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

by Amanda Foreman

  19. “I think now the American Government,” he wrote, “under the inspiration of Seward will refuse us redress. The prospect is melancholy, but it is an obligation of honour which we cannot escape.” PRO, Cowley MSS, FO 519/199, Russell to Lord Cowley, December 7, 1861.

  20. Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974, 1980), vol. 1, p. 212.

  21. Nancy Mitford (ed.), The Stanleys of Alderley (London, 1968), p. 270, Lord Stanley to Lady Stanley, December 2, 1861.

  22. For some reason, he has generally been misidentified as Seymour Conway, although W. H. Russell refers to him properly as Conway Seymour.

  23. G. P. Gooch (ed.), The Later Correspondence of Lord John Russell, 1840–1878, 2 vols. (London, 1925), vol. 2, p. 321, Lord Russell to Lord Clarendon, December 6, 1861. In fact, Lord Clarendon thought that Russell was generally far too namby-pamby with Seward. “I don’t like the low tone taken by Johnny,” he told the Duchess of Manchester; “he is right not to be quarrelsome but humility is not the way to keep vulgarity & swagger in order & there is not a despatch from that beast Seward that does not contain some menace to us.” A. L. Kennedy (ed.), My Dear Duchess: Social and Political Letters to the Duchess of Manchester, 1858–1869 (London, 1956), p. 208, Clarendon to Duchess of Manchester, December 25, 1862.

  24. Desmond McCarthy, Lady John Russell, p. 260, Lady John to Lady Dumferline, December 13, 1861.

  25. Letters of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, ed. G. F. Lewis (London, 1870), pp. 405–6, Lewis to Twistleton, December 5, 1861.

  26. The purchases were actually a coincidence. At the start of the war, the United States had 3 million pounds of saltpeter in reserve, which was all that had been left over from the Mexican–American War. The U.S. Navy commissioned Lammot Du Pont to replenish the country’s supply before the Trent incident took place. It just so happened that he began loading his prodigious cargo on November 28, the day after England received news of the seizure. Once the ban was in effect, Charles Francis Adams advised Du Pont to offload the saltpeter surreptitiously in limited amounts in order to avoid flooding the market.

  27. Regis Courtmanche, No Need of Glory: The British Navy in American Waters (Annapolis, Md., 1977), p. 59.

  28. Mitford (ed.), The Stanleys of Alderley, p. 271, Lord Stanley to Lady Stanley, December 4, 1861.

  29. Ibid., p. 271, Lord Stanley to Lady Stanley, December 6, 1861.

  30. Somerset RO, Somerset MSS, d/RA/A/2a/34/7/1, Admiral Milne to Duke of Somerset, January 24, 1861. Milne also feared the loss of the West Indies as a possible result of the war: “The defence our West India Islands, also Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the St. Lawrence in spring, causes me much anxiety, but in so far as the force at my disposal will admit I will do all I can to defend them from aggression, but your Grace and the members of the Board must be aware the large naval force which these defensives will require, and that the efficiency of our ships will in a great measure depend on the supply of coal at the various stations.” December 22, 1861.

  31. Kenneth Bourne, “British Preparations for War with the North, 1861–1862,” English Historical Review, 76/301 (Oct. 1961), pp. 600–632, at p. 609.

  32. Some pessimists within the War Office feared that victory would be impossible without a deus ex machina–like intervention such as General MacClellan refusing to part with any troops until spring, Confederate activity tying down the majority of Federal troops, a cold winter inhibiting deployment, or New England states such as Maine turning against the Union.

  33. Army Historical Research, vol.19, pp. 112–14, Lieutenant Colonel G. J. Wolseley to Major Biddulph, December 12, 1861.

  34. G. H. Warren, Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas (Boston, 1981), p. 130.

  35. Mitford (ed.), The Stanleys of Alderley, p. 274, Lord Stanley to Lady Stanley, December 20, 1861.

  36. Bourne, “British Preparations for War with the North, 1861–1862,” p. 616.

  37. Owen Ashmore (ed.), “The Diary of James Garnett of Low Moor, Clitheroe, 1858–65,” vol. 2: “The American Civil War and the Cotton Famine, 1861–65,” Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire for the Year 1971, 123 (1972), pp. 105–43, at p. 114, December 3, 1861.

  38. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, vol. 9, December 11, 1861.

  39. W. C. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), vol. 1, pp. 75–77, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., November 30, 1861. Although Bright claimed to have a poor opinion of Lord Lyons, whom he had met once, when he had the opportunity to speak with him properly, he decided that Lyons was, “a sensible man, calm of temper and serious.” R.A.J. Walling (ed.), The Diaries of John Bright (New York, 1931), p. 407.

  40. T. Wemyss Reid, Life of the Right Honorable William Edward Forster (London, 1888), p. 344, Forster to his wife, December 4, 1861.

  41. Spectator, December 7, 1861. Bright was fortunate that no one knew or remembered how he had warmly greeted Senator Slidell when the latter visited England a few years before. Then, he wrote in his diary: “Thro’ the Park with Cobden. With him afterwards to dine at Fenton’s Hotel with Mr. Brown, M.P. Among those present was Mr. Slidell, American Senator, who appeared to be a sensible man with more of the Englishman than American in his manners.” Walling (ed.), The Diaries of John Bright, p. 151.

  42. Deborah Logan (ed.), The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau, 5 vols. (London 2007), vol. 4, p. 312, Martineau to Henry Reeve, December 4, 1861.

  43. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 2, p. 922, December 12, 1861.

  44. Warren, Fountain of Discontent, p. 142.

  45. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 923, December 14, 1861.

  46. “I am here quietly waiting the developments of events over which I have no control,” Adams complained to Motley, the minister to Austria, “and in which I had no participation.” Edward Chalfant, Both Sides of the Ocean (New York, 1982), p. 346.

  47. Weed had assumed that Seward’s trip to London in 1859 had been a success. Instead, he discovered that “every idle word he spoke here, in society, is treasured up and a bad meaning given to it. For example, he made enemies of a Noble Household for laughing at the enormous sums of money paid for Paintings. At another Dinner Table he gave offense by insisting that English Books were absurdly expensive, and that American re-productions were just as good, etc etc etc.” Such boorish behavior would not have won Seward friends anywhere. In the first instance, he betrayed himself to be a philistine, and in the second, unscrupulous, since the American reproductions were cheap only because they were printed in defiance of copyright, thus depriving English authors of their royalties.

  48. University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y., Rush Rees Library, Seward MSS, Mission Abroad, 1861–1862 [microform]; a selection of letters from Archbishop Hughes, Bishop McIlvaine, W. H. Seward, and Thurlow Weed; Weed to Seward, December 18, 1861.

  49. The Times, December 6, 1861.

  50. University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y., Rush Rees Library, Seward MSS, Weed to Seward, December 10, 1861.

  51. “I am placed in a predicament almost as awkward as if I had not been commissioned here at all.” OR, ser. 2, vol. 2, p. 1123, Adams to Seward, December 11, 1861. Warren, Fountain of Discontent, p. 164.

  52. Ibid., p. 152.

  53. T. C. Pease and J. Randall (eds.), The Diary of Orville H. Browning, 1850–1881 (Springfield, Ill., 1925–31), December 10, 1861, p. 50.

  54. Beverley Wilson Palmer (ed.), The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, 2 vols. (Boston, 1990), vol. 1, p. 82, Sumner to Duchess of Argyll, November 18, 1861.

  55. Ibid., pp. 88–89, Charles Sumner to Francis Lieber, December 24, 1861.

  56. Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy (Oxford, 2005), p. 96.

  57. Columbia University, Blackwell MSS, Blackwell to Bodichon, December 30, 1861.
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  58. Frederick W. Seward (ed.), Seward at Washington (New York, 1891), p. 32.

  59. Pease and Randall (eds.), The Diary of Orville H. Browning, 1850–1881, p. 51, December 15, 1861.

  60. Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 331, December 16, 1861.

  61. Martin Crawford (ed.), William Howard Russell’s Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861–1862 (Athens, Ga., 1992), p. 207, Russell to John T. Delane, December 20, 1861.

  62. The mood in the Senate was no different. Senator Orville Browning, for example, was adamantly against any kind of settlement. “We were clearly right in what we did,” he insisted. England could send as many troops as she liked. “We are determined, at all hazards, to hold on to the prisoners.…” Pease and Randall (eds.), The Diary of Orville H. Browning, p. 50, fn.

  63. The United States did not have a naval plan against Britain. Admiral Milne, on the other hand, had already put his fleet on alert. His instructions from London were to end the blockade of the Southern ports (without directly cooperating with the Confederacy). How he achieved this was to be his own affair. Regis Courtemanche, No Need of Glory: The British Navy in American Waters (Annapolis, Md., 1977), p. 59, Admiral Milne to Sir Frederick Grey, December 1861. Milne’s strategy depended on a three-pronged attack. One force, under Commodore Dunlop, would sail from Veracruz and clear the Federal navy from the Gulf. The larger, Milne’s, would attack the U.S. blockading fleet and then proceed up the coast to the Northeast, where it would establish a blockade of the major Northern ports. Milne would be able to count on reinforcements, a sufficient number of coaling vessels, and a working dockyard in Bermuda. He thought that his plan had, in the short term, a good chance of success. A mere three months later, however, after the launch of USS Monitor, he felt that the advantage had started to turn in favor of the North and he looked back to the Trent affair as Britain’s most favorable moment.

  64. Crawford (ed.), William Howard Russell’s Civil War, p. 207, Russell to John T. Delane, December 20, 1861.

  65. Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 2008), vol. 2, p. 224.

  66. Palmer (ed.), Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, vol. 2, p. 87, Sumner to Bright, December 23, 1861. “Are Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell so irresistibly eloquent that we must not run the danger of hearing them speak?” asked the Duchess of Argyll in one of her letters to Sumner. MHS, Argyll Letters, p. 93, Duchess of Argyll to Charles Sumner, December 8, 1861.

  67. 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. 273, Lyons to Russell, December 23, 1861.

  68. Palmer (ed.), Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, vol. 1, pp. 88–89, Charles Sumner to Francis Lieber, December 24, 1861.

  69. Ibid. Opinion remains divided on the issue. At one extreme are those who believe that the North would have crushed the Royal Navy, destroyed “the façade of British military preeminence,” and rocked “the foundations of British economic primacy”; at the other are those who invisage humiliation for the North and swift independence for the South. The strength of these wildly divergent arguments depends, in part, on how long the war might have continued. Nevertheless, the evidence does suggest its own story, one in which all sides come out the worse for wear—except for the South. See, e.g., Russell F. Weigley, A Great Civil War (Bloomington, Ind., 2000), p. 81; Andrew Wellard, “After the Trent, or Third Time Lucky?,” Crossfire, 62 (April 2000).

  70. Beale (ed.), The Diary of Edward Bates, p. 216. Meanwhile, in England, people were beginning to worry that her naval superiority was not nearly superior enough. On the same day as the U.S. cabinet discussions, The Times warned that the North had extraordinary maritime resources. Furthermore, “Our adversaries will lose not a moment after the declaration of war in pressing forward the construction and equipment of cruisers and it must be expected that many of these vessels will, as in the last war, elude the blockade and prowl about the ocean in quest of prey.… It is quite possible that while England is ruling undisputed mistress of the waves a Yankee frigate may appear some fine morning off one of our ports and inflict no slight damage upon us.”

  71. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (London, 1988), p. 444. The result of the crisis was the Legal Tender Act of February 1862, which—inter alia—created a national paper currency, unleashed the power of government bonds, and provided the treasury with the money to pay its bills.

  72. The way Seward framed the discussion, the Trent was really a continuation of the old impressment argument—the one that had led to war in 1812. Then it was over Britain stopping American ships and removing British deserters. Now, alleged Seward, the United States had inadvertently performed a similar violation that he was delighted to rectify, and in so doing, establish once and for all a fifty-year-old American principle. It was complete legal nonsense. The Trent had nothing to do with impressment. But the argument sounded stirring and patriotic, and was guaranteed to go down well with the public. Seward threw in a couple of other arguments for good measure, about ambassadors and dispatches being fair game on the high seas, and other such dubious nonsense.

  73. David H. Donald, Lincoln (New York, 1995), p. 323.

  74. Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 592, December 26, 1861.

  75. Many years later, Trollope wrote in his autobiography: “I was at Washington at the time, and it was known there that the contest among the leading Northerners was very sharp on the matter. Mr. Sumner and Mr. Seward were, under Mr. Lincoln, the two chiefs of the party. It was understood that Mr. Sumner was opposed to the rendition of the men, and Mr. Seward in favour of it.… I dined with Mr. Seward on the day of the decision, meeting Mr. Sumner at his house, and was told as I left the dining room what the decision had been.” Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, ed. Michael Sadleir (New York, 1923), p. 166.

  76. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals (New York, 2005), p. 400. See Logan (ed.), Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau, vol. 4, passim, for Martineau’s references to the plans and the advice.

  77. Pease and Randall (eds.), The Diary of Orville H. Browning, December 27, 1861, p. 519.

  78. Barnes and Barnes (eds.), Private and Confidential, p. 274, Lyons to Russell, December 31, 1861.

  79. Edward L. Pierce (ed.), Memoir of Charles Sumner, 4 vols. (Boston, 1894), vol. 4: 1860–1870, p. 59.

  80. Warren, Fountain of Discontent, p. 20.

  81. David H. Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, 1862 (New York, 1970), pp. 43–44.

  82. Adam Gurowski, Diary from March 4, 1861 to November 12, 1862 (Boston, 1862), p. 165.

  Chapter 9: The War Moves to England

  1. Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, John Ward Diary, 171 Cont A, January 1, 1862.

  2. Seward countered that he had been on tenterhooks himself, until they convened on Christmas Day. “Remember, that in a Council like ours, there are some strong wills to be reconciled.” But Weed was not satisfied. The legation had been the last to know of the commissioners’ release; even the clerks in the City were better informed. “I do not see how I could have prevented the difficulties which attended the delay and suspense in the Trent affair. The telegraph outstrips the mails—and I cannot send despatches or receive them by telegraph,” rejoined Seward. Weed would not back down, insisting that Seward should have at least written privately to Adams, rather than leaving him in complete suspense. Margaret K. Toth (ed.), Mission Abroad, 1861–1862 (Rochester, N.Y., 1954), Seward to Weed, January 22, January 30, and March 7, 1862.

  3. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 2, p. 940, January 8 and 9, 1862.

  4. Letters of Lord St. Maur and Lord Edward St. Maur (London, 1888), p. 245, Duke of Somerset to Lord Edward St. Maur, January 12, 1862.

  5. Nancy Mitford (ed.), The Stanleys of Alderley (London, 1968), p. 281, Jonny Stanley to Maude Stanley, Febr
uary 19, 1862.

  6. Wellcome Library, RAMC.75, f. 2107, Sir Anthony Jackson, January 1862.

  7. Illustrated London News, January 11, 1862. Later, when the extent of American anger became clear, it defended Britain’s response: “And if the British people misinterpreted the sentiments of the Americans with regard either to slavery or secession, the Americans very palpably misinterpreted those of the British people and Government in the affair of the Trent.” April 19, 1862.

  8. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., “The Trent Affair: An Historical Retrospect,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 45 (1912), p. 529.

  9. Toth (ed.), Mission Abroad, p. 236, Hughes to Seward, January 11, 1862.

  10. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, January 15, 1862.

  11. Edward Chalfant, Better in Darkness (New York, 1994), p. 21.

  12. Ibid., p. 25.

  13. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 940, January 10, 1862.

  14. Desmond McCarthy, Lady John Russell, p. 260, Lady John Russell to Lady Dumferline, December 13, 1861.

  15. Letters of Lord St. Maur and Lord Edward St. Maur, p. 245, Duke of Somerset to Lord Edward St. Maur, January 12, 1862.

  16. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, April 19, 1862. His diary for just one week in April, for example, shows that he may have felt lonely, but he was not alone. He went to dinner at Lord Lansdowne’s on April 1: “The dinner was pleasant without being animated.” From there he went to a glittering reception at Stafford House. The next day he went to a dinner at the Duchess of Somerset’s. On the third, he went to a reception of the president of the Royal Society at Burlington House. On April 5, Mrs. Adams had her first reception for Americans in London, with about thirty guests. On the seventh, he had dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, with “Lord and Lady Macclesfield, Lord Ellenborough, Lord and Lady Colville, Lord and Lady Colchester and Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Walpole, and one or two others.”