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

by Amanda Foreman

  The following day Seward showed him around his kingdom, a plain brick building that housed the State Department. There were usually a hundred people scattered throughout its offices, but a recent purging of Southern sympathizers made the place seem almost devoid of activity. Seward’s own office was surprisingly modest in Russell’s view, merely a “comfortable apartment surrounded with book shelves and ornamented with a few engravings.” Also in evidence was his liking for cigars.34 In the afternoon, Seward introduced him to Lincoln. The president may have been new to the role of national leader, but he was an old hand at flattering men’s vanities. “Mr. Russell,” he said. “I am very glad to make your acquaintance, and to see you in this country. The London Times is one of the greatest powers in the world—in fact, I don’t know anything which has more power—except perhaps the Mississippi. I am glad to know you as its minister.”

  Russell was “agreeably impressed with his shrewdness, humor, and natural sagacity.” But it was impossible for him to overlook the sheer ungainliness of the president. Lincoln was a “tall, lank, lean man,” he wrote, “considerably over six feet in height, with stooping shoulders, long pendulous arms, terminating in hands of extraordinary dimensions” that were exceeded only by his enormous feet. “He was dressed in an ill-fitting wrinkled suit of black, which put one in mind of an undertaker’s uniform at a funeral.” His ears were wide and flapping, his mouth unnaturally wide, his eyebrows preternaturally shaggy. Yet all was mitigated for Russell by the look of kindness in his eyes.35

  The state dinner from which Charles Francis Adams had been excluded was fascinating to Russell for the view it provided of Lincoln’s relationship with his new cabinet. The formality of the occasion did not deter some of them from continuing their arguments with the president over the dispensing of patronage. Russell observed that the difference between Lincoln and politicians “bred in courts, accustomed to the world” was that they used sophisticated subterfuge to escape awkward situations whereas the president told shaggy dog stories. But the effect was the same: Lincoln disarmed his enemies without causing offense. As for the secretaries, they all seemed like men of ordinary or average ability, with the exception of Salmon Chase, the secretary of the treasury, who “struck me as one of the most intelligent and distinguished persons in the whole assemblage.” Mrs. Lincoln caught Russell’s attention for other reasons. She was not as ludicrous as the Washington gossips had led him to believe, but her energetic fanning and overuse of the word “sir” were a decided distraction.

  Russell returned to his rooms at Willard’s after the dinner, unaware that Lincoln had asked the cabinet to remain behind for an emergency meeting. Fort Sumter had become the flash point in the tense relations between the North and South; the decision whether to abandon it or fight to preserve federal control could no longer wait. The cabinet deliberations continued the next day. Seward tried every expedient to prevent Lincoln from forcing a decision: he had practically promised Southern negotiators that the president would sacrifice the fort in return for peace and loyalty to the Union. Seward saw dishonor facing him if his double-dealing became known, and his efforts to prevent troops from being sent became ever more serpentine.

  Seward was conspicuously absent when William Howard Russell visited the White House again, on March 31, for a near-deserted reception given by Mrs. Lincoln. Nor did he attend Lord Lyons’s dinner that evening, which gave Charles Sumner the field to himself. The other missing person was Charles Francis Adams, who ought to have paid his respects at the British legation after accepting his post but had hurried home to Massachusetts instead. “My visit has changed my feelings much,” he wrote. “For my part I see nothing but incompetency in the head. The man is not equal to the hour.” Like William Howard Russell, he dismissed the rest of the cabinet as “a motley mixture, consisting of one statesman, one politician, two jobbers, one intriguer, and two respectable old gentlemen.”36 Adams was determined to avoid inconveniencing himself or his family any more than was necessary. Although the last of the Southern diplomatic envoys had already left for London, Adams could not see why he should chase after them. He was going to arrange his affairs, pack in an orderly fashion, and, most important of all, attend his oldest son’s wedding in Massachusetts. Decades later, his son Charles Francis Jr. severely criticized his father for being so petulant:

  Every stage of our action was thus marked by extreme deliberation; and the Confederate Commissioners took full advantage of the fact. There can, I think, be no question that my brother John’s marriage on the 29th of April 1861, led to grave international complications. It is creditable to neither Seward nor my father that the latter was allowed to dawdle away weeks of precious time because of such a trifle. It was much as if a general had permitted some social engagement to keep him away from his headquarters on the eve of a great battle.37

  Adams’s casual neglect of Lord Lyons was another serious mistake. Lyons would have been able to give him valuable insights and directions in his dealings with the British government, among them that the British genuinely desired to keep aloof. He might even have discovered, as Russell did, that Lyons was “strong for the Union.” The information might have been helpful to Seward as well, whose paranoia was increasing by the day. A few days in Seward’s company had allowed Russell to see through the bonhomie to the ambiguities of his character. Initially he had found him to be slightly absurd, but the more Seward insisted that there was no imminent civil war, and that neither England nor France was allowed to refer to it as such, the more Russell inclined to Lyons’s opinion that Seward was either a deluded narcissist or a desperate bully, and possibly both.

  Seward was tormented by his declining political influence, telling his wife that he felt like “a chief reduced to a subordinate position, and surrounded with a guard to see that I do not do too much for my country, lest some advantage may revert to my own fame.”38 He made one last effort to reassert his authority and composed a memorandum entitled “Thoughts for the President’s Consideration,” which was delivered to Lincoln’s office on April 1. It is often called the “April Fool’s Day Memorandum,” and in it Seward argued that a foreign war was the only salvation for the Union. What possessed him to make such a bizarre proposal has puzzled historians ever since.39 Seward criticized the administration, meaning Lincoln, for being “without a policy, either domestic or foreign.” As a remedy, Seward proposed to reunite the country by creating a foreign threat—in his words, to “change the question before the Public from one upon Slavery … to one of Patriotism or Union.”40

  Seward concluded his letter with the statement, “Whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it. Either the president must do it himself … or devolve it on some member of his Cabinet.… It is not in my especial province, but I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.” This was sheer flummery. Seward was making a last grab for power. He had forewarned Henry Raymond, the editor of The New York Times, and shown him the memorandum so that a positive story would accompany the sudden change in policy.41 As it happened, Raymond had nothing to report. Lincoln shrugged off Seward’s attempt to coerce him with magnificent indifference. The proud secretary of state was gradually being corralled. Once the cabinet decided upon a relief expedition to Fort Sumter, the only concession Seward was able to wrest from Lincoln was that the South Carolina authorities be forewarned. It was not much, but it would save him from appearing to have deliberately and recklessly misled the Southern negotiators about the president’s intentions.

  By April 6, the time for deals and machinations had drawn to a close. A relief fleet bearing provisions for the hungry guards of Fort Sumter was making its way toward Charleston. The expectation in Washington was that its appearance would almost certainly provoke violence. William Howard Russell sent a note to Seward asking him for a definite answer regarding the truth about a relief expedition. He was rewarded with an invitation to dine on April 8. The evening began with a foursome of whist beside the fire. As the
game progressed, Seward became more vehement in his pronouncements about the government’s intentions. Suddenly, he put down his cards and ordered his son to fetch his portfolio from the office. His daughter-in-law understood the hint and left the room. When they were alone, Seward handed Russell a cigar and removed a paper from the portfolio. It was, he told Russell, the dispatch he was about to send to Charles Francis Adams.

  Seward proceeded to read the dispatch aloud, “slowly and with marked emphasis,” almost as though he were declaiming a speech in front of a large audience. “It struck me,” wrote Russell in wonderment,

  that the tone of the paper was hostile, that there was an undercurrent of menace through it, and that it contained insinuations that Great Britain would interfere to split up the Republic, if she could, and was pleased at the prospect of the dangers which threatened it. At all the stronger passages Mr. Seward raised his voice, and made a pause at their conclusion as if to challenge remark or approval.42

  Russell did not know what to make of such a performance. Ignorant of Seward’s conversations with Lyons, he was baffled why Seward should want to turn a potential ally into an enemy.

  The following day, April 9, Davis’s Confederate cabinet agreed to attack Fort Sumter before the Federal relief fleet could arrive. In Washington, Russell scouted in vain for information, sloshing through the rain from one department to the next. He wanted to investigate conditions in the South before one or both sides imposed travel restrictions across the lines, but at the same time he was loath to leave the capital in case he missed something of importance. Finally, on the twelfth, he bought a train ticket for Charleston. As he paid a final round of calls to his new acquaintances, he received strong hints that something was about to happen. In fact, the first Confederate gun had fired on Fort Sumter at 4:30 that morning.

  Lord Lyons was keen to hear from Russell during his travels, and invited him to rely on the consulates for his postal needs. The offer soon proved to be indispensable to Russell. He had noticed a certain ugliness creeping into the public mood as he progressed farther south. Virginia was relatively calm, but in North Carolina, he wrote, “the wave of the secession tide struck us in full career.”43 A “vigilance committee” in Wilmington demanded to know his sympathies and refused to let him telegraph his copy to New York. At subsequent train stops, Russell observed drunken posses brandishing their guns.

  He reached Charleston on April 16, 1861, two days after the federal garrison had surrendered to the elaborately named Confederate general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. The boisterous celebrations on the city’s streets reminded him of Paris during the last revolution there. Russell did not pretend to understand the South, but “one thing is for certain,” he asserted to Lyons, “nothing on earth will induce the people to return to the Union.”44 Russell was surprised when the British consul in Charleston, Robert Bunch, revealed that less than a quarter of the Southern population owned all 3.5 million slaves. Even if slavery were abolished tomorrow, calculated Russell, fewer than 300,000 whites would be affected out of a population of 5.5 million. Yet every conversation demonstrated a support for slavery and independence that was inextricably entwined with a hatred of the North.

  Robert Bunch had been the consul in Charleston since 1853 and was regarded by many as a permanent fixture in Southern society. He gave a dinner for Russell on April 18 that was singular in the brutal frankness with which the guests predicted Britain’s swift humiliation by the South if she did not immediately recognize the Confederate government. Only the day before, Virginia had provisionally voted to join the Confederacy, raising the number of seceded states from seven to eight. Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee looked certain to follow. Mr. Bunch’s Southern guests were exultant. “It was scarcely agreeable to my host or myself,” wrote Russell, to be told that England owed allegiance to the “cotton kingdom.” “Why, sir,” sneered one of the guests, “we have only to shut off your supply of cotton for a few weeks, and we can create a revolution in Great Britain. There are four millions of your people depending on us for their bread.… No, sir, we know that England must recognize us.” Russell and Bunch maintained a polite silence as all the Southern guests present voiced their agreement.45

  Two days later, the Charleston papers reported that a local shipping company was starting its own direct line to Europe. Almost as an aside, the papers noted that Jefferson Davis had invited civilian ships to apply for “letters of marque” and that Abraham Lincoln had declared a blockade of Southern ports.3.3 When Russell questioned a businessman about the wisdom of launching a shipping line in the midst of a blockade, he was told, “ ‘If those miserable Yankees try to blockade us and keep you from your cotton, you’ll just send their ships to the bottom and acknowledge us. That will be before autumn, I think.’ It was in vain I assured him he would be disappointed.”46

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  Lincoln’s cabinet in Washington had argued furiously over whether to blockade the South. The president’s decision in April to call for 75,000 volunteers had been universally approved, but the blockade issue thrust Seward squarely into a challenge against his foe Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy. Welles and his supporters in the cabinet wanted Southern ports closed by federal mandate rather than blockaded by the U.S. Navy. He pointed out that a blockade was bound by a set of legal definitions and practices. First and foremost, a country could not blockade itself. A blockade was a weapon of war between two sovereign countries, or “belligerents” in technical terms. By formally blockading the South, the North would in effect be granting it belligerent status, which would be extremely useful to the Confederacy. This quasi-recognition of its existence conferred on the South the power to raise foreign loans and purchase supplies from neutral nations. Its navy would have the right of search and seizure on the high seas. It would also be able to enlist foreign volunteers in countries that had not declared neutrality. These would be no mere trifles.

  Welles argued that Europe would almost certainly go the next step and recognize the existence of the Confederacy. Nevertheless, it was Seward who prevailed, although whether he truly understood the difference between a blockade and a port closure, or why it mattered in international law, remains open to conjecture.47 In addition to declaring a blockade, Lincoln announced that captured privateers would be treated as pirates and executed.48

  Lord Lyons sided with Seward, not about the execution of Southern privateers, but about the blockade, since it would force the North to abide by the Declaration of Paris of 1856.3.4 He soon realized, however, that the secretary of state had no interest in knowing the Paris rules, let alone following them. Seward ignored or failed to carry out even the most basic responsibilities demanded by the declaration.49 Neither the U.S. ministers abroad nor the diplomatic community in Washington were given advance warning. When Seward finally sent an official notice to the foreign ministers on April 27, Lyons was dismayed by the vagueness of the document. It appeared to have been written on the fly, without addressing a single question as to how and when the blockade would be enforced.

  Lyons had never quite given up hope that Britain might support the North, either actively or surreptitiously; it was part of the reason he was working so hard to keep the French in check. Henri Mercier had revealed that France was prepared to ignore the blockade if Britain agreed to the same policy. Having known Mercier since their Dresden days, when they used to partner each other in whist, Lyons thought it was typical of him to devise a plan so fraught with danger. He also disagreed with Mercier’s alternative, which was for Britain and France to respect the blockade until the beginning of the cotton season in September. This would be giving the South “a moral encouragement scarcely consistent with neutrality,” he reprimanded Mercier. Furthermore, it might “entail utter ruin upon the [Northern] Administration and their supporters.”50

  Lyons could not go any further than this with Mercier; Seward’s behavior had made it impossible. “I confess I can see no better policy for us than a strict impartialit
y for the present,” he wrote sadly to Lord John Russell on May 6.

  The sympathies of an Englishman are naturally inclined towards the North—but I am afraid we should find that anything like a quasi alliance with the men in office here, would place us in a position which would soon become untenable.… My feeling against Slavery might lead me to desire to co-operate with them. But I conceive all chance of this to be gone for ever.51

  Seward’s earlier messages to ignore his public statements made Lyons fairly certain that the current display of aggression was for the benefit of the Northern public. It perplexed him that a man of Seward’s intelligence could not see the danger he was courting.52 With an army of 16,000 men and a navy of 9,000, the United States was a military midget compared to any of the Great Powers. “If Seward does not pick a quarrel with us,” wrote Lyons to Lord John Russell, it would not be because “of the insanity which doing so at this crisis … would seem to indicate.” Seward clearly had no intention of “conciliating the European Powers or at all events of not forcing them into hostility.”53 Charles Francis Adams, Jr., later admitted that his family had worshipped a false god. Seward was not the grand strategist or great statesman they had believed him to be. Seward had

  found himself fairly beyond his depth; and he plunged! The foreign-war panacea took possession of him; and he yielded to it. The fact is, as I now see him, Seward was an able, a specious and adroit, and a very versatile man; but he escaped being really great. He made a parade of philosophy, and by it I was very effectually deceived.54

  President Jefferson Davis declared an official state of war on May 6, the same day that Lyons decided Britain could not risk making common cause with the North. William Howard Russell saw the bill lying on Davis’s desk when he arrived to interview him for The Times. Davis proudly informed Russell that more than 400,000 volunteers had answered his call to arms, far more than they needed or could equip. “He asked me if I thought it was supposed in England there would be war between the two states,” wrote Russell. “I answered, that I was under the impression the public thought there would be no actual hostilities.” “And yet you see we are driven to take up arms for the defence of our rights and liberties,” Davis had replied.55