A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (151 page)

 
7.
Raymond A. Jones,
The British Diplomatic Service
(London, 1983), p. 99.

 
8.
Calvin D. Davis, “A British Diplomat and the American Civil War: Edward Malet in the United States,”
South Atlantic Quarterly,
77/2 (1978), p.166.

 
9.
863,409 British and 1,611,304 Irish, PRO FO 115/394, f. 216. Two-thirds of these “British” expatriates were actually Irish immigrants, who harbored a visceral hatred toward the mother country. Nevertheless, they enjoyed the same protection by the British minister as the 98 Scots in Dakota, and the 23,848 Englishmen in Massachusetts. The Foreign Office had recognized that the legation’s staff of five was too small and the sixth attaché was on his way. Although the British government promulgated the official line of “once a Briton, always a Briton,” in practice, Lyons was not expected to take up the cases of naturalized British subjects.

10.
H. C. Allen,
Great Britain and the United States
(New York, 1955), p. 361. In 1819, the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, warned his new British minister, “The jealousies as yet imperfectly allayed inclines the Government of the United States to maintain … [to us] a tone of greater harshness than towards any other Government whatever. The American people are more easily excited against us and more disposed to strengthen the hands of their Ministers against us than against any other State.”

11.
George Washburn Smalley,
Anglo-American Memories
(New York, 1912), p. 174.

12.
Lord Newton (ed.),
Lord Lyons: A Record of British Diplomacy
, 2 vols. (London, 1914)
,
vol. 2, p. 214.

13.
John Evan (pseudonym of Evan John Simpson),
Atlantic Impact
(London, 1952), p. 210. This oft-repeated description of Lyons may possibly be apocryphal but the spirit of the story remains true.

14.
The admiral became his son’s champion: “Had it not been for your visit to England at the critical moment,” he wrote to his father from his new post in Florence, “I should now have been no more than simple Secretary of Legation.” Newton (ed.),
Lord Lyons
, vol. 1, p. 7.

15.
Scott Thomas Cairns, “Lord Lyons and Anglo-American Diplomacy During the American Civil War,” Ph.D. thesis, London School of Economics, 2004, p. 58.

16.
As quoted in Brian Jenkins,
Britain and the War for the Union
, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974, 1980), vol. 1, p. 44.

17.
Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.),
The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865
, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 1, pp. 504–5, February 8, 1859.

18.
Newton (ed.),
Lord Lyons
, vol. 1, p. 14, Lord Lyons to Lord Malmesbury, May 29, 1859.

19.
Charles Dickens,
American Notes for General Circulation
(London, 1842; Penguin Classics, 2000), p. 129.

20.
Edward Dicey,
Spectator of America
, ed. Herbert Mitgang (Athens, Ga., 1971), p. 62.

21.
Ibid., p. 65.

22.
Michael Burlingame (ed.),
Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864
(Carbondale, Ill., 1998), p. 50.

23.
William Howard Russell,
My Diary North and South
, ed. Eugene H. Berwanger (New York, 1988), p. 41, March 26, 1861.

24.
Clay-Copton and Sterling,
A Belle of the Fifties
, p. 139.

25.
Mrs. Clay recalled that Lyons said, “Ah, Madam! do you remember what Uncle Toby said to his nephew when he informed him of his intended marriage?” She, presumably not having read
Tristram Shandy,
had no idea what was coming next. “Then, without waiting for my assent, he added, ‘Alas! alas! quoth my Uncle Toby, you will never sleep slantindicularly in your bed [any] more!’ ” Ibid.

26.
Hudson Strode (ed.),
Private Letters of Jefferson Davis
(New York, 1966), p. 105, Varina Davis to Jefferson Davis, April 10, 1859.

27.
Wilbur Devereux Jones,
The American Problem in British Diplomacy, 1841–1861
(London, 1974), p. 172.

28.
Barnes and Barnes (eds.),
Private and Confidential
, p. 214, Lyons to Lord Malmesbury, June 21, 1859.

29.
Newton (ed.),
Lord Lyons
, vol. 1, p. 14, Lord Lyons to Lord Malmesbury, May 30, 1859.

30.
James O’Donald Mays,
Mr. Hawthorne Goes to England
(Ringwood, 1983), pp. 156–58.

PART I: COTTON IS KING

Chapter 1: The Uneasy Cousins

 
1.
Wilbur Devereux Jones,
The American Problem in British Diplomacy, 1841–1861
(London, 1974), p. 169, Lord Derby to Lord Malmesbury, October 11, 1858.

 
2.
Kenneth Bourne,
The Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 1830–1902
(Oxford, 1970), p. 334, Lord Palmerston to Lord Clarendon, December 31, 1857.

 
3.
In 1807, HMS
Leopard
was prowling off the coast of Virginia when it came across USS
Chesapeake
. The
Leopard
fired on the
Chesapeake
after the vessel refused to heave to, killing three American sailors and wounding a further eighteen. Only one deserter was found.

 
4.
Paul Ford Leicester (ed.),
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 1807–1815
, vol. 9 (London, 1898), p. 366, Jefferson to William Duane, August 4, 1812.

 
5.
Thomas Low Nichols,
Forty Years of American Life
, 2 vols. (London, 1864), vol. 1, p. 409.

 
6.
Jasper Ridley,
Palmerston
(New York, 1971), pp. 270–74, Palmerston to Russell, January 19, 1841.

 
7.
Evelyn Ashley,
The Life and Correspondence of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston
, 2 vols. (London, 1879), vol. 1, p. 408, Palmerston to H. S. Fox, February 9, 1841.

 
8.
The raid had taken place in 1837. The USS
Caroline
was carrying supplies to pro-American Canadian insurgents. Tired of troublemakers fostering rebellion south of the border, a group of armed men seized the
Caroline,
killing an American sailor in the process, and sent it over Niagara Falls. While hogging his barstool, McLeod boasted that he was the killer. In truth, he was a pathetic fantasist.

 
9.
James Chambers,
Palmerston, the People’s Darling
(London, 2004), p. 199.

10.
Ridley,
Palmerston
, p. 273.

11.
The border dispute over New Brunswick and Maine was settled by British minister Lord Ashburton and U.S. secretary of state Daniel Webster.

12.
H. C. Allen,
Great Britain and the United States
(New York, 1955), p. 136.

13.
Ibid., p. 123.

14.
Betty Fladeland,
Men and Brothers
(Champaign, Ill., 1972), p. 351.

15.
Annie Heloise Abel and Frank J. Klingberg (eds.),
A Sidelight on Anglo-American Relations, 1839–1858
(Lancaster, Pa., 1927), p. 40.

16.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897
(New York, 1898), pp. 71–92.

17.
Jean Fagan Yellin, “Harriet Jacobs and the Transatlantic Movement,” in
Sisterhood and Slavery: Transatlantic Antislavery and Women’s Rights: Proceedings of the Third Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University
(Yale, 2001), p. 7.

18.
Allen,
Great Britain and the United States
, p. 198.

19.
William Brock, “The Image of England and American Nationalism,”
Journal of American Studies
, 5 (Dec. 1971). Edward Everett, speech at Bristol, 1842, p. 227.

20.
Nichols,
Forty Years of American Life
, vol. 1, p. 398.

21.
Allen,
Great Britain and the United States
, p.147, quoting the
Edinburgh Review,
1820.

22.
It was often pointed out that Louisiana would still belong to the French if Barings Bank in London had not financed the purchase, selling more than $9 million worth of the $11 million total of bonds sold.

23.
Charles Dickens to Macready, March 22, 1842, quoted in Walter Allen,
Transatlantic Crossing: American Visitors to Britain and British Visitors to America in the Nineteenth Century
(New York, 1971), p. 236.

24.
What Seward actually believed in has been the subject of intense historical debate. In a speech in 1853 he declared it was his aim that the republic “shall greet the sun when he touches the tropics, and when he sends his gleaming rays towards the polar circle, and shall include even distant islands in either ocean.” But Ernest Paolino argues that by 1857 Seward had abandoned the idea of annexing Canada by force. For one thing, a trip to Labrador convinced him that the Canadians would never accept it. Nevertheless, he liked to talk as though he believed it was just a matter of time, if only to annoy the British. In 1860 he made a speech congratulating the Canadians for “building states to be hereafter admitted into the American union.” Ernest N. Paolino,
The Foundations of the American Empire
(New York, 1973), p. 8.

25.
G. H. Warren,
Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas
(Boston, 1981), p. 56.

26.
Henry Adams,
The Education of Henry Adams
, ed. Ernest Samuels (repr., Boston, 1973), p. 102.

27.
David Herbert Donald,
Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War
(New York, 1961), pp. 295–96.

28.
Letters of Sir George Cornewall Lewis
, ed. Sir G. F. Lewis (London, 1870), pp. 390–92, Lewis to the Hon. Edward Twisleton, January 21, 1861.

29.
Illustrated London News
, August 29, no. 814 (Aug. 1856), pp. 121–22. The Duchess of Sutherland made it a point of duty to support black performers who came to England. In 1853, for example, she invited Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, known as “the Black Swan,” to perform a concert at Stafford House in the presence of Queen Victoria. The event was so celebrated that it was turned into a song: “The Other Side of Jordan” (1853).