A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War
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In his own way, Benjamin Moran also reached the summit of his capabilities—if not his ambitions—when in 1876, after twenty-three years at the U.S. legation in London, he was sent to run the legation in Lisbon in 1876, where he showed that he was not without talentz as a diplomat. That year, The New York Times described him as “one of the most capable and experienced diplomats in the service of the United States.”16 He ruled over his little kingdom for six years, gleefully bullying his staff, until his retirement in 1882, when he returned to England and passed the last four years of his life in Braintree, Essex. At his death, the humble printer’s son from Chester, Pennsylvania, was praised by The Times as the “ablest and most honest” representative the United States had ever sent to Great Britain.17
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On July 27, 1866, Cyrus Field stood on the deck of the Great Eastern watching through his binoculars as engineers hauled the transatlantic cable ashore at Heart’s Content, Newfoundland. Finally, after five attempts in nine years, a cable sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of the Atlantic was laid along the 1,800-mile undersea shelf between Ireland and Canada. The cable’s first message, sent through on the twenty-eighth, announced the signing of the armistice between Prussia and Austria. The Americans had been as surprised as the rest of Europe by the speed and efficiency with which Prussia had defeated Austria in the Seven Weeks’ War. The Battle of Sadowa on July 3 had involved nearly half a million soldiers, the largest concentration of troops to date in either Europe or America. The Prussian military observers in the United States during the Civil War had been impressed by how rapidly armies and artillery could be transported by railroad, and during the past year the Prussian war minister had created a Field Railway Section modeled on the Union Construction Corps. The Prussians had also benefited from the close attention they had paid to Civil War developments in artillery and communications.18
The second message to reach Newfoundland was from Queen Victoria to President Andrew Johnson, congratulating him “on the successful completion of an undertaking which she hopes may serve as an additional bond of Union between the United States and England.” At the moment it was just a hope: Austria’s recent defeat had added another layer of complexity to a relationship that was already tense as a result of the unresolved issues left by the Civil War. Prussia’s emergence as the dominant military nation among her neighbors was redrawing of the balance of power in Europe. France was now menaced by a credible threat, and the German Confederation no longer answered to Vienna but to Berlin. It was too soon to tell how these changes would affect Britain and America, but British politicians were worried that it would be the same old story of England facing two threats at once. “It is the unfriendly state of our relations with America that to a great extent paralyses our action in Europe,” Russell’s replacement as foreign secretary, Lord Clarendon, would shortly admit. “There is not the smallest doubt that if we were engaged in a Continental quarrel we should immediately find ourselves at war with the United States.”19
During a Commons debate on March 13, 1865, Prime Minister Lord Palmerston had tried to brush away the many crises of the past four years by putting them down to a family quarrel: “The North wished us to declare on their side and the South on theirs, and we wished to maintain a perfect neutrality.” But this simplification of the arguments between the two countries carried no weight outside the Commons, and little even there. According to The Times and a majority of the British public, both sides had behaved badly. The United States had never supported Britain in any war, including the Crimean, and yet neither the North nor the South had seen the contradiction in demanding British aid once the situation was reversed. Both had unscrupulously stooped to threats and blackmail in their attempts to gain support, the South using cotton, the North using Canada. Both were guilty in their mistreatment of Negroes, both had shipped arms from England, and both had benefited from British volunteers. In America, the perception that Lord Russell had behaved like a villain and that the British ruling classes had schemed with the Confederacy to overthrow the Union in the hope of destroying democracy was so pervasive that the historian George Bancroft digressed upon it during his eulogy on Lincoln before Congress on February 12, 1866.20 Like most Americans, he shared the belief that the declaration of neutrality had been nothing more than an underhanded attempt at recognizing the independence of the South; that the British government had connived with the Confederates to send out the commerce raiders; and that the blockade runners had been allowed to operate with impunity because they enabled the South to keep fighting long after its own supplies were exhausted.
Senator Charles Sumner played a discreditable part in promulgating the myth that Britain had acted maliciously and illegally by awarding belligerent status to the South. His friends in England, especially the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, felt betrayed by his attacks. “You know how heartily my Duke has been with you all through,” the duchess objected on July 4, 1865. “I protest again against your supposing it a proof of Lord Russell’s ill-will.… As to the haste, I suppose there would have been less of it, if the consequence attached to it by you had been foreseen.”21 Lord Russell was so incensed by Sumner’s slurs on his motives and intentions toward the North that he rejected Charles Francis Adams’s proposal in the summer of 1865 for an international arbitrator to consider American claims against Britain, complaining that his successes against the Confederates seemed to count for nothing, whereas his failures—none of which he believed were his fault—counted for everything. Palmerston’s death on October 18, which elevated Russell to the prime ministership once again, removed the only person who would have had weight and influence to show Russell that there could be another approach to the claims.
William Henry Seward never accused Britain of having collaborated with the South. But he steadfastly maintained that relations could not be cordial until reparations had been paid for the Alabama’s depredations and an apology given for Britain having bestowed belligerent status on the South. For most of 1865, the secretary of state was content to allow Charles Francis Adams a free rein in his dealings with Lord Russell—as long as these points were not conceded. Seward did not have the strength to mount the kind of blustering campaign that had marked his first year in office. Physically, he would never return to his old self. His right arm was useless and speaking was difficult; “few of his old friends could meet him without a shock,” wrote his son. However, it was the family tragedy following Powell’s attack that inflicted the greatest damage on Seward. His sons Fred and Augustus slowly recovered from their wounds, but Frances, Seward’s wife, went into a rapid decline and died on June 21, less than three months after the assassination attempt. Their relationship, although complicated, had not been unloving, and her loss severed Seward from what he had always considered to be the better part of himself. Almost immediately after Frances’s death, it became clear that his daughter Fanny’s health had also been affected, and she began to succumb to the tuberculosis that would kill her the following year.
Seward’s troubles increased in 1866 as he struggled to find his footing in President Johnson’s administration.22 Having been partly responsible for the Tennessee pro-war Democrat’s appointment as Lincoln’s vice president, Seward wrongly assumed that Johnson would follow his lead, or at least listen to his advice. Instead, Johnson stubbornly pursued his own line, which leaned decidedly toward maintaining the wretched status of the black population in the South. Johnson’s attempts to obstruct Southern Reconstruction lost him the support of the Republicans. The relationship between the White House and Congress deteriorated so quickly that in March 1866, Johnson vetoed the new Civil Rights Bill, which, among other guarantees, awarded full U.S. citizenship to American blacks. Congress responded by overturning his veto. Seward tried to serve Johnson as faithfully as he had served Lincoln, but even the British minister, Sir Frederick Bruce, noticed the lack of rapport between them and wondered whether the president regarded Seward as more of an obstruction than a help.
Seward’s machinations were upset by a series of raids between May 31 and June 7 across the U.S.-Canada border. This time the guerrillas were not a handful of Confederates but Fenians—Irish Americans committed to Irish independence—who intended to conquer or hold Canada hostage until Britain proclaimed Ireland a free state. The existence and aims of the fifty-thousand-strong Fenian Brotherhood (many of whom were U.S. Army veterans) had never been a secret. The previous autumn, its leaders had approached Seward and Johnson asking to know how the United States would react to the establishment of an Irish republic on Canadian soil, and they had received the ambiguous answer that the government would “acknowledge accomplished facts.” The Fenians had read into this the notion that the United States would send troops north in support once the initial invasion had taken place. The United States did end up sending troops, but it was to arrest rather than to help the Fenians.
Seward knew that the government’s suppression of the Fenian raids would not play well in Washington or across many parts of the country. But a steep rise in Anglophobia aided his plan to force Britain to give up Canada. On July 26, 1866, two days before the completion of the transatlantic cable, the House of Representatives voted unanimously to remove restrictions on the building or selling of warships to foreign nations. It was a deliberate warning to the British government to be prepared in any future conflict for hundreds of Alabama-style raiders, built in U.S. dockyards and manned by U.S. crewmen.
Early in 1867, Seward’s long-held desire to acquire Canada appeared to be on the verge of fulfillment after the Russians offered to sell “Russian America” (Alaska) to the United States. With remarkably little haggling, he brought down the asking price to $7.2 million and signed the treaty of sale with the Russian minister on March 30. “I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely the thirty-six States, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American Union,” Seward declared to an audience in Massachusetts. But to his surprise, the public disagreed and he was harshly criticized in the press for wasting millions on a distant “icebox.” Nor did the prospect of having a U.S. border to the north and south of them encourage the Canadians to seek their absorption within “the magic circle.” On July 1, 1867, British North America became the Dominion of Canada, initially a confederation of four provinces—Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia—under a single Canadian parliament.24 It looked probable that the other provinces, including British Columbia, would soon seek to join Canada rather than the Union.
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The existence of a united, largely self-governing Canada allowed the new British government led by the Tory prime minister Lord Derby (Lord Russell having lost the general election in 1866) to breathe a little easier. Derby’s foreign secretary, Lord Stanley, futilely hoped that Seward would realize that his plan to extract territory in exchange for dropping the Alabama claims had been compromised and would finally agree to begin negotiations. Stanley, Charles Francis Adams had noted in his diary in the spring of 1867, had little reason to be defensive about Britain’s actions during the war and was more willing than Russell to discuss the two countries’ differences. But no British politician was prepared to “confess a wrong and sell Canada as the release from punishment,” nor was the Derby government any more prepared than its predecessor to revisit the question of belligerent rights.25 Seward’s response was uncompromising: “I feel quite certain that the balance of faults has been on the side of Great Britain,” he told Adams on May 2, 1867, in a dispatch for communication to Lord Stanley. “Thus the whole controversy between the two states must remain open indefinitely.”26
The British hoped that Seward was bluffing or blustering, as so often in the past, but his recent dealings with France suggested that he was not. Louis-Napoleon had secretly asked Seward at the end of 1865 whether the United States would recognize the validity of Emperor Maximilian’s rule in Mexico in exchange for a complete withdrawal of the French army. Seward had not only turned down the offer, but allowed General Grant to send thirty thousand U.S. troops under General Philip Sheridan to the Rio Grande, where they provided arms and training to the Juárez rebels. Prussia’s victory over Austria in 1866 convinced Emperor Napoleon that Mexico was a distraction compared to the threat on his doorstep posed by German militarization. He informed Maximilian that the French army would remain in Mexico only until March 1867, when he would have to choose between maintaining his throne unaided and abdicating. Napoleon urged him not to be proud and to abdicate, but Maximilian would not hear of leaving and paid for his misplaced idealism with his life. His rule collapsed within weeks of the French leaving Mexico, and despite a heroic rescue attempt by Prince Felix Salm-Salm, a former Prussian volunteer in the Federal army and colonel of the 68th New York Infantry, Maximilian was captured and executed by the victorious Benito Juárez on June 19, 1867.epl.3
Canada was not Mexico, and the Fenians in the United States were never thought to be as dangerous as the Juaristas. The British desire to resolve the Alabama claims controversy came more from a growing sense that bygones should be bygones. “Surely it is time to forget ancient differences,” declared the Duke of Argyll at a public breakfast in honor of the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison on June 29, 1867, just ten days after Maximilian’s death. “This country desires to maintain with the American people not merely relations of amity and peace; it desires to have their friendship and affection.… I think we ought to feel, every one of us, that in going to America we are going only to a second home.”27 The breakfast was a final gathering of the old guard of pro-Northern supporters and included not just MPs and journalists but also many veteran black abolition campaigners such as Sarah Parker Remond and the Reverend John Sella Martin. Lord Russell was initially not invited, an omission that hurt him deeply. Too embarrassed to explain that Garrison subscribed to the American view that Russell had supported the South during the war, the organizers “found” his invitation. Russell then took advantage of the occasion to offer a public apology for his failure to understand why Lincoln did not simply abolish slavery in 1861:
Distance and want of knowledge of the circumstances of America made me fall into error in that respect. I was afterwards convinced by … Mr. Adams … that I had not rendered due justice to President Lincoln, who was the friend of freedom, and not only the friend, but ultimately the martyr of freedom. (Cheers.) I now, therefore, acknowledge that … I did not do justice to the efforts made by the United States, but I am now persuaded that President Lincoln did all that it was possible to do, and that we are bound to give our tribute of admiration to the excellent policy which the President and his Government pursued.28
Lord Russell’s attempts to make amends impressed Charles Francis Adams and John Bright but not Seward, whose continued intransigence puzzled British friends of the North.29 Shortly before Christmas, however, Seward fatally undermined Adams’s confidence in his judgment by proposing that instead of Canada, Britain could relinquish the Bahamas in exchange for settling the Alabama claims. Now convinced that personal ambition rather than principle was the main force dri
ving Seward’s foreign policy, Adams informed him that he was resigning effective April 1, 1868.
Once it became known that Charles Francis Adams was retiring after seven years in London, the American minister’s stiffness and unsociability was no longer deplored but admired as proof of his integrity and demonstrable fairness toward England.30 By April 1868 there had been four prime ministers in three years: Palmerston, Russell, Derby, and Benjamin Disraeli; Adams’s longevity at the legation during a period of such rapid political transition changed his public persona from that of a Yankee crank to a pillar of the diplomatic community. Ever nervous about making speeches, he turned down the numerous offers to hold a banquet in his honor, but that did not mean he was insensible to the plaudits that came his way. Lord Russell’s speech in the House of Lords on March 27, 1868, gave Adams the most satisfaction of all. “Here I may say I cannot mention that gentleman’s name without expressing my high esteem and respect for him,” declared Russell. “He did everything which honour and good faith and moderation could prescribe.”31
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Seward was becoming conscious of his legacy; he had served as secretary of state for almost a decade, but the past three years under Johnson had been a crushing disappointment. Seward’s political reputation had been tarnished by his ill-judged attempts to play the conciliator between Johnson and his critics. In May 1868, Johnson survived an attempt by the Senate to remove him by impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but only by one vote. “I have always felt that Providence dealt hardly with me in not letting me die with Mr. Lincoln,” Seward remarked bitterly. “My work was done, and I think I deserved some of the reward of dying there.”32 Seward was frequently accused of being drunk in public during the latter half of Johnson’s presidency: “He no longer seemed to care,” wrote Henry Adams, who visited Washington in 1868; “he asked for nothing, gave nothing, and invited no support; he talked little of himself or of others, and waited only for his discharge.”33 This was an exaggeration—Seward cared a great deal—but he had lost the facility of keeping his friends loyal and his enemies afraid. “His trouble,” sneered a critic, “is not that the party to which he once belonged is without a leader, but that he wanders about, like a ghost—a leader without a party.”34