A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (161 page)

 
9.
Toth (ed.),
Mission Abroad
, p. 236, Hughes to Seward, January 11, 1862.

10.
MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, January 15, 1862.

11.
Edward Chalfant,
Better in Darkness
(New York, 1994), p. 21.

12.
Ibid., p. 25.

13.
Wallace and Gillespie (eds.),
The Journal of Benjamin Moran
, vol. 2, p. 940, January 10, 1862.

14.
Desmond McCarthy,
Lady John Russell
, p. 260, Lady John Russell to Lady Dumferline, December 13, 1861.

15.
Letters of Lord St. Maur and Lord Edward St. Maur
, p. 245, Duke of Somerset to Lord Edward St. Maur, January 12, 1862.

16.
MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, April 19, 1862. His diary for just one week in April, for example, shows that he may have felt lonely, but he was not alone. He went to dinner at Lord Lansdowne’s on April 1: “The dinner was pleasant without being animated.” From there he went to a glittering reception at Stafford House. The next day he went to a dinner at the Duchess of Somerset’s. On the third, he went to a reception of the president of the Royal Society at Burlington House. On April 5, Mrs. Adams had her first reception for Americans in London, with about thirty guests. On the seventh, he had dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, with “Lord and Lady Macclesfield, Lord Ellenborough, Lord and Lady Colville, Lord and Lady Colchester and Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Walpole, and one or two others.”

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.