A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War

by Amanda Foreman

  The House of Representatives failed to muster enough votes to expel Brooks, and, although he immediately resigned his seat, South Carolinians expressed their views by promptly reelecting him. To Southerners, infuriated by the constant moral and political tirades poured down on them by Northern abolitionists, Brooks was a hero. They had long felt beleaguered by the persistence of Northern attempts to curtail slavery. For many, Brooks had acted out their greatest fantasy against the abolitionists. Thousands of canes arrived at his house, some with gold or silver tips and one that bore the words “Hit Him Again.”

  Abolitionists, on the other hand, regarded Sumner’s savage beating as a call to action. The terrible scene on the chamber floor, described in lurid detail by every newspaper, also served to unite the North. Rather than worrying about the activities of immigrants, or black preachers, or Freemasons, Northerners could finally agree on a common enemy. The Republican Party was overwhelmed with new members. But for Sumner, his martyrdom came at a terrible price. Even after his wounds healed, the psychological scars proved far more intractable. On March 7, 1857, the frail patient was gently conveyed onto a steamer bound for England. It was the beginning of three years of self-imposed exile. By his own estimation, his political career and possibly his life were concluded. Still, Sumner was not just popular abroad; he was now a bona fide hero. His English friends welcomed him as though he were a wounded general returning from war. Later, some would claim that his assault marked the beginning of the Civil War.28

  The Duchess of Sutherland insisted that the wounded warrior recuperate at Stafford House. After his caning she had redoubled her efforts to arouse English sympathy against Southern slavery. One of her most successful events was a public reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by the black American performer Mary Webb. The scene at Stafford House “would have caused considerable astonishment to any gentleman of the Southern States of America,” reported the Illustrated London News. “A large audience was gathered together in that hall … to listen to a lady of color giving dramatic readings.… Our Southerner would have been confounded and disgusted at the sight of what he would call a ‘tarnation nigger’ being listened to with the most respectful attention by no inconsiderable number of the aristocracy of England.”29

  Among the new friends Sumner made during his stay at Stafford House were the Duchess of Sutherland’s daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, the Duke of Argyll. For the Argylls, it was the perfect meeting of minds. “He was a tall, good-looking man,” recalled the duke in his memoirs, “very erect in attitude, with a genial smile and a very intellectual expression. I always found his conversation full of charm, not only from his devotion to one great cause, but from his wide and cultivated interest in literature and in art.”30 Like Sumner, the thirty-three-year-old duke was a striking figure, whose flaming red hair—which he wore shoulder length—and theatrical dress were considered emblematic of his idiosyncratic politics. His views were always logical and well thought out, and yet strangely angular, so that on any given subject it defied prediction whether they coincided with those of his own party or with those of the opposition. This trait, combined with his caustic and often dogmatic style of debating, meant that Argyll carried weight in politics but would never inspire a following. Both he and Sumner would always be forces in their own right, and yet also their own greatest impediments to power. For the future of British-American relations, however, the relationship between Argyll and Sumner would prove to be one of the most important friendships of the Civil War.

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  1.1 The term “impressment” meant the legal conscription of a civilian, usually a sailor, into the Royal Navy. The practice had been going on since the 1600s. It was rare for “landlubbers” to be impressed, but in time of war all kinds of injustices took place, which for the most part the authorities pretended not to notice.

  1.2 Although slavery was abolished in Vermont in 1777, the former colony attempted to go it alone for the first fourteen years after independence, joining the Union only in 1791.

  1.3 Southerners referred to slavery (and by extension the cotton economy) as the “peculiar institution” not because it was strange, but because the mode of life was particular to the South and nowhere else.

  1.4 For the first half of the nineteenth century, the “Monroe Doctrine,” when it was observed at all, was enforced by the Royal Navy, since it was in Britain’s interest to prevent the Great Powers from interfering with the balance of power in South America.

  1.5 Several objects, including the Singer sewing machine and the Colt .45-caliber single-action army revolver, were subsequently sent on a triumphant tour around Britain.

  1.6 In November 1841, the journey of the Creole from Virginia to Louisiana was interrupted when the slaves on board mutinied and took the ship to Nassau in the Bahamas. The British authorities refused to hand over the mutineers or return the slaves.

  1.7 Despite fronting four presidents, the Whig Party survived for less than twenty-five years and was more a collection of factions than a cohesive national party. By the time of its demise in the early 1850s, several new parties were forming, including the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party, so called because when questioned about their affiliation, its members were instructed to say “I know nothing.”

  1.8 The East Coast–based Free-Soilers, whose slogan was “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men,” initially competed with the Republican Party, which was born in the Midwest in 1854 and also opposed slavery, and then became absorbed by their newer rival.

  TWO

  On the Best of Terms

  The Dred Scott case—William Seward visits London—The Liberals come to power—John Brown’s raid—The Prince of Wales tours America

  Seward was delighted when many Southern newspapers suggested that he ought to be next in line for a caning. With Sumner recuperating in Europe, Seward hoped to appeal to radical antislavery voters in the Republican Party. His chance to shine came just two days after Sumner set sail and the Democrat James Buchanan was sworn in as president. On March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court handed down its opinion on the notorious Dred Scott case. Scott was a former slave who had been taken by his late master from Missouri, where slavery was legal, to Illinois, which had abolished slavery in 1818. Scott had sued for his freedom, but the Southern-dominated Court decided that the federal government had no right to decide matters pertaining to slavery in any part of the United States, whether free or unfree.

  The Court’s decision wrecked the thirty-seven-year-old Missouri Compromise, which had ensured that as more territories joined the Union there would always be an even balance between the slave and free-soil states. Worse still, the Court declared that black people were not citizens, and were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Blacks were no more entitled to citizenship than horses or sheep; they could not vote, own a passport, or apply to the courts. Seward denounced the Dred Scott decision at every opportunity, accusing President James Buchanan and Chief Justice Rodger B. Taney of having colluded over the ruling. Northern public opinion supported Seward’s attacks, since it was widely believed above the Mason-Dixon Line that there was a slave-power conspiracy afoot to spread slavery throughout the United States.

  In the fall of 1857, six months after the Dred Scott ruling, the collapse of the largest insurance company in the country sparked a catastrophic economic crisis throughout the North. During the financial panic that followed, prices on the New York Stock Exchange plunged by 45 percent, hundreds of banks failed, railroads went bankrupt, factories closed, and seemingly overnight there was mass unemployment running into the hundreds of thousands. The Panic of 1857 spread to Britain, too—where investors held, among other securities, £80 million worth of railroad stocks and bonds.1 Only the Southern cotton-growing states escaped the panic largely unscathed, apparently vindicating the superiority of a slave system over the factory-based economy of the North. In a speech to the Senate on March 4, 1858, Senator James Hammond
of South Carolina boasted that Southern cotton exports had saved the economy from total collapse during the 1857 panic, and for this reason the South had the right to dictate terms to the whole of the United States. “Cotton is King.… What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South.” Hammond and the other Southern senators fiercely resisted subsequent attempts by the Northern states to protect their domestic industrial base by imposing high tariffs on foreign imports.

  Seward’s language became increasingly violent whenever he discussed the differences between the two sections of the country. By the end of 1858 he was arguing that the Dred Scott case should mark the end of all Northern concessions to the South. During a speech on October 25, 1858, in Rochester, New York, he declared that the South had started “an irrepressible conflict” with the North: “The United States must … become either entirely a slave-holding nation or entirely a free-labor nation.” A week earlier, while debating his Democratic opponent in the contest for one of Illinois’s two seats in the United States Senate, the Republican candidate, a lawyer from Springfield, had made a similar-sounding statement: that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”2.1 The lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, lost the election, but his speech won him national acclaim. Whereas Lincoln sounded as though he were giving a warning, Seward seemed to be laying down a challenge.2 Seward later claimed that “irrepressible” was not the same as “unavoidable,” but the damage could not be undone. The press dubbed him “Irrepressible Conflict Seward,” fostering the sense that he was a divisive rather than a unifying figure and voiding three years of careful positioning by Seward to be perceived as the moderate alternative to Charles Sumner.

  Seward’s friend and political manager, Thurlow Weed, advised him to take a long trip abroad in the hope that the public would forget the unfortunate phrase. The presidential election would not be until November 1860, which was two years away. There was still sufficient time for Seward to repair his reputation. Weed was confident that the British would have no idea anything was amiss with Seward’s presidential aspirations and would treat him with the respect afforded to the next leader of the Americans.

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  Seward’s arrival in England on May 20, 1859, coincided with a recent improvement in Anglo-American relations. English outrage over U.S. support for the Russians during the Crimean War of 1854–562.2 had become less acute after the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58, when the Americans were firmly behind the British Army rather than the mutinous Indian soldiers known as Sepoys. Closer to home, Lord Napier’s popularity in Washington had overcome some of the bad feelings on both sides of the Atlantic after his unlucky predecessor, John Crampton, was expelled by the U.S. government for participating in a secret scheme to recruit American volunteers to fight on the British side in the Crimean War. The perennial flashpoints between Britain and America—the right of the Royal Navy to search American ships suspected of transporting slaves from Africa or the Caribbean and the jostling over boundaries and territorial control in British North America and Central America—had threatened to ignite in 1858. However, these were contained by successful diplomacy in some instances, and by plain reluctance to go from words to something worse in others.4 In his second annual address to Congress in December 1858, President Buchanan stressed the importance of peaceful relations between the two countries: “Any serious interruption of the commerce between the United States and Great Britain would be equally injurious to both. In fact, no two nations have ever existed on the face of the earth which could do each other so much good or so much harm.”

  When the two navies did meet at sea, on July 29, 1858, it was to perform the heroic maneuver of linking together the first transatlantic telegraph cable. An underwater cable had been laid in 1851 between Dover and Calais, but the raging storms of the Atlantic had twice defeated the combined efforts of British and American engineers. This time, the cable held strong as HMS Agamemnon and USS Niagara sailed toward their respective destinations flying specially designed flags that incorporated the stars of Old Glory with the stripes of the Union Jack. On August 16, 1858, the line was opened with the message “Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and goodwill to men.” Queen Victoria followed with a cable of congratulations to President Buchanan and the people of the United States. Both countries celebrated in a “Festival of Connection,” New York held a candlelight parade, newspapers printed special editions, the streets were decorated with flags, and shops displayed commemorative posters and ribbons.5 Cyrus Field, the American investor behind the venture, was hailed as a genius and visionary. But the telegraph worked for only a month, and the disintegrating connection was destroyed in a clumsy repair attempt by one of the English engineers. The Atlantic cable would remain a dream for another eight years.

  The Central American disputes were still under negotiation, however, when Seward arrived in London on May 20, 1859. The city had grown blacker, noisier, and more frantic since Seward’s visit in his youth. Its population had increased from 900,000 to more than 3 million. Horse-drawn omnibuses, carriages, and wagons bumped and jostled one another and pedestrians on some of the most congested streets in the world; a thousand vehicles an hour crossed over London Bridge.6 Nor was London the dirty, unregulated city of a generation before. The Great Stink of 1858 (a mini–heat wave “cooked” the raw sewage in the Thames, sending noxious fumes through the city) had forced city planners to begin an ambitious sewer and water system for the capital. The squares and parks were just as Seward remembered, but these green spaces were now dwarfed by a new set of landmarks. The Gothic architecture of the rebuilt Houses of Parliament (after the great fire of 1834) seemed especially foreign to him compared to the neoclassical government buildings of Washington. This was a bold, even arrogant London that dared other cities to emulate its style.

  As Weed predicted, Seward’s arrival was eagerly anticipated by the denizens of Fleet Street and Westminster, who assumed that he was visiting England to cement his relationship with the country’s leaders ahead of his election to the presidency. That it might be curiosity rather than admiration behind the scramble to make the acquaintance of the great Anglophobe never seemed to occur to Seward. He peppered his letters to his wife, Frances, with exclamations of excitement that so many famous figures wished to meet him. The morning after his first London ball, he boasted that he had “conversed with royalties and nobles, ad infinitum.” There were “Princesses and Princes, and Dukes and Duchesses of the royal party, Indian Princes, and all the Diplomatic Corps. It was a thorough jam—like the Napier ball.”7

  Seward owed his initial entrée into London society to the Napiers, who had taken great pains to introduce him to their friends and relations. By the time the Season was in full swing, he was on nodding terms with every senior politician and fashionable hostess in London. Lord Napier also prepared Seward for his presentation to the Queen, sending him to his own tailor, shoemaker, and hatter. But as memorable as the occasion was for the unabashed republican, Seward was more star-struck by his visit to Stafford House to meet the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. “The Duchess is the most accomplished lady in England. I could not tell you how kind and gracious she was to me,” he wrote to his wife. “She detained me after the party had left, and we had a long, and most agreeable tete-a-tete.” Believing Seward’s abolitionism to be sincere, the duchess ordered her relations to show him the same hospitality; her daughter and son-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, her brother, the Earl of Carlisle, and her cousin, the Duke of Devonshire, dutifully opened their houses to Seward, the last being anxious to repay him for the courtesy shown to his son, Lord Frederick Cavendish. By the beginning of June, Seward was able to reel off the names and titles of society figures as though they had been his friends for years: “I dined with the Earl of Carlisle, and a large party of nobles and statesmen of the Liberal class. It would be tedious to recount [all] their names,” he wrote to Frances in early June
: “Lord Granville, Lord and Lady Shaftsbury [sic], Lord and Lady Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, Mr. Delane, editor of The Times, and others. It was a most agreeable party.”8

  The polite conversations around the table were merely a façade; behind the scenes, intense political negotiations were taking place. Seward had arrived in London at an extraordinary moment in British politics. The liberal factions in Parliament were coming together to oust Lord Derby’s Conservative government. Lord John Russell and Viscount Palmerston had reached a cordial understanding to form a new political party. Since Palmerston was on what could loosely be termed the “right” of liberal politics and Russell on the “left,” between them they would be able to form a broad coalition.

  On June 6, 1859, 274 MPs assembled in the ballroom of Willis’s Rooms in St. James’s and declared themselves the Liberal Party. Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell shook hands, demonstrating forgiveness of all previous acts of treachery and rivalry toward each other during their previous stints as prime minister, agreeing to become the party’s joint leaders. (It was noted that the seventy-five-year-old Palmerston sprang onto the dais while the sixty-nine-year-old Russell had to be helped up the steps.) Four days later, on June 10, the Liberals voted en masse in a motion of no confidence against Lord Derby’s ministry, winning by a majority of thirteen votes. The Queen, who disliked both Russell and Palmerston, was annoyed with “those two terrible old men,” as she called them. After considerable prevarication, she chose Palmerston as her new prime minister—much to Russell’s disappointment. Russell became foreign secretary, a post that played to his weaknesses rather than his strengths.