth out of the pasha as to how he had become mixed up with the Confederates. The information trickling in only heightened Russell’s suspicions about Bravay and Company. Palmerston agreed that he, too, was worried about “this ship building business.” Yet there was no obvious remedy: Seward’s threats and Adams’s letters made it politically impossible for them to amend the Foreign Enlistment Act without appearing to bow to U.S. pressure.

  The British cabinet’s concern had increased in August after Richard Cobden shared with them his most recent correspondence from Charles Sumner. The senator, reported Cobden, had made a volte-face about England, and instead of being her chief ally in the U.S. capital was now her loudest critic. Sumner appeared to be so bent on revenge for Britain’s accumulated wrongdoings that Cobden had felt constrained to remind him, “We have been the only obstacle to what would have been almost a European recognition of the South.”24.2 10 The more Russell heard about the state of opinion in the North, the less he agreed with the advice of the law officers to wait until there was positive proof against the rams. Finally, on August 31, the Foreign Office received a telegram from the British consul in Egypt confirming that the pasha story was a ruse. Yet still the legal advisers to the Customs and Treasury departments rejected his entreaties for action.

  Although he was still on holiday in Scotland, Russell telegraphed his undersecretary for foreign affairs, Austen Henry Layard, on September 3 to say that he would return to London for a confrontation with the law officers if necessary. Palmerston concurred with Russell: the Confederates were dragging the government into “neutral hostility.” He considered the possibility of having to pay damages to Lairds to be worth the risk—it would certainly be cheaper than a war with the United States.11 Layard obediently sent the detention order that day. Fearful that his telegram might lose itself—in the way that unpopular messages were wont to do in the Treasury Depart
ment—he wrote to them again two days later.12 His persistence paid off, and a customs official informed Lairds of the order.

  Lord Lyons’s secretary of the legation, William Stuart, received instructions to explain to Seward that the vessels were being detained even though the government did not expect a favorable decision from the courts. Unfortunately, no one remembered to share this concern with Charles Francis Adams, or indeed to apprise him of the recent developments regarding the rams. Russell’s sudden reticence may have been prompted by a fear of leaks, or a desire to wait until he had definite news, but most likely he had become annoyed with the aggressive tone of Adams’s letters and decided that the minister could afford to wait a little while.

  Over the next two weeks, there was frenetic correspondence among the members of the cabinet as they debated whether the detention order had been the right step. As if to remind the ministry how fraught the issue remained in Parliament, the Liverpool Courier declared on September 12 that a government that truckled to U.S. pressure was worthy of impeachment. The next day, Palmerston suggested to the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Duke of Somerset, that the navy should purchase the rams from M. Bravay, which would avoid the embarrassment of another legal battle. At the very least, he wrote in all seriousness, “we are short of iron clads and it takes time to build them.” The rams would be a useful addition to British naval capacity just in case “[the Federals] should be disposed and able next year to execute their threatened vengeance, for all the forbearance we have shown them.”13

  In October, Captain Hoare, the Royal Navy attaché to the British embassy in Paris, visited M. Bravay with a line of credit and a list of questions. Their conversation left Hoare with no doubt of the rams’ true ownership. The Frenchman’s nods and winks were irritating but illuminating—had James Bulloch witnessed this display of self-important puffery, he would have been furious at Bravay’s indiscretion. Nevertheless, the Frenchman refused to sell the rams at any price, and Hoare returned home with nothing except a poor opinion of the Confederates’ dealings. By coincidence, British crewmen from the Florida arrived in Liverpool during the week of Hoare’s meeting with Bravay. Captain Maffitt had let them go to save money, but everyone, including Consul Dudley, assumed they were coming to take the rams out of Lairds shipyard while there was still time. This mistaken belief sent officials into a frenzy. Russell saw another Alabama incident in the making and wanted the marines to become involved; the Home Office ordered the Liverpool constabulary to keep a close watch on the sailors.14