A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (98 page)

They all talked of him with extraordinary admiration, and I was obliged to conceal the very distant nature of my relations to him by ingenious prevarication. I said that I had not seen him since the end of the Parliamentary session, as I had been absent from England since that time, and I did not let on that I had only seen him once, two years before that epoch, and then from the gallery of the House of Commons when he was on the floor.
²⁸

British descriptions of Lincoln had led Stephen to expect a clumsy, elephantine figure of bizarre proportions, not the “benevolent and hearty old gentleman” who laughed and smiled so readily. “I felt quite kindly to him,” Stephen recorded. He thought Lincoln was far more impressive than Seward, whose initial good impression was undermined by his fatal propensity to swagger. “He is a little, rather insignificant-looking man, with a tendency to tell rather long-winded and rather pointless stories,” wrote Stephen dismissively. “He rather amused me by the coolness with which he talked about government affairs to me as a total stranger. Within five minutes after he saw me he said that if England permitted the rebel rams to start, they would declare war.”
²⁹

Taking advantage of the military pass Seward had written out for him, Stephen had visited General Meade’s headquarters in Virginia, where no one, either during the journey or in Meade’s camp, believed him when he said that England remained unconvinced that slavery was the real cause of the war. “They perfectly laugh at me,” Stephen wrote to his mother after he had arrived in New York at the end of September. “I might as well tell them that in England we did not think the sun is the cause of daylight.” Nor did Americans believe him when he tried to explain the confusion that had led many Englishmen to support the South. “Assuming that Englishmen had really understood the nature of the quarrel, I should feel ashamed of my country myself. Of course, I know they didn’t,” he added, “but it is no use trying to drive that into Americans, it only produces shrugs of their shoulders and civil grins.”
³⁰

Exasperation with English attitudes to the war had also led an acquaintance of Stephen’s, Henry Yates Thompson, to visit America in order to gain firsthand knowledge about the situation. His own family had fallen victim to the fashionable moralizing that dismissed the North as an empire-seeking nation of hypocrites and elevated the South as the last bastion of a preindustrial paradise. “I am quite staggered by your letter,” he had written crossly to his mother from Philadelphia on September 19 in response to her comment that Northern racism was as bad as, if not worse than, Southern slavery. “If you really think slavery pleasanter, all I say is you don’t know what slavery is,” he raged. “I am so certain myself of the good to humanity of this War that, if the North were not winning, I should be inclined to volunteer myself, and have a shot at some of those accursed people you are all praising so loudly.”
³¹

Thompson arrived in Washington at the beginning of October, shortly after Stanton had ordered twenty thousand reinforcements to General Rosecrans at Chattanooga. He visited Seward on the second: “I was quite shocked by his appearance: he was so bowed,” he wrote to his brother Sam. “I was told afterwards that he has a son very ill just now with one of the armies. If I had known that before, I should not have gone.… The photographs of Seward look quite different from how he really appears now.”
³²
Thompson did not feel comfortable bothering Seward for a pass to Meade’s headquarters, nor did he try to impose himself on the president. His only sight of Lincoln was a glimpse of a cadaverous face through the window of a carriage, its wheels churning such a cloud of pale dust that the cavalry trotting behind looked like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Thompson was right to avoid the White House; the Lincolns were in silent mourning for the unmentionable side of Mary’s family. Her brother-in-law, Confederate general Todd Helm, had been killed at the Battle of Chickamauga. Three of Mary’s brothers had already died for the South.
³³
Thompson stayed only a few days in the city and then headed out west.

—

Henry Yates Thompson’s departure from Washington coincided with the return of Lord Lyons from his holiday in Canada. The minister had spent the previous week in New York, taking the temperature of the city. “It is a pity I cannot come here oftener,” he told Lord Russell. “This is so much the best place for obtaining a knowledge of what is going on in the political world.”
³⁴
It was a strange time for Lyons to make a visit. Tiffany and Co. was flying the Russian flag on the front of its building, and American and Russian flags lined the whole of Broadway.

Two weeks earlier, four Russian warships had sailed into New York Harbor. Their appearance took the country by surprise. The press speculated that Czar Alexander II had sent the fleet as a goodwill gesture to the North. Some people even wondered whether the czar was making a covert offer of military aid—“Thank God for the Russians,” wrote Gideon Welles in his diary. But when Seward questioned the Russian minister, Baron Stoeckl, about the fleet’s visit, the baron was vague. The real reason the czar had sent his fleet to North America was in order to keep it ready in case Russia resumed hostilities against England and France. The Russian admiral of the fleet had orders to give every impression of military support short of actually lying.
³⁵

The city organized a parade and an elaborate banquet in honor of the Russian visitors. In the midst of the excitement, the arrival of Admiral Milne on the flagship HMS
Nile
was hardly reported in the press. It was the first visit by a British admiral since the War of 1812, and a genuine gesture of goodwill that Milne and Lyons had been planning for several weeks. But the Russian presence crushed their hopes of making a strong impression on the American public. In contrast to the throngs who visited the Russian ships, not a single vessel approached the
Nile.
The closest Milne came to a public honor was a dinner party given for him and his wife at Cyrus Field’s house in Gramercy Park. The admiral did not mind the indifference shown to his visit, though Lyons was disappointed, given the multiple occasions on which Milne had restrained his officers and punished those who displayed less than strict neutrality in the conflict. Milne instinctively warmed to the energy and spirit of the North.
³⁶

Before the end of Milne’s visit, the commander of the Brooklyn Navy Yard came to his senses and invited the admiral for a tour. Milne was introduced to Major General Irvin McDowell of Bull Run fame and other official dignitaries. “Although on our arrival there was evidently much coolness,” Milne reported to the Duke of Somerset, “yet before we left the tide in our favour had evidently turned.” As Lyons had discovered for himself during their first meeting in Canada, it was impossible not to like and respect the admiral.

Washington was more welcoming toward Admiral Milne. Seward once again set aside his work for the mixed pleasure of escort duty, and Gideon Welles suspended his loathing of Britain for the hour he sat next to Milne at a dinner at Willard’s. The navy secretary had a good memory for courtesies as well as slights: the previous July, HMS
Phaeton
had happened to sail past the U.S. Virgin Islands on Independence Day. Mindful of Milne’s order to show respect when in American waters, the captain had surprised the Federal warship moored in the harbor by hoisting the U.S. flag and firing a twenty-one-gun salute.

Admiral and Lady Milne sailed back to Canada on October 12. “I believe my visit has done much good in many ways, and I would strongly recommend that such visits should be repeated,” he wrote to the Duke of Somerset.
³⁷
The British weekly newspaper in New York, the
Albion,
thought Milne deserved official praise for his courage in forcing the issue. “And now that the ice is broken, we trust that hereafter and in happier times, the British Admiral commanding … may make frequent visits to this port.”
³⁸
He could see that Americans cared about British opinion to an astonishing degree. Yet this vital part of diplomatic relations was left solely to the whim of the press. If nothing else came from Milne’s visit, his sober assessment of Britain’s unpopularity gave credibility to Lyons’s repeated warnings to the Foreign Office. As if to underline the point, the treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, made a bizarre speech in Ohio shortly after Milne’s visit about wanting to seize “Old Mother England by the hair” and give her a good shaking.

Lyons and, lately, the Foreign Office had come to believe that Seward was Britain’s best hope for keeping relations level between the two countries, and both were rooting for him in his ongoing battles with Gideon Welles and Charles Sumner.
³⁹
(No one outside the British government knew that Seward was giving Lyons off-the-record advice on how to forestall some of the congressional attacks on British interests.)
⁴⁰
Contemplating the immediate future, Lyons saw only dangerous corners and looming obstacles now that he knew for certain “that Mr. Sumner and the ultras will make another onslaught on Mr. Seward when Congress opens.”
⁴¹
Worse still was Baron Mercier’s revelation that he had requested a leave of absence. His wife had put up with Washington for his sake, Mercier explained to Lyons, but she could stand it no longer. Lyons could not help himself, but he hoped that the French Foreign Ministry would share his anxiety and consider Mercier too important to be replaced.

When trouble for Lord Lyons did come, it was from the South rather than the North. On October 23, he read in the
National Intelligencer
that the four remaining British consuls had been ordered to leave the Confederacy in retaliation for Britain’s alleged support for the North.
⁴²
The consuls’ unceasing efforts on behalf of conscripted Britons had been an irritant to the Confederate State Department for more than a year, and they made convenient scapegoats that Judah Benjamin had no scruple about using. Acting consul Allan Fullarton in Savannah had provided the excuse when on October 3 he sent to Richmond a belligerent protest on behalf of six drafted British subjects. Four days later, on October 7, Benjamin convened a special cabinet session to discuss the consuls. Jefferson Davis was conveniently in Tennessee with General Bragg and therefore protected from any international outcry that might follow. The decision to expel them was apparently unanimous.
⁴³
If Benjamin did not gain any popularity by the move, at least he did not lose any, and he doubted that the Confederacy would suffer, either.

—

The troubles endured by the Scotsman William Watson showed the importance of the consuls to the British community. Tired of struggling to find work in the South after leaving the Confederate army, Watson had decided to try his hand at blockade running. During the summer he sailed from New Orleans to Belize. There, fear of the Confederate commerce raiders had led to a glut of cheap U.S.-owned ships for sale. He bought a flat-bottomed vessel, christened her
Rob Roy,
and headed for the Gulf of Mexico. When Watson eventually reached Galveston, he discovered that the city was barely functioning. “It was now virtually in ruins, and the grass was growing in the streets,” he wrote. Anarchy and martial law ruled simultaneously.

Watson was powerless to prevent a local commander from impounding the
Rob Roy
for defense duty. But he had faith in Consul Arthur Lynn. “When I saw that gentleman and reported the matter he was a little surprised, but said he would scarcely be much astonished at anything these people—the Confederates—would do. They were now desperate, and would not let any regard for international law or individual rights interfere with any project they meant to carry out.”
⁴⁴
In the face of Consul Lynn’s protests, Confederate general John B. Magruder promised that he would release the
Rob Roy
if an alternative vessel could be found.
⁴⁵
Naturally disappointed by this response, Watson went to Magruder’s headquarters himself. The officers were sarcastic toward him until he was recognized by a former member of the 2nd Texas Regiment. “I was quite astonished at the great effect which this little incident had upon the demeanor of the officials towards me,” wrote Watson. The
Rob Roy
was returned, and Watson was again free to face the ordinary hazards of blockade running.
⁴⁶

Several weeks passed before Consul Lynn learned of Benjamin’s order for the British consuls to leave, and when he read the order itself, he noticed that his name had been left off the list. He decided to remain at his post until circumstances changed. Consul Frederick Cridland in Mobile had also escaped Richmond’s notice and was determined to stay. Every white male between the ages of sixteen and sixty was being conscripted. “Letters are received and applications are made to me daily by British subjects to interfere and prevent their being forced into military service, but I cannot assist them,” he wrote on November 14. Yet he hoped that his presence still retained some moderating effect. Cridland’s letter caused much indignation in the Foreign Office over the plight of Britons in the South; it sickened Lord Lyons each time a letter appeared from the Confederacy pleading for help that he was unable to give.
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