A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (118 page)

There was a national uproar after Palmerston and Russell announced that Britain would not fight alongside the Danes after all. Whether the government’s course was right or wrong mattered less than the obvious fact that it was a complete reversal from the one originally proposed. On July 4, Disraeli introduced in the House of Commons the motion against the government. “Yet I am more than doubtful about the result,” the Southern propagandist Henry Hotze reported to Judah Benjamin. He considered the Tory Party to be destitute of policies; “the chief end of its tactics is to get into office without committing itself on either of the two great questions … the American and the Danish.” This, feared Hotze, could be their undoing.
¹

Henry Adams was tickled to be so close to and yet untouched by the Liberals’ political crisis. “Everyone who has an office, or whose family has an office, is in a state of funk at the idea of losing it,” he chuckled to Charles Francis Jr. Recently he had been feeling flat and “more and more doubtful every day as to what life is made for,” he had confided to his brother. “I am getting old, and must be at work. The
chef
can do without me, if he only tries.”
²

The parliamentary debates on the censure continued for four days. Gladstone’s speech in the Commons sealed his position as the undisputed leader-in-waiting of the Liberal Party, although it was not strong enough to silence the government’s critics. “I wish either that one could put one’s nerves into one’s pocket … or that one could run away from the future,” Henry wrote to his brother on July 8. “The division takes place tonight, and the excitement in society is tremendous.” Their father had heard that the government was down to a majority of two or four votes in the Commons. He was surprised to find himself hoping the Liberals would prevail.

The Confederate commissioner James Mason was still waiting for the interview with Palmerston that William Schaw Lindsay had promised in June. The prime minister had played his part with finesse, making no commitments to the pro-Southern faction in Parliament while ensuring that the Tories could not offer them anything that was not already under discussion. Rose Greenhow, who had become close to the opposition through a fortuitous friendship with the Tory hostess Lady Chesterfield, was convinced that the Confederates were wasting their time with the Liberals.
³
Despite telling Mason everything she heard in Lady Chesterfield’s drawing room, she could not shake his faith in Palmerston. “Saw Mr. Mason who was very busy,” Rose wrote on July 8. “He does not think we have anything to gain by a change in ministry. [For] Queens sake!”

Adams finished his work early that night so he could go to the House of Commons and watch the government fight for its life. He squeezed into the Strangers’ Gallery at 5:00
P.M.
and sat through seven speakers while waiting for Palmerston to make his stand. It was past midnight when the prime minister finally rose to address the House. “He is not a good speaker, his manner is hesitating,” Adams wrote in his diary, which was true of Palmerston at the best of times. “And yet I cannot doubt,” he added reluctantly, “that he makes the only real leader now to be found in English politics.”
⁴
The division took place at half past two in the morning, with the Tories confident that they had the votes. Mrs. Greenhow waited impatiently at her lodgings: “I am anxious for news from Parliament,” she wrote in her diary. “I am afraid the Government will have a majority.”
⁵
Both Houses divided at the same moment. The peers went against the government by a majority of 9 votes; but in the Commons, the Tories discovered that a handful of MPs had switched sides during the debate, uneasy that the price of government would mean effectively declaring that Britain was no longer a Great Power but a feeble, blustering bully. The Liberals survived by a majority of 18 votes.

“Had the scale turned the other way, the scene would have been worth staying to see,” wrote Adams, who left before the result was called. His early departure meant that he missed a first in the history of the Commons.
⁶
As soon as the numbers were called, Palmerston clambered up the stairs on his gouty foot to the Ladies’ Gallery to embrace his wife in plain view of the House. She cared as much as Palmerston himself that when he did go out of politics, it would be on his own terms.

—

With the parliamentary crisis safely behind them, the Confederate lobby at Westminster stepped forward to claim its reward from Palmerston. Lindsay’s resolution for mediation was to be the climax of a week of carefully orchestrated events. The Confederate lobby had reasoned—justifiably—that the previous failures in the Commons had been exacerbated by the problem of individuals acting on their own. In order to succeed, they had to appear united, representative of the entire country, and popular among MPs of all persuasions.

For several weeks, Spence’s Southern Independence Association had been distributing petitions throughout England calling for British intervention in the war. These were intended to represent the voice of the ordinary public—some of them, like the Manchester petition, contained more than five thousand signatures.
⁷
Next, Mason was to have his interview with Palmerston, followed by the deputation from the Reverend Francis Tremlett’s peace society. Separately, representatives from the cotton factories were to deliver a 90,000-signature-strong petition to Russell. Only then, after the government had heard from the rich and the poor, from manufacturers and merchants, all demonstrating that the country desired action on behalf of the South, would Lindsay put forward his resolution.

The plan began well. At Henry Hotze’s instigation,
The Times
reported that the Northern armies had been checked on every front. Lindsay took Mason to see Palmerston at Cambridge House on July 14: “I was received with great civility, and after the ordinary topics of salutation Lord P. commenced the conversation,” Mason wrote afterward to Judah Benjamin. Palmerston seemed interested in the South’s military options, but he became evasive when Mason asked him for a definite answer as to whether Britain would join with Napoleon in offering to broker an armistice. (If Mason had paid any attention to recent debates in Parliament, he would have realized that the idea of an Anglo-French alliance on practically any issue was preposterous.) He tried not to be disappointed by the interview, but it hardly seemed worth the seven-week wait.

Palmerston was no less opaque when Francis Tremlett and James Spence arrived the following day with the delegation from the Society for Promoting the Cessation of Hostilities in America. Tremlett had collected an impressive group that included six MPs and the president of the Royal College of Surgeons. Palmerston listened politely but quipped, “Those who in quarrels interpose / Will often wipe a bloody nose” and sent them on their way. Lord Russell presented a more sympathetic demeanor to the factory workers who visited the Foreign Office on July 18. Their petition described the poverty and hunger endured by those in the once profitable cotton trade and begged Russell to “enter into concert with other European powers, with a view to restore peace on the American continent.” But he was just as vague as Palmerston over when international mediation might be appropriate.

It would have been sensible for Lindsay to retreat at this moment, but the dogged MP would not give up, knowing that if he withdrew his resolution now, there would not be another opportunity to debate intervention for several months. While Lindsay pondered how best to use the limited means at his disposal, Rose Greenhow continued to plead with every member of the government who happened to come her way. She cornered Gladstone at a dinner given by Lord Granville on July 21 and reminded him that less than two years ago he had declared the Confederacy a nation. “Your sympathies have been with us of the South, but your Government have aided the Yankees,” she scolded. “Your neutrality is a farce.” Gladstone parried her accusations with a mixture of humor and obfuscation. Recognition, he told her, would not help the South and would only make the North angry. Rose tried again on July 24 when Lady Chesterfield brought her to Lady Palmerston’s final party of the season and introduced her to the prime minister. Rose was annoyed that he used the same arguments as Gladstone. “Talked a good deal with him,” she wrote in her diary. “He asked me how I got over. I said, ‘Run the blockade.’ ”
⁸

The next afternoon, Lindsay finally raised the subject in the House of Commons, though he was now certain of the answer. He did not bother trying for a resolution, but simply asked Palmerston the same question put by Mason during his private interview eleven days earlier: whether the government had any intention of ending the war in America. The curt response he received was the same: there was “no advantage to be gained” by doing so, even though “Her Majesty’s Government deeply lament the great sacrifice of life and property in America and the distress which that war has produced in this country.”
⁹

—

“Thus has terminated an operation which has cost much labor and money to somebody or other” was Charles Francis Adams’s sarcastic epitaph.
¹⁰
He had paid little attention to the Confederates after Palmerston’s successful repulse of the Tory attack, being more concerned with the worsening asthma of his daughter Mary. He blamed the London fogs for undermining her health, adding the crime of bad weather to the long list of malicious and treacherous acts that Britain would one day be called upon to answer.
¹¹
Adams also seemed to draw comfort from his belief that the British upper classes were united in favor of slavery and injustice. He wasted considerable time and effort in July arguing with Lord Russell, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the rescue of the
Alabama
’s officers had been prearranged with the owner of the
Deerhound.
Adams was so intent on proving a conspiracy that he neglected to make capital out of the genuine scandal surrounding the
Alabama:
that Southern officers had saved one another and left the English seamen to drown. Adams also squandered an opportunity to undermine accusations of Northern arrogance and hypocrisy when on July 28 the Commons debated the problem of British workers being kidnapped or tricked into the Federal army. Instead of supplying Northern supporters with information on the latest efforts to stop the abuse, Adams took umbrage against the tone of the complaints and insisted it proved the intent of “the higher classes” to destroy the Union.
¹²

Rose Greenhow suffered from the same willful blindness as Adams, though she confused sympathy for Southern suffering (her own in particular) with acceptance of Southern slavery. Few people had the nerve or desire to challenge her fantasy, though the Duchess of Sutherland snubbed Rose in the most pointed manner possible when Lady Chesterfield introduced them at the Kensington horticultural show. Rose was able to comfort herself with the observation that the duchess’s girth and “gaudy apparel” compared badly with her own remarkably youthful appearance. She had greater trouble putting aside her embarrassment at an incident during a dinner given by Lord Granville’s sister, Lady Georgiana Fullarton. An unnamed earl had pressed her relentlessly on the subject of slave families until she lost her temper and shrilly revealed the ugly prejudices of her native country. Rose sensed the alienation of her audience and was furious. It was at moments like this that she hated the English almost as much as she hated the North.
¹³

“My heart yearns to stay and also to go,” she wrote in her diary after the prorogation of Parliament. Her diplomatic mission appeared to have fizzled into something resembling a goodwill tour. She had not extracted any new promise from the emperor, nor had she helped Mason and Lindsay achieve any material change in government policy. “I thirst for news from home. The desperate struggle in which my people are engaged is ever present,” she wrote unhappily.
¹⁴
Rose’s book sales had brought her more than £2,000, money she preferred to distribute in the South rather than waste on yet another jolly though meaningless outing with her Tory friends. She assured Mason and Spence that her absence would not be for long. After all, her elder daughter, Florence, had recently joined her in England, and she could not leave little Rose (who was still uncertain about boarding school life) for too long.
^32.1

Rose would be joining an exodus of Southerners. Captain Semmes was also making arrangements to go home, though he knew that prison and possibly execution were likely if the Federals caught him. He was more than a little in love with Louisa Tremlett, the Reverend Francis Tremlett’s sister, and, unwilling to leave just at the moment, had accepted the Tremletts’ invitation to accompany them on a walking tour of Europe. Other survivors of the
Alabama
had already left, as had Lieutenant James Morgan of the ill-fated
Georgia.
Rose braved the Channel crossing to France one more time in order to say farewell to her daughter. They went shopping and Rose bought her a watch, “which made her very happy.” It was one of the few times the child smiled. “My little darling very miserable that I am going away,” wrote Rose on July 28. Two days later, she took little Rose back to the convent “and left her sobbing bitterly. It was a heavy trial … my heart is very sad.”