17. David H. Donald, Lincoln (New York, 1995), p. 329.
18. Anthony Trollope, North America (repr. London, 1968), pp. 139–40.
19. T. C. Pease and J. Randall (eds.), The Diary of Orville H. Browning, 1850–1881 (Springfield, Ill., 1925–31), p. 520, December 28, 1861. Aware that people were whispering behind his back, in January Seward tried to rouse public support by publishing all of the previous year’s correspondence between the State Department and the various legations. He made sure to include the originals of letters that had been toned down. His opponents replied by publishing a pamphlet entitled “A Review of Mr. Seward’s Diplomacy,” which exposed his considerable blunders. Jay Monaghan, Diplomat in Carpet Slippers (New York, 1945), p. 212.
20. Pease and Randall (eds.), The Diary of Orville H. Browning, January 25, 1861, p. 527.
21. BL Add. MS 415670, f. 219, Herbert to mother, January 14, 1862.
22. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (London, 1988), p. 372.
23. Martin Crawford (ed.), William Howard Russell’s Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861–1862 (Athens, Ga., 1992), pp. 218–19, Russell to Delane, January 16, 1862.
24. Illustrated London News, February 22, 1862.
25. Ibid., March 22, 1862.
26. BL Add. MS 415670, f. 221, Herbert to mother, February 4, 1862.
27. Charles F. Johnson, The Long Roll (repr. Shepherdstown, W.V., 1986), p. 93.
28. Illustrated London News, March 22, 1862.
29. There were some minor incidents in January and February but Lyons brushed them off. Not serious, but annoying, was Seward’s cheeky offer to let British troops travel through Maine to Canada. It was actually a case of lost luggage, but Seward used the incident to make it appear as though he were graciously allowing the British Army to disembark in the United States on their way to invade her from Canada.
30. West Sussex RO, Lyons MSS, box 300, Lord Lyons to Augusta Mary Minna Lyons, January 31 and February 7, 1862.
31. PRO 30/22/36, f. 27–28, Lyons to Russell, February 1, 1862.
32. Edward Dicey, Spectator of America, ed. Herbert Mitgang (Athens, Ga., 1971), pp. 90–92.
33. John B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, ed. Earl Schenck Miers (Urbana, Ill., 1958), p. 63, January 1, 1862.
34. C. Vann Woodward (ed.), Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981), p. 286, February 11, 1862.
35. Eli N. Evans, Judah P. Benjamin (New York, 1988), p. 146.
36. Crawford (ed.), William Howard Russell’s Civil War, p. 219, Russell to Delane, January 16, 1862.
37. Living Age, 69/3 (Oct.–Dec. 1863), p. 189.
38. Burton J. Hendrick, Statesmen of the Lost Cause (New York, 1939), p. 235.
39. When Slidell was a boy, living in the First Ward, his best friend was Charles Wilkes. The friendship was broken when they were teenagers, over the affections of a local girl. They had not seen each other for many years when Slidell became Wilkes’s unwilling guest on board the San Jacinto.
40. Woodward (ed.), Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, p. 170, September 28, 1861.
41. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 1212, September 22, 1863.
42. Crawford (ed.), William Howard Russell’s Private Diary and Letters, p. 61, May 25, 1861.
43. William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Eugene H. Berwanger (New York, 1988), p. 164, May 25, 1861. Slidell’s experience of foreign diplomacy was limited to his eighteen-month stint in Mexico, where he served as the American minister, 1845–46.
44. The Times, December 10, 1861.
45. Francis W. Dawson, Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861–1865, ed. Bell I. Wiley (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 182, Dawson to mother, February 20, 1862.
46. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, encl. no. 3, p. 332, Mason to Hunter, February 7, 1862.
47. Stephen Z. Starr, Colonel Grenfell’s Wars (Baton Rouge, La., 1971), p. 40.
48. Ibid.
49. E. D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, 2 vols. in 1 (New York, 1958), vol. 1, p. 243.
50. Ibid., p. 263.
51. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, p. 343, Mason to Hunter, February 22, 1862.
52. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, p. 243.
53. Ibid., p. 261, and Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974, 1980), vol. 1, p. 253. The blockade issue was further muddied by Northern plans to block up Charleston Harbor with a “stone fleet”—that is, sinking wrecks to make passage impossible—which was considered in England to be shortsighted and inhumane.
54. Toth (ed.), Mission Abroad, p. 386, Weed to Seward, February 18, 1862.
55. Seward’s continued silence was a gift to the South. The Economist, for example, pronounced, “It is in the independence of the South, and not in her defeat, that we can alone look with confidence for the early amelioration and the ultimate extinction of the slavery we abhor.”
56. Citizenship was not conferred on free blacks until 1866. However, the legation began quietly giving out passports in 1862.
57. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, January 25, 1862. Ironically, on March 6 the New York State Chamber of Commerce passed a resolution thanking John Bright for his advocacy of the “principles of constitutional liberty and international justice for which the American people were contending.”
58. Devon RO, 2065m/c1/29, J. W. Buller, MP, to Georgiana, March 14, 1862.
59. Toth (ed.), Mission Abroad, p. 400, Weed to Seward, February 20, 1862.
60. Charles Vandersee, “Henry Adams Behind the Scenes: Civil War Letters to Frederick W. Seward,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 71/4 (1967), p. 249.
61. MPUS, pp. 22–23, n. 112, Adams to Seward, February 7, 1862.
62. Stephen B. Oates, “Henry Hotze: Confederate Agent Abroad,” The Historian, 27 (1965), p. 134.
63. Ibid., p. 135.
64. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, p. 347, Hotze to Hunter, February 23, 1862.
65. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), Diary of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 961, March 6, 1862.
66. Roundell Palmer, Memorials, 2 vols. (London, 1894, repr. 2003), vol. 1, p. 404.
67. Toth (ed.), Mission Abroad, p. 463, Weed to Seward, March 8, 1862.
68. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, March 8, 1862.
69. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, p. 359, Mason to Hunter, March 11, 1862.
Chapter 10: The First Blow Against Slavery
1. John Stuart Mill, The Contest in America, repr. from Fraser’s Magazine, February 1862 (Boston, 1863). The Adams family met John Stuart Mill at a dinner given by the Argylls. Years later, Henry Adams sheepishly admitted that he drank too much wine that night, and “after dinner engaged in instructing John Stuart Mill on the peculiar merits of an American protective system.… Mr. Mill took no apparent pleasure in the dispute.” Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (repr. Boston, 1973), p. 126.
2. Philip Van Doren Stern, When the Guns Roared: World Aspects of the American Civil War (New York, 1965), p. 112.
3. W. D. Jones, “Blyden, Gladstone and the War,” Journal of Negro History, 49 (1964), p. 58, fn.
4. George Douglas, Eighth Duke of Argyll (1823–1900): Autobiography and Memoirs, ed. the Dowager Duchess of Argyll, 2 vols. (London, 1906), vol. 2, p. 190, May 13, 1862.
5. Jones, “Blyden, Gladstone and the War,” p. 58. Blyden had recently returned from a diplomatic mission to the United States where he was subjected to the usual treatment meted out to free blacks, such as being denied the right to ride on public busses or eat in white-owned restaurants. He was particularly upset at being denied entry to the House of Representatives. There was no such bar to the Houses of Parliament, which surprised some Northerners. Benjamin Moran laughed at Charles Wilson’s annoyance at having to sit beside “the negro representative from Hayti.” On February 6, he wrote in his diary: “From what I have been told the black exhibited a good deal better
manners than did my fellow secretary. For all his ‘black republicanism,’ he clearly indicated by his uneasiness a decided antipathy to ‘the nigger’.”
6. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, April 16, 1862. Adams was convinced that Lord Shaftesbury was against the North, and was using his influence with the antislavery societies. However, Thurlow Weed became acquainted with Shaftesbury and realized that the earl, like so many others, had been alienated by the North’s willingness to continue slavery.
7. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago 1948, 1949), vol. 2, p. 979, April 16, 1862.
8. David Hepburn Milton, Lincoln’s Spymaster: Thomas Haines Dudley and the Liverpool Network (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 2003), pp. 5–7.
9. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, pp. 832–33, June 24, 1861.
10. “You may rest assured that no proper effort will be wanting on my part to report to you all that can be learned of the doings of rebel agents here,” Consul Morse promised. NARA, T. 168, roll 30, vol. 30, desp.1, Morse to Seward, January 30, 1862.
11. Milton, Lincoln’s Spymaster, p. 33.
12. F. L. Owsley, The CSS Florida (Philidelphia, 1965; repr. Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1987), p. 22.
13. He definitely could not afford marine insurance. In spite of Weed’s conviction that Lloyds was making a handsome profit out of secretly providing insurance to blockade runners, Huse’s experience was that the terms were so outrageous as to be prohibitive. ORN, ser. 4, vol. 1, p. 127, Caleb Huse to Major Gorgas, March 15, 1862.
14. BL Add. MS 38951, ff. 53–55, Lord Hammond to Austen Henry Layard, April 20, 1862.
15. See, for example, MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, May 9, 1862.
16. PRO FO5/818, Russell to Lyons, April 17, 1862.
17. Napoleon then said the complete opposite to William Dayton, the U.S. minister: “Mr. Adams tells me,” reported Benjamin Moran on April 17, “that Louis Napoleon in a personal interview with Mr. Dayton expressed his regret at the precipitate recognition of the rebels as belligerents by France and Gt. B., and stated that it was England’s work. He is now willing to withdraw it if Gt. B. will also.”
18. Louis Martin Sears, “A Confederate Diplomat at the Court of Napoleon III,” American Historical Review, 26/2 (Jan. 1921), pp. 255–81, Slidell to Mason, April 12, 1862.
19. NARA, T. 168, roll 30, d. 1, Morse to Seward, April 12, 1862.
20. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 969, March 22, 1862.
21. W. C. Ford, A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), vol. 1, p. 133, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., April 11, 1862.
22. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, p. 134.
23. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 2, p. 183, Bulloch to Mallory, April 11, 1862.
24. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 978, April 14, 1862.
25. ORN, ser. I, vol. 1, pp. 745–49, Captain Pegram to Mallory, March 10, 1862.
26. Francis W. Dawson, Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861–1865, ed. Bell I. Wiley (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 32.
27. Duke University, Francis Dawson MSS, Dawson to mother, May 16, 1862.
28. James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes (eds.), The American Civil War Through British Eyes, vol. 1 (Kent, Ohio, 2003), pp. 313–14, Lyons to Russell, March 16, 1861.
29. It is true that wooden ships were defenseless against those made of iron. However, D. P. Crook quotes the Manchester Guardian (April 3, 1862), one of the few English newspapers to maintain a sense of perspective about the news: “There may be a certain truth in saying that our whole navy consists of but two men of war [Warrior and Black Prince]; but it is to be observed that, in the same sense, the French have but one, the Americans have only a gunboat, and no other nation has any navy at all.” Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861–1865 (New York, 1974), p. 188. In reality the Monitor and the Warrior could never have engaged each other because the former could only sail in calm water and the latter could only maneuver in the open sea.
30. John Black Atkins, The Life of Sir William Howard Russell, 2 vols. (London, 1911), vol. 2, p. 93.
31. Martin Crawford (ed.), William Howard Russell’s Civil War: Private Diary and Letters (Athens, Ga., 1992), p. 231, Russell to Mowbray Morris, March 15, 1862.
32. Edward Dicey, Spectator of America, ed. Herbert Mitgang (Athens, Ga., 1971), p. 149.
33. Lawley’s early life is described in Brian Jenkins, “Frank Lawley and the Confederacy,” Civil War History, 23 (March 1977), and William Stanley Hoole, Lawley Covers the Confederacy (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1964).
34. Jenkins, “Frank Lawley and the Confederacy,” p. 148.
35. Julia Miele Rodas, “More Than a Civil (War) Friendship: Anthony Trollope and Frank Lawley,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, 60/1 (1998), p. 42, Lawley to mother, February 2, 1862.
36. Crawford (ed.), William Howard Russell’s Civil War, p. 230.
37. Alan Hankinson, Man of Wars: William Howard Russell of “The Times,” 1820–1907 (London, 1982), p. 180.
38. William Watson, Life in the Confederate Army: Being the Observations and Experiences of an Alien in the South During the Civil War (London, 1887; repr. Baton Rouge, La., 1995), p. 285.
39. Atkins, The Life of Sir William Howard Russell, vol. 2, p. 105, March 24, 1862.
40. Ilana Miller, Reports from America (Stroud, 2001), p. 212.
41. Crawford (ed.), William Howard Russell’s Civil War, p. 235, Russell to Stanton, April 2, 1862.
42. Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, 4 vols.; vol. 2: War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863 (New York, 1960), p. 3.
43. William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Eugene H. Berwanger (New York, 1988), p. 340.
44. Hankinson, Man of Wars, p. 181.
45. A. Taylor-Milne, “The Lyons-Seward Treaty of 1862,” American Historical Review, 38/3, pp. 511–25.
46. The small U.S. fleet known as the Africa squadron had been patrolling the west coast of Africa since 1860; the largest fleet was the British Preventive Squadron, which had six ships.
47. James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes, Private and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers in Washington to the Foreign Secretaries (Selinsgrove, Pa., 1993), p. 280. The source for the footnote on this page is the same.
48. University of Rochester, Fanny Seward Diary, ff. 21–29, March 22, 1862.
49. Dicey, Spectator of America, p. 58.
50. Lincoln had calculated that paying owners compensation for all the slaves in the Northern states would cost the equivalent of eighty-seven days of warfare.
51. The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, ed. Carl Schurz, Frederic Bancroft, and William Archibald Dunning, 3 vols. (Garden City, N.Y., 1917), vol. 2, p. 304.
52. Taylor-Milne, “The Lyons-Seward Treaty of 1862.”
53. PRO 30/22/36, ff. 63–66, Lyons to Russell, April 8, 1862.
Chapter 11: Five Miles from Richmond
1. Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr. (ed.), Sir Henry Morton Stanley, Confederate (Baton Rouge, La., 2000), p. 129.
2. Ibid., pp. 123, 124.
3. Ibid., p. 126. Eighteen-year-old Henry D. Parker survived but was discharged from the army on April 10.
4. Stanley P. Hirshon, The White Tecumseh (New York, 1997), p. 120.
5. Grant was in fact named Hiram Ulysses Grant, but a mistake in his application to West Point resulted in his being known as Ulysses S. Grant.
6. Peter Batty and Peter Parish, The Divided Union (London, 1987), p. 80.
7. Hughes (ed.), Sir Henry Morton Stanley, p. 136.
8. Edward Dicey, Spectator of America, ed. Herbert Mitgang (Athens, Ga., 1971), p. 208.
9. Dawson’s propensity for romantic flights of fancy helped him to survive his transition to life as a junior officer in the navy. There was nothing knightly about the first time he tried to climb in
to bed: “Like one of the heroes of my favorite Marryatt [sic], I signalized my entrance into the hammock on one side by pitching out on my head on the other side.” Francis W. Dawson, Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861–1865, ed. Bell I. Wiley (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), pp. 40–42.
10. Lord Lyons was annoyed by Mercier’s visit. It was his firm belief that they should respect the Northern embargo and refrain from any direct communication with the South. He also feared that it would give the impression of a crack in the Anglo-French accord. For that reason alone, Seward was not averse to Mercier’s solo mission.
11. Robert Douthat Meade, Judah P. Benjamin: Confederate Statesman (Baton Rouge, La., 2001), p. 254.
12. James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes (eds.), The American Civil War Through British Eyes, vol. 2 (Kent, Ohio, 2005), p. 26, Lord Lyons to Lord Russell, April 28, 1862.
13. C. Vann Woodward (ed.), Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981), p. 330, April 27, 1862.
14. Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis: Confederate President, 3 vols. (New York, 1959), vol. 2, p. 246.
15. See Ella Lonn, Foreigners in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, N.C., repr. 2001), pp. 113–15, for a discussion of the European Brigade. There were 2,500 Frenchmen, 800 Spaniards, 500 Italians, 400 Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians, and 500 Swiss, Belgians, English, Slavonians, and others.
16. Virgil Carrington Jones makes clear that by April 30, New Orleans was relatively calm. “Truly the backbone of the rebellion is broken,” reported Admiral Porter. Jones, The Civil War at Sea, 3 vols. (New York, 1961), vol. 2, p. 138.
17. Robert S. Holzman, “Ben Butler in the Civil War,” New England Quarterly, 30/3 (Sept. 1957), pp. 330–45, at p. 335.
18. PRO FO5/848, ff. 403–10, Consul Coppel to Lord Russell, May 9, 1862.
19. Holtzman, “Ben Butler in the Civil War,” p. 334.
20. The British consul tried to protect the 105 British members of Company B. When Butler learned that 39 of them had sent their uniforms and weapons to friends in the Confederate army, he ordered the entire company to appear before him in full kit, or face either expulsion or imprisonment. Two men, according to a petition from the British residents, Samuel Nelson and J. Turner Roe, were arbitrarily arrested and sent “to work as common laborers on the forts which is tantamount to a death sentence given the weather, conditions etc.” They requested a British warship for protection. PRO FO5/848, ff. 433–39, Petition on behalf of British Residents of New Orleans, June 11, 1861.
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