A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (39 page)

The arrival of the British newspapers on Friday, December 13, brought an abrupt end to all the speculation and celebrations that had been allowed to proliferate unchecked since November 16. The angry leaders and articles demanding reparation left no doubt as to how the British regarded Wilkes’s act. On Monday morning in New York there were rowdy scenes at the stock exchange as investors dumped their bonds and rushed to buy commodities such as gold, saltpeter, and gunpowder. A run on the banks suspended all business, including the payment of a loan to the Treasury that Secretary Chase had been expecting in mid-December. The New York offices of Barings and Rothschild’s closed their doors, and Rothschild’s transferred their American holdings to France to safeguard them from confiscation by the U.S. government.
⁵⁶

Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell took a brief rest from her teaching duties at the New York Infirmary to explain to her friends in London that it was all a terrible mistake. “Indeed, I have never before had cause for so much gloom,” she wrote. “The
Trent
affair was no intentional insult to the English flag—on the contrary … the whole thing is marked more by the
ill-breeding
of Americans and a reckless ignoring of consequences than by … deliberate insults which England attributes to her.” Her friends and relatives were keenly divided on the issue. “With part of our own family furiously American and part as furiously English—disapproving as we do of the conduct of both countries—it is a terrible trial of feeling,” she admitted.
⁵⁷

In Washington, Seward was aghast, having received over the weekend the first of Adams’s dispatches regarding the British response to the
Trent
affair. A plaintive letter had also come from the Duchess of Sutherland begging him to stay true to his ideals: “I do not know if you will recollect me; but I think so. I liked much having known you. Your feeling toward England seemed so friendly. Your aspirations, your earnestness against slavery were so great, I rejoiced in hearing you speak,” she wrote.
⁵⁸
The letters so shook him that he ran across the street to the White House. He burst in on Lincoln, who was entertaining a few friends, to announce that Britain was preparing for war. “I don’t believe England has done so foolish a thing,” declared Orville Browning, one of the senators present. After Seward had read out Adams’s dispatch, their incredulity turned to outrage. Browning jumped up and urged Lincoln to “fight to the death.”
⁵⁹

More newspapers arrived on the sixteenth, with reports that Britain was backing up her demands with thousands of “crack troops.” Perhaps almost as disturbing for Seward was the discovery that Sumner and Lincoln had been discussing the
Trent
affair behind his back. Seward realized he had three choices: to press for war, to follow Sumner’s lead and support arbitration, or to argue for the correct but unpopular course demanded by England. Seward hated all three options. That night he went to the Portuguese minister’s ball looking bloodshot and disheveled. He ruined his attempt to appear relaxed by swearing and speaking too loudly. Toward the end of the evening Seward unsteadily approached a group of guests, which included William Howard Russell and the Prince de Joinville, and began boasting of what would happen to Britain if she forced the United States into war. “We will wrap the whole world in flames!” he exclaimed. “No power so remote that she will not feel the fire of our battle and be burned by our conflagration.”
⁶⁰

William Howard Russell assumed that Seward had made up his mind to fight, even though a guest at the ball had scoffed that the secretary of state “always talks that way when he means to break down.” Russell’s letters from home showed that war was a foregone conclusion over there;
The Times
was already making arrangements for him to report from Canada. The following night, however, Russell went to Seward’s house for dinner and was greeted by the secretary of state as if the events of the previous day had never happened. Seward smoothly assured him “that everything consistent with US honour would be done” to assuage Britain’s feelings.
⁶¹
Russell silently disagreed with Seward’s prediction; he thought the public would never stand for it and neither would Congress.
⁶²
From his military contacts, Russell heard that the army’s commanders were confident they would whip the British, which he found rather amusing, having recently spent an evening with Captain Leonard Currie, the English assistant adjutant general to General Smith, who told him “amusing stories of utter want of subordination, mutiny in refusing to go on guard or on duty, etc.”
⁶³

Seward’s dinner was in full swing when the
Europa
sailed into Boston Harbor. Quietly and unobtrusively, Captain Conway Seymour boarded the Washington train for the last stage of his journey. He had been traveling for only a few hours when the train came to a shuddering halt in the dark countryside. Hearing that repairs would not take place until the morning, Seymour commandeered a horse and rode all night to Baltimore, where he succeeded in chartering a special train to Washington. Finally, a little before midnight on Wednesday, December 18, the white-faced and exhausted Queen’s messenger climbed the steps of Lord Lyons’s house.

The following day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Lyons presented himself at Seward’s office. (In one of those strange quirks of timing, on the other side of the Atlantic, Charles Francis Adams had his meeting with Lord Russell on the same day, at the same hour.) Everything, it seemed to him, depended upon his delivery. He had to persuade the secretary of state to bring his games to an end without provoking him into making some last desperate attempt at bravado. Lord Russell was confident in his minister, but his namesake, William Howard Russell, shuddered to think that peace depended on the shyest man in North America. “Lord Lyons is a very odd sort of man,” he wrote to the editor of
The Times
on December 20, “and not quite the person to deal with this crisis tho’ he is most diligent, clear headed and straight viewed. He is nervous and afraid of responsibility—and he has no personal influence in Washington because he never goes into American society tho’ he gives dinners very frequently.”
⁶⁴

Lyons was nervous, but he carried himself with surprising aplomb. Seward let him speak without interruption and then asked to know the truth: What would happen if the government refused or requested further discussion? “I told him that my instructions were positive and left me no discretion,” reported Lyons. Seward looked straight at him and begged for more time; he would never be able to bring around Lincoln’s cabinet, let alone the country, in only seven days. Lyons believed him and agreed to return in two days, at which point the clock would be started. He went home feeling that his mission was already lost; he sincerely doubted that two, ten, or twenty days would make a difference. Rear Admiral Milne was sent a coded telegram instructing him to be ready to transport the legation staff to Canada.

When Lyons returned to Seward on Saturday, December 21, he was met with a plea for a couple more days. Ordinarily Lyons never disobeyed orders, but he knew that Seward was in a corner. Lyons had received an assurance from Baron Mercier that France’s letter in support of Britain would be arriving any day. If Seward did not succeed in convincing the president’s cabinet, the United States would be fighting an Anglo-French alliance in the North and the Confederacy in the South. A new appointment was set for Monday the twenty-third at 10:00
A.M.,
but this had to be the final meeting, he told Seward. The official protest would be presented on Monday, and the United States would have seven days to respond. That afternoon, Lincoln told Senator Browning that Seward had asked Lyons to read the demands to him in two days’ time. The president had “an inkling of what they were,” reported Browning, unaware that Lincoln knew exactly what they were since Seward had been keeping him informed from the beginning. After Seward’s first meeting with Lyons, Lincoln had approached the editor of the
Philadelphia Press
for his help in “preparing the American people for the release of Mason and Slidell.”
⁶⁵
But Lincoln was being pulled in different directions; Sumner had also come by the White House to show him letters from John Bright and others that supported arbitration. Frustrated by his three-way conversation with Lyons, Lincoln asked Sumner why he could not speak to the minister himself. “If I could see Lord Lyons, I could show him in five minutes that I am heartily for peace,” he said.
⁶⁶
But Sumner would not allow it, saying without justification that a meeting between the president and a minister would be a breach of protocol. Sumner went further and not only extracted a promise from Lincoln to show him any correspondence before it was sent to Lord Lyons, but also set him up to defy Seward.

On the twenty-third, Lord Lyons went to the State Department for the third time, wondering if the meeting with Seward would be their last together. There was little for them to say to each other after he presented Lord Russell’s letter; but Lyons could not help feeling sorry for Seward. He knew that the secretary of state was carrying an immense burden. Lyons had tried to make the situation easier for him by granting the extra time; if the transatlantic cable had still been working, he would not have had the discretion, but as it was, Lyons boldly made the decision in his belief that Seward would do his utmost to prevent a war. “You will perhaps be surprised to find Mr. Seward on the side of peace,” Lyons explained to Lord Russell. But “ten months of office have dispelled many of his illusions … he no longer believes … in the ease with which the United States could crush rebellion with one hand, and chastise Europe with the other.” Lyons was optimistic that Seward had learned his lesson and would never again regard relations with England as “safe playthings to be used for the amusement of the American People.”
⁶⁷

Seward persuaded Lincoln to call a cabinet meeting for ten o’clock on Christmas morning. The secretary of state began by passing around copies of Lord Russell’s “seven-days” letter. As he talked, however, it became clear that the cabinet remained opposed to releasing the Confederate commissioners.
⁶⁸
Sumner, who was also present, spoke after Seward; he had come armed with letters from England. John Bright’s was particularly eloquent about the aristocratic mob screaming for war. Sumner outlined to the cabinet what he had previously told Lincoln: since capitulation was politically impossible, an offer to go to arbitration was the government’s only option. Otherwise Britain and probably France would break the blockade. The ironclad ships of the Royal Navy would smash the wooden U.S. fleet, the North would in turn be blockaded and its ports destroyed. The Confederacy, in the meantime, would sign a free trade agreement with England, “making the whole North American continent a manufacturing dependency of England.”
⁶⁹

Sumner was still speaking when the door opened and a messenger brought in the official French response to the crisis. The dispatch unambiguously denounced Wilkes’s act as a violation of international law. For a second, Seward was crestfallen, until he realized that his case had just been made for him. Edward Bates, the attorney general, was the first to see that Sumner’s proposal for arbitration was hardly less dangerous than retaining the commissioners. Bates recorded in his diary: “I … urged that to go to war with England is to abandon all hope of suppressing the rebellion.… The maritime superiority of Britain would sweep us from the Southern waters. Our trade would be utterly ruined and our treasury bankrupt. In short … we
must not
have war with England. There was great reluctance on the part of some of the members of the cabinet—and even the President himself—to acknowledge these obvious truths.”
⁷⁰
The situation was too galling, objected Salmon P. Chase, despite, or possibly because, the country was facing bankruptcy unless he could raise another loan. The markets had reacted almost as badly to the notion of arbitration as they had to that of the prisoners arriving in Fort Warren. Banks were nearly at the bottom of their reserves, government bonds were plummeting again, and gold was running high.
⁷¹

The meeting adjourned at 2:00
P.M.
with an agreement to reconvene the following day. Before he left, Lincoln turned to Seward and asked him to summarize his arguments on paper. The president would do the same for Sumner’s arbitration idea, and they would debate the two positions in the morning. Seward wrote all night; Lincoln made a half-hearted attempt before accepting that it was useless to delay the inevitable. When Senator Browning anxiously questioned him after dinner, Lincoln reassured him that there was not going to be a war with England.

By morning Seward had drafted a twenty-six-page response to Lord Lyons, which in effect dismissed the entire imbroglio as a consequence of Wilkes’s forgetting to take the
San Jacinto
to a prize court for adjudication. He hoped it answered all the cabinet’s objections, but he was too tired to judge. He left his house on Lafayette Square early and paid a surprise visit to Chase. If the secretary of the treasury could be persuaded, he thought, the others would follow his line. In fact, Chase, like Lincoln, had already begun to come around to Seward’s way of thinking. Seward showed him the letter and explained why his idea was so much better than Sumner’s. Rather than risk war by insisting on arbitration, they should pack the commissioners off to London and claim it as a victory for American neutral rights.
⁷²
Chase consoled himself with the thought that if that happened, revenge on England would only be postponed.