A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (83 page)

The Confederates in England had reviled Lewis ever since his speech against recognition the previous November. They were not sure what de Grey or Hartington might achieve for their cause, but the simple fact of there being two more known supporters in positions of power was enough to rescue the Confederates from their gloom. Nothing had gone right for them since the launch of the Erlanger-sponsored cotton bonds in March, and even these had ultimately proven to be a disappointment. Rumors spread by Federal agents that Jefferson Davis intended to default on the bonds had caused the price to plummet. Only secret buying on a massive scale by the Confederates was keeping them at a reasonable level.

The secret ship-construction program had also suffered a spate of reversals. A week after the
Georgia
’s escape on April 1, Matthew Fontaine Maury learned that John, his eldest son, was missing at Vicksburg and presumed dead. “Oh my dear, dear wife,” he wrote, “my heart is gone from me.”
^21.2
Maury’s only mementoes of his lost son John were a short letter and his old winter coat, which had been shortened to fit his twelve-year-old-son Brave; this at least “has its memories,” he wrote.
⁴
Heartbroken, Maury abandoned London and went with Brave to live in Bowdon, on the outskirts of Manchester, refusing to see anyone except his closest friends. Almost simultaneously, the government impounded the
Alexandra
in Liverpool, which Fraser, Trenholm had intended to donate to the Confederate navy; and James Bulloch heard that the former paymaster of the
Alabama,
a man named Clarence Yonge, was exacting revenge for his dismissal by telling both the Federals and the British government everything he knew about the Confederates’ operations.

Bulloch tried to guess what his enemies would learn from Yonge. The Lairds rams currently under construction would be safe, he thought, since Yonge had left England the previous July: “I do not think he was ever in the Birkenhead works, or that he has any personal knowledge of what is going on there. He surely can have no knowledge of the
Alexandra.
”
⁵
But the government’s evident willingness to use Yonge to build its case against the
Alexandra
made Bulloch fearful that the era of legal loopholes and fly-by-night escapes had passed. He became convinced of this toward the end of April, after Charles Francis Adams was allowed to commit a serious diplomatic blunder without incurring any official sanction.

Shortly after the seizure of the
Alexandra,
Adams had written in his diary, “The course of the government has raised the whole hive of sympathizers, as it was never stirred before. What with the case of the
Alexandra,
and that of the
Peterhoff …
the effect is to stimulate ill temper. The greater the necessity of keeping as quiet and calm as possible.”
⁶
But instead of heeding his own advice, Adams became entangled in a blockade-running scandal involving two American gunrunners who were shipping arms to Mexico. Admiral Wilkes’s capture of the
Peterhoff
had made insurance for sailing in Mexican waters prohibitive for small firms. The gunrunners, General Juan Napoleon Zerman and Colonel Bertram B. Howell, asked Adams to provide them with an affidavit stating they were aiding the Mexicans and not the South. This, they hoped, would lower their insurance premium, since their ship would no longer be at risk of capture by the U.S. Navy. In spite of Moran’s warnings, Adams not only provided Howell and Zerman with a letter of indemnity, but also embellished it with pointed jabs at Lloyds for underwriting “dishonest enterprises” such as blockade running.
⁷
As is so often the case with compromising letters, one copy became several. The letter went from Lloyds to the owners of the
Peterhoff,
thence to the Foreign Office, and finally to
The Times.

The press called Adams a hypocrite for protesting against British arms sales to the South while secretly helping Americans to supply Mexico. One newspaper wondered if he was selling protection; another accused him of plotting to drive British shipping from the Americas.
The Times
returned to its favorite theme of Northern hypocrisy. The paper often reminded its readers of the example set during the Crimean War, when President Franklin Pierce had rebuffed Britain’s protests over the shipments of American-made weapons to the Russians with the retort: “Americans sold munitions of war to all buyers without troubling themselves about the ports to which the goods would be consigned, or the purposes to which they would be put.”

The French also issued a strong protest to the U.S. minister in Paris. The Foreign Office was incensed with Adams and thought “his explanation of it … very lame.” The embarrassed ministry desperately tried to stave off a debate on the subject but finally yielded on April 23. Aided by the Tories, pro-Southern MPs excoriated the government for allowing the North’s envoy to become “the Minister for Commerce in England.” One sarcastically remarked that Adams’s notion “of honesty and neutrality is remarkable. Every thing is honest to suit his own purposes.” Some of the speeches that followed were so insulting toward the North that the speaker of the House later apologized to Adams. Calm was restored only after Palmerston and Russell assured their respective listeners in the Commons and the Lords that Seward would disavow Adams’s “extraordinary” and “unwarrantable” act.

The government had to work hard to stifle the controversy, muzzling its party members and planting stories in the press that the Foreign Office was satisfied with Adams’s protestations of innocence. Palmerston twisted Delane’s arm into having
The Times
imply that Howell and Zerman had tricked Adams. But none of these efforts to protect Adams diminished his sense of grievance. He remained convinced that his behavior had been above reproof, and for weeks afterward he badgered Lord Russell to retract his speech in the Lords. Henry Adams loyally supported his father, telling his brother Charles Francis Jr., “When the whole
Peterhoff
story is told, we shall reverse everything and overwhelm these liars.”
⁸
Nevertheless, he could see that his father was floundering and was relieved when the prominent New York lawyer William M. Evarts arrived on May 1. Evarts, one of Seward’s closest political confidants, had been sent by him to liaise with the Crown prosecution lawyers in the
Alexandra
trial. But instead of bolstering Charles Francis Adams’s confidence, Evarts’s arrival had sent him into further decline. Evarts was the fourth U.S. agent to arrive that spring. Henry could joke about having a “complete Cabinet of Ministerial advisers and assistants,” but he was not the one whose competence appeared to be in doubt.

—

Hartington’s maiden speech as the new undersecretary for war took place on May 14, 1863. He managed to arrive late for the debate—regarding a bill to regulate the country’s volunteer militias—and without his papers, but the House appeared to accept his apology once he demonstrated a sound grasp of the subject. The Confederate sympathizers in the Commons held their breath, waiting to see whether he might use the opportunity to praise the South; finally, after keeping them in suspense until the end of his speech, Hartington fulfilled their hopes by making a long and favorable comparison between English volunteer soldiers and the brave fighting men he had recently seen in the Confederacy. By itself, Hartington’s speech was a minor event, but its timing turned out to be extremely fortunate for the South, coming as it did four days before the news of Lee’s victory at Chancellorsville. James Mason’s supporters in Parliament were so elated that they immediately laid plans to rattle the government again about Admiral Wilkes and Northern interference with British ships in the West Indies. In France, a friendly meeting with the Spanish ambassador lifted Commissioner Slidell’s spirits.

It was the news of Stonewall Jackson’s death, however, that made the Confederates spring into action. They were amazed and delighted by the spontaneous outpouring of public grief in England. Newspapers carried long eulogies to the fallen hero;
The Times
even compared Jackson’s death to Admiral Nelson’s at Trafalgar. Flags flew at half-mast at many cotton mills. Public expressions of sympathy were hastily drawn up for Jackson’s widow. The unexpected intensity of the reaction delivered the Confederates from their despair even as it threw the U.S. legation and its supporters into deeper vexation. The querulous Liberal MP John Roebuck, whose youthful affection for America had changed in his old age to a blazing dislike, held a mass meeting in Sheffield that voted to recognize the Confederacy. A few days later, on June 1, the pro-Confederate owner of the
Saturday Review
, Alexander Beresford Hope, formed a committee calling itself the “British Jackson Monumental Fund.” Beresford Hope, whose vociferous support for the Confederacy stemmed from a misguided belief that its political system was more aristocratic than the North’s, announced that the fund was going to commission the Irish sculptor John Foley, designer of the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, to make a statue of Stonewall Jackson that would be presented to the people of Virginia upon completion.
^21.3
Not to be outdone, publishing houses hastily called for biographies about the general. The race was won by the English governess stranded in Richmond during Lord Edward St. Maur’s visit, Catherine Hopley, who pipped the competition with her
Stonewall Jackson,
published in August.
¹⁰

The Confederates also regarded it as a good sign that the newest of their three cruisers, the
Georgia,
had made contact with the
Alabama
in Brazil. The vessels had met in the harbor of Bahia quite by chance. “Day broke and we found ourselves very near two men-of-war,” wrote James Morgan.

What was their nationality? It seemed an age before the hour for colors arrived, but when it did, to our great delight, the most rakish-looking of the two warships broke out the Stars and Bars! “It is the
Alabama
!” we gasped, and commenced to dance with delight. The officers hugged one another, each embracing a man of his own rank, except the captain and myself. Like the commander, I was the only one of my rank aboard, so I hugged myself.
¹¹

The shipping magnate William Schaw Lindsay had succeeded William Gregory as the Confederacy’s chief political lobbyist in the Commons. He was a safer choice than Roebuck, less volatile and more popular among his fellow MPs. Lindsay was elated by the commotion over Jackson’s death, believing it meant the country was ready to recognize Southern independence. He invited Mason and Roebuck down to his estate in Surrey for a concentrated weekend of plotting. After the meeting, Roebuck wasted little time. In the first week of June he met with Benjamin Disraeli, who said all the things that an opposition leader would when offered the chance of attacking the government without actually committing himself or his party to a change in their policy of noninterference in the American war. But this was encouragement enough for Roebuck, who gave notice in the House of his intention to revisit the question of Southern recognition. The debate was slated for the end of June. The Confederates took the news with a degree of caution. Roebuck was an asset to the extent that the MP represented himself as a man of the people, but (in the words of one observer) vanity was “written all over his face when you came near it.” They trembled at the idea of letting Roebuck loose in the Commons without an explicit move by the French beforehand. John Slidell drew up a memorandum for Emperor Napoleon’s attention, which outlined all the reasons why an independent South suited French interests, and requested an interview.

When Mason returned to England, he found Waterloo Station placarded with posters depicting the British Union Jack crossed with the Confederate flag. Hackney cab drivers were displaying the emblems in miniature. Hotze was working at a feverish pace, distributing posters, placards, and circulars up and down the country. The
Morning Herald
and the
Standard
agreed to print editorials demanding recognition every other day until the debate. Spence was also in his element. During the past two years he had changed from being a businessman of no great talent or success into a canny political operator respected by the Southerners in England and feared by the Northern lobby. For the new push in Parliament, Spence formed two separate organizations. One was a respectable club, called the Manchester Southern Club, whose purpose was to distribute Confederate material in the north of England; the other was his own private army of agitators. The group successfully broke up an abolitionist meeting at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. “These parties are not the rich spinners but young men of energy with a taste for agitation but little money,” Spence wrote to Mason.

It appears to my judgment that it would be wise not to stint money in aiding this effort to expose cant and diffuse the truth. Manchester is naturally the centre of such a move and you will see there are here the germs of important work—but they need to be tended and fostered. I have supplied a good deal of money individually but I see room for the use of 30 or 40 pounds a month or more.
¹²

Almost no one outside the legation had the least suspicion that public opinion was being cleverly manipulated. “The intelligence of the country is now unanimous in our favor,” Henry Hotze wrote proudly. He was exaggerating his success, but there had been an undeniable shift back toward the South since the initial excitement aroused by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of the year. Hotze’s genius lay in his understanding of who and what constituted fashionable opinion. He knew how to portray the South in ways that appealed to particular constituencies, such as the clergy, university students, journalists, actors, and artists, whom he considered to be natural proselytizers as well as role models.