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

by Amanda Foreman

  General Grant’s election to the presidency in November 1868 opened a fresh path of negotiations for both countries; for Seward it meant that he had only four months left in office to engineer one final diplomatic triumph. But his attempt to repair Anglo-American relations ended in failure. The increasingly anti-British tone in the capital arising from the prolongation of the Alabama claims dispute required the kind of political skills that the outgoing secretary of state had long ceased to possess. The Senate rejected his proposed “Johnson-Clarendon Treaty,” which would have resolved the majority of America’s disputes with Britain, by 44 votes to 1. The triumphant architect of Seward’s humiliation in the Senate was his old rival Charles Sumner.

  On April 13, 1869, Sumner gave an address to the Senate in which he laid the entire cost of the war after Gettysburg in 1863 at Britain’s feet. He estimated the financial damages caused by the Confederate commerce raiders to be $15 million, adding a further $2 billion for the indirect damages caused by Britain’s “un-neutral neutrality.” As a proportion of Britain’s GDP, the same figures today would be $155 million for the commerce raiders and $265 billion for the indirect costs.35 Sumner also demanded an unreserved admission of guilt and an apology from Britain, followed by a new treaty to arrange for the reparations. The speech rescued Sumner’s flagging political career. It was one of the only instances in his life in which he correctly judged the prevailing public opinion and successfully capitalized on it to increase his power in Washington. A few weeks later, Sumner gave another speech in which he spoke of Britain’s complete withdrawal from the Americas. Until that moment, Sumner’s influence with the new Grant administration had looked tenuous, but now he had national popularity as well as his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to reinforce his bargaining power with the president.

  Sumner was aided by the fact that Grant’s attitude toward England was cool, bordering on hostile, and that both the new president and his secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, were fascinated by the possibility of absorbing Canada into the United States.epl.4 But Sumner’s resurgence in Washington did not last long. He overplayed his hand as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee by making it abundantly clear that the administration could not make the smallest decision on foreign policy without his assent.

  It was Sumner’s active opposition to Grant’s plan to purchase Santo Domingo during the first half of 1870 that sealed his downfall. It was too great a challenge to the administration’s authority to be allowed to go unpunished. Hamilton Fish’s determination to break free of Sumner’s control removed the impasse between Britain and America over the Alabama claims. The timing could not have been better: Gladstone’s foreign secretary in 1870, Lord Granville, was as anxious to find common ground with the U.S. secretary of state as Fish was with him.

  The sudden political will in Britain and America to end the differences between them produced one of the most remarkable and successful international conventions of the nineteenth century. “We are taking several bites out of that big cherry,” Granville wrote triumphantly to John Bright in October 1870, “reconciliation with the States.”37 Two teams, each consisting of five commissioners, met in Washington on February 24, 1871. By all accounts, the commissioners got on remarkably well; the British were surprised to discover that their American counterparts were “a very gentlemanly good set of fellows socially” and that Hamilton Fish was “quite English in manner and appearance.”38 In only nine weeks, the two teams negotiated the Treaty of Washington, which settled most disputes, potential and historical, for the next twenty years. Fish was satisfied by the British apology over the Alabama’s escape, and in return he agreed to close any legal loopholes that would allow U.S.-made Alabamas to prey on British merchant ships in time of war. He also used Sumner’s inevitable objections to the negotiations, since America’s right to Canada was not part of the discussion, to engineer the latter’s removal as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

  The Treaty of Washington established two tribunals, one to arbitrate the claims of private individuals against the United States for actions committed during the Civil War, the other to rule on the Alabama claims. At the first, Mary Sophia Hill finally had her say in court. In fact, she said far too much, and her claim was dismissed for indecorous language. Undaunted, she appealed the decision: “I leave my case in your honorable hands, feeling that justice, even at this late hour, will be done me, and the insult to our flag; through me, be canceled, as England always has and always will protect the most humble of her subjects. As I said before, my health is ruined, so I do not consider the damage of two thousand pounds excessive.”39 This time, the court decided that £2,000 was excessive but otherwise found in her favor, and on January 5, 1872, awarded her $1,560 in damages.

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  At long last, the Alabama claims tribunal met in Geneva in December 1871. Charles Francis Adams was called out of retirement to represent the United States on the panel of five international judges who were to decide on the case. Adams had not wanted the appointment, and when he met his fellow judges he thought his worst fears confirmed. The British representative, Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn, had so short a temper that he seemed unbalanced, while the three other judges—a Swiss, a Brazilian, and an Italian—had varying degrees of familiarity with the English language. America and Britain each sent two legal teams to argue their respective sides. The proceedings started calmly enough, until the British team discovered in early January 1872 that Sumner’s “indirect claims” for $2 billion—at 7 percent interest—had been included by the Americans for arbitration. The British demanded that the claims be excluded, and the Americans responded with equal vehemence that they stay and be decided upon by the judges. There was outrage in Britain when the news became known. Prime Minister William Gladstone declared in the House of Commons on February 7 that the government would be “insane to accede to demands which no nation with a spark of honour or spirit left could submit to even at the point of death.”

  President Grant could not have dropped the indirect claims, even if he wanted to, without jeopardizing his reelection hopes in November. Yet the idea that the Alabama and her sister ships, the Florida, Georgia, and Shenandoah, were responsible for prolonging the war by two years, as Sumner claimed, was patently ludicrous. The proceeding stalled until Charles Francis Adams took it upon himself to prevent the tribunal from collapsing. He knew that neither government could be seen to back down, and therefore he persuaded the other judges on the panel to exclude the $2 billion claim from consideration.

  Three months later, on September 14, 1872, the tribunal ruled that Britain owed $15.5 million, including interest, for the damage caused by the Confederate cruisers. Ironically, the sum was $500,000 more than the amount first proposed by Charles Sumner in 1869.epl.5 The American press complained that it was too little, the British press that it was too much, but there was a shared sense of pride in both countries that a high moral precedent had been set in allowing disputes to be resolved in an international court rather than on the battlefield.40 Adams is usually praised on the unfounded assertion that he prevented Britain from supporting the South, whereas his real triumph—when he transcended his own limitations and acted with visionary patriotism—was his brave decision to intervene at the Alabama tribunal in June 1872.

  Before Adams returned home, he briefly visited England in order to say one last farewell to Lord Russell, and to reassure him that his reputation had not been sullied by Britain’s expression of regret for the escape of the Alabama or by the payment of the claims. This act of generosity toward Russell caused Adams to arrive back in the United States too late to say goodbye to Seward, who died on October 10. The former secretary of state’s death received respectful attention, but not the national mourning that he deserved considering his service to the country. Seward was too complex and contradictory a person to be easily categorized; he was not, as is now sometimes claimed, one of the greatest secretaries of state in U.S. hist
ory; his chronic and sometimes dangerous manipulation of foreign relations to boost his domestic agenda precludes him from that title. But after a disastrous beginning at the State Department, Seward became essential to the preservation of peace between America and Britain. His restraint of the forces that could have destroyed the fragile neutrality of the British government remains one of his outstanding achievements.

  Two months after the ruling in Geneva, Sergeant Gilbert H. Bates, formerly of the 1st Wisconsin Heavy Artillery Regiment, traveled to Britain on a personal goodwill mission. Starting in Scotland on November 6, 1872, Bates walked the length of the country, bearing aloft the Stars and Stripes, to prove to Americans that the British bore no ill will toward the United States. He had performed a similar feat in 1868, marching through the South from Vicksburg to Washington. At Bolton, northwest of Manchester, Bates was accosted by a man who declared that he, too, was a Federal veteran and wished to carry the flag through the town; it was James Pendlebury. Surprised, Bates handed him the flag and Pendlebury was allowed to have his moment of glory. Bates received a hero’s welcome when he reached London on November 30. Addressing an appreciative crowd in front of the Guildhall in the City, he declared:

  It has been asserted by the press that this is a Yankee test of English feeling towards the States, but as far as I am concerned, it is no test. It is only a proof that I was right … when I said the English people respected America.… I have met with nothing but the kindest treatment. I have not had even a cross look from any one. My own countrymen on the other side of the Atlantic have been watching the progress of the tour of my flag with the greatest interest, and therefore I am gratified that the English people have proved that I was right.41

  The resolution of the Alabama claims brought the Civil War chapter of British-American history to a close. The prewar resentment between the two countries had finally played itself out and a new, less hysterical and suspicious relationship was forming. Thirteen years later, in 1885, Ulysses S. Grant could write about the two countries in his memoirs with hope instead of rancor. “England’s course towards the United States during the rebellion exasperated the people of this country very much against the mother country,” he wrote.

  I regretted it. England and the United States are natural allies, and should be the best of friends. They speak one language, and are related by blood and other ties. We together, or even either separately, are better qualified than any other people to establish commerce between all the nationalities of the world.42

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  Almost immediately after the war, the British writer William Michael Rossetti (the brother of the artist Dante Gabriel) tried to explain its impact on English public opinion in an essay for the American Atlantic Monthly. Rossetti claimed never to have seen his compatriots so animated “in connection with any other non-English occurrences”: the entire country had divided over the merits of the Civil War, and whether abolition, democracy, the Union, or the right to self-determination had been the real principle at stake. Expressions such as “ ‘I am a Northerner,’ and ‘I am a Southerner’ ” were “as common on Englishmen’s lips as ‘I am a Liberal’ or ‘a Conservative.’ ”43 It has been the purpose of this book to restore to view the Anglo-American world that Rossetti described.

  In 1925, the U.S. consulate in London collected information on British Civil War veterans for the Federal Pensions Bureau for the last time. By then, the largest survivors’ organization in the country, the American Civil War Veterans (London Branch), had dwindled from 140 members to a mere 24 ex-soldiers and 21 widows. But already in histories of the war it was as though the British volunteers in the Union and Confederate armies had never existed.44

  This is not to say that Britain was rubbed out of the Civil War, far from it: 1925 was also the year that the first major study of Anglo-American relations during the war was published, E. D. Adams’s Great Britain and the American Civil War. After Adams came a trickle and then a flood of books on the subject as the role of international diplomacy gained ever greater prominence in the historiography of the Civil War. “No battle,” observed Allan Nevins, author of the eight-volume series Ordeal of the Union, in 1959, “not Gettysburg, not the Wilderness, was more important than the contest waged in the diplomatic arena and the forum of public opinion.” The seemingly inexhaustible scholarly interest in these two areas continues to endorse the truth of Nevins’s insight. But studies of movements, forces, factors, and political calculations ultimately have to be anchored by individual experience. A World on Fire has been an attempt to balance the vast body of work on Anglo-American history in the 1860s with the equally vast material left behind by witnesses and participants in the war—to depict the world as it was seen by Britons in America, and Americans in Britain, during a defining moment not just in U.S. history but in the relations between the two countries.45

  The histories of the British participants in what is and always will be an American story bring the sharper focus that often comes with distance. Though united by language and a shared heritage, the Britons in America were nevertheless strangers who happened to find themselves, for a variety of reasons, in the midst of great events. Their simultaneous involvement and detachment (even when their observations turned out to be misleading or mistaken) provide a special perspective on the war, one that by definition was not possible for native-born Americans.46 There were also many instances when the intimate access granted to British observers meant they were the only independent witnesses to record a particular event—such as William Howard Russell on President Lincoln’s first White House dinner, or Frank Vizetelly on the flight of Jefferson Davis after the fall of Richmond. For this reason their accounts remain not only fascinating but invaluable relics of the Civil War.

  Rossetti concluded his essay about Britain and the American Civil War with an apology that speaks for all those authors who venture into this complex history: “For anything I have said which may possibly sound egotistic or intrusive—still more for anything erroneous or unfair in my statements or point of view—I must commit myself to the candid construction of my reader, be he [or she] American or English.”47

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  epl.1 The poet Algernon Swinburne also became friends with Feilden. “I defy you not to like him if you knew him,” Swinburne wrote to a friend in 1867. “[He is] one of the nicest fellows alive, and open as such men should be, to admiration of all fallen causes and exiled leaders. I am not saying they are equal in worth—heaven forbid—only I must say that failure is irresistibly attractive, admitting as I do the heroism of the North.”

  epl.2 The Shenandoah had been at sea for a year when Captain Waddell finally brought her back to England, six months after the war’s end. During that time the cruiser had captured thirty-eight ships, the majority of them Northern whalers, and taken more than a thousand prisoners. Waddell had believed that the South would continue to fight after Lee’s surrender. It was the capture of President Davis—which he learned from the British bark Barracouta on August 2, 1865—that persuaded him to surrender, too.

  epl.3 As a veteran of the Federal army, Prince Salm-Salm was almost unique among the 2,500 Americans who immigrated to Mexico after the Civil War. The exodus of ex-Confederates was orchestrated by Matthew Fontaine Maury, who offered his services to Emperor Maximilian in June 1865 and was appointed imperial commissioner of immigration. Most settled near Cordoba in a specially designated area known as the Carlotta Colony, where they eked out a miserable existence for a couple of years before returning to the South. Another nine thousand Southerners moved to Brazil, where slavery remained legal, and about a thousand went to British Honduras, now Belize. The community at Forest Home in Punta Gorda died out, and its cemetery is now a tourist attraction.

  epl.4 In late March 1865, President Lincoln had discussed the Trent affair with General Grant, making it clear that Britain deserved to be punished: “We gave due consideration to the case, but at that critical period of the war it was soon decided to deliver up the pr
isoners. It was a pretty bitter pill to swallow, but I contented myself with believing that England’s triumph in the matter would be short-lived, and that after ending our war successfully we would be so powerful that we could call her to account for all the embarrassments she had inflicted upon us.”36

  epl.5 Britain actually paid out $8,070,181, since the United States agreed to give Canada $5.5 million for the right to fish in its waters and also paid $1,929,812 in compensation as a result of rulings at the mixed commission on British and American claims.

  1. Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons, 2nd Lord Lyons (1817–87). Lyons arrived at the British legation in the spring of 1859 and stayed until December 1864, when he returned to England, having worked himself to exhaustion.

  2. The British legation at Rush House, 1710 H Street, Washington.