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

by Amanda Foreman

  38. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, p. 1219, Slidell to Benjamin, September 29, 1864.

  39. Ibid., p. 1209, Hotze to Benjamin, September 17, 1864.

  40. The Private Journal of Georgiana Gholson Walker, p. 112.

  Chapter 33: “Come Retribution”

  1. Duke University, Malet family MSS, Malet to mother, August 30, 1864, and September 29, 1864.

  2. Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974, 1980), vol. 2, p. 369.

  3. Robin Winks, Canada and the United States: The Civil War Years (Lanham, Md., 1988), pp. 143–47. Monck had telegraphed Lord Lyons, who immediately sent a message to Seward, alerting him to the plot. Meanwhile Monck ordered the Welland Canal between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario to be watched for suspicious steamboats. General Cox in Ohio informed Edwin Stanton on November 15 that “the Rebels who left Windsor to join the raid are returning, saying that the plans are frustrated for the present, and will have to be postponed for a time.” OR, ser. 3, vol. 3, p. 1043, Cox to Stanton, November 15, 1863.

  4. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson (eds.), The Letters of Charles Dickens, 3 vols. (New York, 1974), vol. 3, p. 207, Dickens to John Forster, April 24, 1842.

  5. Bradley A. Rodgers, Guardian of the Great Lakes (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), p. 84.

  6. Charles Frohman, Rebels on Lake Erie (Columbus, Ohio, 1975), p. 98.

  7. Oscar A. Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada (Hanover, Mass., 1970), p. 105.

  8. Frohman, Rebels on Lake Erie, p. 73.

  9. John W. Headley, Confederate Operations in Canada and New York (Kent, Ohio, 1906), p. 252.

  10. Daniel B. Lucas, Memoir of John Yates Beall (Montreal, 1865), p. 32.

  11. Frohman, Rebels on Lake Erie, p. 93.

  12. Ibid., p. 80.

  13. Frances Elizabeth Owen Monck, My Canadian Leaves: Diary of a Visit to Canada, 1865–6 (London, 1891), p. 122.

  14. Ibid., p. 137.

  15. Ibid., p. 148, October 4, 1864.

  16. Ibid., p. 170.

  17. Ann Blackman, Wild Rose: Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Civil War Spy (New York, 2005), pp. 298–99.

  18. Thomas E. Taylor, Running the Blockade (Annapolis, Md., repr. 1995), p. 123.

  19. Blackman, Wild Rose, p. 300.

  20. The Times, November 15, 1864.

  21. South Carolina Historical Society, Feilden-Smythe MSS, Beauregard to Feilden, September 5, 1864.

  22. James M. Morgan, Recollections of a Rebel Reefer (Boston, 1917), pp. 197–98.

  23. South Carolina Historical Society, Feilden-Smythe MSS, Feilden to Julia McCord, September 27, 1864.

  24. Ibid., Feilden to Julia McCord, September 25, 1864.

  25. The wine, for example, was coming from Bermuda, and the ring was being made from the last of his gold sovereigns. Ibid., Feilden to Julia McCord, September 27, 1864.

  26. South Carolina Historical Society, Feilden-Smythe MSS, Jordan to Hardee, October 12, 1864.

  27. The Times, November 5, 1864.

  28. Frank E. Vandiver (ed.), The Civil War Diary of Josiah Gorgas (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1947), p. 145, October 6, 1864.

  29. Illustrated London News, January 21, 1865.

  30. Ibid., October 22, 1864, p. 407.

  31. John B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, ed. Earl Schenck Miers (Urbana, Ill., 1958), p. 433, October 10, 1864.

  32. Mary Sophia Hill, A British Subject’s Recollections of the Confederacy (Baltimore, 1875), p. 66.

  33. PRO FO5/1285, n. 78, Burnley to Russell, September 26, 1864.

  34. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, p. 433, October 4, 1864.

  35. Hill, A British Subject’s Recollections, p. 40.

  36. Francis W. Dawson, Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861–1865, ed. Bell I. Wiley (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 125.

  37. Ibid., pp. 201–2, Dawson to mother, October 13, 1864.

  38. W. C. Ford, A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), vol. 2, pp. 194–96, September 18, 1864. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was vastly overstating the condition of the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry, an elite black regiment that included Charles Douglass, the son of the abolition campaigner Frederick Douglass; and Joshua Laurence, father of the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose work was set to music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

  39. Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne, Eight Months in America: Letters and Travel Notes, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1974), vol. 1, p. 32, June 20, 1864.

  40. A. S. Lewis (ed.), My Dear Parents (New York, 1982), p. 107, Horrocks to parents, November 19, 1864.

  41. James McPherson (ed.), Atlas of the Civil War (Philadelphia, 2005), p. 190.

  42. Gary W. Gallagher (ed.), The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), p. 212.

  43. Quoted in Horace Greeley, The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion, 2 vols. (London, 1867), vol. 2, p. 611.

  Chapter 34: “War Is Cruelty”

  1. The Private Journal of Georgiana Gholson Walker, ed. Dwight Franklin Henderson, Confederate Centennial Studies, 25 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1963), p. 113, October 11, 1864.

  2. William Tidwell lists five separate Confederate “cells” operating in Canada: in Toronto, under Jacob Thompson; in Hamilton, under Cassius F. Lee; in St. Catherine’s, under Clement Clay; in Windsor, under Steele; and in Montreal, under Patrick Charles Martin and George N. Sanders. April ’65: Confederate Covert Action in the American Civil War (Kent, Ohio, 1995), p. 135.

  3. John W. Headley, Confederate Operations in Canada and New York (New York, 1906), p. 265.

  4. Mabel Clare Weaks, “Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell,” Filson Club History Quarterly, 34 (1960), p. 12, Grenfell to Mary, October 11, 1864. Stephen Z. Starr says it is only speculation that Grenfell was Hines’s deputy, although well-founded speculation. Colonel Grenfell’s Wars (Baton Rouge, La., 1971), p. 183.

  5. Stephen Starr writes, “There is unfortunately no way of discovering what thoughts passed through his mind as he sat quietly in his hotel room in the dreary hours of a November night.” Ibid., p. 203.

  6. Duke University, Malet family MSS, Sheffield to Malet, November 11, 1864.

  7. PRO 30/22/38, f.120, Lyons to Russell, October 28, 1864.

  8. Bulloch’s successful manipulation of the legal system made it appear as though there was a vast conspiracy by the British to help the Confederacy. Dudley reported to Seward on November 15 that the owners of the Laurel and the Sea King were British. They both sailed under the British flag and the sailors were British. “The armament, shot, shell, guns, powder, and everything down to the coal in the hold are English, all the produce and manufacture of Great Britain. Even the bounty money paid for enlisting the men was English sovereigns and the wages English coin, pounds, shillings and pence. It seems to me that nothing is wanting to stamp this as an English transaction from beginning to end.…” NARA M. 141, roll t-29, d. 386.

  9. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 2, p. 731, Bulloch to Whittle, October 6, 1864.

  10. Tom Chaffin, Sea of Gray (New York, 2006), pp. 58–64.

  11. Chester G. Hearn, Gray Raiders of the Sea: How Eight Confederate Warships Destroyed the Union’s High Seas Commerce (Camden, Me., 1992), p. 152. The American merchant marine had shipped over 5 million tons before the war. The latest statistics point to a decline of 4 million tons.

  12. The ship and her crew had been continuously at sea since sneaking out of Brest on February 10, 1864. Yet the flight from the U.S. flag meant that in eight months the Florida had only managed to capture thirteen prizes. Short of coal, and worried that his bored crew might mutiny unless given their shore leave, Captain Charles Morris (Maffitt’s replacement) had sailed into Bahia, Brazil, where he was pounced upon by the waiting USS Wachusett.

  13. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 2, p. 736, Bulloch to Stephen Mallory, October 20, 1864. R. I. Lester, Confederate Finance and Purchasing in Great Britain (Charlottesville, Va., 1975), pp. 190–91.

  14. Virginia Historical Society, R
aphael Semmes MSS, MSS1Se535a/53–65, Maury to Tremlett, October 23, 1864.

  15. Virginia Mason, The Public Life and Diplomatic Correspondence of James M. Mason (New York, 1906), p. 514.

  16. John Bennett, “The Confederate Bazaar at Liverpool,” Crossfire: The Magazine of the American Civil War Round Table, 61 (Dec. 1999).

  17. David Hepburn Milton, Lincoln’s Spymaster: Thomas Haines Dudley and the Liverpool Network (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 2003), p. 121.

  18. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 2, pp. 1346–47, November 7–8, 1864.

  19. Sheffield Archives, WHM 460a/47, Spence to Wharncliffe, November 2, 1864. C. Vann Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981), p. 664, Varina Davis to Mary Chesnut, October 8, 1864. The source for the quotation in the first footnote on this page is Sheffield WHM 460a/46, Spence to Wharncliffe, October 31, 1864.

  20. Sheffield, WHM 460a/51, Wharncliffe to Adams, November 9, 1864.

  21. Library of Congress, Hotze Papers, private letterbook, Hotze to Gregg, October 8, 1864. The journal was moving from its two rooms in Bouverie Street to more spacious premises at 291 Strand, and Hotze could not afford any decrease in the circulation. Yet he must have seen the increasing references in the press to the South as a slave state. On the same day as his reproof to Gregg, a writer in the Dumfries Standard declared that he hoped “the day is not far distant when a deep sense of shame shall be felt in this country for even the partial and temporary sympathy manifested for the pro-slavery States of America.” Loraine Peters, “The Impact of the American Civil War on the Local Communities of Scotland,” Civil War History, 49 (2003).

  22. The Index was printing 2,250 copies a week—an impressive circulation considering that John Bright’s Morning Star circulation was only 5,000.

  23. Angus Hawkins, The Forgotten Prime Minister, vol. 2 (Oxford, 2008), p. 291.

  24. SRO, Somerset MSS, d/RA/A/2a/40/13, Palmerston to Duke of Somerset, September 6, 1864.

  25. Scott Thomas Cairns, “Lord Lyons and Anglo-American Diplomacy During the American Civil War,” Ph.D thesis, London School of Economics, 2004, p. 348, Palmerston to de Grey, September 11, 1864.

  26. Somerset RO, Somerset MSS, d/RA/A/2a/40/16, Palmerston to Duke of Somerset, November 30, 1864.

  27. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, November 21, 1864. While writing about his fears of a Democratic victory, he revealed an ugly prejudice against the Democratic financier Augustus Belmont, whom he slated as “the German Jew agent of the foreign stockbrokers, the Rothschilds.”

  28. Russell thought he was giving more than they deserved when he wrote: “Of the causes of the rupture Her Majesty’s Government have never presumed to judge.… Such a Neutrality Her Majesty has faithfully maintained and will continue to maintain.” A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy, Including the Diplomatic Correspondence, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Nashville, 1905), vol. 2, p. 687, Russell to Commissioners, November 25, 1864.

  29. E. D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, 2 vols. in 1 (New York, 1958), vol. 2, p. 243. Slidell visited the French Foreign Ministry, thinking that the foreign minister wished to discuss the manifesto. Instead, he received an official complaint regarding the forced enlistment of French subjects into the Confederate army. The minister refused to show any interest in the capture of CSS Florida in neutral waters, or in any other U.S. infringements dangled before him by Slidell.

  30. Ernest Samuels (ed.), Henry Adams: Selected Letters (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. 71, Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., November 25, 1864.

  31. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 1354, December 1, 1864, and November 30, 1864.

  32. W. C. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), vol. 2, p. 223, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, November 14, 1864.

  33. The system for exchanging prisoners had worked according to a strict hierarchy: 1 general = 46 privates; 1 major general = 40 privates; 1 brigadier general = 20 privates; 1 colonel = 15 privates; 1 lieutenant colonel = 10 privates; 1 major = 8 privates; 1 captain = 6 privates; 1 lieutenant = 4 privates; 1 noncommissioned officer = 2 privates.

  34. William Elsey Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, 5 vols. (New York, 1918), vol. 5, p. 2473.

  35. James Pendlebury MSS, private collection.

  36. Arnold Haultain (ed.), Reminiscences by Goldwin Smith (New York, 1910), p. 336.

  37. Goldwin Smith wrote, for example: “Does the Bible Sanction American Slavery?” (1863), as well as his “Letter to a Whig Member of the Southern Independence Association” (1864).

  38. Haultain (ed.), Reminiscences by Goldwin Smith, p. 353.

  39. Robin Winks, Canada and the United States: The Civil War Years (Lanham, Md., 1988), p. 305.

  40. Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 2 vols. (New York, 2008), vol. 2, p. 740.

  41. PFRA, 2/2 (1864), p. 760, Seward to Lyons, November 3, 1864.

  42. Frederick W. Seward (ed.), Seward at Washington (New York, 1891), p. 250.

  43. William Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American (New York, 2000), p. 539.

  44. Bell I. Wiley, Confederate Women (New York, 1975), p. 109.

  45. John B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, ed. Earl Schenck Miers (Urbane, Ill., 1958), p. 447, November 9, 1864.

  46. A. S. Lewis (ed.), My Dear Parents (New York, 1982), p. 108.

  47. Francis W. Dawson, Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861–1865, ed. Bell I. Wiley (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 204, Dawson to mother, November 25, 1864.

  48. Ibid., pp. 132–33.

  49. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, p. 456, December 5, 1864.

  50. Dawson, Reminiscences, p. 205, Dawson to mother, November 25, 1864.

  51. Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War (Cambridge, 1995), p. 188. In popular myth, thousands of families were driven out into the desolate countryside at the point of the bayonet. In reality, 1,644 people, including 860 children, were put on trains to nearby towns.

  52. Archibald McCowan, “Five Months in a Rebel Prison, 1 October 1864 to 1 March 1865,” Victorian Periodical Review (1993).

  Chapter 35: “The British Mark on Every Battle-field”

  1. Oscar A. Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada (Hanover, Mass., 1970), p. 117.

  2. ORN, ser. 1, vol. 3, p. 718, Thompson to Benjamin, December 3, 1864.

  3. Frederick Job Shepard, The Johnson’s Island Plot: An Historical Narrative of the Conspiracy of the Confederates …, ed. Frank H. Severance (Buffalo, 1906; repr. Ithaca, N.Y., 2007), p. 45.

  4. John W. Headley, Confederate Operations in Canada and New York (New York, 1906), p. 271.

  5. Ibid., p. 272.

  6. New York Times, November 26, 1864.

  7. Edward O. Cunningham, “In Violation of the Laws of War,” Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, 18/2 (Spring 1977), pp. 189–201.

  8. New York Times, November 27, 1864.

  9. George Templeton Strong, Diary of the Civil War, 1860–1865, ed. Allan Nevins (New York, 1962), p. 522, November 29, 1864.

  10. Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, 2 (1864), p. 370, Seward to Lyons, December 4, 1864.

  11. Joseph Burnley, the new legation secretary, complained that once Lyons fell ill it became next to impossible to get him to write his letters. An unofficial count by Lord Lyons’s biographer revealed a grand total of 8,236 letters written by Lyons since 1861. It was no wonder that he could not face another dispatch.

  12. Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, 1 (1864), p. 370, Seward to Adams, December 5, 1864.

  13. PRO FO881/1334, p. 72, Monck to Burnley, December 14, 1864.

  14. Headley, Confederate Operations, p. 309.

  15. W. C. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), vol. 2, p. 238, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, December 25,
1864.

  16. Sumner’s bill to forbid segregation on Washington’s streetcars died in the House through lack of support.

  17. “Letters of Goldwin Smith to Eliot Norton,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 49 (1916), p. 115, Goldwin Smith to Norton, December 29, 1864.

  18. Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada, p. 177; ORN, ser. 1, vol. 3, p. 930, Thompson to Benjamin, December 3, 1864.

  19. William Tidwell, James Hall, and David Winfred Gaddy, Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1988), p. 203.

  20. Cleburne concluded: “It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties. We have now briefly proposed a plan which we believe will save our country. It may be imperfect, but in all human probability it would give us our independence.… Negroes will require much training; training will require time, and there is danger that this concession to common sense may come too late.” OR, ser. 1, vol. 52/2, p. 592, Cleburne to Johnston, January 2, 1864.

  21. OR, ser. 1, vol. 39/3, p. 162, Sherman to Grant, October 9, 1864; OR, ser. 1, vol. 39/3, p. 377, Sherman to Thomas, October 20, 1864.

  22. Frank E. Vandiver (ed.), The Civil War Diary of General Josiah Gorgas (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1947), p. 157, December 20, 1864.

  23. Thomas Taylor, Running the Blockade (Annapolis, Md., repr. 1995), p. 140.

  24. The Times, February 7, 1865.

  25. Taylor, Running the Blockade, p. 141.

  26. John B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, ed. Earl Schenck Miers (Urbane, Ill., 1958), p. 467, December 27, 1864.

  27. ORN, ser 2, vol. 3, pp. 1253–56, Benjamin to Mason and Slidell, December 27, 1864.

  28. Craig A. Bauer, “The Last Effort: The Secret Mission of the Confederate Diplomat, Duncan F. Kenner,” Louisiana History, 22 (1981).

  29. The Times, March 8, 1865.

  30. South Carolina Historical Society, Feilden-Smythe MSS, Feilden to Julia Feilden, December 21, 1865.