A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (17 page)

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Punch tells the Southern planters that the days of slavery are numbered, December 1860.

The boastful rhetoric of Southern politicians was also attacked in the press. Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas came in for particular censure for his arrogant speech to the Senate on December 6, 1860. The South would be able to dictate her own terms to the world, he declared, because “Cotton is King.… He waves his sceptre not only over these thirty-three states, but over the island of Great Britain.” Queen Victoria herself, Wigfall roared, must “bend the knee in fealty and acknowledge allegiance to that monarch.” The South could turn off the supply of cotton and cripple England in a single week. The cabinet feared Wigfall could be right and agreed with Palmerston “that no time should be lost in securing a supply of cotton from other quarters than America.”
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The South owed more than $200 million to the North, with most of the debt concentrated in New York, a city whose commercial ties with the cotton states were so close that some banks accepted slaves as collateral. The financial community was sent into a panic by the readiness of Southern businesses to use South Carolina’s self-declared independence as an excuse to repudiate their debts. The
New York Post
denounced the practice as treachery, declaring, “The city of New York belongs almost as much to the South as to the North.” The victims of the financial crisis were not only New Yorkers. In Britain, investors had almost $400 million in U.S. stocks, bonds, and securities; Benjamin Moran lost most of his savings in a matter of weeks. But the impact went deeper and wider in New York, and included victims such as Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, whose hard-won funds for her women’s medical college simply evaporated. Mayor Fernando Wood was so anxious about the state of the financial markets that he briefly entertained a proposal for New York to secede from the Union and become a “free city.”

In late December, with Lincoln still in Illinois going through appointment lists and President Buchanan having retreated to his bedroom in the White House, Seward took the lead role in guiding the North’s response to the seceding states. Thurlow Weed’s prediction that Lincoln would “share” power—and the escalating crisis—had convinced Seward to put aside his hurt pride and agree to become secretary of state.
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His self-belief and ambition returned in full force once the decision was made: “I have advised Mr. L that I will not decline [the post],” Seward wrote to his wife on December 28. “It is inevitable. I will try to save freedom and my country.”
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The Senate had appointed the “Committee of Thirteen,” and the House of Representatives the “Committee of Thirty-three,” to address Southern grievances. Seward not only dominated the Senate committee but also made sure that his supporters—particularly Charles Francis Adams—were among the thirty-three. Their work became all the more urgent after news reached Washington that the Southern states were seizing federal arsenals and forts. Seward’s strategy was to conciliate and delay for as long as possible. The South had been threatening to secede for years; he was convinced that if the hotheads could be contained, the moderates would gradually reassert control. He talked with such assurance that young Henry Adams felt he was in the presence of greatness.
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But to Charles Sumner, Seward’s willingness to guarantee the institution of slavery in order to save the Union was an insupportable betrayal of abolition principles. Sumner cornered Henry’s brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., when he visited the Senate and ranted at him like a “crazy man,” blaming “the compromisers, meaning Seward and my father.”
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As far as Sumner was concerned, his friendship with Adams was irreparably broken.

Seward ignored Sumner’s ravings, confident that his conciliation plan would work given sufficient time. But in early January, two delegations from the New York business community were told by Southern leaders in Washington that a movement had started that could not be stopped. Mississippi voted to secede on January 9, Florida on the tenth. Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana followed in quick succession; their senators left Washington and went to Montgomery, Alabama, where a special convention was due to begin on February 4. Texas followed on February 1, 1861, the seventh state to secede from the Union. On the morning of the third, Seward paid a surprise call on Lord Lyons, to reassure him that the South would be back in the fold in less than three months. Lyons had been wondering for several weeks when either the old or the new administration would remember the existence of the diplomatic community. He did not discount the value of being able to talk privately with the incoming secretary of state, but everything else about the interview made Lyons dread his future relationship with Seward. He sent two reports of the meeting to Lord John Russell. In the official dispatch, which would be printed for public consumption in the parliamentary “Blue Book,” he gave a bland description that only hinted at the threats and preposterous claims Seward had leveled at him. Seward had, wrote Lyons with classic understatement, “unbounded confidence in his own skill in managing the American people.”

In the separate dispatch marked “private and confidential,” however, Lyons admitted that he had been horrified by Seward’s mix of cynicism and naïveté. The secretary of state had tried to persuade him that there was enough federal patronage at his disposal to bribe the South back into the Union. As far as Seward was concerned, there was no need to discuss the international ramifications of the conflict because none existed. As long as there was no bloodshed, he told Lyons, the seceding states would eventually change their minds. Seward also repeated to him a recent conversation with the minister for Bremen (one of the smaller states of the German Confederation), “no doubt for my instruction.” The hapless diplomat had complained about the Republican Party’s election promise to place tariffs on foreign imports, saying that such a move would turn Europe against America at the moment when she most needed friends. Seward claimed to have replied that nothing would give him more pleasure, since he would then have the perfect excuse for an international quarrel, “and South Carolina and the seceding states would soon join in.” “I am afraid,” concluded Lyons, “that he takes no other view of Foreign Relations, than as safe levers to work with upon public opinion here.”
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A few days later, Lyons heard that Seward was trying to pass a message to him and the French minister that they should ignore anything he might say about either Britain or France, since underneath he had “the kindest motives towards the two countries.” Lyons thought that Seward’s visit to Britain the previous summer had given him not only a handful of fond memories but also the dangerous misconception “that England will never go to war with the United States” and therefore “could be safely played with without any risk.”
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Lord John Russell advised Lyons to be blunt with Seward: he should understand that England’s “forbearance sprung from a consciousness of strength, and not from the timidity of weakness.”
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On February 8, 1861, Henry Adams wrote to his brother that Seward was in high spirits “and chuckles himself hoarse with his stories. He says it’s all right. We shall keep the border states … the storm is weathered.” The next day in Montgomery, Alabama, the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America elected Senator Jefferson Davis—one of Seward’s closest Washington friends before the crisis—as provisional president. William Lowndes Yancey, the voice of secession, proclaimed memorably “that the man and the hour have met.” Davis was inaugurated on February 18. A future general in the Confederate army informed his wife that “the firm conviction here is that Great Britain, France and Russia will acknowledge us at once in the family of nations.”
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Davis placed so much confidence in the power of cotton that he appointed Yancey, who had never been abroad, to lead the Confederate diplomatic mission to Europe.

Seward was still offering deals to Southern negotiators, even though Confederate troops were threatening the tiny federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston, when Lincoln arrived in Washington on February 23. Everything about the new president proclaimed his rusticity. The two years he had spent in Congress during the late 1840s appeared to have left him in the same unpolished state as when he first entered it. During Seward’s first private conversation with him, Lincoln admitted with startling candor that he had no idea about international relations, saying, “I shall have to depend upon you for taking care of these matters of foreign affairs, of which I know so little, and with which I reckon you are familiar.” More extraordinarily still, Lincoln showed Seward his inaugural address and invited him to give his comments.
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Less than a week before Lincoln’s arrival, Seward had insisted to the Bremen minister that the presidency was a matter of luck—rather like the monarchy—and no one took the officeholder seriously. “The actual direction of public affairs belongs to the leader of the ruling party here.”
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Seward was obviously referring to himself, as though he was expecting Lincoln to settle meekly into his role as the ceremonial leader of the country, leaving him in charge.

No matter how hard Seward argued and cajoled, however, Lincoln would not be swayed from his notion that he alone had the right to select the members of his cabinet. Nor did he accept Seward’s contention that the United States should abandon Fort Sumter rather than take a stand against Southern threats. Seward dared not reveal his promises to the Southern negotiators that Fort Sumter would not be reinforced. While Seward struggled to assert his will over Lincoln, the Northern Republicans in the Senate took advantage of the missing Southern politicians, who were free-traders to a man, to pass the Morrill Tariff on February 27. The protectionist bill placed high import duties on most imported manufacturing goods; since 40 percent of Britain’s export trade went to the United States, the effect of the tariff on Britain would be devastating. Its impact on international relations ought to have been of the highest priority to the State Department.
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Seward was bitterly disappointed by Lincoln’s refusal to alter his appointments to the cabinet. His dismay was not palliated by the fact that the six other members were either neutral toward the president or former rivals, and equally suspicious of one another. Three—Caleb Smith (Interior), Edward Bates (attorney general), and Simon Cameron (War)—were cool toward him. But the others—Salmon Chase (Treasury), Gideon Welles (Navy), and Montgomery Blair (postmaster general)—were outright enemies.
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Seward tendered his resignation on March 2. Lincoln calmly offered him the American legation in Britain as an alternative. He already had a second choice for secretary of state: William L. Dayton, the attorney general of New Jersey. “I cannot afford to let Seward take the first trick,” Lincoln explained to his private secretary. Furious at being outsmarted by the novice leader, Seward conceded defeat before Dayton could be alerted of his good fortune. He withdrew his resignation on March 4, and the unsuspecting Dayton was put down for London. But having lost the battle to keep some of his greatest enemies out of the cabinet, Seward became even more determined that no one should interfere with his conciliation strategy, and all through March he feverishly schemed and maneuvered behind Lincoln’s back.

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Among the diplomatic community in Washington, the main topic of conversation was whether the North would employ any commercial sanctions against countries doing business with the South. Lyons agreed with Lord John Russell that Britain’s commercial interests were paramount, but he also thought that it would be a calamity if the North forced the “maritime Powers of Europe to interfere” to protect their cotton supply since, in his view, the “stain of slavery” made the South “loathsome to the civilized world.”
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On March 20, Seward made another of his unscheduled visits to Lyons, this time to sound out the minister’s opinion on how the British would react if the North “interrupted” the South’s commerce. Realizing this meant a blockade of Southern ports, Lyons attempted a little bluster of his own and threatened point-blank that if the North recklessly deprived Britain of cotton, she would fight back, and “the most simple, if not the only way, would be to recognize the Southern Confederacy.” Recognition, in legal terms, meant granting the South the status of a sovereign country. The North would not only then suffer a psychological blow but might also find itself facing a united Europe that was prepared to protect the supply of cotton at the point of a gun.

Lyons was unaware that he had committed a grave error. He had given the impression to Seward, who thought that Lyons was too unimaginative to be bluffing, that Britain was looking for an excuse to recognize the South. Seward pretended that he agreed with Lyons’s position, a tactic he often employed when he wanted to buy time. According to Seward’s political philosophy, a frightened enemy was better than an untrustworthy friend. When he left the legation, it was to think about how to keep Britain at bay rather than how to help her avoid a disruption to her cotton industry.

The following day, Lyons gave a formal dinner that included Seward and the senior members of the diplomatic corps. Though Washington had not taken to the minister, it welcomed his copious champagne and French chef. The dinner itself passed without incident, but by the time the guests had moved to the drawing room, Seward was lubricated and loquacious. His gravelly voice suddenly rose above the gentle hum, causing Lyons to stop his conversation and turn around. He saw that Seward was having a heated discussion with the French and Russian ministers. Seward impatiently motioned him to join them.