A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (23 page)

However, the South was picking up backhanded support from politicians who were keen to rub John Bright’s nose in the apparent failure of democracy. “We are now witnessing the bursting of the great republican bubble which had so often been held up to us as a model on which to recast our own English Constitution,” Sir John Ramsden, MP, proclaimed in the Commons on May 27 to a scattering of sarcastic cheers. Gladstone and Russell hurriedly disowned Ramsden’s speech. “I do not think it just or seemly that there should be among us anything like exultation of their discord,” Russell chided. Unfortunately, he diminished the good effects of his speech with some unnecessary observations on the failings of American democracy.
⁴⁰

Reports of the Commons debate reached an American audience already infuriated by excerpts of William Howard Russell’s candid travelogues that had found their way back across the Atlantic. Northerners objected to his description of racism, and especially his honest appraisal of pro-Southern feeling in New York. Southerners were offended by his depiction of them as heartless and arrogant. (“Charleston people are thin skinned,” commented the Southern diarist Mary Chesnut; “I expected so much worse.”)
⁴¹
Seward was incensed for a different reason. All along he had insisted there was a silent majority of pro-Union voters in the South, but Russell’s letters from Georgia and South Carolina revealed the very opposite. Seward was sure they had influenced Britain’s decision to award belligerent rights to the South and was determined to make Russell pay for his reporting when he returned to the North.

Seward had also learned from Dallas that Lord John Russell had met the Southern envoys. Whether his reaction was driven by fear or embarrassment, it was nevertheless a gross miscalculation with regard to his own standing with Lincoln as well as his future relations with Britain. On May 21, 1861, he composed an insolent and threatening dispatch for Adams to read to Lord Russell, which stated there would be war if England had any dealings with the Confederacy or its envoys. This infamous letter came to be known by its number in the sequence of dispatches: Dispatch No. 10. Lincoln was no more inclined to declare war on England in May than he had been in April. According to Charles Sumner, the president showed him Seward’s dispatch and asked for his opinion. Seward’s blunder was Sumner’s opportunity to ingratiate himself with the White House. Sumner encouraged Lincoln to make drastic changes to the document. The more offensive phrases were removed, the threats toned down. Adams was no longer ordered to present the dispatch to Russell; it was simply for his own guidance.

Washington gossip related that Sumner paid an unscheduled visit to Seward and lectured him on the danger of misusing his powers.
⁴²
Already furious at having his dispatch amended, Seward allegedly lost control and kicked his desk, shouting, “God damn them, I’ll give them hell,” referring to Britain and France. “I’m no more afraid of them than I am of Robert Toombs [the Confederate secretary of state].” It was a delicious victory, made sweeter for Sumner when he recounted the interview to Lincoln. “You must watch him and overrule him,” he urged the president.

Map.6
London
Click
here
to view a larger image.

Seward asserted his independence by reversing some of Lincoln’s changes before the dispatch was sent. He also preserved the original document in the State Department’s files so that when the annual compilation was published, it was his letter rather than the amended dispatch that appeared.
⁴³
But he could not erase the perception among the diplomatic community in Washington that Charles Sumner was the more reasonable and better statesman of the two.
⁴⁴
All the foreign ministers heard the gossip about Dispatch No. 10, including Lyons, who was able to give Lord Russell a fair indication of its contents before the letter reached London. Seward accused Britain of deliberately ruining his plan to quarantine the South by encouraging the Confederates to believe that full recognition was imminent. Britain had acted precipitously and maliciously in declaring neutrality, he argued, since the president had only announced his
intention
to declare a blockade.

Seward was ignoring such inconvenient facts as the four British merchant ships that were seized by U.S. Navy blockaders when they tried to sail from Southern ports.
⁴⁵
He was also discounting the desire of neutral countries to have their legal rights as neutrals acknowledged. Earlier in the month, the State Department had been misinformed about a Canadian steamer named the
Peerless
that was alleged to have been purchased by the Confederacy. In fact, it was Federal agents who had purchased the ship, but this had not been communicated to Seward. Seward threatened to send the U.S. Navy into Canadian waters to seize the
Peerless
unless Britain voluntarily handed over the vessel. “I said,” Lyons informed Lord Russell, “that even if the
Peerless
should in fact be sold to the Seceded States, she could never cause the United States anything like the inconvenience which would follow a deliberate violation of neutral rights.”
⁴⁶

The longer Seward reflected on the belligerency issue, the more he portrayed himself—and by extension the North—as the victim of British machinations. His language toward Lord Lyons was so coarse that the minister sought to avoid social occasions where they might meet. Seward was using his relationship with the New York press to whip up public excitement against Britain; he even went so far as to write an anonymous attack on Lyons for the
Daily Herald.
⁴⁷
“I shall do my best not to be a discredit to you,” Lyons promised Russell after a group of senators demanded his expulsion, “but I am on very dangerous ground.”
⁴⁸

The French had yet to announce neutrality officially, although Seward was aware that France and Britain had agreed to work in tandem on American issues. It suited him to claim that England had acted alone and precipitately. He refused to receive Lyons and Mercier together or to acknowledge that there was an official understanding between the two countries. Mercier did not mind, since he was rushing ahead with schemes to end the blockade, which required extreme tact and patience on Lyons’s part to discourage.

“Every imaginable accusation of hostility to the United States is brought against Her Majesty’s Government,” Lyons reported to the Foreign Office. Seward’s propaganda campaign had succeeded in convincing the entire country that Britain had wronged the North. “Disappointment and exasperation are universal and deep,” wrote a New York lawyer in his diary. “The feeling of cordiality toward England—of brotherhood, almost of loyalty, which grew out of the Prince’s visit last fall (how long ago that seems!)—is utterly extinguished.”
⁴⁹
Lyons’s advice to London was to be firm but conciliatory, stay abreast with France, and “manifest a readiness on our part for war [though] the possibility of our being forced into hostilities is so painful a subject that I shrink from contemplating it.” Nevertheless, on June 10, Lyons telegraphed in cipher to Rear Admiral Sir Alexander Milne, the commander of the North Atlantic squadron, to be ready for the following signal: “Could you forward a letter for me to Antigua?” Milne sent a notice to his officers: “Be on your guard and prepared. States may declare war suddenly.”
⁵⁰

Charles Francis Adams first heard of the British government’s anxiety about Seward on June 1, during a dinner party at Lord Palmerston’s house. Lady Palmerston had chosen the guest list with care, inviting people who were known friends of the North, such as Richard Monckton Milnes. Hoping this would have put Adams at his ease, after dinner Lord Palmerston spoke to him about Seward’s behavior. “He intimated,” recorded Adams, “that his ways of doing things towards Lord Lyons had been ungracious and unpleasant.” This was the first time Adams had heard of the tensions in Washington. It seemed unbelievable, and he almost told Palmerston that it had to be a misunderstanding. After reflecting on the conversation the following morning, Adams decided that Seward’s brusque manner was probably the cause, and he resolved to warn his friend to be more circumspect.
⁵¹

On June 7, Ambrose Dudley Mann went to the Commons to observe William Gregory make his motion for recognition. Moran was also sitting in the Strangers Gallery and noticed with glee that the Southern envoy Mann “scowled awfully” as speakers from both sides of the House criticized Gregory for his unseemly haste. At length the scolding became unbearable, and Gregory withdrew his motion. Adams was writing his report of the debate when Dispatch No. 10 arrived at the legation. “I scarcely know how to understand Mr. Seward,” he wrote in disbelief. “The rest of the government may be demented for all that I know, but he surely is calm and wise.” Henry Adams was less forgiving. “A dispatch arrived yesterday from Seward,” he informed his brother on June 11, “so arrogant in tone and so extraordinary and unparalleled in its demands that it leaves no doubt in my mind that our Government wishes to face a war with all Europe.… I urged papa this morning, as the only man who could by any chance stop the thing, to make an energetic effort.”
⁵²

Adams was still angry and embarrassed that the neutrality proclamation had been issued on the day of his arrival. He considered Lord John Russell’s explanation to be spurious and self-serving. Nor did he accept Mr. Forster’s contention that “GB had done all they could to aid us.” Cunard had offered to lease twenty steamships to the Federal navy, which would have doubled its force of working steamers, until the Foreign Enlistment Act made such transactions illegal. But it was difficult for Adams to take the moral high ground when Seward seemed so intent on giving it away.

During an interview with Russell on June 12, Adams rephrased much of Seward’s dispatch and “softened as well as I could the sharp edges.” He also threw in a question about the
Great Eastern,
which had departed for Canada the week before with more than two thousand troops on board.
⁵³
Russell answered bluntly that it was due to Seward’s threats to seize a British vessel in Canadian waters; more regiments were on their way, he added. This was “another curse of Seward’s horseplay,” Adams recorded in irritation.
⁵⁴
He could easily imagine how news of the reinforcements would be received in Washington, and he consoled himself with the fact that he had not yet signed the lease for his house: Henry Adams thought they would all be home in two months.

The expectation of his recall lent an unreal cast to the London season; Charles Francis Adams attended the first drawing room of the season feeling more like an observer than a participant. In his diary he admitted that as far as aristocracies went, the English managed theirs tolerably well but the system remained deficient. “My feelings, as you know, have never been partial to the English,” he wrote to a friend.
⁵⁵
He resented the relatively low status accorded to him by the rules of English society. The American legation in London had none of the social and political importance enjoyed by its British counterpart in Washington, and the fact that he was the third Adams to represent America counted but little among families whose record of diplomatic service went back two or three hundred years. The feeling that “he was there to be put aside” was magnified by the English reluctance to speak to strangers. “No effort is made here to extend acquaintances,” Adams complained after the family went to a ball only to spend the entire evening in a lonely cluster.
⁵⁶
Yet he knew this had not been the experience of Charles Sumner, or of John Motley, and he wondered whether Sumner was poisoning his English friends against him and Seward.
⁵⁷

But those who did try to be friendly to Adams were often put off by his stiff manner. Five cabinet members gave dinners in his honor in June; only one, the Duke of Argyll, was prepared to repeat the experiment. “I have not yet been to a single entertainment where there was any conversation that I should care to remember,” Adams complained to Charles Francis Jr.
⁵⁸
The Argylls were able to look past Adams’s reserve since they regarded him more as a cause than a person. Adams unbent a little once he experienced the difference between a normal London dinner and the informal, lively gatherings at Stafford House. “The Duke and Duchess,” he recorded in his diary, “have the simplest and most engaging manners of any of the nobility I have yet seen.”
⁵⁹