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

by Amanda Foreman

  9. 863,409 British and 1,611,304 Irish, PRO FO 115/394, f. 216. Two-thirds of these “British” expatriates were actually Irish immigrants, who harbored a visceral hatred toward the mother country. Nevertheless, they enjoyed the same protection by the British minister as the 98 Scots in Dakota, and the 23,848 Englishmen in Massachusetts. The Foreign Office had recognized that the legation’s staff of five was too small and the sixth attaché was on his way. Although the British government promulgated the official line of “once a Briton, always a Briton,” in practice, Lyons was not expected to take up the cases of naturalized British subjects.

  10. H. C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States (New York, 1955), p. 361. In 1819, the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, warned his new British minister, “The jealousies as yet imperfectly allayed inclines the Government of the United States to maintain … [to us] a tone of greater harshness than towards any other Government whatever. The American people are more easily excited against us and more disposed to strengthen the hands of their Ministers against us than against any other State.”

  11. George Washburn Smalley, Anglo-American Memories (New York, 1912), p. 174.

  12. Lord Newton (ed.), Lord Lyons: A Record of British Diplomacy, 2 vols. (London, 1914), vol. 2, p. 214.

  13. John Evan (pseudonym of Evan John Simpson), Atlantic Impact (London, 1952), p. 210. This oft-repeated description of Lyons may possibly be apocryphal but the spirit of the story remains true.

  14. The admiral became his son’s champion: “Had it not been for your visit to England at the critical moment,” he wrote to his father from his new post in Florence, “I should now have been no more than simple Secretary of Legation.” Newton (ed.), Lord Lyons, vol. 1, p. 7.

  15. Scott Thomas Cairns, “Lord Lyons and Anglo-American Diplomacy During the American Civil War,” Ph.D. thesis, London School of Economics, 2004, p. 58.

  16. As quoted in Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974, 1980), vol. 1, p. 44.

  17. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 1, pp. 504–5, February 8, 1859.

  18. Newton (ed.), Lord Lyons, vol. 1, p. 14, Lord Lyons to Lord Malmesbury, May 29, 1859.

  19. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London, 1842; Penguin Classics, 2000), p. 129.

  20. Edward Dicey, Spectator of America, ed. Herbert Mitgang (Athens, Ga., 1971), p. 62.

  21. Ibid., p. 65.

  22. Michael Burlingame (ed.), Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864 (Carbondale, Ill., 1998), p. 50.

  23. William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Eugene H. Berwanger (New York, 1988), p. 41, March 26, 1861.

  24. Clay-Copton and Sterling, A Belle of the Fifties, p. 139.

  25. Mrs. Clay recalled that Lyons said, “Ah, Madam! do you remember what Uncle Toby said to his nephew when he informed him of his intended marriage?” She, presumably not having read Tristram Shandy, had no idea what was coming next. “Then, without waiting for my assent, he added, ‘Alas! alas! quoth my Uncle Toby, you will never sleep slantindicularly in your bed [any] more!’ ” Ibid.

  26. Hudson Strode (ed.), Private Letters of Jefferson Davis (New York, 1966), p. 105, Varina Davis to Jefferson Davis, April 10, 1859.

  27. Wilbur Devereux Jones, The American Problem in British Diplomacy, 1841–1861 (London, 1974), p. 172.

  28. Barnes and Barnes (eds.), Private and Confidential, p. 214, Lyons to Lord Malmesbury, June 21, 1859.

  29. Newton (ed.), Lord Lyons, vol. 1, p. 14, Lord Lyons to Lord Malmesbury, May 30, 1859.

  30. James O’Donald Mays, Mr. Hawthorne Goes to England (Ringwood, 1983), pp. 156–58.

  PART I: COTTON IS KING

  Chapter 1: The Uneasy Cousins

  1. Wilbur Devereux Jones, The American Problem in British Diplomacy, 1841–1861 (London, 1974), p. 169, Lord Derby to Lord Malmesbury, October 11, 1858.

  2. Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 1830–1902 (Oxford, 1970), p. 334, Lord Palmerston to Lord Clarendon, December 31, 1857.

  3. In 1807, HMS Leopard was prowling off the coast of Virginia when it came across USS Chesapeake. The Leopard fired on the Chesapeake after the vessel refused to heave to, killing three American sailors and wounding a further eighteen. Only one deserter was found.

  4. Paul Ford Leicester (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 1807–1815, vol. 9 (London, 1898), p. 366, Jefferson to William Duane, August 4, 1812.

  5. Thomas Low Nichols, Forty Years of American Life, 2 vols. (London, 1864), vol. 1, p. 409.

  6. Jasper Ridley, Palmerston (New York, 1971), pp. 270–74, Palmerston to Russell, January 19, 1841.

  7. Evelyn Ashley, The Life and Correspondence of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, 2 vols. (London, 1879), vol. 1, p. 408, Palmerston to H. S. Fox, February 9, 1841.

  8. The raid had taken place in 1837. The USS Caroline was carrying supplies to pro-American Canadian insurgents. Tired of troublemakers fostering rebellion south of the border, a group of armed men seized the Caroline, killing an American sailor in the process, and sent it over Niagara Falls. While hogging his barstool, McLeod boasted that he was the killer. In truth, he was a pathetic fantasist.

  9. James Chambers, Palmerston, the People’s Darling (London, 2004), p. 199.

  10. Ridley, Palmerston, p. 273.

  11. The border dispute over New Brunswick and Maine was settled by British minister Lord Ashburton and U.S. secretary of state Daniel Webster.

  12. H. C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States (New York, 1955), p. 136.

  13. Ibid., p. 123.

  14. Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers (Champaign, Ill., 1972), p. 351.

  15. Annie Heloise Abel and Frank J. Klingberg (eds.), A Sidelight on Anglo-American Relations, 1839–1858 (Lancaster, Pa., 1927), p. 40.

  16. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897 (New York, 1898), pp. 71–92.

  17. Jean Fagan Yellin, “Harriet Jacobs and the Transatlantic Movement,” in Sisterhood and Slavery: Transatlantic Antislavery and Women’s Rights: Proceedings of the Third Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University (Yale, 2001), p. 7.

  18. Allen, Great Britain and the United States, p. 198.

  19. William Brock, “The Image of England and American Nationalism,” Journal of American Studies, 5 (Dec. 1971). Edward Everett, speech at Bristol, 1842, p. 227.

  20. Nichols, Forty Years of American Life, vol. 1, p. 398.

  21. Allen, Great Britain and the United States, p.147, quoting the Edinburgh Review, 1820.

  22. It was often pointed out that Louisiana would still belong to the French if Barings Bank in London had not financed the purchase, selling more than $9 million worth of the $11 million total of bonds sold.

  23. Charles Dickens to Macready, March 22, 1842, quoted in Walter Allen, Transatlantic Crossing: American Visitors to Britain and British Visitors to America in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1971), p. 236.

  24. What Seward actually believed in has been the subject of intense historical debate. In a speech in 1853 he declared it was his aim that the republic “shall greet the sun when he touches the tropics, and when he sends his gleaming rays towards the polar circle, and shall include even distant islands in either ocean.” But Ernest Paolino argues that by 1857 Seward had abandoned the idea of annexing Canada by force. For one thing, a trip to Labrador convinced him that the Canadians would never accept it. Nevertheless, he liked to talk as though he believed it was just a matter of time, if only to annoy the British. In 1860 he made a speech congratulating the Canadians for “building states to be hereafter admitted into the American union.” Ernest N. Paolino, The Foundations of the American Empire (New York, 1973), p. 8.

  25. G. H. Warren, Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas (Boston, 1981), p. 56.

  26. H
enry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (repr., Boston, 1973), p. 102.

  27. David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1961), pp. 295–96.

  28. Letters of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, ed. Sir G. F. Lewis (London, 1870), pp. 390–92, Lewis to the Hon. Edward Twisleton, January 21, 1861.

  29. Illustrated London News, August 29, no. 814 (Aug. 1856), pp. 121–22. The Duchess of Sutherland made it a point of duty to support black performers who came to England. In 1853, for example, she invited Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, known as “the Black Swan,” to perform a concert at Stafford House in the presence of Queen Victoria. The event was so celebrated that it was turned into a song: “The Other Side of Jordan” (1853).

  30. George Douglas, Eighth Duke of Argyll (1823–1900): Autobiography and Memoirs, ed. the Dowager Duchess of Argyll, 2 vols. (London, 1906), vol. 1, p. 412.

  Chapter 2: On the Best of Terms

  1. Kathleen Burk, Morgan Grenfell, 1838–1988 (Oxford, 2002), p. 20.

  2. John M. Taylor, William Henry Seward: Lincoln’s Right Hand (New York, 1991), p. 107.

  3. Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy (Oxford, 2005), p. 138.

  4. Playing to the gallery, Seward had urged President Buchanan to give Britain one year to withdraw entirely from Central America. If she refused, he argued, the United States would have the right to annex Canada. Cuba had become the largest importer of slaves after Brazil, prompting Lord Palmerston to order the Royal Navy to surround the island, if necessary, and board any suspicious-looking ship, whatever the color of its flag. By May 1858, the navy had boarded 116 suspected slave ships, of which 61 were American-owned. The New York press, in particular, raised an outcry, and Secretary of State Lewis Cass demanded that Britain stop such activities immediately. Senator James Murray Mason had steered a bill through the Senate to send a U.S. naval squadron to the Caribbean. The British government backed away from a confrontation and ordered the Royal Navy to desist from the practice. Palmerston was outraged by Derby’s pusillanimity, but he placed the greater blame on the United States. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (New York, 1997), p. 764.

  5. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham (New York, 1999), p. 676.

  6. H. C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States (New York, 1955), p. 158.

  7. Frederick W. Seward (ed.), Seward at Washington (New York, 1891), p. 372.

  8. Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 113.

  9. H. F. Bell, Lord Palmerston, 2 vols. (London, 1936), vol. 2, p. 253. Her mother had been the great Lady Melbourne, a political hostess whose influence in the 1780s was second only to the Duchess of Devonshire’s.

  10. John Prest, Lord John Russell (London, 1972), p. 134. “You give great offence to your followers,” his exasperated brother, the Duke of Bedford, once complained, “by not being courteous to them, by treating them superciliously or de haut en bas, by not listening … to their solicitations, remonstrances, or whatever it may be.… ”

  11. Ibid., p. 349.

  12. Beverly Wilson Palmer (ed.), The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, 2 vols. (Boston, 1990), vol. 1, p. 24, Sumner to Duchess of Argyll, May 22, 1860.

  13. Seward (ed.), Seward at Washington, p. 390.

  14. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 1, p. 545, May 21, 1859.

  15. Ibid., p. 558, June 23, 1859.

  16. Ibid., p. 504, February 8, 1859.

  17. K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation (Oxford, 1998), p. 202.

  18. James Matlack Scovel, “The Great Free Trader by His Own Fire Side,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine (1893), p. 129.

  19. Seward (ed.), Seward at Washington, p. 380. Deborah Logan (ed.), The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau, 5 vols. (London, 2007), vol. 4, p. 180, Martineau to Henry Reeve, July 6, 1859. Seward also told Harriet Martineau that he believed Sumner’s ailments were mostly psychological.

  20. Wilbur Devereux Jones, The American Problem in British Diplomacy, 1841–1861 (London, 1974), p. 200.

  21. Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanties: http://www.mfh.org/special-projects/shwlp/site/honorees/remond.html, Sarah Parker Remond to Abby Kelly Foster, September 1858. Sibyl Ventress Brownlee, “Out of the Abundance of the Heart: Sarah Ann Parker Remond’s Quest for Freedom,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts, 1997, p. 119.

  22. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, vol. 1, p. 608, November 22, 1859.

  23. Ibid., p. 614, December 10, 1859.

  24. Ibid., p. 616, December 16, 1859.

  25. Brownlee, “Out of the Abundance of the Heart,” p. 136.

  26. David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1961), p. 348.

  27. Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 114.

  28. James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes (eds.), Private and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers in Washington to the Foreign Secretaries (Selinsgrove, Pa., 1993), p. 223, Lord Lyons to Lord Russell, December 6, 1859.

  29. Mason’s report was published in June 1860.

  30. Mrs. Roger A. Pryor, Reminiscences of Peace and War (New York, 1905), p. 98.

  31. Rose Greenhow, My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington (London, 1863), p. 192.

  32. Martin Duberman, Charles Francis Adams (New York, 1961), p. 213.

  33. Greenhow, My Imprisonment, p. 192.

  34. Ernest Samuels (ed.), Henry Adams: Selected Letters (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 21, Henry Adams to Abigail Adams, February 13, 1860.

  35. Duberman, Charles Francis Adams, p. 21.

  36. Charles Francis Adams would have argued back that he had not been a slouch during his adulthood: he served in the Massachusetts state legislature for five years, and was twice an unsuccessful candidate for vice president in 1848 and 1872.

  37. San Juan Island remained under joint military occupation for the next twelve years. Then, after Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Washington, the San Juan question was referred to Kaiser Wilhelm I. He established a three-man arbitration commission, which studied the issue for almost a year. On October 21, 1872, the commission ruled in favor of the United States. A month later, the Royal Marines packed their bags, said goodbye to their American friends, and marched out of the English camp for the last time. Two years later, the American camp was abandoned.

  38. PRO 30/22/34, ff. 130–33, Lyons to Russell, April 10, 1860.

  39. PRO 30/22/34, ff. 149–50, Lyons to Russell, May 22, 1860.

  40. As recently as March 2, Sumner had told her, “I incline now more than ever to think that Seward will be [our candidate].” Palmer (ed.), The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, vol. 1, p. 19.

  41. No one had actually counted the prince’s entourages so it came as a terrible shock when there were too many bodies for too few beds. Buchanan gallantly offered up his room and slept on a sofa in the corridor.

  42. Stanley Weintraub, Edward the Caresser (New York, 2003), p. 68.

  43. Ibid., p. 71. The issue of slavery would force itself upon the prince one more time, in the North. On October 18, 1860, a delegation of African-Americans presented him with “An Address of Colored Citizens of Boston to the Prince of Wales,” which offered “their profound and grateful attachment and respect for the Throne which you represent here, under whose shelter so many thousands of their race, fugitives from American slavery, find safety and rest … and where the road to wealth, education, and social position, and civil office and honors is as free to the black man as to the white.” Anti-Slavery Advocate, 2/403/50, February 1, 1861.

  44. Weintraub, Edward the Caresser, p. 73.

  45. Edward Dicey, Spectator of America, ed. Herbert Mitgang (Athens, Ga., 1971), p. 11.

  46. Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York (New York, 1951; repr. Syracuse, N.Y., 1996), p. 24.

  47. Weintraub, Edward the Caresser, p. 76.

&n
bsp; 48. The 69th Regiment, New York State Militia, was the nucleus for the 69th New York State Volunteers, which was itself one of the three founding Irish regiments of the famous New York Irish Brigade.

  49. Seward (ed.), Seward at Washington, p. 455.

  50. Palmer (ed.), Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, vol. 1, p. 23, Sumner to Seward, May 20, 1860.

  51. Glyndon Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (Oxford, 1967), p. 231.

  52. Hallward Library, University of Nottingham; Newcastle, NEC/10885/134, Duke of Newcastle to Sir Edmund Head, June 5, 1861.

  53. Sir Theodore Martin, The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, vol. 5 (New York, 1880), p. 204.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Martin Crawford, The Anglo-American Crisis of the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Times and America, 1850–1862 (Athens, Ga., 1987), p. 76, Morris to Bancroft Davis, October 30, 1860.

  56. Lord Newton (ed.), Lord Lyons: A Record of British Diplomacy, 2 vols. (London, 1914), vol. 1, pp. 27–28, Lord Lyons to Duke of Newcastle, October 29, 1860.

  57. Crawford, The Anglo-American Crisis of the Mid-Nineteenth Century, p. 10, October 12, 1860.

  58. Newton (ed.), Lord Lyons, vol. 1, p. 29, Lord Lyons to Duke of Newcastle, December 10, 1860.

  Chapter 3: “The Cards Are in Our Hands!”

  1. Wilbur Devereux Jones, The American Problem in British Diplomacy, 1841–1861 (London, 1974), p. 198.

  2. Ibid.

  3. BDOFA, part I, ser. C, vol. 5, p. 162, law officers of the Crown to Lord John Russell, December 7, 1860.

  4. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 1, pp. 751, 753, December 7 and December 11, 1860.

  5. Ibid., p. 765, January 9, 1861.

  6. The Times, January 9, 1861.

  7. Illustrated London News, January 19, 1861.

  8. William S. Walsh, Abraham Lincoln and the London Punch (New York, 1909), p. 20.

  9. Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974, 1980), p. 86. And BDOFA, part I, ser. C, vol. 5, pp. 169–70, Lord Lyons to Lord John Russell, December 18, 1860.

  10. Glyndon Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (Oxford, 1967), p. 240.