A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (94 page)

In October, Captain Hoare, the Royal Navy attaché to the British embassy in Paris, visited M. Bravay with a line of credit and a list of questions. Their conversation left Hoare with no doubt of the rams’ true ownership. The Frenchman’s nods and winks were irritating but illuminating—had James Bulloch witnessed this display of self-important puffery, he would have been furious at Bravay’s indiscretion. Nevertheless, the Frenchman refused to sell the rams at any price, and Hoare returned home with nothing except a poor opinion of the Confederates’ dealings. By coincidence, British crewmen from the
Florida
arrived in Liverpool during the week of Hoare’s meeting with Bravay. Captain Maffitt had let them go to save money, but everyone, including Consul Dudley, assumed they were coming to take the rams out of Lairds shipyard while there was still time. This mistaken belief sent officials into a frenzy. Russell saw another
Alabama
incident in the making and wanted the marines to become involved; the Home Office ordered the Liverpool constabulary to keep a close watch on the sailors.
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If Lord Russell had expected gratitude from Charles Francis Adams, he was soon disabused. The U.S. minister was only just beginning to express his pent-up frustration with the British government. Ignorant of Russell’s marathon negotiation with the law officers, Adams assumed that it was his “war letter” that had frightened the English into action, and he fired another cannonade of unfortunate remarks on September 16: “If Her Majesty’s Government have not the power to prevent the harbours and towns of a friendly nation from being destroyed by vessels built by British subjects, and equipped, manned, and dispatched from her harbours,” he raged, “then … all international obligations, whether implied or expressed, [are] not worth the paper on which they are written.”
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His letter was passed around the cabinet, accompanied by various noises of disgust and outrage. “It seems to me that we cannot allow to remain unnoticed his repeated and I must say somewhat insolent threats of war. We ought, I think, to say to him in civil Terms ‘you be dammed,’ ” declared Palmerston. Russell thought the same. In his reply on September 25 he dispensed with the usual expressions of “regret and concern” and went straight to the point: “There are, however, passages in your letter,” he wrote, that “plainly and repeatedly imply an intimation of hostile proceeding towards Great Britain on the part of the Government of the United States unless steps are taken.” These threats would not be tolerated: Her Majesty’s Government will never “overstep the limits of the law” for the sake of appeasing another government, and “they will not shrink from any consequences of such a decision.”
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Adams came to his senses after he received Russell’s indignant reply and hastily apologized for his letter. Henry Adams, on the other hand, was unrepentant. “They meant to play us, like a salmon,” he told Charles Francis Jr., until their father’s threat of war ended “the little game.… Undoubtedly to us this is a second Vicksburg. It is our diplomatic triumph, if we manage to carry it through.”
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It was Russell’s fault that the legation wrongly assumed Adams had scored a victory over him. His pride had brought him the worst of all outcomes: his efforts unacknowledged, his reputation tarnished, and the government made to look weak. Adams’s apparent diplomatic coup was naturally the talk of Washington. William Stuart was so alarmed that he spoke to Seward’s son, Frederick, on September 18 to explain the real sequence of events. But the myth of the British lion cowering under the onslaught of the American eagle had already taken hold.

Seward could not resist making capital out of England’s embarrassment. He had asked Thurlow Weed to plant newspaper stories about the dangerous rams in England, so that he could fight a “battle” and emerge the victor. Gideon Welles was infuriated by the ease with which his rival manipulated the news. “I am under restrictions which prevent me from making known facts which would dissipate this alarm,” he wrote in his diary. “It does not surprise me that the
New York Times …
and all the papers influenced by Seward should be alarmed. [He] knows those vessels are to be detained, yet will not come out and state the fact, but is not unwilling to have apprehension excited. It will glorify him if it is said they are detained through protest from our minister.”
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Charles Sumner unwittingly played into Seward’s hands. The rage and paranoia that had recently alarmed his friends burst into public view on September 10. Several thousand people crowded into the Cooper Union in New York to listen to him deliver a four-hour tirade against Britain. “I am disappointed and disgusted with Sumner’s own conduct,” wrote Lord Lyons after he had read the speech in full.
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Its real purpose, he believed, was to strengthen Sumner’s position against Seward. If the rams were stopped, people would remember the Cooper Union speech as being instrumental in the diplomatic victory; but if the warships were allowed to set sail, Sumner would be able to point to his speech as proof that he, at least, had been willing to confront the British. The vehement denunciations of Britain were baffling to Sumner’s friends. Some attributed his excess of feeling to his old head injury, others to grief over the recent death of his brother; all agreed on the calamitous damage to his reputation. Having positioned himself as the voice of moderation, his new bellicosity made him look like the worst kind of political opportunist. Lord Lyons would never trust him again; “I had hoped better things of him,” he wrote.
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One of the few letters of approval came from Seward, who, with exquisite irony, sent Sumner his hearty congratulations.
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The Economist
announced there was no hope for Anglo-American relations if a “friend” like Sumner could make such a hostile speech. His accusation that the British government was conniving with the Confederates had to be answered, which Russell duly did in a widely praised speech. Sumner became agitated by the criticism coming from the other side of the Atlantic and obstinately stuck to his position, even after he learned that Russell had detained the rams
before
his Cooper Union speech. Protests from English acquaintances simply made his declarations more extreme. “If Russell wants cotton, let him withdraw all support … for the Rebellion,” he ranted to John Bright who, for all his faults, pandered to no man and refused to play along with Sumner’s characterization of Russell.
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Adams was disappointed that few people in England other than his own son gave him credit for stopping the rams. But a bruised ego was the least of his worries. On September 28, Moran recorded that the legation messenger had grievously swindled the family. Letters had been intercepted, Adams’s wine cellar ransacked, money taken, even checks forged. Feeling that their sanctuary had been violated, Mrs. Adams was already pining to leave London when an anonymous letter arrived at the legation:

Dam the Federals

Dam the Confederates

Dam you both

Kill you damned selves for the next
10
years if you like; so much the better for the world and for England. Thus thinks every Englishman with any brains.

NB.PS. We’ll cut your throats fast enough afterwards for you if you aint tired of blood, you devils.
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This decided the matter. Adams found a large seaside retreat for rent in St. Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings. There, he led Henry and Brooks into the slate-blue water for bracing plunges before breakfast.
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It was a relief to leave behind the chaos and discord of the legation. “My state of depression of spirits is becoming chronic,” he wrote in his diary in a rare moment of self-reflection. “This way of living does not suit me, and the condition of public as well as of my private affairs at home is not satisfactory.”
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Adams’s chief solace was that his difficulties paled beside those of the Confederates in London. Mason had announced on September 21 that he was closing the commission. Benjamin Moran was almost sorry to see him go: “Mr. Mason was the unfittest man they could have sent here, and has proved an ignominious failure.”
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Mason’s English friends had feared just such a reaction to his departure and had entreated him to stay; the press, including
The Times,
considered his resignation ill judged. But Mason was acting on Judah Benjamin’s instructions. The Confederate secretary of state had ordered him to relocate to France under the new designation of “special commissioner to the Continent” and to give as his reason for the move Southern dissatisfaction with Britain.
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Yet the state of affairs in France was no better for the Confederates. A disgruntled clerk at the offices of Bravay and Company had passed incriminating documents to the U.S. legation. The French authorities naturally professed to be shocked to learn that the Confederates were using their dockyards, and the foreign minister, Drouyn de Lhuys, glibly assured William L. Dayton, the U.S. minister in Paris, that there would be a thorough investigation into the matter. The deception granted Bulloch a reprieve, but it was no guarantee that his construction program would be allowed to continue.

There was a funereal atmosphere at James Mason’s house in Sackville Street when Rose Greenhow arrived for dinner on September 17. She had seen him the day before. “He was very kind—and we had a long talk,” she wrote in her diary.
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Mason apologized for leaving her in such an awkward position. She had been expecting to make a life for herself in London as the Confederate commission’s political and social hostess, re-creating her role in Washington before the war, and his departure would deprive her of an essential platform for her mission. Mason had also performed a vital function for the Confederates and their sympathizers in England by containing the personal differences between them to a sustainable level. It had not mattered quite so much that Spence dismissed Henry Hotze’s propaganda journal, the
Index,
as a waste of time and money, or that Hotze considered Spence to be a deluded abolitionist, when there was a third party to keep them apart. How they would work together once he was in France had not been resolved. Spence and Hotze vied with each other to help Rose. Spence took her to Richard Bentley and Sons, Charles Dickens’s publishers, who eagerly acquired the memoir she had been writing in Richmond,
My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington.
Hotze trumpeted Rose to the readers of the
Index
as one of the great martyrs of the Southern cause, a heroine whose “spirit and talent [were] not common even among women of the South.”
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For all of Hotze’s genius at shaping public opinion, he failed to understand the gravity of the situation in Liverpool. “The Rams in the Mersey are more than ever the centers of attention. The efforts of the Government to insure their detention are really ludicrous,” he sneered to Benjamin. Bulloch, on the other hand, saw nothing amusing about the government’s actions. On October 8, Russell decided that Lairds could not be trusted, and he changed his detention order to outright seizure. The Duke of Argyll congratulated Russell and urged him not to regret defying the law officers: “They would never have advised you to do what you have so rightly done,” he wrote. “I say, three cheers for the House of Russell.”
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Palmerston agreed with Argyll that there “was no moral Doubt that [the rams] are intended for Confederate service.” Even the Queen became involved, telling Gladstone that the rams business should not be allowed “to endanger the Government.” Despite her concern, Gladstone thought “she did not appear to lean towards over-conciliation of the Federal Government.”
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James Bulloch insisted in his memoirs that he never intended the rams to sneak out of England. If that was so, Lairds had done him a disservice with their suspicious activity.

The task of guarding the rams was one of the least rewarding experiences of Captain Edward Inglefield’s career in the Royal Navy. He and his men were threatened wherever they went in Liverpool. An intelligent and empathetic officer, he realized that the anger directed toward them chiefly stemmed from a fear that the five hundred craftsmen working on the rams would lose their jobs, and he advised the Home Office to allow the work to continue until the ships were completed. Inglefield deliberately refrained from putting on a show of force: he moored his sloop at some distance from the rams, carried nothing more threatening than an umbrella, and ordered his men to remember that on this mission they were peace preservers, not war makers. It was a sensible but risky move. One ram looked primed to leave: “Her turrets are very nearly completed, and excepting stores she can be ready for sea almost any day,” he reported. “I have taken upon myself not to permit the boilers to be run up, or the fires laid even for presumed experimental purposes.”
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