A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (33 page)

Anderson frequently passed Federal agents in the street, but he had learned to tell the difference between those who were genuine arms purchasers like himself and those whose real business was to keep a watch on his own movements. “My friend McGuire is indefatigable in his attentions towards me,” he observed. “His instructions must be very stringent for he posts himself opposite the very door of the Hotel.” Ignatius Pollaky, Sanford’s detective, insisted that he had a “fix on upon every agent of the rebellion,” but still the name and location of the
Fingal
remained a mystery.
³
Sanford had been successfully intercepting the Confederates’ telegrams until clerks at the Liverpool telegraph office became suspicious and uncovered the operation. This blunder enabled the Confederates to lodge an official complaint with the authorities. Reports appeared in the press, accusing the U.S. legation of setting up an illegal “system of political espionage and terrorism” in Britain.
⁴
Charles Francis Adams was mortified to be blamed for Sanford’s handiwork. The spying “has been productive of great evil,” raged Moran in his diary. “Not one farthing of good has it done us.”
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Adams had never imagined that his post would be so troublesome and difficult. “Indeed the position of a minister at this Court is far more important and responsible than I had supposed,” he admitted in his diary.
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It disturbed him that Seward would stoop to playing dirty tricks against his opponents. “Early training in the school of New York State politics” had blunted some of his finer qualities, Adams thought. “[This] shows itself in a somewhat brusque and ungracious manner towards the representatives of foreign nations … [and], in a rather indiscriminate appliance of means to an end.” Adams had no desire to be a part of Seward’s schemes, but equally he resented learning about them in the press.

A suspicion that Seward’s behavior was the real reason behind Lord Russell’s invitation to stay at Abergeldie Castle in Scotland made Adams extremely reluctant to accept. He had no wish to travel a thousand miles in order to be grilled about his wayward chief, especially since his confidence in Seward had declined over the summer. Benjamin Moran was delighted to have the opportunity to act as the minister’s conscience. “I have advised him to go, and he probably will,” he wrote complacently in his diary on September 21. Two days later, Adams reluctantly boarded the train for the overnight journey to Aberdeen.

Although Seward’s threats of war had died down since Bull Run, the substitution of high rhetoric for low-level harassment had made the British cabinet nervous about the U.S. secretary of state’s intentions. Knowing that Adams shared his dislike of ceremony, Lord Russell had asked him to his private retreat in Scotland in the hope that the informal setting would enable them to be frank toward each other; it had worked with John Lothrop Motley, who had visited earlier in the month before taking up his new post at the U.S. legation in Vienna. During Adams’s visit, Russell deliberately avoided any searching interviews or prolonged conversations of the type the minister dreaded. Their “desultory” talks ebbed and flowed around family meals and bracing country walks along the wooded banks of the river Dee.

Russell’s campaign to charm Adams was a complete success. “He was for the first time,” recorded Adams, “easy, friendly, I might almost call it genial … I liked him better the nearer I saw him.” Some of the misunderstandings and fears from the summer, which had seemed so intractable, simply melted away. “The result of this protracted interview was decidedly advantageous,” wrote Adams. “In the first place we tacitly grew into more confidence in one another.”
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Refreshed by his initiation into the pleasures of alfresco tea with Scotch eggs and boiled peat water, Adams’s good mood lasted until his return to the legation on September 27, where he found a scene of perfect chaos. Benjamin Moran was losing his temper at an unruly crowd of would-be volunteers and passport seekers while the secretary, Charles Wilson, who, if not drunk, was only recently sober, sat hunched behind his desk reading the newspapers. Only after the legation had been cleared and the latest surveillance reports retrieved from the piles of rubbish in Wilson’s corner did Adams learn that no progress at all had been made in finding Bulloch’s secret cargo ship. He was about to give up on the project when a stranger came to the legation on October 1 offering to sell information about the rebels. Much as it offended Adams’s sensibilities to pay him, he realized it was their best chance to thwart the Confederates: “The truth is,” he wrote in his diary, “of late they have been too cunning for us.”
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Ten days later, the Confederates’ mole in the Foreign Office sent word that Adams knew the name and the location of the
Fingal.
Anderson and Bulloch went down to Holyhead in Wales on October 15 but were too late to prevent a customs officer from boarding the
Fingal,
his pen and notebook in hand. Bulloch was aghast: “I thought of the rifles and sabres in the hold, and the ill-armed pickets on the Potomac waiting and longing for them.”
⁹
The two men took a desperate risk. Anderson tricked the customs officer into leaving the steamer. Then, instead of sailing into dock as promised, Bulloch ordered the
Fingal
to weigh anchor and “we cracked on all the steam her boilers would bear.” They expected to be fired upon or chased by a customs ship, but nothing happened. “It was half past eight o’clock before we got fairly out to sea beyond the reach of batteries and pursuit,” wrote Anderson. “How my heart lightened as I looked at the blue water again and found myself on board a good staunch ship once more.”
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Shortly after the
Fingal
’s escape, the U.S. legation heard that the
Bermuda
had arrived at Savannah. “Wilson pretends to disbelieve it,” complained Moran on October 17. “But I fear it is fact.” Otherwise, he thought, there would not be so many advertisements in
The Times
for investors to buy shares in blockade-running ships. “John Bull would violate every law of honor and every principle of justice if he can secure his own ends thereby,” Moran declared.
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The same criticism was being leveled, with equal rancor, by the British government against Seward.

—

“Mr. Seward appears to have deemed it advisable to get up a little excitement about the European Powers again” was how Lord Lyons wryly characterized the situation to Lord Russell on October 22.
¹²
William Howard Russell was not constrained like Lyons by the language of diplomacy. Seward was up to “his usual tricks,” he noted in a letter to J. C. Bancroft Davis. “He is determined to resort to his favorite panacea of making the severed States reunited by a war with England.”
¹³
Neither Lyons nor William Howard Russell thought it was a coincidence that Seward’s latest salvos against England had started when public confidence in the Lincoln administration was wavering. “A victory would do much to set things straight,” Lyons had written privately to Lord Russell in September, “but some of the illusions with which the war was begun are gone forever. The appearance of unanimity in the North has completely vanished.”
¹⁴
Lyons was referring to the political controversy started by Union general John C. Frémont in the border state of Missouri, who in August had announced the emancipation of all slaves in the state belonging to Confederate sympathizers. Frémont’s impetuous act not only threatened to tear the army apart, with some regiments appearing ready to resign en masse rather than fight for the Negro, but also gave the strongest possible incentive to Missouri and the other slave-owning border states to join forces with the Confederacy.

Lincoln was already considering the removal of Frémont from his post when General McClellan suffered his first significant defeat. It was only a small engagement between two brigades at a place called Ball’s Bluff, forty miles upriver from Washington, but the high number of Federal soldiers killed and wounded shook Lincoln’s confidence in his new military commander. The possibility that the South might grow from eleven to thirteen or fourteen states could tip the scales against the North. The next day, October 22, Lincoln announced to his cabinet that he was repudiating both Frémont and his emancipation declaration. He was prepared to lose the support of the radical abolitionists in his own party, but not that of Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland, which would make “the job on our hands,” Lincoln confessed, “too large for us.”
¹⁵

Lord Lyons had at first paid little attention to Seward’s rather obvious attempts to distract attention from the U.S. government’s woes.
¹⁶
He was too busy trying to prevent the secretary of state from undermining the Anglo-French alliance. Seward had begun to woo Emperor Napoleon III in the delusion that France was the friendlier of the two nations.
^7.1
17
When Henri Mercier, the French minister, warned him that his government was losing patience with the blockade, Seward hinted that if the emperor withdrew his recognition of Southern belligerency, the North would do everything in its power to ensure a steady supply of cotton. Rather than being grateful for this show of favoritism, the French saw it as further proof that the North was heading for defeat. Mercier regarded Southern independence as a fait accompli and was trying to persuade Lyons that it was in everybody’s interest for the Great Powers to recognize the Confederacy. Logic must prevail over sentiment, Mercier patiently but persistently argued. Lyons refused to be drawn in: “I take, perhaps, a more hopeful view than M. Mercier does of the Military prospects of the North,” he explained to Lord Russell.
¹⁹

However, Lyons could not ignore Seward’s declaration on October 26 that the North was “expelling” Consul Bunch from Charleston (where it had no effective jurisdiction) for holding talks with the Confederacy about privateering. The staff at the British legation was furious that Seward had made no reference to the French consul, who had also taken part in the negotiations. Lyons maintained a stony silence during his interview with Seward, knowing that it would annoy the secretary of state to be denied a reaction. “Mr. Bunch has merely been selected as a safer object of attack than the British or French Government,” he reported angrily to Lord Russell after the meeting.
²⁰
It was not the transparency of Seward’s motives that worried Lyons but the American’s failure to realize the impact of his words and deeds on the international stage. “He always tries violence in language first,” observed Lyons, “and then runs the risk of pledging himself and the nation to violent courses, if he be taken at once at his word.”
²¹

When Lord Russell heard the news about Consul Bunch, he understood that his efforts with Adams were unlikely to have the slightest effect on Seward’s behavior. “It is the business of Seward to feed the mob with sacrifices every day,” he wrote to Lord Palmerston, “and we happen to be the most grateful food he can offer.” As long as there were no actions accompanying the secretary of state’s words, Russell thought the safest course was to ignore him, since Seward was a “singular mixture of the bully and coward.”
²²
Palmerston agreed, although he wished that more regiments had been sent to Canada as a warning to Seward against becoming too cocky. But the British cabinet’s anxieties were dismissed by the new secretary for war, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, who advised them not to be fooled by Seward’s charade of aggression: “The Washington government is violent and unscrupulous,” he wrote, “but it is not insane.”
²³

Throughout Britain, however, the effect of Seward’s threats, which he ensured were known to the press, was to swing public opinion dramatically away from the North. The mills had already moved to short time in order to preserve their dwindling cotton stocks.
Reynolds’s Newspaper,
a popular weekly aimed at the working classes, blamed the Northern blockade rather than the Southern cotton embargo for the looming crisis. “England must break the Blockade,” cried an editorial in early autumn, “or Her Millions must starve.”
²⁴
Henry Adams was trying without success to plant favorable articles in the press. “I hope that you will see in some of the London newspapers if not my writing, at least my hand,” he wrote in confidence to his brother Charles Francis Jr. “They need it, confound ’em.”
²⁵
Benjamin Moran was convinced that the Confederates were either feeding Reuter with false information or encouraging him to slant his news. “That he is under the influence of the rebels is too clear to be the subject of doubt,” he fulminated in his diary. Only after the news service turned a recent Federal victory into a defeat was Moran able to persuade Charles Francis Adams to deliver a friendly warning to Reuter.
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