A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (20 page)

found himself fairly beyond his depth; and he plunged! The foreign-war panacea took possession of him; and he yielded to it. The fact is, as I now see him, Seward was an able, a specious and adroit, and a very versatile man; but he escaped being really great. He made a parade of philosophy, and by it I was very effectually deceived.
⁵⁴

President Jefferson Davis declared an official state of war on May 6, the same day that Lyons decided Britain could not risk making common cause with the North. William Howard Russell saw the bill lying on Davis’s desk when he arrived to interview him for
The Times.
Davis proudly informed Russell that more than 400,000 volunteers had answered his call to arms, far more than they needed or could equip. “He asked me if I thought it was supposed in England there would be war between the two states,” wrote Russell. “I answered, that I was under the impression the public thought there would be no actual hostilities.” “And yet you see we are driven to take up arms for the defence of our rights and liberties,” Davis had replied.
⁵⁵

Russell had witnessed for himself the Southern version of liberty. During a break in his journey to Montgomery, a slave girl, hardly more than ten years old, had begged him to take her away from “the missus.” She promised to serve him faithfully in return, since “she could wash and sew very well.”
⁵⁶
The incident helped Russell to clarify his feelings about the South. At first glance, its ruling class was just like the English aristocracy. “They travel and read, love field sports, racing, shooting, hunting, and fishing, are bold horsemen, and good shots,” he admitted. But behind the façade was not an enlightened society founded on the ideals of ancient Rome but “a modern Sparta—an aristocracy resting on helotry, and with nothing else to rest upon.… Their whole system rests on slavery, and as such they defend it.”
⁵⁷

Montgomery, Alabama, was dreary and hot. “I have rarely seen a more dull, lifeless place,” he wrote. “It looks like a small Russian town in the interior.”
⁵⁸
The ubiquitous slave auctions filled him with disgust. He was also unnerved by the discovery that he was the only white man in the city who was not carrying a loaded revolver. His interview with Davis had been a strange anticlimax. Both men were aware that the meeting could have far-reaching consequences. This was Davis’s first, and perhaps only, opportunity to speak directly to Great Britain. Thousands of miles away, there was an audience waiting to meet the man who could hold Britain’s textile industry for ransom should he so choose. Yet Davis was too proud to make a grand statement or appeal. “He proceeded to speak on general matters,” wrote Russell, “adverting to the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny.” But apart from asking the journalist whether “England [thought] there would be war between the two states,” Davis hardly mentioned the crisis at all. Their conversation was so ordinary that Russell padded out his report for
The Times
with a description of Davis’s appearance. The former secretary of war under President Pierce was “about fifty-five years of age,” wrote Russell, “his features are regular and well-defined, but the face is thin and marked on cheek and brow with many wrinkles, and is rather careworn and haggard. One eye is apparently blind, the other is dark, piercing and intelligent.”
⁵⁹
Russell avoided mention of Davis’s tic or his demeanor, which, though gentlemanly, was cold.
⁶⁰

Russell was equally disappointed with the Southern secretary of war, Leroy Walker, and the secretary of state, Robert Toombs. The former spat and chewed while talking mostly nonsense, not being a military man; the latter seemed earnest though dim. “Seward had told me,” Russell wrote, “that but for Jefferson Davis the secession plot could never have been carried out. No other man of the part had the brain, or the courage and dexterity.” Consul Bunch had said something similar to him during his stay in Charleston. In a frank appraisal protected by diplomatic seal, Bunch had commended Davis for his statesmanlike qualities but dismissed the rest of the Confederate cabinet as “the dead level of mediocrity.”
⁶¹
Having now made their acquaintance, Russell agreed.

—

The one Southern cabinet member who did make a forcible impression on Russell was Judah P. Benjamin. Russell disliked Jews in general, but he could not help warming to Benjamin, describing him as “the most open, frank, and cordial of the Confederates whom I have yet met.”
⁶²
Benjamin, he learned, was not a native Southerner. He had been born in the Caribbean on the island of St. Croix, which technically made him a British subject. His family moved to the South when Benjamin was a baby, eventually settling in Charleston when he was eleven years old. Benjamin’s undeniable brilliance propelled him to Yale Law School when he was only fourteen. Something else—the cause has never been revealed—led to his expulsion. Russell noted in his diary that Benjamin was “clever keen & well yes! What keen and clever men sometimes are”—referring, perhaps, to a certain ambiguity about Benjamin’s sexuality.
⁶³
Women enjoyed his company (although not his wife, Natalie, who had moved to Paris with their daughter in 1847); he could banter with them for an entire evening in English or French on any subject they pleased. But behind his perpetual smile there was a mysterious veil that none could penetrate.

Though he was only attorney general, Benjamin had already made himself indispensable to Davis. There was so little for him to do at the newly formed Department of Justice that Benjamin could devote most of his energies to whatever appealed to him. For the time being, he was acting as the president’s grand vizier. He shielded Davis from the office seekers and took on the burden of sorting through many of the tedious but necessary details of government. “When in doubt,” recorded a visitor, all strangers were referred to “Mr. Judah P. Benjamin, the ‘Poo Bah’ of the Confederate Government.”
⁶⁴

In contrast to his inarticulate colleagues, Benjamin immediately engaged Russell in an intelligent debate. Referring to the blockade and the legality of letters of marque, Russell asked, “Suppose, Mr. Attorney-General, England, or any of the great powers which decreed the abolition of privateering, refuse to recognise your flags?” What if, he added, “England, for example, declared your privateers were pirates?” In that case, replied Benjamin, “it would be nothing more or less than a declaration of war against us, and we must meet it as best we can.” He did not seem too downcast by the possibility. It was obvious to Russell that Benjamin was thinking about next season’s cotton crop. Benjamin confirmed his suspicion by saying with a smile, “All this coyness about acknowledging a slave power will come right at last … we are quite easy in our minds on this point at present.”
⁶⁵

Many years later, when Benjamin was an exile in London, Russell bumped into him at a dinner party. They walked home together, reminiscing about the war. Russell reminded him of their meeting in Montgomery, and how Benjamin had been so certain that the British and French would intervene as soon as their cotton stocks were low. “Ah, yes,” Benjamin replied, “I admit I was mistaken! I did not believe that your government would allow such misery to your operatives, such loss to your manufacturers, or that the people themselves would have borne it.”
⁶⁶

Benjamin was too discreet to say that when the Confederate cabinet held their first meeting, his had been the lone voice in favor of making preparations for a protracted war. The secretary of war, Leroy Walker, remembered the meeting with shame: “At that time, I, like everybody else, believed there would be no war. In fact, I had gone about the state … promising to wipe up with my pocket-handkerchief all the blood that would be shed,” he recalled despairingly.

There was only one man there who had any sense, and that man was Benjamin. Mr. Benjamin proposed that the government purchase as much cotton as it could hold, at least 100,000 bales, and ship it at once to England.… For, said Benjamin, we are entering on a contest that must be long and costly. All the rest of us fairly ridiculed the idea of a serious war. Well, you know what happened.
⁶⁷

Benjamin allowed himself to be swayed by his colleagues’ optimism. Europe would end the blockade by the following October, he explained genially to Russell, “when the Mississippi is floating cotton by the thousands of bales, and all our wharfs are full.”
⁶⁸
Shortly after Russell left Montgomery for Mobile, Alabama, the Provisional Confederate Congress voted to prohibit all trade with the North in order to prevent cotton from being shipped via Northern ports. “The cards are in our hands!” proclaimed the editors of the
Charleston Mercury,
obviously unfazed by the doubts expressed by Russell when he visited their offices, “and we intend to play them out to the bankruptcy of every cotton factory in Great Britain and France or the acknowledgement of our independence.”
⁶⁹

^3.1
The taxation on foreign goods depended on the economic interests of various Northern states; sugar, raw wool, iron, flaxseed, hides, beef, pork, grain, hemp, coal, lead, copper, and zinc all received protection from outside competition—as did dried, pickled, and salted fish.

^3.2
“He is obtrusive,” complained Welles, “assuming and presuming, meddlesome, and uncertain, ready to exercise authority always, never doubting his right until challenged; then he becomes timid, uncertain, distrustful, and inventive of schemes to extricate himself.… I think he has no very profound or sincere convictions.”
²⁰

^3.3
A letter of marque was a government license allowing a civilian ship to attack the merchant shipping of an enemy in time of war. Ships that carried such letters were called privateers, to distinguish them from pirates. Davis had resorted to this old-fashioned method of sea warfare because it would be many months before the Confederacy had its own navy.

^3.4
The treaty had been drawn up and signed by the seven Great Powers of Europe—Austria, France, Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire, Prussia, Russia, and Sardinia—after the Crimean War in order to establish a set of international laws governing both blockades and privateering. Ironically, America had not signed the treaty because President Franklin Pierce refused to relinquish the right to use licensed privateers.

FOUR
Expectations Are Dashed

Where is Adams?—Debate in the Commons—The neutrality proclamation—First interview with Lord John Russell—Seward’s horseplay—The power of Uncle Tom

A
poem in
Punch,
on March 30, 1861, neatly expressed Britain’s cotton dilemma:

Though with the North we sympathize,

It must not be forgotten,

That with the South we’ve stronger ties,

Which are composed of cotton.

The journalist William Howard Russell’s revelation that the South hoped to exploit these ties, along with his poignant descriptions of slave life, provoked outrage in England when his reports started to appear in April. But the North gained less support than Southerners had feared, since, in his inaugural address on March 4, Lincoln had promised not to interfere with slavery. The Morrill Tariff, with its rampant protectionism and whiff of anti-British bias, was an even greater gift to the Confederacy.
¹

At the U.S. legation, Benjamin Moran read the angry protests against the new tariff and took it to mean that the country as a whole had turned against the North. But George Dallas, the outgoing American minister whose existence was barely acknowledged by Seward, was much more sanguine about the hostile opinion expressed in newspapers. Britain “cannot be expected to appreciate the weakness, discredit, complications, and dangers which we instinctively and justly ascribe to disunion,” he told Seward on April 9. “English opinion tends rather, I apprehend, to the theory that a peaceful separation may work beneficially for both groups of states and not injuriously affect the rest of the world.”
²
He had obviously heard this said by many different people: even Thackeray had written to an American friend, asking, “In what way will it benefit the North to be recoupled to the South?” After all, at this time, England had not wanted “the Colonies” to go their own way, “and aren’t both better for the Separation?”
³

Nor did Dallas believe there was anything to be feared from the British government. Lord John Russell had rebuffed Seward’s demand for a promise never to have any dealings with the South or its representatives, but “his lordship assured me with great earnestness that there was not the slightest disposition in the British government to grasp at any advantage,” Dallas reported to Seward.
⁴
Far from looking for an advantage, the cabinet was approaching a state of panic over American affairs. Russell was shocked that six weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration there was still no replacement for the now irrelevant Dallas, and he was mystified as to what could be delaying the arrival of Charles Francis Adams at such a perilous moment in his country’s history.