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

by Amanda Foreman

  Russell had witnessed for himself the Southern version of liberty. During a break in his journey to Montgomery, a slave girl, hardly more than ten years old, had begged him to take her away from “the missus.” She promised to serve him faithfully in return, since “she could wash and sew very well.”56 The incident helped Russell to clarify his feelings about the South. At first glance, its ruling class was just like the English aristocracy. “They travel and read, love field sports, racing, shooting, hunting, and fishing, are bold horsemen, and good shots,” he admitted. But behind the façade was not an enlightened society founded on the ideals of ancient Rome but “a modern Sparta—an aristocracy resting on helotry, and with nothing else to rest upon.… Their whole system rests on slavery, and as such they defend it.”57

  Montgomery, Alabama, was dreary and hot. “I have rarely seen a more dull, lifeless place,” he wrote. “It looks like a small Russian town in the interior.”58 The ubiquitous slave auctions filled him with disgust. He was also unnerved by the discovery that he was the only white man in the city who was not carrying a loaded revolver. His interview with Davis had been a strange anticlimax. Both men were aware that the meeting could have far-reaching consequences. This was Davis’s first, and perhaps only, opportunity to speak directly to Great Britain. Thousands of miles away, there was an audience waiting to meet the man who could hold Britain’s textile industry for ransom should he so choose. Yet Davis was too proud to make a grand statement or appeal. “He proceeded to speak on general matters,” wrote Russell, “adverting to the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny.” But apart from asking the journalist whether “England [thought] there would be war between the two states,” Davis hardly mentioned the crisis at all. Their conversation was so ordinary that Russell padded out his report for The Times with a description of Davis’s appearance. The former secretary of war under President Pierce was “about fifty-five years of age,” wrote Russell, “his features are regular and well-defined, but the face is thin and marked on cheek and brow with many wrinkles, and is rather careworn and haggard. One eye is apparently blind, the other is dark, piercing and intelligent.”59 Russell avoided mention of Davis’s tic or his demeanor, which, though gentlemanly, was cold.60

  Russell was equally disappointed with the Southern secretary of war, Leroy Walker, and the secretary of state, Robert Toombs. The former spat and chewed while talking mostly nonsense, not being a military man; the latter seemed earnest though dim. “Seward had told me,” Russell wrote, “that but for Jefferson Davis the secession plot could never have been carried out. No other man of the part had the brain, or the courage and dexterity.” Consul Bunch had said something similar to him during his stay in Charleston. In a frank appraisal protected by diplomatic seal, Bunch had commended Davis for his statesmanlike qualities but dismissed the rest of the Confederate cabinet as “the dead level of mediocrity.”61 Having now made their acquaintance, Russell agreed.

  —

  The one Southern cabinet member who did make a forcible impression on Russell was Judah P. Benjamin. Russell disliked Jews in general, but he could not help warming to Benjamin, describing him as “the most open, frank, and cordial of the Confederates whom I have yet met.”62 Benjamin, he learned, was not a native Southerner. He had been born in the Caribbean on the island of St. Croix, which technically made him a British subject. His family moved to the South when Benjamin was a baby, eventually settling in Charleston when he was eleven years old. Benjamin’s undeniable brilliance propelled him to Yale Law School when he was only fourteen. Something else—the cause has never been revealed—led to his expulsion. Russell noted in his diary that Benjamin was “clever keen & well yes! What keen and clever men sometimes are”—referring, perhaps, to a certain ambiguity about Benjamin’s sexuality.63 Women enjoyed his company (although not his wife, Natalie, who had moved to Paris with their daughter in 1847); he could banter with them for an entire evening in English or French on any subject they pleased. But behind his perpetual smile there was a mysterious veil that none could penetrate.

  Though he was only attorney general, Benjamin had already made himself indispensable to Davis. There was so little for him to do at the newly formed Department of Justice that Benjamin could devote most of his energies to whatever appealed to him. For the time being, he was acting as the president’s grand vizier. He shielded Davis from the office seekers and took on the burden of sorting through many of the tedious but necessary details of government. “When in doubt,” recorded a visitor, all strangers were referred to “Mr. Judah P. Benjamin, the ‘Poo Bah’ of the Confederate Government.”64

  In contrast to his inarticulate colleagues, Benjamin immediately engaged Russell in an intelligent debate. Referring to the blockade and the legality of letters of marque, Russell asked, “Suppose, Mr. Attorney-General, England, or any of the great powers which decreed the abolition of privateering, refuse to recognise your flags?” What if, he added, “England, for example, declared your privateers were pirates?” In that case, replied Benjamin, “it would be nothing more or less than a declaration of war against us, and we must meet it as best we can.” He did not seem too downcast by the possibility. It was obvious to Russell that Benjamin was thinking about next season’s cotton crop. Benjamin confirmed his suspicion by saying with a smile, “All this coyness about acknowledging a slave power will come right at last … we are quite easy in our minds on this point at present.”65

  Many years later, when Benjamin was an exile in London, Russell bumped into him at a dinner party. They walked home together, reminiscing about the war. Russell reminded him of their meeting in Montgomery, and how Benjamin had been so certain that the British and French would intervene as soon as their cotton stocks were low. “Ah, yes,” Benjamin replied, “I admit I was mistaken! I did not believe that your government would allow such misery to your operatives, such loss to your manufacturers, or that the people themselves would have borne it.”66

  Benjamin was too discreet to say that when the Confederate cabinet held their first meeting, his had been the lone voice in favor of making preparations for a protracted war. The secretary of war, Leroy Walker, remembered the meeting with shame: “At that time, I, like everybody else, believed there would be no war. In fact, I had gone about the state … promising to wipe up with my pocket-handkerchief all the blood that would be shed,” he recalled despairingly.

  There was only one man there who had any sense, and that man was Benjamin. Mr. Benjamin proposed that the government purchase as much cotton as it could hold, at least 100,000 bales, and ship it at once to England.… For, said Benjamin, we are entering on a contest that must be long and costly. All the rest of us fairly ridiculed the idea of a serious war. Well, you know what happened.67

  Benjamin allowed himself to be swayed by his colleagues’ optimism. Europe would end the blockade by the following October, he explained genially to Russell, “when the Mississippi is floating cotton by the thousands of bales, and all our wharfs are full.”68 Shortly after Russell left Montgomery for Mobile, Alabama, the Provisional Confederate Congress voted to prohibit all trade with the North in order to prevent cotton from being shipped via Northern ports. “The cards are in our hands!” proclaimed the editors of the Charleston Mercury, obviously unfazed by the doubts expressed by Russell when he visited their offices, “and we intend to play them out to the bankruptcy of every cotton factory in Great Britain and France or the acknowledgement of our independence.”69

  * * *

  3.1 The taxation on foreign goods depended on the economic interests of various Northern states; sugar, raw wool, iron, flaxseed, hides, beef, pork, grain, hemp, coal, lead, copper, and zinc all received protection from outside competition—as did dried, pickled, and salted fish.

  3.2 “He is obtrusive,” complained Welles, “assuming and presuming, meddlesome, and uncertain, ready to exercise authority always, never doubting his right until challenged; then he becomes timid, uncertain, distrustful, and inventive of schemes to extricate
himself.… I think he has no very profound or sincere convictions.”20

  3.3 A letter of marque was a government license allowing a civilian ship to attack the merchant shipping of an enemy in time of war. Ships that carried such letters were called privateers, to distinguish them from pirates. Davis had resorted to this old-fashioned method of sea warfare because it would be many months before the Confederacy had its own navy.

  3.4 The treaty had been drawn up and signed by the seven Great Powers of Europe—Austria, France, Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire, Prussia, Russia, and Sardinia—after the Crimean War in order to establish a set of international laws governing both blockades and privateering. Ironically, America had not signed the treaty because President Franklin Pierce refused to relinquish the right to use licensed privateers.

  FOUR

  Expectations Are Dashed

  Where is Adams?—Debate in the Commons—The neutrality proclamation—First interview with Lord John Russell—Seward’s horseplay—The power of Uncle Tom

  A poem in Punch, on March 30, 1861, neatly expressed Britain’s cotton dilemma:

  Though with the North we sympathize,

  It must not be forgotten,

  That with the South we’ve stronger ties,

  Which are composed of cotton.

  The journalist William Howard Russell’s revelation that the South hoped to exploit these ties, along with his poignant descriptions of slave life, provoked outrage in England when his reports started to appear in April. But the North gained less support than Southerners had feared, since, in his inaugural address on March 4, Lincoln had promised not to interfere with slavery. The Morrill Tariff, with its rampant protectionism and whiff of anti-British bias, was an even greater gift to the Confederacy.1

  At the U.S. legation, Benjamin Moran read the angry protests against the new tariff and took it to mean that the country as a whole had turned against the North. But George Dallas, the outgoing American minister whose existence was barely acknowledged by Seward, was much more sanguine about the hostile opinion expressed in newspapers. Britain “cannot be expected to appreciate the weakness, discredit, complications, and dangers which we instinctively and justly ascribe to disunion,” he told Seward on April 9. “English opinion tends rather, I apprehend, to the theory that a peaceful separation may work beneficially for both groups of states and not injuriously affect the rest of the world.”2 He had obviously heard this said by many different people: even Thackeray had written to an American friend, asking, “In what way will it benefit the North to be recoupled to the South?” After all, at this time, England had not wanted “the Colonies” to go their own way, “and aren’t both better for the Separation?”3

  Nor did Dallas believe there was anything to be feared from the British government. Lord John Russell had rebuffed Seward’s demand for a promise never to have any dealings with the South or its representatives, but “his lordship assured me with great earnestness that there was not the slightest disposition in the British government to grasp at any advantage,” Dallas reported to Seward.4 Far from looking for an advantage, the cabinet was approaching a state of panic over American affairs. Russell was shocked that six weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration there was still no replacement for the now irrelevant Dallas, and he was mystified as to what could be delaying the arrival of Charles Francis Adams at such a perilous moment in his country’s history.

  Benjamin Moran thought Dallas’s benign view of the British made him either an idiot or a crypto–Southern sympathizer. Dallas was certainly neither, but the knowledge that he was soon to go home may have made him apathetic when he should have been wooing potential Northern allies in Parliament. Moran also knew of at least one MP who was collaborating with the nascent Southern lobby in England. William Gregory, the MP for Galway, had given notice in the House of Commons that he was going to propose recognition of the South on May 1. Moran thought the move had been prompted by Gregory’s friend Robert Campbell, the American consul in London.4.1

  Campbell was a genial though strident secessionist from North Carolina who had supplied Gregory with letters of introduction for his tour of the United States in 1859. In Washington, he had stayed in a boardinghouse popular with Southern senators; their “fire-eating talk” of independence, interspersed with liberal amounts of whiskey, had swept the MP into their ranks. Privately, he thought their humanity had been dulled by slavery, but Gregory accepted his new friends’ claim that emancipation was morally and economically impossible.5

  Moran was furious with Dallas for failing to curb the pro-Southern activities of consuls who had not yet been replaced by Republican appointees, but he dared not speak when his own future seemed so uncertain. He remained in suspense until confirmation of his reappointment arrived on the fifteenth. Moran’s other fear—that he was the only loyal American official left in Britain—seemed a raging certainty after he caught one of the new Southern envoys, Ambrose Dudley Mann, sneaking into the legation to see Dallas.

  The arrival of the Confederate envoys was not unexpected; their identities had been public knowledge for several weeks. Consul Robert Bunch wrote from Charleston to warn the foreign office that they were three of the rankest amateurs ever to have been sent on so sensitive a diplomatic mission. He attributed President Davis’s selection of such men to Southern arrogance and the belief that the Confederacy did not need proper advocates when cotton could do the talking. Mann had served as a U.S. minister to Switzerland but Bunch dismissed him as “a mere trading politician, possessing no originality of mind and no special merit of any description.” The second envoy, William Lowndes Yancey, had never been anything but a rabble-rouser. His campaign to reopen the slave trade, not to mention his support for expeditions against British territories in Central America, made him a peculiar choice to send to England. Bunch was particularly disdainful of Yancey: “He is impulsive, erratic and hot-headed; a rabid secessionist.” Bunch could not see a single reason for the appointment of the third envoy, Pierre Rost, apart from his friendship with Jefferson Davis’s family and his proficiency in Creole French.6

  Moran despised Dallas’s excuse that Mann was an old and valued friend until he, too, was forced to choose between loyalty and patriotism. A few days after Dudley Mann visited the legation, Moran received a letter from a friend in London who asked him for the Confederate envoy’s address. The friend, Edwin De Leon, until recently the U.S. consul in Egypt, had invited him to his wedding two years earlier, but Moran was appalled at his request and wrote sorrowfully that “I would do anything in reason for him, but could not find it in my conscience to assist treason.”7

  —

  Forcing a debate in the House of Commons had become William Gregory’s mission, and he would not be thwarted. Palmerston pulled the pro-Confederate MP aside in the Commons on April 26 and demanded to know why he saw fit to place the government in such an awkward position. He reminded Gregory that the speeches would be reprinted in Southern and Northern newspapers and that both sides would end up being “offended by what is said against them, and will care but little for what is said for them; and that all Americans will say that the British Parliament has no business to meddle with American affairs.” He reported to Lord John Russell that Gregory “admitted the truth of much I said, but said he had pledged himself to Mr. Mann, the Southern envoy.… Perhaps your talking to Gregory, either privately or in the House, might induce him to put his motion off.”8 Russell was anxious about being pushed to make a public statement ahead of events. George Dallas had shown that he was as ignorant of the situation as the Foreign Office. During his last interview with Russell on May 1, he had insisted that a blockade was not under consideration, since there was no mention of the fact in the latest State Department instructions; it had to be a fabrication of the New York press. But Russell discovered the next day from Lord Lyons’s dispatches that the idea was very much under consideration.

  The day after Palmerston’s confrontation with Gregory, the British government learned tha
t the Confederates had captured Fort Sumter. The initial newspaper reports were brief, but it appeared as though the South had won an easy victory. (The Thompson family in Belfast became the envy of the neighborhood after they received a long account of the battle from their son, a Union private in the Sumter garrison.)9 “We cut a sorry enough figure indeed,” complained Moran as he read through the dailies. “Everybody is laughing at us.” Many papers described the news as “a calamity” and “a subject of regret, and indeed of grief,” but Moran’s attention was held by the Illustrated London News, which printed a pious editorial in favor of peace and “no coercive measures,” next to an announcement that Frank Vizetelly, the paper’s star artist, war reporter, and brother of the editor, was taking the next steamer to New York.10 The tutting and clucking in the British press about the demise of the democratic experiment and the sorry state of “our American cousins” also grated on Moran’s nerves. The Economist recalled Britain’s futile reaction to the American Declaration of Independence and advised the North to settle the dispute with grace; to continue fighting now, its editor, Walter Bagehot, scolded, would be “vindictive, bloody and fruitless.”11 The conservative Saturday Review could not resist making a dig at Seward, who, “though he cannot keep the Federal fort at Charleston, has several times announced his intention of annexing Canada.”12