A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (30 page)

The image of the rout was so powerful that no British bank was now prepared to invest in Union bonds. August Belmont, the American agent for Rothschild’s, the largest bank in the world at the time, was unable to convince his own employers, let alone any of its rivals. Bull Run also overshadowed the North’s subsequent successes in the following months. In late August, when the Union gained control of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina’s main route to the Atlantic, the victory was largely ignored by the English press. George Henry Herbert’s family was among the few who followed the campaign. Herbert’s regiment, the 9th New York Volunteers, was part of an amphibious attack on the two Confederate forts guarding the inlet. The rebels were shelled out of their position, leaving Herbert and the invaders to the poisonous snakes, toads, ticks, and mosquitoes that inhabited the forty-mile-long sandbank.
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Until recently, he had been the target of much mockery from his comrades, but the horrors of war had brought the men together.
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“I have now quite a love for my profession,” he wrote in a letter home after the battle.
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In London, the occupants of the American legation had their suspicions confirmed by the North’s vilification in some British newspapers. “I cannot conceal from myself the fact that as a whole the English are pleased with our misfortunes,” Charles Francis Adams confided miserably to a friend. “There never was any real good will towards us. Of course, you will keep these views to yourself. It is not advisable in these days for ministers abroad to be quoted.”
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It was just as well he was unaware of Palmerston’s quip that Bull Run should be renamed “Yankees Run.” Adams had finally settled in his new life when William Howard Russell’s report of the battle appeared in
The Times.
The legation had moved into new premises in Portland Place, the archives had been unpacked and a new cataloguing system put in place. Defeat robbed these improvements of their luster. Benjamin Moran sulked in the basement, and Adams’s doubts about his mission returned; recalling Seward’s threatening dispatches with embarrassment, Adams wrote in his diary “we deserve it all.”
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Harriet Martineau continued to write supportive articles in the
Daily News
and
Morning Star,
but she, too, had decided that Seward was the most dangerous politician she had ever encountered: “Seward in the Cabinet is enough to ruin everything,” she complained to a friend.
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She blamed him for having allowed the passage of the Morrill Tariff, since the bill was practically “inviting the world to support the Confederate cause.”
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The Rothschild’s agent, August Belmont, agreed; during the American banker’s unsuccessful visit to England to drum up interest in Union bonds, he was repeatedly asked to justify the attack on British trade. Palmerston told him at a private meeting shortly after Bull Run: “We do not like slavery, but we want cotton, and we dislike very much your Morrill tariff.”
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Even the pro-Northern
Spectator
appeared to have lost patience, complaining on June 15, “The Americans are, for the moment, transported beyond the influence of common sense. With all of England sympathizing, more or less heartily, with the North, they persist in regarding her as an enemy, and seem positively anxious to change an ally … into an open and dangerous foe.”

The eighteenth of August was Adams’s fifty-fourth birthday. That evening he was despondent. “My career in life is drawing on to its close,” he wrote in his diary, seeing no future for himself or his country. Yet the situation in Britain was not as desperate as he believed. Immediately after the Battle of Bull Run, Vizetelly’s
Illustrated London News
had sternly reminded readers “that the victory of the South places its cause in no better position in English eyes.”
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In Liverpool, the authorities ordered Southern ships to haul down the Confederate flags that had suddenly appeared after the battle. But the most significant development by far was the rejection of the Southern envoys’ request on August 7 for a formal interview with Lord Russell.
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Undeterred, the Confederates sent him a thirty-nine-page letter outlining the reasons why the South had attained the right to recognition. Russell’s reply was short and pointed. “Her Majesty,” he replied on August 24, “has, by her royal proclamation, declared her intention to preserve a strict neutrality between the contending parties in that war.”
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Russell’s rebuff brought the relations between the Confederate diplomats to a new low. They had been arguing among themselves for some time, and after this latest blow their disagreements became increasingly personal. Not only were they isolated in England, but weeks went by while they waited for instructions from Richmond. “Our sources of information are the New York and Baltimore papers,” the envoys complained to the Confederate secretary of state.
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Left to their own devices, Yancey became the odd man out as Rost and Mann turned to Edwin De Leon, the former U.S. consul in Egypt, whose arrival in London had caused Benjamin Moran so much heartache. De Leon, a journalist by training, had originally intended to plant a few articles in the press before going home. But he soon realized that Mann needed his help; Yancey had to be controlled. “He was not a winning or persuasive man,” wrote De Leon, “but a bold, antagonistic and somewhat dogmatical one; abrupt in manner, regardless of the elegancies and small courtesies of life, a refined man in feeling, but not deportment.”
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Mann and De Leon tried to distract Yancey with busywork while they negotiated a secret deal with Paul Julius de Reuter’s telegraph agency. Shortly before Bull Run, Reuter had personally approached both the U.S. legation and the Southerners for the exclusive right to distribute their official reports from America. Benjamin Moran had indignantly rebuffed him, but the Southerners knew there was great potential in the deal, since many English and European newspapers relied on Reuter’s telegrams for their American news.
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Moran soon rued his mistake; Reuter “is against us,” he grumbled in his diary. “He systematically prostitutes the monopoly he holds to depreciate the Union … there is no way to remedy the business but by buying the fellow up. This I would not do.”
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The sudden alteration from a pro-Northern to a pro-Southern tone made the U.S. consul in Leith wonder if the Scottish editors had been bribed. They “exaggerate as might be expected all the little mistakes of our Northern Army into a mountain,” he protested. “No sheet in South Carolina could serve them better.”
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William Yancey was also resentful of the patronizing way he was treated by the four purchasing agents who were buying arms for the South.
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It was his friendship with John Laird, MP, Yancey liked to point out, that had opened the door to the largest shipbuilding firm in Liverpool. In many ways, the Confederate cabinet regarded weaponry as of greater importance than diplomacy.
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Before the war, the North had manufactured 97 percent of the country’s weapons.
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The Confederacy had declared its independence with a mere 160,000 firearms and limited means of manufacturing any more. Only one factory in the entire South, the Tredegar Ironworks in Richmond, was capable of producing artillery. There was not enough time for the chief of the Ordnance Bureau, Major Josiah Gorgas, to develop the iron mines, erect the foundries, and build the factories required to equip a modern army. The soft-spoken Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, found his department in an equally deprived state. The Confederate navy had no warships and only two naval dockyards, in Pensacola, Florida, and Norfolk, Virginia. Its three hundred officers were on shore leave until Mallory could provide them with vessels. From the outset, Mallory accepted that he could not construct an entire navy; the best he could hope for, and perhaps all he really needed, was a few raiders to attack Northern merchant ships, and a small fleet of ironclad warships to attack the Federal blockade.
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The two Confederate agents selected by Gorgas and Mallory to run the international war effort were a far cry from the amateurs in charge of Southern diplomacy. Caleb Huse, the purchasing agent for the army, and James Dunwoody Bulloch, whom Mallory assigned to acquire ships for the navy, were men of the highest integrity and resourcefulness. Both had family and business connections in the North, but it was to the Confederacy’s immeasurable good fortune that their hearts belonged to the South. Major Huse was an artillery officer who had spent six months in Europe, courtesy of the U.S. Army, studying the armaments industry.
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The forty-year-old Bulloch was a former naval officer who had been working for a Northern mail company at the start of the war. He had not seen his native Georgia for ten years, but, he wrote, “my heart and my head were with the South.”
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He was about to sail his mail ship out of New Orleans when the guns at Fort Sumter began firing. In the face of bitter Southern opposition, Bulloch scrupulously insisted on returning the vessel to its rightful owners in New York. Only then did he offer his services to the Confederacy.

When Huse arrived in England in April, he had discovered that Northern agents had almost stripped the country of surplus arms. They were paying cash in advance, as though part of their mission was to prevent guns from reaching the Confederacy. Huse had come with limited funds; Edwin De Leon lent him $10,000 of his own money, but it was not nearly enough to outbid the Federal agents.
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Huse was rescued by Charles Prioleau, the director of the merchant shipping firm Fraser, Trenholm and Co. in Liverpool, who agreed to advance him the payments for his weapons. Prioleau was from Charleston, a fact he proudly advertised by fixing the “bonnie blue” star of South Carolina above his front door. Moreover, his firm was the British arm of a large Charleston firm called John Fraser and Co. There was already an agreement in place between the Confederacy and Fraser, Trenholm for the company to act as the South’s financial agents in Europe. But Prioleau was going much further by giving credit to Huse without a guarantee in place.

He did the same for James Bulloch when the naval agent arrived the following month in a similar condition. Bulloch had no difficulty finding Fraser, Trenholm’s Liverpool headquarters, which took up an entire three-story building near the docks.
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Although he took the precaution of using the back door, Bulloch was spotted by Federal spies who had been waiting for him. The Union report compiled on him had provided an extremely detailed description of his features; he was a “very dark, sallow man with black hair and eyes, whiskers down each cheek but shaved clean off his chin and … about 5’8" high.”
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For the first few days, Bulloch continued to creep about the city, until he read in the local newspapers the precise details of his mission. The information was all there, from the number of ships he was seeking to his means of paying for them. It was, Bulloch wrote in astonishment, “as if the particulars had been furnished direct from the Treasury Department or from the pages of my instructions.”
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The man behind the exposure was the flamboyant American diplomat Henry Sanford, who had introduced William Howard Russell to Seward in March. Shortly thereafter, he had left Washington to take up the post of minister to Belgium. Sanford inspired contradictory reactions in people. Charles Sumner was one of his most loyal supporters; Charles Francis Adams had loathed him from the moment they met. Sanford was not awed by the Adams name; he himself was wealthy and well connected, had studied abroad, could speak several languages, and, although he was only thirty-eight, had served in numerous legations including those at St. Petersburg and Paris. In his own mind he was an ingenious sophisticate, a ladies’ man, and a puppeteer. To others, such as Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, Sanford might have been tolerable were it not for his insatiable desire “to be busy and fussy, to show pomp and power.”
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Seward had diverted Sanford to Paris to serve as the interim minister until William L. Dayton could settle his affairs at home. But he expected Sanford to perform many roles and to travel widely. At one time, Seward entertained serious hopes that Garibaldi would agree to lead the Union war effort, since he had briefly lived in the United States during his exile in the 1850s, and one of Sanford’s tasks was to persuade Garibaldi to accept Seward’s offer. (Garibaldi told Sanford he was not interested unless abolition became the main objective of the war and he was made supreme commander of all U.S. forces.) Sanford’s most important mission was to counteract Confederate activity in Europe “by all proper means.”
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Sanford took these words literally, and from the moment he arrived in Europe focused his formidable energy on creating a surveillance network that stretched from London to Belgium. He wanted every rebel to have at least one Federal operative dogging his footsteps.
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