A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (62 page)

Adams had finally given in to his anxiety over all this talk of Confederate recognition and possible intervention and had sought an official interview with Lord Russell. He waited restlessly on the day of the twenty-third, watching the hours tick by until it was time for him to leave for his three o’clock appointment. He was disappointed when he arrived at the Foreign Office to find several ambassadors lolling about the antechamber still waiting for their meetings. Seeing his pained look, one of them tried to cheer him up but soon relinquished the attempt. Adams did not see Russell until half past four. By then he had rehearsed his position so many times that he was able to put his question to Russell as effortlessly as an afterthought. They were speaking about Lord Lyons, who had called on Adams that morning, and Adams casually “expressed the hope that he might be going out for a long stay. I had indeed, been made of late quite fearful that it would be otherwise. If I had entirely trusted to the construction given by the public to a late speech, I should have begun to think of packing my carpet bag.” Just as casually, Russell replied that Gladstone had been misunderstood and that the cabinet’s position remained unchanged. They talked on, but Adams was so relieved he no longer felt the need to press the issue, except to remark that the North would not take kindly to Gladstone’s speech.
²⁵
Russell did not detain him, equally relieved that he had been able to lie while sticking to the letter of the truth.

Lord Lyons left for New York on October 25. “I have sent off Lyons without instructions,” Russell informed Palmerston, “at which he is much pleased.”
²⁶
Lyons had never ceased waging his discreet but determined campaign, speaking quietly to both senior Tories and Liberals about the folly of interfering in the war. He felt a profound sense of loyalty and gratitude to Russell, but he refused to acquiesce in a policy that he believed to be morally and practically wrong. The cancellation of the latest cabinet meeting signaled to him that the proposal had died. “I am quite satisfied with the course the government means to take at present with regard to American politics—which diminishes the annoyance of going back,” Lyons told his sister on the twenty-fourth. During their four months together they had talked frequently about his coming home, and he promised, “My object now will be to bring my mission to America to an end as soon as I can with credit and propriety.” They probably both knew that this was a vain hope.
²⁷

Lyons was also mistaken about Russell’s proposal. It was napping rather than dead or dying. John Slidell’s informant wrote on October 28, “I have just returned from Broadlands … and have also seen several leading political men in town. My impression is that little or no progress has been made as regards your question.”
²⁸
During the last week of October the memorandum war continued as more cabinet members felt compelled to state their positions. When Russell received George Grey’s letter on the twenty-eighth, he thanked him “for writing me a letter instead of printing a Memorandum,” and compared it to Lewis, “who sprang a mine on me.” But why, he asked, did people think inaction was morally superior to intervention? “If a friend were to cut his throat,” he wrote, “you would hardly like to confess, ‘he told me he was going to do it, but I said nothing as I thought he would not take my advice.’ ”
²⁹
Clarendon observed, “Johnny always loves to do something when to do nothing is prudent.”
³⁰
When Lord Lyons realized that Russell had not abandoned his plan, he sent him repeated warnings “that at this moment Foreign Intervention, short of force, could only make matters worse.”
³¹

Russell was still feeling put upon when Lord Cowley sent him the news that the emperor had ordered his new foreign minister to approach Britain with a proposal of Anglo-French intervention. Russell was delighted. Once again he could be an angel of peace and prevent any further bloodshed in America. “Was there ever any war so horrible?” he asked Cowley rhetorically.
³²
Now he could call a new cabinet meeting and his plan would have to be discussed. Palmerston had the opposite reaction. If the North wished to waste the lives of thousands of emigrant Germans and Irishmen, it was not, he decided, England’s business to interfere. Moreover, his suspicion of anything French made him skeptical of the proposal. The French have no morals, he told Russell, and would probably agree to all kinds of egregious provisions for slavery. “The French Government are more free from the shackles of principle and of right and wrong on these matters, as on all others than we are,” he insisted.
³³

By November 7, rumors about the emperor’s proposal had leaked to the press. Adams’s spirits sank in proportion to the rise among Confederates. Russell was like a child anticipating a birthday. After reading that a mass meeting of cotton workers in Oldham had passed a resolution in favor of intervention, Russell could not help asking the mayor what had changed in the district. Nothing, the mayor replied; the gathering was small compared to previous American war meetings in Oldham, and it had been intentionally packed with Confederate supporters. (James Spence’s agents provocateurs, Aitken and Grimshaw, were so disheartened by their inability to form a genuine social movement that they ceased their activities shortly afterward.) But in London, James Mason was growing more optimistic. “The cotton famine,” he was pleased to report, “is looming up in fearful proportions.” He added that 700,000 workers were currently living off charity and that typhoid appeared to be on the rise. “The public mind is very much agitated and disturbed at the fearful prospect for the winter, and I am not without hope that it will produce its effects on the counsels of the Government,” he wrote.
³⁴

Ill.28
Punch’s characterization of Louis-Napoleon advocating a joint approach—Palmerston holding back, November 1862.

The effects were not as great as he believed: every economic indicator showed that the country was absorbing the cotton shock, and civic and church leaders were confident that mass unemployment in Lancashire could be alleviated if private individuals throughout the country donated sufficient funds to help the workers. Lord Derby set the example with a donation of £12,000, the largest ever given by one person to a particular cause at that time. He was the chairman of the Central Relief Fund that was overseeing the efforts of 143 committees to collect money and clothing. The workers were unemployed, but many were not sitting idle; Harriet Martineau and others were organizing schemes to help them learn new trades and skills. The sewing and cooking schools, she noted, were proving to be especially popular with the women.
³⁵

Charles Francis Adams had been so satisfied with Lord Russell’s explanation that he saw no reason to alter his holiday plans. He was in Tunbridge Wells with his family when the cabinet met on November 11 to debate the French proposal. Benjamin Moran was equally sanguine. “Lord Russell gave Mr. Adams assurances at their last interview that nothing would be done without notifying him,” Moran wrote in his diary on the eleventh. “I rest undisturbed … I infer the French proposal will be rejected.”
³⁶
But while he was pottering about the empty legation, there was open war in the British cabinet. George Cornewall Lewis and the Duke of Argyll were the leaders of the opposition to Russell and Gladstone. The week before, Lewis had sent around a second memorandum—this one over fifteen thousand words—that answered every single one of Russell’s and Gladstone’s arguments. He had also enlisted his son-in-law, the gifted lawyer William Vernon Harcourt, to write a companion piece for
The Times
under the pseudonym “Historicus.”

Russell’s ship was sinking, though he steadfastly remained at the helm. He opened the cabinet meeting by explaining his position once again. When he had finished, he turned expectantly to Palmerston. Russell’s desperate glare told him that retreat was impossible. The cornered prime minister made a few halfhearted comments about not letting Lancashire down. “I do not think his support was very sincere,” wrote Lewis; “it certainly was not hearty: The proposal was now thrown before the Cabinet, who proceeded to pick it to pieces. Everybody present threw a stone at it of great or less size, except Gladstone, who supported it, and the Chancellor and Cardwell, who expressed no opinion.”
³⁷
As they debated throughout the morning and into the following day, it became obvious to Lewis that Russell had been rather too forward with the French and feared the consequences of declining their offer. But he remained unmoved by Russell’s embarrassment or his dread of annoying France. Lewis scolded Russell for his unrealistic faith in the ability of outsiders to impose peace on America: “What would an eminent diplomatist from Vienna, or Berlin, or St. Petersburg know of the Chicago platform or the Crittenden compromise?” The idea of the Great Powers dictating the terms of agreement between the North and South was ludicrous.
³⁸
He continued to harry the foreign secretary until, in Gladstone’s words, “Lord Russell rather turned tail. He gave way without resolutely fighting out his battle.” Not surprisingly, Gladstone was disgusted with his colleagues. “But I hope,” he wrote to his wife, “[the French] may not take it as a positive refusal, or at any rate that they may themselves act in the matter. It will be clear that we concur with them, that the war should cease.”
³⁹

Russell hoped that his reply to the emperor on November 13 was open-ended and flattering enough to soften the awkward fact that his offer was being turned down. Napoleon was indeed annoyed with the foreign secretary, especially since the Russians had also been lukewarm about his proposal. But the emperor’s anger paled beside that of the Confederates, who still perceived Russell as their archnemesis. Henry Hotze’s self-confidence suffered a precipitate fall. He wondered whether his attempts to manipulate opinion had backfired. Worse still was the shock of discovering that the government had far greater control over the press than he had ever imagined. Once it was announced that the French proposal had been declined, Hotze could not find a newspaper willing to print his attack on Lord Russell, not even
The Times.
⁴⁰

There is no single reason why the British cabinet voted against intervening in the war. Economically, it did not make sense to interfere; militarily, it would have meant committing Britain to war with the North and once again risking Canada and possibly the Caribbean for uncertain gains; politically, there was no support from either party or sufficient encouragement from the other Great Powers apart from France; and practically, the decision to intervene would have required a majority consensus from a cabinet that had never agreed on the meaning or significance of the war. But there is also an individual whose name is rarely mentioned and yet who deserves his place among the reasons, and that is Seward. From the beginning of the war, eighteen months earlier, Seward had threatened Britain to stay out of the conflict or face the consequences. His bluster and posturing had driven away a potential ally, but the message was heard. A few months after the cabinet discussion, William Harcourt joked to Lewis that it was “a little amusing that the whole wrath of the South and the imputation of being the real obstacle to Intervention should fall on Lord John. It only shows how little is known of the real history of affairs.… It reminds me of what Sir R. Walpole said: ‘don’t tell me of history; I know that
can’t
be true.’ ”
⁴¹

When Charles Francis Adams returned from Tunbridge Wells in mid-November, he straightaway paid a visit to Russell’s house in Chesham Place. Naturally, they discussed Britain’s reply to the French emperor. Adams told him, “I hoped it would open the eyes of the [American] people to their mistake as to the disposition of the Emperor and make them more liberal to England.” Russell’s hearty assent to this was no doubt driven by a combination of guilt and embarrassment. Adams mistakenly thought it was due to the foreign secretary’s having scored a diplomatic coup. “His Lordship seemed a little elated by his paper and was more cordial than usual,” he wrote in his diary on November 15. “He alluded to the alleged audience granted to Mr. Slidell … and said that if the Queen had granted any such to Mr. Mason there would have been no end to the indignation in America. I said, yes.”