A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (29 page)

In the North, the expressions of shame and horror were also accompanied by calls for better leadership. Lincoln responded decisively. Less than twenty-four hours after the Battle of Bull Run he dismissed Irvin McDowell and ordered his replacement, General George McClellan, to come at once to Washington. He also asked Congress for a million additional soldiers. Lincoln used the intervening time until McClellan’s arrival to write a private memorandum setting out his thoughts for the next phase of the war. The defeated army would be renamed the Army of the Potomac, the other Northern armies in the field would also be reorganized, and the army chiefs would be assigned a clear set of objectives. He even added a list of what the objectives should be, starting with the capture of Manassas, followed by Virginia and Tennessee.
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General McClellan arrived in Washington on July 26; by then most of the army had staggered back to camp, although it was still an unruly rabble. Two regiments were in outright rebellion and more could follow unless McClellan imposed his authority quickly. The 79th Highlanders was one of the regiments in mutiny; it was not the lack of rifles that upset the men but the appointment of a new colonel without their consent. McClellan sent in trustworthy regiments to put down both rebellions, and the 79th was marched in shame through Washington under armed guard.
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He hung the regiment’s colors in his office as a warning to others.

The thirty-five-year-old McClellan possessed a flair for organization, and within a few weeks the changes to the Army of the Potomac were so noticeable that the press was hailing him as America’s answer to Napoleon Bonaparte. He was treated with almost reverential deference by the president’s cabinet and greeted with lusty cheers whenever he rode into the camps. McClellan reacted to the adulation with the calm acceptance of a man whose life had hitherto been blessed by an unbroken train of good fortune. He came from a wealthy Philadelphia family; in addition to good looks, intelligence, and physical prowess, he could boast an adoring wife and a wide circle of friends.

William Howard Russell was not altogether surprised by the general’s meteoric rise. Russell had met McClellan in the Crimea, where the latter was there as a military observer for the U.S. Army, and thought him a rather overconfident young man. He did not know if McClellan had outgrown his youthful arrogance, but he noticed that his riding style had not changed; the general “is stumpy and with an ungraceful seat on horseback,” he noted in his diary.
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McClellan’s lack of horsemanship did not prevent him from becoming the star attraction when a real Prince Napoleon and his entourage arrived in Washington on August 2. Prince Joseph Charles Bonaparte—“Plon-Plon” in certain circles—was a cousin of Napoleon III (who himself was Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew). He had fled from France to avoid a duel, although this was not known in the North. No one had informed the administration that Plon-Plon was coming, which led to an unintended snub when Baron Mercier accompanied the prince to the White House. The doorbell was rung, the knocker pulled, and yet the front door remained closed. The royal party waited impatiently to be let in until “an employee, who happened to be passing by, took care of this duty,” recalled an aide.

The prince had his revenge on Lincoln by not uttering a word after the initial introduction. The president and Seward, who was also present, were both overcome with confusion. Lincoln bought some time by inviting the prince to sit down, which required the fetching and repositioning of several chairs. “But once these new positions were acquired,” wrote the aide, “the two parties sat opposite each other … the Prince, impatient because he had had to wait, took a cruel pleasure in remaining silent. Finally, the President took the risk of speaking.” He tried to ask the prince about his father, but mistakenly referred to a childless uncle. “This incident made him lose his confidence still further.” Mercier stepped in with a comment about the weather in general, and then about the rain of a few days past. Lincoln resorted to another round of handshaking that used up just enough time to allow the party to be shown to the door without undue haste.
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Lord Lyons took advantage of the temporary
froideur
between France and America to give a dinner in the prince’s honor. Seward, Charles Sumner, and General McClellan were all invited, but not William Howard Russell, to the latter’s disgust.
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Lyons had intended the event to be a grand demonstration of the Anglo-French alliance, and though he admired Russell, he considered the dinner far too important to include a mere journalist. The next morning Lyons wrote proudly to his sister, “It went off very well,” despite the appalling heat, “as it was not hotter in my dining room than everywhere else.”
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The French had unwittingly scored a blow for England in the battle of wits between Lyons and Seward. McClellan had glowed with pleasure under the flattery lavished on him by the prince’s military aides. Sumner, too, had been the recipient of extravagant compliments. But to Seward they displayed a Gallic aloofness that was noticeable and embarrassing. The French considered him uncultured, unpolished, and profoundly nonintellectual. Seward “does not speak any language but English,” wrote one of the aides contemptuously, “and knows Europe very little, though he customarily declares in a comically emphatic way that he has travelled throughout Europe for several years.”
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Seward was not amused when Prince Napoleon requested a pass to visit the Confederate headquarters. He pretended at first not to understand his hints and forced him to make a direct application. The French party, once again accompanied by Baron Mercier, traveled to General Beauregard’s headquarters, where they listened with great respect to the Confederate version of Bull Run.
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As word spread through the camps of the prince’s arrival, French volunteers, including some who had fought in Garibaldi’s army, stopped by to pay their respects. “Such strange and romantic personalities!” recorded the aide, surprised that even members of the French aristocracy were coming across the Atlantic to fight for the Confederacy. Beauregard had appointed as his assistant inspector general Lieutenant Colonel Prince Camille de Polignac, whose father, Jules de Polignac, had served as prime minister under Charles X and whose grandmother Yolande had made the family rich and powerful through her notorious friendship with Marie Antoinette.
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The prince returned to Washington unconvinced by the South’s arguments or its military confidence, although his aides, he confessed with a laugh to Lord Lyons, “seemed to think that they would rather command the Southern soldiers.” Baron Mercier escorted the prince and his party to New York on August 11 before anyone in Washington could discover their views. As they were leaving, a report reached the French legation that Seward had ordered the arrest of Charles James Faulkner, the former American minister to France and a citizen of Virginia, on suspicion of treason. Faulkner had been popular in France, and his detention sealed the party’s dislike of the secretary of state.

Faulkner’s arrest was not the only diplomatic upset of that week. On August 16, Lyons was called to the State Department by Seward, who informed him, with a gleam in his eye, that one Robert Mure, a naturalized American of Scottish birth, had been arrested in New York as he was about to sail for Liverpool. Mure had been caught with treasonable correspondence hidden inside a diplomatic bag he was carrying from the British consulate in Charleston. So began a long-drawn-out affair that caused Lyons many sleepless nights. Seward pestered him with alleged crimes committed by British subjects who were said to be in cahoots with the rebels. Lyons suspected that much of Seward’s professed outrage was bluster, but he could not deny there was an element of truth about some of the British consuls. One or two were highly partisan—especially Consul Bernal in Maryland.
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An investigation by Lyons revealed that Consul Bunch in Charleston, however, was not one of the alleged Southern sympathizers. Bunch had entrusted his diplomatic pouch to Robert Mure, who was heading to England via New York, because the Northern blockade prevented its going directly by sea from South Carolina and the Southern ban on “commercial intercourse” meant there was no post between the states. It was Mure who made the egregious error of allowing the bag to be contaminated with private letters and documents. Seward had been waiting for one of the British consuls to make a slip and was amply rewarded by the contents of this bag. He graciously allowed the sealed dispatches to be sent to London unopened, but the rest he passed on to the press. Not surprisingly, many of the letters contained vitriolic comments about the North.
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There was a fresh outcry for Lyons’s expulsion that almost made him wish for his own removal. “I am getting a longing for home which it will be difficult to gratify,” he confided to his sister on August 23, “for I don’t see how can I well get out of the scrape of happening to be the Minister here just now.… I don’t believe the Americans mean to quarrel with us and I would rather not be removed in consequence of making some blunder—and I see no other means of getting away.”
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William Howard Russell dined at the legation that evening and was shocked by the sadness emanating from Lyons.

Russell felt guilty because he suspected that his own actions had contributed to Lyons’s difficulties. The first copy of his Bull Run report in
The Times
arrived in New York on August 18. Within forty-eight hours nearly every newspaper in the North carried front-page denunciations of Russell. He was branded a liar and Confederate sympathizer. One newspaper claimed he was never at Bull Run; another, that he had incited the panic himself.
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The New York Times
derisively called him “Bull Run Russell.” He received hate mail and death threats; shop owners would not serve him; the Lincolns ignored his greeting when their carriage passed by. Seward received a mass petition from Philadelphia, demanding Russell’s expulsion. Sherman and other senior officers assured him that his description of the rout was perfectly fair, but the feeling among the lower ranks was implacably hostile. A German soldier leveled his gun at Russell, shouting, “[B]ull Run Russell! You shall never write [B]ull’s Runs again!” Somewhat recklessly, Russell rode up to the man and challenged him. Although the soldier later claimed it was a “choake,” “as his rifle was capped and loaded and on full cock, with his finger on the trigger, I did not quite see the fun of it.” General Irwin McDowell commiserated with him, saying he was “very much rejoiced to find that I was as much abused as he had been.”
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From Beauregard’s headquarters in Virginia, Samuel Phillips Day, the English correspondent for the
Morning Chronicle,
brought more ire on Russell by sending an inflammatory letter to
The New York Times
about Northern cowardice at Bull Run.
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The day after the letter was printed, a young English officer named Henry Ronald Hislop MacIver called at Russell’s lodgings asking if he knew how to find Mr. Day. MacIver bored Russell with stories of his military adventures in India and Italy until he realized the journalist had no intention of helping him, at which point he left rather crossly. A few days later Russell heard that MacIver had been caught trying to sneak across the lines into Virginia; he assured Lord Lyons that this was one arrest the legation could ignore.

“I feel it is my doom to be the best abused man in America on both sides,” Russell lamented to
The Times
’ New York correspondent, J. C. Bancroft Davis. Southern newspapers were being almost as vicious about him as those in the North. “He prefers to attribute Bull’s Run to Yankee cowardice rather than to Southern courage,” complained the diarist Mary Chesnut.
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In Richmond, Samuel Phillips Day was forced to deny that he had anything to do with
The Times.
Russell was furious with London editor John Thaddeus Delane for ignoring his request to preface the Bull Run report with others from American papers.
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But the opportunity to embarrass John Bright, who had finally announced his support for the North, was too great for Delane to resist; he not only printed Russell’s report without any additional commentary, but mischievously also placed the account next to a bombastic editorial from the
New York Herald
about the retribution coming to Europe once the war was won.
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—

Since Frank Vizetelly’s last dispatch in the
Illustrated London News
had been so laudatory about Northern recruits, the contrast between his suggestion of an easy victory and Russell’s description of the Union army collapse was stunning. The effect on public opinion was just as Delane hoped. Prince Albert’s private secretary, General Charles Grey, whose views were typical of a certain kind of crusty conservative, celebrated Bull Run as a victory for England. “I confess I cannot help being pleased with the course things are taking in America,” he wrote to his brother, Earl Grey, “because I think it will before long put an end to the fighting and leave the world in a much safer state.”
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General Grey thought a divided America would be too busy quarreling with itself to bother with Britain. The Federal army’s collapse on the battlefield also appeared to vindicate those who claimed that the North was fighting the war out of vanity whereas the South was fighting for independence.
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