A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (162 page)

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Authors: Amanda Foreman

Tags: #Europe, #International Relations, #Modern, #General, #United States, #Great Britain, #Public Opinion, #Political Science, #Civil War Period (1850-1877), #19th Century, #History

BOOK: A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War
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4.
George Douglas, Eighth Duke of Argyll (1823–1900): Autobiography and Memoirs
, ed. the Dowager Duchess of Argyll, 2 vols. (London, 1906), vol. 2, p. 190, May 13, 1862.
 
5.
Jones, “Blyden, Gladstone and the War,” p. 58. Blyden had recently returned from a diplomatic mission to the United States where he was subjected to the usual treatment meted out to free blacks, such as being denied the right to ride on public busses or eat in white-owned restaurants. He was particularly upset at being denied entry to the House of Representatives. There was no such bar to the Houses of Parliament, which surprised some Northerners. Benjamin Moran laughed at Charles Wilson’s annoyance at having to sit beside “the negro representative from Hayti.” On February 6, he wrote in his diary: “From what I have been told the black exhibited a good deal better manners than did my fellow secretary. For all his ‘black republicanism,’ he clearly indicated by his uneasiness a decided antipathy to ‘the nigger’.”
 
6.
MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, April 16, 1862. Adams was convinced that Lord Shaftesbury was against the North, and was using his influence with the antislavery societies. However, Thurlow Weed became acquainted with Shaftesbury and realized that the earl, like so many others, had been alienated by the North’s willingness to continue slavery.
 
7.
Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.),
The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865
, 2 vols. (Chicago 1948, 1949), vol. 2, p. 979, April 16, 1862.
 
8.
David Hepburn Milton,
Lincoln’s Spymaster: Thomas Haines Dudley and the Liverpool Network
(Mechanicsburg, Pa., 2003), pp. 5–7.
 
9.
Wallace and Gillespie (eds.),
The Journal of Benjamin Moran
, vol. 2, pp. 832–33, June 24, 1861.
10.
“You may rest assured that no proper effort will be wanting on my part to report to you all that can be learned of the doings of rebel agents here,” Consul Morse promised. NARA, T. 168, roll 30, vol. 30, desp.1, Morse to Seward, January 30, 1862.
11.
Milton,
Lincoln’s Spymaster
, p. 33.
12.
F. L. Owsley,
The
CSS
Florida
(Philidelphia, 1965; repr. Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1987), p. 22.
13.
He definitely could not afford marine insurance. In spite of Weed’s conviction that Lloyds was making a handsome profit out of secretly providing insurance to blockade runners, Huse’s experience was that the terms were so outrageous as to be prohibitive. ORN, ser. 4, vol. 1, p. 127, Caleb Huse to Major Gorgas, March 15, 1862.
14.
BL Add. MS 38951, ff. 53–55, Lord Hammond to Austen Henry Layard, April 20, 1862.
15.
See, for example, MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, May 9, 1862.
16.
PRO FO5/818, Russell to Lyons, April 17, 1862.
17.
Napoleon then said the complete opposite to William Dayton, the U.S. minister: “Mr. Adams tells me,” reported Benjamin Moran on April 17, “that Louis Napoleon in a personal interview with Mr. Dayton expressed his regret at the precipitate recognition of the rebels as belligerents by France and Gt. B., and stated that it was England’s work. He is now willing to withdraw it if Gt. B. will also.”
18.
Louis Martin Sears, “A Confederate Diplomat at the Court of Napoleon III,”
American Historical Review
, 26/2 (Jan. 1921), pp. 255–81, Slidell to Mason, April 12, 1862.
19.
NARA, T. 168, roll 30, d. 1, Morse to Seward, April 12, 1862.
20.
Wallace and Gillespie (eds.),
The Journal of Benjamin Moran
, vol. 2, p. 969, March 22, 1862.
21.
W. C. Ford,
A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865
, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), vol. 1, p. 133, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., April 11, 1862.
22.
Adams,
The Education of Henry Adams
, p. 134.
23.
ORN, ser. 2, vol. 2, p. 183, Bulloch to Mallory, April 11, 1862.
24.
Wallace and Gillespie (eds.),
The Journal of Benjamin Moran
, vol. 2, p. 978, April 14, 1862.
25.
ORN, ser. I, vol. 1, pp. 745–49, Captain Pegram to Mallory, March 10, 1862.
26.
Francis W. Dawson,
Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861–1865
, ed. Bell I. Wiley (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 32.
27.
Duke University, Francis Dawson MSS, Dawson to mother, May 16, 1862.
28.
James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes (eds.),
The American Civil War Through British Eyes
, vol. 1 (Kent, Ohio, 2003), pp. 313–14, Lyons to Russell, March 16, 1861.
29.
It is true that wooden ships were defenseless against those made of iron. However, D. P. Crook quotes the
Manchester Guardian
(April 3, 1862), one of the few English newspapers to maintain a sense of perspective about the news: “There may be a certain truth in saying that our whole navy consists of but two men of war [
Warrior
and
Black Prince
]; but it is to be observed that, in the same sense, the French have but one, the Americans have only a gunboat, and no other nation has any navy at all.” Crook,
The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861–1865
(New York, 1974), p. 188. In reality the
Monitor
and the
Warrior
could never have engaged each other because the former could only sail in calm water and the latter could only maneuver in the open sea.
30.
John Black Atkins,
The Life of Sir William Howard Russell
, 2 vols. (London, 1911), vol. 2, p. 93.
31.
Martin Crawford (ed.),
William Howard Russell’s Civil War: Private Diary and Letters
(Athens, Ga., 1992), p. 231, Russell to Mowbray Morris, March 15, 1862.
32.
Edward Dicey,
Spectator of America
, ed. Herbert Mitgang (Athens, Ga., 1971), p. 149.
33.
Lawley’s early life is described in Brian Jenkins, “Frank Lawley and the Confederacy,”
Civil War History
, 23 (March 1977), and William Stanley Hoole,
Lawley Covers the Confederacy
(Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1964).
34.
Jenkins, “Frank Lawley and the Confederacy,” p. 148.
35.
Julia Miele Rodas, “More Than a Civil (War) Friendship: Anthony Trollope and Frank Lawley,”
Princeton University Library Chronicle
, 60/1 (1998), p. 42, Lawley to mother, February 2, 1862.
36.
Crawford (ed.),
William Howard Russell’s Civil War
, p. 230.
37.
Alan Hankinson,
Man of Wars: William Howard Russell of “The Times,” 1820–1907
(London, 1982), p. 180.
38.
William Watson,
Life in the Confederate Army: Being the Observations and Experiences of an Alien in the South During the Civil War
(London, 1887; repr. Baton Rouge, La., 1995), p. 285.
39.
Atkins,
The Life of Sir William Howard Russell
, vol. 2, p. 105, March 24, 1862.
40.
Ilana Miller,
Reports from America
(Stroud, 2001), p. 212.
41.
Crawford (ed.),
William Howard Russell’s Civil War
, p. 235, Russell to Stanton, April 2, 1862.
42.
Allan Nevins,
The War for the Union,
4 vols.; vol. 2:
War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863
(New York, 1960), p. 3.
43.
William Howard Russell,
My Diary North and South
, ed. Eugene H. Berwanger (New York, 1988), p. 340.
44.
Hankinson,
Man of Wars
, p. 181.
45.
A. Taylor-Milne, “The Lyons-Seward Treaty of 1862,”
American Historical Review
, 38/3, pp. 511–25.
46.
The small U.S. fleet known as the Africa squadron had been patrolling the west coast of Africa since 1860; the largest fleet was the British Preventive Squadron, which had six ships.
47.
James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes,
Private and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers in Washington to the Foreign Secretaries
(Selinsgrove, Pa., 1993), p. 280. The source for the footnote on this page is the same.
48.
University of Rochester, Fanny Seward Diary, ff. 21–29, March 22, 1862.
49.
Dicey,
Spectator of America
, p. 58.
50.
Lincoln had calculated that paying owners compensation for all the slaves in the Northern states would cost the equivalent of eighty-seven days of warfare.
51.
The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz
, ed. Carl Schurz, Frederic Bancroft, and William Archibald Dunning, 3 vols. (Garden City, N.Y., 1917), vol. 2, p. 304.
52.
Taylor-Milne, “The Lyons-Seward Treaty of 1862.”
53.
PRO 30/22/36, ff. 63–66, Lyons to Russell, April 8, 1862.

Chapter 11: Five Miles from Richmond

 
1.
Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr. (ed.),
Sir Henry Morton Stanley, Confederate
(Baton Rouge, La., 2000), p. 129.
 
2.
Ibid., pp. 123, 124.
 
3.
Ibid., p. 126. Eighteen-year-old Henry D. Parker survived but was discharged from the army on April 10.
 
4.
Stanley P. Hirshon,
The White Tecumseh
(New York, 1997), p. 120.
 
5.
Grant was in fact named Hiram Ulysses Grant, but a mistake in his application to West Point resulted in his being known as Ulysses S. Grant.
 
6.
Peter Batty and Peter Parish,
The Divided Union
(London, 1987), p. 80.
 
7.
Hughes (ed.),
Sir Henry Morton Stanley
, p. 136.
 
8.
Edward Dicey,
Spectator of America
, ed. Herbert Mitgang (Athens, Ga., 1971), p. 208.
 
9.
Dawson’s propensity for romantic flights of fancy helped him to survive his transition to life as a junior officer in the navy. There was nothing knightly about the first time he tried to climb into bed: “Like one of the heroes of my favorite Marryatt [
sic
], I signalized my entrance into the hammock on one side by pitching out on my head on the other side.” Francis W. Dawson,
Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861–1865
, ed. Bell I. Wiley (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), pp. 40–42.

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