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

by Amanda Foreman

  The Economist criticized the public’s overreaction to the news of Fort Fisher, since the South “still [has] large armies in the field, they have still the ablest generals of the Republic in their ranks,” but most other papers now declared the Confederacy to be without hope.20 It was common knowledge that the South would not be able to survive without its imports. During the past four years, 60 percent of the Confederacy’s rifles had come through the blockade, 75 percent of her saltpeter, and 30 percent of her lead, and, particularly after 1862, the blockade runners had become the South’s lifeline.21 Consul Thomas Dudley in Liverpool had recently completed his statistics for 1864 and amassed evidence against 113 steamships and 304 sailing vessels. Despite the U.S. Navy’s efforts, the South had managed to export 124,700 bales of cotton in return for meat, shoes, arms, medicines, and all the other necessities of war. A total of 303 steamships had successfully run into Wilmington during the war, more than twice the number that reached Charleston.22 The port had become indispensible to the Confederacy. On February 15, Consul Dudley reported that the blockade-running business had died almost overnight.

  It had taken four years and seven hundred U.S. ships at a cost of $567 million to close every Southern port. During that time, there had been 6,316 attempts and 5,389 runs past the blockade. The average capture rate for the whole war was only 30 percent, but this figure hides the increasing success of the Federal navy over time. In 1861, roughly nine out of ten blockade runners reached their destinations, but by 1865 the number was only one in two. Although criticized as inept at the time, it is now clear that the blockade played a vital role in the Northern war effort. Guns, meat, and shoes could be shipped in on the blockade runners, but not the heavy cargoes such as iron rails, telegraph poles, and train carriages that the South needed in order to move its armies, feed its people, communicate over long distances, and transport supplies. These hammer blows to the South cost only 10 percent of the total expenditure of the war; except for Rose Greenhow and a few others, almost no one was killed; and a mere 132,000 sailors were employed by the Federal navy compared to 2.8 million soldiers in the army.23

  —

  Mrs. Adams, Henry, Mary, and Brooks left London on February 1 to begin a tour of the Continent. The family had given up the house in Ealing in the expectation that Charles Francis Adams would follow them soon, assuming that Seward would grant his request and appoint a successor. They also were hoping for a visit from Charles Francis Jr., who had surprised them by becoming the colonel of his regiment and proposing marriage to Mary Hone Ogden in the same month.

  “Neither Henry nor Brooks Adams had the decency to bid me goodbye,” Moran raged in his diary. “I didn’t expect so much civility from the boy, but I did from Henry.” He was equally incensed with his new assistant secretary, Dennis Alward, for ingratiating himself so easily into Adams’s favor. “Mr. Adams is very civil, but it is the smile of the ogre,” he wrote. The minister had wounded Moran to the quick by inviting Alward to ride in his carriage, and, at a reception given by the Countess of Waldegrave, he had taken “special pains to introduce Mr. Alward to everybody and equal pains not to introduce me at all.”24

  Parliament resumed business on February 7. “I have no reason to anticipate any modification in the policy of the ministry toward us,” wrote Mason to Judah Benjamin. “Still, as we have a large body of earnest friends and sympathizers in both houses, it may be that something will arise during the session of which advantage can be taken.”25 The “something” was the universal consternation over Congress’s repeal of the two treaties with Canada, particularly the Rush-Bagot Treaty, which limited the naval power on the Great Lakes. The hysteria over the issue in Parliament alarmed Adams, who warned Seward on February 9: “The insurgent emissaries and their friends are busy fanning the notion that this is a prelude to war the moment our domestic difficulties are over.” With uncharacteristic force, he charged the secretary of state to remember that the future of Anglo-American relations lay in his hands.26

  Ill.59 Punch depicts Lincoln advising restraint on the move to punish Canada by ending the free trade treaty, February 1865.

  All of Adams’s meetings with Lord Russell since December had been very satisfying. The foreign secretary had taken care to explain the government’s position regarding the Confederate operations in Canada and what steps had been taken to prevent them. They had both agreed that the two countries had survived far worse aggravations. “We had heretofore passed through so many troubles during this war,” Russell told Adams, “so we might safely get over this one.”27 But in late January, Russell’s tone had become anxious; he requested clarification on twelve U.S. steam launches under construction in British dockyards, and whether they were for military or civilian use. Adams realized that the government’s concern was whether they would be used not against the South, but on the Great Lakes against the British. Palmerston was genuinely alarmed. “There is something mysterious about these launches,” he wrote to Russell. “Could they have not got them sooner, more cheaply and as good in their own dockyards? What they are really meant for one cannot say. Their size is quite enough for carrying guns, and it is probable they are destined to cover the landing of troops on our shores in the Lakes.”28

  The British cabinet agreed that Quebec should be fortified as quickly as possible; the navy’s budget was increased, and the Queen was warned on February 12 that the country was preparing for war. Her private secretary, Lieutenant General Charles Grey, argued unsuccessfully for a preemptive strike.36.3 29 Although the Queen deprecated the idea, she shared Grey’s anxiety, acknowledging in her diary “the impossibility of our being able to hold Canada, but we must struggle for it.”30 Lord Lyons was summoned to the palace to give his assessment of the United States’ intentions. Still in the grip of mental exhaustion and in great pain from his neuralgia, he could not help sounding bleak. Lyons “seemed bitterly disgusted with his post at Washington and with the dreadful people he has had to deal with—so insincere and ungentlemanlike,” the Queen recorded after the interview. “He thinks the position a dangerous one, but does not believe in a war [between the United States and] us, at least he hopes it may not come to it.”31

  Lord Russell had been sincere when he told Adams in December that responsibility for preventing an Anglo-American war rested on the two of them finding “a safe issue from this, as we had from so many other troubles that had sprung up during this war.”32 In mid-February, he decided to send a protest to the Confederate government over its blatant abuse of British neutrality. Unlike the previous remonstrance sent in 1864, this one would be sent to Washington with a request that the U.S. government pass the letter on to Richmond. Russell showed the document to Charles Francis Adams. Addressed to Mason, Slidell, and Mann, it complained that Confederate acts in Britain and Canada had showed “a gross disregard of her Majesty’s character as a neutral power, and a desire to involve her Majesty in hostilities.”33

  Adams was astonished by the passion in Russell’s voice; “he read it over slowly and deliberately,” the minister recorded in his diary. During the subsequent conversation, Russell agreed with Adams “that it looked ill” when Canadian and English juries repeatedly acquitted Confederate offenders. “People here now took sides, almost as vehemently on our questions as we did ourselves. It was to be regretted, but there was no help for it,” Russell had argued, which received the blunt riposte from Adams that if Britain had become embroiled in the Prussian-Danish war, “in two months, Prussia would have been fitting out fast steamers in the port of New York, and we should not have been able to stop them. His Lordship candidly enough admitted that the idea had occurred to him.”34 “This conference was one of a most friendly character,” Adams wrote to Seward, “and convinced me that whatever might be the desires of the French emperor, nothing but the grossest mismanagement on our part would effect any change in the established policy of this ministry towards us.” Over the next few days, Adams repeated his warnings with greater vehemence.35


  Adams wondered whether Seward was even bothering to read his reports, since the secretary of state rarely responded to specific points and had ignored Adams’s request to leave London.36

  —

  The news that the U.S. Congress had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, had an even greater effect on British public opinion than the North’s recent military victories. No amount of sneering by Henry Hotze in the Index could diminish the moral grandeur of emancipation. He had been counting on the memoirs of Fitzgerald Ross and of Belle Boyd to create a sensation—and a diversion—but neither book was ready for publication. “I can do no better though I have tried very hard,” Ross explained to his publishers. “Is it the general experience of authors that the preface is the most difficult part of the book to write?”37 Belle Boyd was being helped with her book by the writer George Augustus Sala, who may also have become her lover; if he did, the affair was suddenly complicated by the return of Belle’s husband, Sam Hardinge, who had been released without explanation from Fort Delaware on February 8 and had arrived in London with his health completely broken down.36.4 Belle included Hardinge’s prison diary in her memoirs, but there is no record of what happened to him once he reached England; he simply disappeared and was never mentioned again. She was similarly tight-lipped about the birth date of her daughter, Grace.39

  James Mason was in Paris with Mann and Slidell composing a joint response to Lord Russell’s protest when Duncan Kenner arrived on February 24.40 The commissioners could not believe that the South they remembered would genuinely consider emancipation; to them, slavery was the core of Southern identity.41 Yet Mason had recently received a letter from his eldest son, Lieutenant James M. Mason, Jr., who fully embraced the idea of offering freedom to the slaves in return for their fighting for the Confederacy: “With proper discipline they will fight as well as any mercenaries,” he insisted. His regiment, the 42nd Virginia Infantry, had almost starved while fighting General Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, and it was hardly better off in Petersburg. He doubted any of them could survive another winter of such suffering: “If the North continues her present energy, the long night of ruin, misery and agony will surely come unless indeed, you in Europe, do something for our aid.”42

  Kenner had risked his life to deliver Davis’s proposal of emancipation in return for recognition, and it did not matter to him whether the commissioners were relieved or outraged.43 Slidell realized that they had no choice, and on March 4 he had an interview with the emperor, who repeated his condolences and sent the commissioner on his way. But Mason still could not bring himself to accept the truth; he accompanied Kenner to London and tried to keep him distracted with business arrangements for the Confederate cotton loan. Kenner could not be deflected from his real purpose for long, however, and he insisted that Mason arrange the meeting with Lord Palmerston.

  The Confederate commissioner reluctantly complied, but had one more trick up his sleeve. At the last minute he succeeded in persuading Kenner to step aside and allow him to make the representation, on the grounds that the mission required the skills of an experienced diplomat. Mason met with Lord Palmerston on March 14, 1865. By his own account, he prevaricated for almost twenty minutes before finally asking whether “there was some latent, undisclosed obstacle on the part of Great Britain to recognition.” Palmerston had already divined the real purpose of the conversation and replied without hesitating that slavery had never been the obstacle. Mason was elated until he recounted the conversation to a friend, Lord Donoughmore, who told him that Palmerston had said this precisely to forestall a last-minute appeal from the South: slavery had always been the chief impediment to recognition. The South had squandered her only chance of achieving it by not emancipating the slaves in 1863, when Lee was the undisputed victor on the battlefield. For a brief moment, Mason feared that he had been responsible for ruining the South’s last hope of survival, and wanted to see Palmerston again so he could be much clearer this time, but Donoughmore assured him that “the [opportunity] had gone by now, especially that our fortunes seemed more adverse than ever.”36.5 44

  Hotze informed his editorial staff that “the Confederate funds in Europe were in a state of bankruptcy … and the Index would probably be discontinued in two or three months.” “This greatly disconcerted me,” wrote his deputy John Thompson, “as I am at a loss to know how to live when my salary is cut off.”45 The Confederates in London were further demoralized by the debate in the Commons on the night of the fourteenth about the proposed cost of Canada’s defenses. Benjamin Moran observed the proceedings from the Strangers’ Gallery, expecting to hear the North denounced or the South eulogized. To his surprise, Southern recognition was not even mentioned, and “the marked feature was the tone of respect towards the US, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward. This was in wonderful contrast to the jeers, the sneers and the disrespect common in that House on all occasions when these names were mentioned two and three years ago.… Forster made a speech that amounted to eloquence. I didn’t think he had it in him.”46

  The revolution in British attitudes toward the North and South was also apparent in the Foreign Office’s approach to persons who had run afoul of the U.S. authorities, as Mary Sophia Hill found to her disappointment. “I should like my trial denounced,” she had written to Lord Wharncliffe in February.47 Mary had written in a similar vein to Lord Russell: “I have come to this country for the purpose of carrying my case personally to your Lordship, and to ask for justice to be done me, and though but a humble individual, I feel assured not all is in vain. England’s flag protects her subjects, wherever they may be scattered.”48 But he did not feel inclined “to ask for justice,” and after reviewing all the documents in Mary’s case, neither did Russell’s legal advisers. “Her whole story is, moreover, extremely improbable,” insisted the attorney general on March 18:

  It is not true, as she says, that she was acquitted; she was found guilty, and banished. It is certainly not improbable that she may have been rudely treated by the United States authorities; but the British Consul and Lord Lyons appear to have done all that was in their power to save her from the consequences of her own (to say the least) very imprudent acts. We are clearly of opinion, that there is no ground for your Lordship’s interference in this matter.49

  Robert Burley encountered a similar response to his requests regarding his son Bennet, the Confederate guerrilla in Canada. Frightened by the execution of John Yates Beall, Bennet’s friend and coconspirator, Burley Sr. had enlisted the help of his local MP, Robert Dalglish, as well as MP William Forster, to take up the case with the Foreign Office and the American legation.50 (Fitzgerald Ross became concerned for Colonel Grenfell and asked his publisher to remove all references to his friend from his memoir.) He also made a heartfelt appeal to Lord Russell to save his son. The foreign secretary scribbled on the back of Burley’s letter: “Inform him a copy of his letter will be sent to Washington with instructions to do the best for his son.”51 Translated, it meant the government would not contest the charges.

  Russell was so anxious about the apparent rise in Northern hostility toward England that he asked Lord Lyons to cut short his recuperation and return immediately to Washington. But to his surprise, instead of dutifully agreeing, Lyons resigned from the diplomatic service. “Lord Russell has been extremely kind to me, and so indeed has every one,” Lyons wrote to his former secretary of the legation, William Stuart. Seward’s subsequent letter especially moved him: “I accept your farewell with sincere sorrow,” the secretary of state wrote on March 20. “But I reconcile myself to it because it is a condition of restoration of your health.” Seward promised that Anglo-American relations would prosper after the war, although it saddened him that Lyons would not be around to enjoy the moment when the two countries “are reconciled and become better friends than ever.… But God disposes.” It was bittersweet for Lyons to read these words. “I confess that I do not feel so much relief or even pleasure as might have been expected,” he told
Stuart. “I seriously thought of offering to go back immediately when I heard the decision of the Cabinet.” That decision was the appointment of Sir Frederick Bruce, the former minister to China, as the new head of the Washington legation. It was not Bruce that troubled Lyons but the reality of being replaced. He even missed “my Washington Mission.” In Lyons’s reply to Seward, he reflected on “the friendly and unconstrained terms on which we were” and how much good they had produced. “I am most anxious that my successor’s intercourse with you should be placed at once on the same footing.”52

  “You are about to proceed to Washington at a very critical period,” Russell informed Sir Frederick Bruce on March 24, 1865.53 He warned Bruce on no account to mention the Alabama or allow Seward to speak to him about reparations for the Confederate cruisers built in Britain. If Seward brought up the Confederate cruisers, Bruce was to declare the subject beyond his remit.54 That night, Benjamin Moran encountered Lyons and Bruce together at the French embassy ball. Lyons smiled wryly when Moran asked how he had enjoyed Washington, and he replied with monumental understatement that “he had had a very satisfactory time in the US, although rather hard worked.”55

  Charles Francis Adams was amused by the government’s “singular panic in regard to what will be done by us, after restoration [of the Union]. A week or two since you could not drive the notion out of their heads that we were not about to pounce at once upon Canada.”56 But Adams took the greater satisfaction from seeing the humiliation of his former adversaries:

  One thing seems for the present to be settled. That is, that no hope is left for any aid to the rebel cause. England will initiate nothing to help them in their critical moment.… The voluminous intrigues of the rebel emissaries have been completely baffled, their sanguine anticipations utterly disappointed. They have spent floods of money in directing the press, in securing aid from adventurers of all sorts, and in enlisting the services of ship and cannon builders with all their immense and powerful following, and it has been all in vain. So far as any efforts of theirs are concerned, we might enter Richmond tomorrow. This act of the drama is over.57