A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (31 page)

Sanford knew even before Huse and Bulloch that two more Confederate agents were on their way. One of them, navy lieutenant James North, had orders to buy or commission two armored warships for the Confederacy. The other, Major Edward Anderson, would be working with Caleb Huse.
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They landed at Liverpool on June 25, by which time Sanford had hired a private detective of murky reputation named Ignatius Pollaky. Sanford told Seward that Pollaky operated his own agency and “knows his business.” Together they were going to destroy the Confederate network from the inside. “How it will be done,” wrote Sanford on July 4, “whether through a pretty mistress or a spying landlord is nobody’s business; … but I lay … stress on getting … full accounts of their operations here.… I go on the doctrine that in war as in love everything is fair that will lead to success.”
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Letters and telegrams could be copied, messages intercepted, informants bribed, or perhaps the odd accident might befall an unlucky Confederate agent. One of Sanford’s ideas involved paying postmen a pound a week to reveal the frequency and origin of every letter received by the Confederates.
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An English arms manufacturer tipped off the Confederates to the fact that they were under surveillance. “My attention was brought to these people by Mr. Isaacs who came over to my quarters one morning and asked me if I knew I was being watched,” wrote Edward Anderson. “Come with me to your window then, said he, and I will point out to you a shadow that never loses sight of you—at the same time directing my notice to a rough looking fellow standing across the street on the corner.” Anderson immediately went down and tried to embarrass the detective by asking for street directions, which he gave rather awkwardly.

He was a plain, countrified looking man, roughly clad and by no means bearing about him the appearance of a detective officer. Subsequently, when I came to know him better I was impressed with the effect produced by dress, for when I met my man on the following day, he was accoutred in a neat suit of black clothing like a gentleman, and on subsequent occasions in different costumes … sometimes with moustache and whiskers and again clean shaved. I never failed however to recognize my shadow. Assisting him were one or two others.
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On another occasion, while returning on the night train from Paris, Anderson shared a carriage with one of his shadows. “We had some little talk together,” he recorded in his diary, “but neither of us learned much of the other.”
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He was not alone in having such face-to-face encounters. Suspicious figures seemed to loiter in every doorway. “They have agents employed for no other purpose,” commented Caleb Huse.
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Sanford intended to keep all the Confederates under surveillance, but he realized that James Bulloch had to be the chief target. “He is the most dangerous man the South have here and fully up to his business,” he told Seward. “I am disbursing at the rate of £150 a month on this one man which will give you an idea of the importance I attach to his movements.” He hoped that Bulloch might try to slip off to the Continent, where it would be relatively easy to have him arrested for failing to carry the proper documentation. “Of course, no one official would appear in the matter,” he assured Seward.
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Sanford was less concerned about Lieutenant North, whose contribution to the Southern war effort puzzled the detectives. North appeared to be working on his own, but what he was doing, apart from costing Sanford money in espionage expenses, remained a mystery. He seemed to spend a great deal of time moping and, from the look of his intercepted mail, complaining.

Sanford’s fears about Bulloch had been prescient. The Confederate agent knew that the real threat to his operations was not from the spies (who were irritating), but from the legal obstacles created by the Foreign Enlistment Act. Before he set about any naval business, Bulloch obtained expert legal opinion on what the act allowed and disallowed, hoping to uncover any loopholes. To his surprise, he discovered it would be relatively easy to circumvent the rules: the act forbade a belligerent nation from outfitting or equipping warlike vessels in British waters, but there was nothing to prevent the construction of a ship with an unusual design. A vessel could be built in Britain with gun ports, for example, but it could not leave with any guns on board; it could have a magazine to store gunpowder, but would not be allowed to set sail with the powder present.

Bulloch went to work as soon as he received his legal advice. Within a few weeks he had made two contracts, one for a gunboat and the other for a top-of-the-line warship with copper-plated bunkers and enough storage space to hold a year’s worth of spare parts. For the first, Bulloch used an intermediary to hide the involvement of the Confederacy and invented some Italian owners who were expecting delivery in eight months’ time.
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To give authenticity to the Italian claim, the vessel was called the
Oreto
for the time being. But the other ship did not require the same subterfuge, since it was being built by Laird and Sons, the Liverpool company owned by Yancey’s friend John Laird. With a nod and a wink, Lairds accepted the explanation that the modifications were innocent. This vessel, Project No. 290 on Lairds’ books, was going to cost a staggering £47,500, to be paid in five installments.
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With the first part of his mission now fulfilled, Bulloch turned his attention to helping Caleb Huse buy munitions. The victory at Bull Run lent urgency to their mission. “We want arms,” implored LeRoy Walker, the Confederate secretary of war, “and must have them if they are to be had … the enemy is daily augmenting his supplies.”
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By the end of August, the agents had amassed so considerable a quantity of supplies that their most pressing problem was the threat of discovery by the authorities.
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Now the Confederates found themselves stymied by the neutrality proclamation. Bulloch was unable to persuade any shipping owner to break the blockade. Finally, after much negotiation, Bulloch and Anderson made a deal with Fraser, Trenholm to rent space on the
Bermuda,
one of the company’s fastest steamers, which was docked at Hartlepool on the east coast and already slated for use during the cotton season, when the blockade would be tested in earnest.

Henry Sanford knew about the
Bermuda
and had a plan that involved the U.S. Navy pouncing on her as soon as she reached the open sea “no matter what her papers.” “We can discuss the matter with the English afterwards,” he asserted confidently.
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Seward ignored his suggestion, and Lord Russell turned down Charles Francis Adams’s request to detain the
Bermuda,
since the minister was unable to show that she was anything other than a private ship on a private commercial venture. The officials in Hartlepool had observed her loading, and even noted that arms and ammunition were being “packed to resemble earthenware.”
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But there was no legal reason for her detention and the vessel sailed away on August 22, despite the fact that everyone concerned knew her real purpose and destination.

Fraser, Trenholm and Co. had great hopes for the
Bermuda.
Every Southerner, not to mention every British merchant with a half-decent cargo ship, believed that the blockade was a fiction. Latest estimates put the entire U.S. Navy blockading fleet at forty-two steamships. The Southern coastline extended over 3,500 miles, from the tip of Virginia to the banks of the Rio Grande in Texas, and included hundreds of ports, bays, and inlets. Almost two hundred navigable rivers fed into the sea; many harbors had several entrances and numerous channels for hiding ships. Much of the South lay behind enormous sandbars that acted like a double coastline, allowing ships to sail from port to port without ever having to go out onto the open sea. When these considerations were added to the poor condition of the U.S. Navy, it seemed incomprehensible to Southerners that any country, let alone Britain, would accept that the blockade met the main legal requirement for its international recognition, namely, that it was real and being enforced on a daily basis. They were hoping that the Royal Navy would sweep away the miserable little wooden ships stifling the South’s commerce and declare the ports once again open to the world.

Ordered by the Foreign Office to keep a record of blockade activity, the various British consuls responded by saying there really wasn’t any. Phrases such as “totally inefficient” and “totally ineffective” appeared with regularity.
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Yet the picture conveyed by the statistics was misleading. The South was not one vast open harbor, ready to receive and distribute all the goods that Europe cared to ship. If that had been the case, New York would never have been so vital a trade partner. Only ten Southern ports were deep enough for transatlantic shipping; and just five of those (Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans, Savannah, and Wilmington) were adequately provided with road and rail links.
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The U.S. ships merely needed to be well placed rather than omnipresent. The Union Blockade Board, instituted by the secretary of the navy in June, was already at work analyzing the Confederacy’s strategic weaknesses.

—

Two days after the departure of the
Bermuda,
Anthony Trollope and his wife, Rose, set sail for Boston. They arrived on September 5, after a brief stop in Halifax, beating the
Bermuda
to America by two weeks. Trollope had long wanted to visit the United States in order to write a travel book. It would be a break from writing fiction and perhaps, he hoped, might even put an end to the notoriety attached to the Trollope name. His mother had intended to be amusing rather than offensive in her
Domestic Manners of the Americans,
but the book had caused such damage to Anglo-American relations that Trollope had often thought, “If I could do anything to mitigate the soreness, if I could in any small degree add to the good feeling which should exist between two nations which ought to love each other so well … I should.”
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Boston literary circles welcomed the Trollopes with warmth that belied the harsh statements against Britain in the press. The only sharpness they encountered was directed at Rose; people often asked her if she regretted writing
Domestic Manners,
to which she patiently replied that she was not her mother-in-law. Trollope had the occasional argument over Britain’s neutrality. Bostonians, in common with the rest of the North, believed that England’s greed for cotton was the real reason it had granted belligerency to the South.

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But no one abused Trollope with the freedom or viciousness with which Washingtonians insulted William Howard Russell. Every obstruction was now thrown in Russell’s way. Although General McClellan was unfailingly polite to him and never turned down his request for a pass, Russell found that the guards and sentries took a mean delight in turning him away. He did not know when his punishment would end, and while it continued, he was useless as a war correspondent.

Frank Vizetelly had no such impediments and was able to witness the rehabilitation of the 79th Highlanders when he visited them on September 11. Among them, Ebenezer Wells had been promoted to wagon master, a change that increased the young man’s chances of survival but kept him on the move all day long. During one grueling marathon, his raw and bloody feet swelled out of their boots. “After cutting my boots here and there,” he wrote, “I was obliged to throw them away and marched the last six miles on a stony road, nearly barefoot.”
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The 79th Highlanders were now deemed trustworthy enough to participate in a reconnaissance mission on a Confederate outpost near Lewinsville, a small town less than thirteen miles from Washington.

Vizetelly sketched the aftermath as McClellan greeted the returning soldiers with a dip of his hat. The artist was delighted to have something to occupy himself for a couple of days; the endless training was driving him mad.
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Russell was also bored. “Time passes away in expectation of some onward movement, or desperate attack, or important strategical movements; and night comes to reassemble a few friends, Americans and English, at my rooms or elsewhere, to talk over the disappointed hopes of the day, to speculate on the future, to chide each dull delay, and to part with a hope that tomorrow would be more lively than to-day,” he wrote in his diary on September 11. General McClellan would probably spend all winter pummeling his volunteer army into shape, a prospect Russell found extremely disheartening. “I like the man,” he wrote in his diary. “But I do not think he is equal to his occasion or his place.”
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“In truth,” he added, “life is becoming exceedingly monotonous and uninteresting.… But for the hospitality of Lord Lyons to the English residents, the place would be nearly insufferable.”
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“The only thing that makes me stick out here,” Russell wrote to Delane on September 13, “is the determination not to show a white feather for these fellows.” He refused to follow the suggestion of Mowbray Morris, the managing editor of
The Times,
to seek safety in the British legation. The quickest way to stop the death threats and petitions against him, Russell told Delane, would be to tone down the anti-Northern bias in the newspaper: “I don’t want to ask you to sacrifice the policy of
The Times
to me, but I would like you if possible not to sacrifice me.”
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He warned Delane that his penchant for quoting the rabble-rousing
New York Herald
as though it were the chief mouthpiece of the Union would eventually rebound on
The Times,
but the editor denied he was baiting the Americans. It was, Delane wrote back, “simply that we don’t mean to be bullied by a so-called Power that can scarcely defend its capital against its fellow-citizens.”
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