Bayonets, Balloons & Ironclads: Britain and France Take Sides With the South

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  After his meeting with the War Production Board, Lincoln had need of advice of a different kind later that same day. Secretary of State William Seward and former ambassador to the Court of St. James, Charles Francis Adams had arrived together

  Adams had been a perfect choice to represent the United States in London. The appointment of the son and grandson of presidents who had both also served as ambassadors there was meant as a mark of respect to the British. His breeding was impeccable by British standards and his integrity never questioned. What he missed in the subtleties of diplomatic indirection he made up in a relentless advocacy of American interests that earned the respect of the British. Among his friends were the great reformers, the independent Radicals, John Bright and Richard Cobden. He had a wealth of knowledge of who was who in British politics, a resource Lincoln was eager to tap.

  “Tell me, Adams, about Disraeli’s cabinet. Has he had as easy a time with his as I have had with mine?” Seward burst out laughing. He knew the political genius that was required of Lincoln to hold together a cabinet most of whose members had thought they could all do a better job than the simple rail splitter form Illinois, first of whom had been at one time Seward himself.

  Adams leaned forward on his cane. “Mr. President, the British cabinet system is quite different from ours. The prime minister is only head of government; the Queen is the head of state. You as president hold both offices. The prime minister is, in effect a member of the cabinet, which represents the interest of his party. The cabinet is the collective leadership of that party. You, like the centurion in the Bible, can say, ‘I tell a man to come and he cometh; I tell a man to go and he goeth.’ But the most important decisions of a British government are collective ones of the entire cabinet.”

  Lincoln smiled. “The centurion never had my cabinet.”

  Adams went on. “Ministers act with more independence than in an American cabinet, yet all important issues are arrived at by a consensus in cabinet. It is a rare PM who acts against the judgment of his cabinet.

  “Disraeli has retained the men that Lord Derby had selected as a shadow cabinet before the Palmerston government fell. They are men of ability and experience. The British parliamentary system ensures that prospective cabinet officers progress through a series of lesser appointments that season and prepare them for high office, much like Roman officialdom.

  “For example, Lord Stanley, the Foreign Secretary, who was Lord Derby’s son, has extensively toured the empire and was appointed undersecretary for foreign affairs in his father’s first government in 1852. In his father’s second government, he held the office of Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1858 and then President of the Board of Control while at the same time exercised a leadership role in pushing important legislation through Parliament. He followed that by becoming Secretary of State for India where he left an excellent record as an administrator.”

  Seward added, “The Stanleys are the richest land-owing family in England and of such prominence that after the Greeks tossed out their Bavarian king, they had their heart set on Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred. When he declined they sought a great and wealthy English noble. A testament to Lord Stanley’s good sense was that he avoided that ‘bed of thorns.’”

  Adams resumed. “I have it on authority that he has stated that the normal attitude of a British foreign secretary was like that of a man floating down a river and gaffing off whatever obstacles threatened his vessel.”16

  Lincoln nodded. “He seems a man of practical good sense. Any man who has sat in my chair knows that events control him far more than he controls events. Heaven help us from the man who thinks events are like an orchestra to be conducted. That reminds me of something General Grant told me. He said that leading an army is just like conducting an orchestra until some sonofabitch climbs out of the orchestra pit and starts chasing you around the stage with a bayonet.”

  Adams paused. “I could go on, but it is more of the same; the Disraeli cabinet is able and experienced. They stepped into office able to devise and execute policy.”

  At that moment the door opened, and two men were shown into Lincoln’s office.

  “Sumner, good of you to come,” Lincoln said as he extended his big hand. Senator Charles Sumner was a big bear of a man, not nearly as tall as Lincoln’s six foot four inches, but he made it up in bulk. A shock of brown hair framed a face that men were remarking more and more resembled that of Edmund Burke, great Conservative member of Parliament and friend of America during the Revolution. Perhaps the comparison was prompted by the fact that Sumner had been as great a friend of Great Britain as Burke had been of America.

  The Republican from Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, was more than an Anglophile. As a young man he had traveled to Great Britain and by his modest good manners, charm, and the good sense to immediately seek out a fine English tailor, was ushered into the highest society. This innocent from Boston had been shocked to find out the British actually played cards for money. Before the Civil War the British had considered only Edward Everett, the great American orator, a more perfect model of a British statesmen than Sumner. His friendship for the British had taken a difficult turn with the start of the Civil War. Britain’s barely disguised support of the Confederacy had collided with Sumner’s profound antislavery convictions. Those very convictions had so enraged a South Carolinian member of the House of Representatives before the war that this Southern gentleman had marched into the Senate chamber and so brutally caned Sumner over the head that it was feared he would never recover.

  But recover he did. Massachusetts refused to replace him, letting his empty desk in the Senate chamber as a reproach to the slave power until he could resume his duties, his antislavery convictions now haloed with the blood of martyrdom. He had few friends in the Senate, but his influence in the North was immense. And for that reason, Lincoln found his council useful, not only on the issue of the black man, but for his shrewd observations of the British, and more.

  As for the black man himself, Lincoln then turned to Douglass as a great smile lit his face. “Douglass, I have great need of you. Please, sit, both of you.” He motioned to the two winged-back chairs that framed the fireplace. He took a moment to stir the fire with a poker, then pulled up a chair.

  For a moment he considered the two men before him. Sumner he had come to know well since assuming the presidency. Douglass he had only met last year when Lincoln became the first president to receive a black man in the White House. But in a profound way, he had consulted Douglass far more than Sumner. Son of slaves, Douglass, like Lincoln was the quintessential American self-made man. He possessed a world-class intellect married to kingly bearing, presence, and an eloquence devoted to the freedom of his race that announced themselves with the éclat of Jovian thunderbolts. His speeches had reached audiences that totaled in the many hundreds of thousands and done more to stir the abolitionist feelings of Northern white men to boil than any other man. Like Cromwell he was the living embodiment of the idea that it was not enough to strike when the iron is hot but to strike to make the iron hot.

  For the first two years of the war, he had despaired of Lincoln, thinking that he would compromise with the Slave Power. It was only after the Emancipation Proclamation that he realized what Lincoln had so subtlety had understood. The war against the Confederacy was itself the furnace of revolution, a revolution in the minds of men. Only when the furnace glowed white hot would it burn away the illusion that the nation had shattered for any reason but slavery. It was slavery that was the enemy of the Union and of free men everywhere. For this the nation would fight.

  The obdurate heart of this resolve was represented by the three Massachusetts men in the room. Only Douglass was not born and bred to the Cromwellian Puritanism of the Old Bay State. But in his likeness to an Old Testament prophet, he was as much of Massachusetts as its granite.

  Seward was the first to speak. Lincoln had no more loyal cabinet officer and
friend than Seward, ever since the Secretary of State realized that Lincoln, the unknown prairie politician, was not about to be only a figurehead. They were one of the great collaborations in history. But Seward exercised a very un-New England use of profanity and hyperbole. As the Civil War was erupting he had openly stated that a good war with Great Britain would bring the country back together. He opened the meeting by briefly reviewing the few scrapes of news of fighting on the New York border. “We will see this damned thing through. Victory or death is the watchword throughout the country, I say,” whacking the table with his fist for emphasis.

  It was almost a cue. Lincoln said, “That reminds me of the story of the soldier whose two sisters had embroidered a belt for him that read, ‘Victory or Death!’

  “’No, no,’” the soldier says. “Don’t put it quite that strong. Put it ‘Victory or get hurt pretty bad.’”17 Even the deadly serious Adams surprised himself by laughing, but quickly brought himself under control.

  Today Lincoln was again in a playful mood. “Sumner, do you have any friends left in England?”

  Sumner winced. Lincoln was referring to Sumner’s speech of September 10 of last year. With the beginning of the Civil War, Sumner’s correspondence to his friends in the highest circles of British society assumed a new importance as he pressed the position of the Union. To his old friend John Bright, he had also poured out his frustrations with the course of the war, asking once, after Burnside’s fiasco at Fredericksburg, if it might be possible to “send us an Englishman who will handle . . . two hundred thousand men.” He had also been unrelenting in equating British actions with blatant support of the Slave Power. Like a constant drip of water on stone, they were slowly but surely having an effect on British opinion at the highest levels. But by the summer of 1863 he had feared that the growing crisis over the Laird Rams affair would lead to war and prepared a manifesto laying out American grievances against Great Britain. Edward Everett had warned him that the speech “would be appropriate as a manifesto or a declaration of war.”18 Unknown to him, Everett’s fears proved prescient and the speech appropriate. Four days before he had delivered the speech, the battle of Moelfra Bay, sparked by the attempted escape of one of the Laird Rams from Liverpool, had occurred. Britain’s declaration of war was skimming across the Atlantic as he spoke in Boston.19

  Lincoln already knew the answer to his question. Sumner’s correspondence had continued, though more circumspectly. As General Sharpe was the first to admit, the Canadian border leaked like a sieve in both directions. Letters went back and forth, and Lincoln had been keen to read everything Sumner forwarded. It was as important to keep his fingers on the pulse of British as well as American public opinion, and for this Sumner’s letters were priceless. The insight they gave him into the British leadership was more than priceless.

  “Tell me, Sumner, did you ever meet Disraeli?”

  Sumner sighed. “Yes, back in ’40. I thought he was one of the most vulgar fops I ever saw.”

  “Oh my, I hope you didn’t tell him that to his face.”

  “No, but I made a point of snubbing him.”

  For the first time Douglass spoke. “That was a mistake, Senator. I saw him speak in the House during the debate on the repeal of the Corn Laws almost twenty years ago.” Douglass had toured England with as much social success as Sumner a half decade later. “He spoke against Sir Robert Peel, and his philippics were among the most scathing and tortured of anything in their line to which I have listened. His invectives were all the more burning because delivered with the utmost coolness and studied deliberation.” He had Lincoln and Sumner’s full attention. “Mr. President, Disraeli is a most dangerous man.”20

  Adams added, “During my time in England, despite the fact that Disraeli as leader of the Tories in Parliament led his strong minority in sharp attacks on the policy of the Palmerston government, he never once did so on what they called the ‘American question,’ despite repeated urging by the friends of the South.”21

  Lincoln asked, “Why?”

  “I believe he has no natural animus against the United States, a feeling that was rife among the Tories. He also broke with Lord Derby, the leader of the Tory Party before the latter’s incapacitation last year, in defending the United States during the Trent Affair, saying that he thought America had been placed in a very difficult position in which she had acted honorably. After Palmerston’s government declared war, he turned those very talents Douglass here has referred to against Lord Russell, the Foreign Secretary, during inquiries in the House of Commons. Made Russell sweat, and the man can’t afford to lose another ounce. I have no doubt Disraeli knows exactly what ignited the war.”

  Sumner added, “Bright informs me that there are two things that drive Disraeli. He is drunk on fame. And he will maintain the empire at all costs, at all costs.”

  “So he won’t take it kindly if we decide to keep Canada?”

  “Mr. President, Disraeli will spend the treasure of a hundred years of empire to ensure the survival of that empire.”

  Douglass spoke again. “If I learned anything of the British in my stay there, it is that they are implacable, especially if they have been humiliated. They are Romans in that.”

  “So we shouldn’t beat them too much, is that it, gentlemen?” It was not a question that they could answer, nor one Lincoln expected them to. “Well, our Irish project should put that to the test, I think.” His eyes twinkled with another story. “You know, Paddy is always up for a fight. We just have to point that pugnacious disposition to something useful. This reminds me of an emigrant form Ireland. Pat arrived in New York on election day, and was, perhaps, as eager to vote early and late and often. So, upon his landing at Castle Garden, he hastened to the nearest voting place, and as he approached, the judge, who received the ballots, inquired, ‘Who do you want to vote for? On which side are you?’ Poor Pat was embarrassed; he did not know who were the candidates. He stopped, scratched his head, then, with the readiness of his countrymen, he said: ‘I am fornent the government, anyhow. Tell me, if your Honor plases, which is the rebellion side, and I’ll tell you how I want to vote. In Ould Ireland, I was always on the rebellion side, and by Saint Patrick, I’ll stick to the same in America.’”22

  He got up, suddenly serious, and stood before the fire grate. “You know, I did my best to avoid this war. ‘One war at a time,’ I said to everyone. ‘One war at a time.’ And we would have got through it too, except for the Laird Rams. The British just could not leave well enough alone. And now we both are in a war that neither of us wanted.” He shook his head. “I thought I had a knotty problem with war production, but that is just a ball of string compared to this Gordian Knot. Anyone seen Alexander’s sword?”

  PORT HUDSON, LOUISIANA, FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 1864

  The French gunners were superb. Shot after shot tore away chunks of the parapet manned by the men of the Corps d’Afrique. The French assault regiments had dashed from its forward trenches toward the point on the bastion where the shells were concentrated.

  The tip of the assault was not French, though. It was Sudanese in sky-blue uniforms. Napoleon III had pressured the ruler of Egypt to loan him a regiment of African Muslim slave soldiers better able to survive the yellow-fever Vera Cruz coast. They had come north with the French army out of Mexico with a reputation for savagery and had fought at Vermillionville where their massacre of surrendered Union soldiers had soiled the honor of the victory. Bazaine had waited until this moment for an opportunity he could punish them in a useful way. Their white officers led from the front, mindful of the disgrace they must expiate. Behind them the horde ran ululating, “Allah u akbar!”

  Behind the parapets the Union black soldiers and their white officers crouched as the French shells pounded the earthen ramparts of the bastion flinging bodies through the air. The crew of the brigade’s single coffee mill gun had thrown a blanket over their piece to keep the flying dirt from the disintegrating parapet off the mechanism. Through
the deafening artillery “Allah u akbar!” keened to a howl closer and closer. Then the shout went up within the bastion, “Up, boys, up!” Men threw themselves forward in firing position. “Allah u akbar!”

  “Fire!” The front of the Sudanese wave collapsed, but those behind surged over the fallen. “Allah u akbar!” The wave of sky blue flowed forward dropping bodies by the score, but still they came. “Allah u akbar!” Most of their white officers were down by now, but still they came. They crossed the last open space and impaled themselves on the abattis, bunching up as those in front tried to climb over the stake-studded logs. Here the canister caught them, sweeping away dozens with each discharge. The French artillery had ceased; their men were too close to the bastion walls. Now the coffee mill gun’s click-bang sounded as the gunner began turning the crank, and the faster he turned it, the faster the staccato steam hammer sound became. The Sudanese were melting away, their wild charge hung up on the abattis. “Allah u akbar,” died away, replaced by a wail of fear. Suddenly they broke to the rear and through the ranks of the follow on French line regiment, which would do no better.

  The boys of the Corps d’Afrique waved their caps and cheered as their chaplain raised his hands to heaven and shouted, “God be praised!”

  THE LONDON GUILDHALL, FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 1864

  At the moment Lincoln was making his wry comment on not beating the English too much, their Prime Minister was bringing the attendees at the Lord Mayor’s dinner to their feet in thunderous applause. Again and again he had put his finger on the country’s “inexhaustible” resources available in a righteous war. Now Benjamin Disraeli ended, saying, “She is not a country that when she enters into a campaign has to ask herself whether she can support second or third campaigns. She enters into a campaign which she will not terminate till right is done.”

  Lord Derby’s (son of the late party leader and pronounced “Darby,” as God intended it) applause was, however, pro forma. Described as the most isolationist Foreign Secretary Great Britain had known, he was privately aghast as the fact that his country was in an open-ended war, with not some alien, despotic regime, but flesh of its flesh and bone of its bone. His tentative attempts to haul Disraeli down from his war to the death position had got him nowhere.