A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (24 page)

Even Americans could find Adams difficult to approach. “He said he was very glad to see me,” recorded a visiting diplomat, “in a tone which no doubt was intended for kindness. It was certainly courteous. But there was a lack of warmth and stiffness about it which … made me feel as though the temperature of the room had dropped several degrees.”
⁶⁰
Adams was incapable of producing charm on demand, a serious handicap for a diplomat. “My own wish,” he wrote in his diary, “is to be silent when I have nothing to say, and not to be compelled to make conversation on topics which do not interest me.”
⁶¹
Lord and Lady Macclesfield went out of their way to welcome the new minister, only to be met with suspicion. “I am at a loss to know the cause of their civility to us,” he wrote, adding, “It is always irksome to me, who have the same cold manners [as the English] to attempt to make acquaintances, so that I hardly know how I shall get on.”
⁶²
Yancey sneered in his report to the Confederate secretary of state that “in his diplomatic and social relations, Mr. Adams is considered a blunderer,” though the same could be said of him.

Adams would have welcomed any excuse to stay at home. “We are invited everywhere, and dine out almost every day, but this brings us no nearer [to belonging],” he admitted to Charles Francis Jr.
⁶³
Henry Adams yearned to cut a dash among the fashionable young men, like any twenty-three-year-old, but, as an “American who neither hunted nor raced, neither shot nor fished nor gambled, and was not marriageable,” there was no obvious circle for him to join. Nor did he have school or university ties to ease his entry. Tagging along to events with his father made him feel like a burden. “Every young diplomat,” he wrote, “and most of the old ones, felt awkward in an English house from a certainty that they were not precisely wanted there, and a possibility that they might be told so.”
⁶⁴
Henry’s introduction to the season began with a dance given by the Duchess of Somerset, where he was forced into a Scottish reel with the daughter of the new Turkish ambassador. He could not remember a more excruciating twenty minutes.

Adams was too busy to notice his son’s unhappiness. Seward showed more restraint in his subsequent dispatches, but he continued to insist on a retraction of the neutrality proclamation.
⁶⁵
The Queen’s Advocate, Sir John Harding, claimed that his sympathies lay with the North, but, recorded Adams, when “I tried to explain to him the nature of my objection, which is much misunderstood here, he defended it with the usual argument.”
⁶⁶
The British attitude in general dismayed him. “People do not quite understand Americans or their politics,” he wrote to Charles Francis Jr. He had heard that Richard Cobden thought separating from the South would be good for the North,
⁶⁷
and John Bright had come out strongly for “strict neutrality.”
⁶⁸
“They think this a hasty quarrel,” complained Adams. “They do not comprehend the connection which slavery has with it, because we do not at once preach emancipation. Hence they go to the other extreme and argue that it is not an element of the struggle.”
⁶⁹

Adams was himself guilty of mischaracterization. The English reaction was far more complicated than he allowed. The celebrated novelist Mrs. Gaskell, an ardent admirer of the United States, confessed to being “thoroughly puzzled by what is now going on in America.” “I don’t mind your thinking me dense or ignorant,” she wrote candidly to the future president of Harvard, Charles Eliot Norton. “But I should have thought (I feel as if I were dancing among eggs) that separating yourselves from the South was like getting rid of a diseased member.” She added: “You know I live in S. Lancashire where all personal and commercial intimacies are with the South. Everyone looks and feels sad (—oh so sad) about this war. It would do Americans good to see how warm the English heart is towards them.”
⁷⁰

Charles Darwin, whose
Origin of Species
had been published in 1859, highlighted another aspect that troubled the English. “Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God,” he wrote to the botanist Asa Gray, “that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery.”
⁷¹
A leading abolitionist, Richard Webb, voiced a similar complaint from Ireland: “Neither Lincoln nor Seward has yet spoken an antislavery syllable since they took office.”
⁷²
Seward had specifically instructed all U.S. ministers and consuls to avoid mentioning the word in connection with the Union. The deliberate omission was a grievous miscalculation. Seward had sacrificed the North’s trump card in Britain in the hope that it would appease the South. Instead, he had provided ammunition to his critics who accused the North of hypocrisy.
The Economist
had already stated, “The great majority of the people in the Northern States detest the coloured population even more than do the Southern whites.”
⁷³
At the beginning of June, Moran’s nemesis, Sarah Parker Remond, gave credence to the charge in an article about her family’s persecution as free blacks in New England. Though she included a plea for England to support the North, it sounded absurd against the backdrop of her heart-rending experiences.
⁷⁴

Yet for all the finger-pointing and public criticism of the North, the Southern envoys failed to make the slightest change in Britain’s policy. “We are satisfied that the Government is sincere in its desire to be strictly neutral in the contest,” Yancey repeated in his next letter to Secretary Toombs, “and will not countenance any violation of its neutrality.”
⁷⁵
Writing to a close friend in the South, Yancey admitted that the mission was not turning out the way he had envisioned: “In the first place, important as cotton is, it is not King in Europe.” Furthermore, he added, “The anti-Slavery sentiment is universal.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
has been read and believed.”
⁷⁶

^4.1
The U.S. consulate in London was a separate entity from the legation in the nineteenth century, and dealt primarily with matters arising from shipping and trade.

^4.2
It took ten days for a newspaper report in New York to be reprinted in
The Times.
There was a slightly quicker diplomatic route: if Lord Lyons needed to send an urgent message, he could send a telegram to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where it would be taken by steamer to Liverpool and telegraphed to London; this could cut the delay to eight or, in good weather, seven days.

FIVE
The Rebel Yell

William Howard Russell in New Orleans—Sam and Mary Sophia Hill volunteer—Elizabeth Blackwell inspires the U.S. Sanitary Commission—“On to Richmond”—The Battle of Bull Run—Not a fight but a stampede

“T
here is on the part of the South an enormously exaggerated idea of its own strength,” William Howard Russell wrote to Lord Lyons from New Orleans on May 21, 1861.
¹
The city was celebrating succession with parades and fireworks as though the war was already won. All the public buildings and many private houses were flying the new Confederate flag.
^5.1
There were no doubts here about the power of cotton. It was “not alone king but czar,” remarked the
Times
journalist after he was told for the dozenth time that the shipping season just past had been the most profitable in the city’s history.
²

Russell was not enamored with the Deep South. The unceasing battle against mosquitoes, the crude sanitation, and the greasy food that typified Southern cuisine made him consume more alcohol than his liver could tolerate. “Too much talk, smoke & brandy & water” was becoming a frequent complaint in his diary.
³
The South’s erratic postal service was also a source of torment. It had taken a month for a plaintive letter from his wife, Mary, to reach him. He knew she would assume he had not bothered to reply. “God comfort her,” he wrote sadly in his diary on May 25, “and make me worthy of her.”
⁴

William Mure, the British consul in New Orleans, rescued Russell from many hours of lonely reflection by inviting him to stay at his house. The extensive commercial ties between New Orleans and Liverpool were reflected in the social prominence of the British consulate; Mure’s generosity gave Russell the best possible introduction to the South’s biggest and wealthiest city. New Orleans was the fourth-largest port in the world and a commercial juggernaut compared to Richmond, Virginia, which had been chosen as the Confederacy’s new capital. Known as the Crescent City because of the way it curved around a deep bend of the Mississippi River, New Orleans was the epicenter of the slave trade and the gateway not only for the majority of the South’s cotton crop, but also for its tobacco and sugar. As business opportunities came and went, so, too, did many of New Orleans’s foreign immigrants. The 1860 census had revealed that little more than half the population of 168,000 had been born in the South.
⁵
Russell grasped at once how an outsider like Judah Benjamin could find opportunities here that were denied him elsewhere in the Confederacy.
⁶

New Orleans had belonged first to Spain and then France until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 made it part of the United States. The original French and Spanish settlers called themselves Creoles, and their descendants still lived in the sixty-six blocks downtown known as the Vieux Carré, or the French Quarter. Here they built their houses in the Caribbean style with inner courtyards, pastel façades, and ornate balconies that allowed the occupants to see and be seen from the street. The English-speaking newcomers had congregated uptown, on the other side of the canal that ran through the city, in the so-called Garden District. They pointedly built their houses in the Greek Revival style, using red brick instead of plaster, and planted lush gardens that screened the buildings from the street.

New Orleans’s French culture was reflected in the number of volunteer regiments for the Confederate army with names such as Chasseur, Lafayette, and Beauregard in the title. Russell noticed that the foreign immigrants tended to cluster together; hence there was the Irish Brigade, the Garibaldi Legion, and the European Brigade.
^5.2
Russell was especially taken with the Dickens-inspired “Pickwick Rifles,” though the name itself suggested Mure had not been entirely successful in persuading Britons to adhere to the Foreign Enlistment Act.
⁷

It was not the willing recruits that concerned Mure, however, but rather those who were forced to volunteer whether they wanted to or not.
⁸
King Cotton ruled with a brutal hand in New Orleans. British subjects were being marched to recruiting posts by self-appointed vigilantes, “not in twos or threes, but in tens and twenties,” the consul told Russell. One woman had complained to him that her husband was held hostage and beaten for three days until he agreed to enlist; his face was so badly disfigured when they brought him home that she failed to recognize him. Dissent was treated in the same harsh manner. “Every stranger is watched, every word is noted,” Russell wrote in one of his dispatches to
The Times.
People who stated “their belief that the Northerners will be successful are sent to prison for six months.”
⁹

Throughout the Confederacy intense pressure was being exerted on the 233,000 foreign residents to prove their loyalty to the South. For William Watson, a Scotsman working as a mechanic in Baton Rouge, failure to follow his friends into the Pelican Rifles of the 3rd Louisiana Infantry would have been unthinkable. “I would never take up arms to maintain or enforce slavery,” he wrote in his memoirs. But Watson’s friends told him he would be fighting for independence, a cause so worthy that he could not remain aloof “without injury” to his honor.
¹⁰
A Welsh immigrant in Texas joined for similar reasons: “Every man and child that can carry a gun is a soldier in the South,” he explained to his family.
¹¹

In Arkansas, another Welsh immigrant, twenty-year-old Henry Morton Stanley (who would later achieve fame by “finding” Dr. Livingstone in Africa), was shamed into enlisting in the Dixie Grays of the 6th Arkansas Infantry by a neighbor who sent him the Southern equivalent of a white feather. He received a parcel “which I half-suspected, as the address was written in a feminine hand, to be a token of some lady’s regard,” he wrote. “But, on opening it, I discovered it to be a chemise and petticoat, such as a Negro lady’s-maid might wear. I hastily hid it from view, and retired to the back room, that my burning cheeks might not betray me.”
¹²