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

by Amanda Foreman

  Ill.14 Punch depicts the United States as a recalcitrant child in need of a whipping.

  More than £2 million had been spent in the scramble to get ships and troops to America. It would be some time before soldiers came home. Jonny Stanley wrote to his parents from Montreal to say that he was safe although lonely. The infinite forests and frozen lakes of Canada were “very dull, and the people, however socially inclined, thoroughly different in manners and ways of thinking.”5 The troops had so little to do that a sizable number would slip away over the winter months, only to reappear on the other side of the American border as Northern volunteers.6

  The press assumed that relations between the two countries would quickly return to normal. The Illustrated London News congratulated England for having dealt with the crisis so adroitly. “We are therefore clear of all blame in the whole transaction,” it opined on January 11, “and legally, morally, and even sentimentally, we have shown ourselves friends to the Americans.”7 This was not the view of 20 million Americans. Huddled in his frozen headquarters in northern Virginia, Union general George Meade wrote to his wife that “if ever this domestic war of ours is settled, it will require but the slightest pretext to bring about a war with England.”8 A congressman from Illinois swore on the floor of the House that he had “never shared in the traditional hostility of many of my countrymen against England. But I now here publicly avow and record my inextinguishable hatred of that Government. I mean to cherish it while I live and to bequeath it as a legacy to my children when I die.” From Paris, Seward’s unofficial emissary Archbishop Hughes exhorted him to remember that the “awful war between England and America must come sooner or later,—and in preparing for it, even now, there is not a moment to be lost.”9

  Charles Francis Adams had neither the clarity of anger nor the cushion of complacency to comfort him. The news about the Trent had been followed by a letter from Charles Francis Jr. informing his family that he had joined the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry. The unexpected blow made ordinary business seem “utterly without interest,” wrote Adams.10 The upset to the family was not enough, however, to divert attention from an embarrassing gaffe by Henry Adams. On January 10 The Times revealed that “Mr. H. Adams,” the younger son and private secretary of the American minister, had published a mildly insulting article about English society for the American press. Henry had never intended to acknowledge “A Visit to Manchester” as his own, and so he had vented some of his frustrations about his social isolation in London society, pointedly remarking, “in Manchester, I am told, it is still the fashion for the hosts to see that the guests enjoy themselves. In London the guests shift for themselves … one is regaled with thimbles full of ice-cream and hard seed cakes.” Charles Francis Jr. had accidentally left Henry’s name on the manuscript when he sent it to the editor of the Boston Courier.11 Until then, Henry had been enjoying great success as the New York Times’ anonymous London correspondent. “The Chief,” as Henry called his father, gave his son a sharp dressing-down, so sharp that Henry briefly considered self-exile on the Continent.12 He was teased without mercy by Benjamin Moran, who repeated ad nauseam “it is not every boy of 25 who can in 6 mos. residence here extort a leader from The Times.”13

  When he visited the Foreign Office on January 11 for his first meeting since the Trent crisis, Adams hoped that Lord Russell had not seen the Times article about his son. There was no cause for concern: Russell could be curiously obtuse about what he read in the papers. (Lady Russell had a far better understanding of the power of the press than her husband; she thought the American public had been goaded beyond endurance by the “sneering, exulting tone” in English newspapers after Bull Run.)14 The two men passed the first half of the interview congratulating each other on preserving the peace, after which it was down to business again. Russell’s current concern was the risk to peace posed by Union and Confederate cruisers. The Sumter had recently arrived at Cadiz, having destroyed a number of U.S. merchant ships along the way. The government expected a confrontation with a U.S. Navy ship but would not tolerate a free-for-all in British waters, which in Palmerston’s words would be a “scandal and inconvenience.” In Southampton, the disruption to ordinary business had risen to unsupportable levels; the crews of the CSS Nashville and USS Tuscarora—which had been pursuing the Nashville since December—were fighting each other in the streets.15 Adams was caught by surprise, not having given a thought to either vessel during the past few weeks. It was back to the old state of affairs, he realized.

  Life for all the occupants of the American legation was slowly returning to normal. People had stopped inviting them, Henry told Charles Francis Jr., “on the just supposition that we wouldn’t care to go into society.” The drought ended with a dinner at the Argylls’ on January 17. The evening passed far more enjoyably than the U.S. minister expected; Gladstone sat next to him and showed genuine interest in his views, and the guest on his other side praised him for “my conduct during the difficulties.” But Adams’s enjoyment was curtailed when the conversation turned to Seward and his now infamous quip to the Duke of Newcastle. “I feel my solitude in London much more than I do at home,” Adams wrote in his diary a short time later. “The people are singularly repulsive. With a very considerable number of acquaintances, I know not a single one whose society I should miss one moment.”16

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  Adams did not know the true state of affairs in Washington, and Seward did not wish to enlighten him. The Trent was only one of many crises that threatened the administration during the winter of 1862. Criticism of the Federal government’s lack of progress was growing ever louder, with Lincoln receiving the largest share of the blame. The border states had not been secured, and the vast Army of the Potomac encamped around Washington had yet to do anything other than drill. Its leader, General McClellan, remained bedridden with typhoid. The War Department was riddled with incompetence and corruption and the Treasury had run out of gold, leaving Secretary Chase with no alternative but to print more money. On the night of January 10, Seward received a summons to the White House. There he found Chase, Assistant Secretary of War Peter Watson, and two generals gathered in a solemn huddle around the president. They had to act now, Lincoln told them, and find a way to produce victories or face the possibility “of our being two nations.”17 Frustrated by the generals’ objections, Lincoln decided he would issue a presidential order for all naval and military forces to begin an advance on February 22, regardless of obstacles or delays.

  The president’s frustration presented an opportunity for Seward to strengthen their relationship at a time when his own allies were deserting him in droves. “There is a formidable clique organized against Mr. Seward,” the attorney general noted in his diary on February 2. “I do not think I heard a good word spoken of Mr. Seward as a Minister even by one of his own party,” observed Trollope of his time in Washington. “He seemed to have no friend, no one who trusted him.”18 Frank Blair, the powerful congressman from Missouri, complained to colleagues that Seward was “selfish, ambitious and incompetent” and apparently more concerned with fighting England than the South.19 A senator attacked Seward for being “a low, vulgar, vain demagogue.”20

  Seward gave loyal service to Lincoln; while Mary Lincoln seemed incapable of fulfilling the role of confidante, the former contender for the White House found that he could adapt to the role with ease. Seward could not solve the president’s military problems, but he was able to smooth the way for the secretary of war’s departure on January 14, 1862, and the appointment of Edwin Stanton. The new secretary was arrogant and devious but, in contrast to Cameron, was efficient and would attack the department’s problems with energy. The amiable but useless Cameron chose to spend his forced retirement in Russia, where he replaced the equally useless Cassius Clay as minister.

  Simultaneously with Cameron’s removal, some flicker of life appeared in the North’s military machine. On January 14, the English volunteer George Henry Herbert learned that the “Zou-
Zous”—as members of the 9th New York Infantry (Hawkins’s Zouaves) were affectionately called—were going to evacuate from Hatteras Inlet. Despite the monotony of drilling and digging at Camp Wool, Herbert had never felt so content with his life. “Since I wrote to you I have received my promotion. I am now 2nd Lieutenant,” he informed his mother. He promised to send a photograph of himself in his new officer’s uniform in his next letter in case it was his last. “Our boys here are in high glee, we are going to leave Hatteras in a day or two,” he explained. “We are part of an expedition under the command of General Burnside. It consists of somewhere about an hundred vessels of all sorts, containing a land force of as near as I can learn, about 10,000 men of all arms. Its destination is unknown. The rumour is New Orleans. I fervently hope so.”21

  The rumors were unfounded. Thirteen thousand men were leaving Cape Hatteras, heading up the North Carolina sounds to the mysterious Roanoke Island, a forlorn stretch of grass and swamp between the mainland and the Outer Banks. Its first inhabitants, Sir Walter Raleigh’s ill-fated colonists, had survived in the New World for less than four years before they mysteriously disappeared. Three hundred years later the island seemed as untamed as ever. Its chief importance was strategic: whoever owned Roanoke held the key to Richmond’s back door.22

  General Ambrose Burnside (whose name and prodigious whiskers inspired the word “sideburns”) had convinced General McClellan that he could lead a combined amphibious force in light-draft and flat-bottomed boats that would have no trouble navigating the shallow waters of Roanoke Sound. The Confederate garrison guarding Roanoke was small and unlikely to withstand a sustained assault. Burnside was so confident that he gave permission for journalists to accompany the expedition. William Howard Russell heard the news from his sickbed in a hotel in New York. The journalist had been worn down by the unrelenting campaign of abuse against him: “There is a sort of weakness and languor over me that I never experienced before,” he told Delane. Frank Vizetelly would go and report for both of them.23

  Ill.15 USS Picket leading the ships of the Burnside expedition over the Hatteras Bar in North Carolina, by Frank Vizetelly.

  Vizetelly, so deep in debt that even Russell would no longer lend him money, was overjoyed at the prospect of escaping Washington. He joined Burnside’s flotilla on January 10 with nothing else except a small bag containing a change of clothes and his pencils. “Woe is me!” he wrote after several days of crashing seas and hurricane winds. One night, a thunderous wave hit the boat with such force that he was catapulted from his bed against the cabin door, which burst open, depositing him with a thud in eight inches of briny water. He decided this would be his first and last amphibious expedition.24

  The first phase of the attack was easily accomplished and the southern half of Roanoke Island was captured on February 7 without Herbert or his friends firing a shot. “Day broke cold, damp, and miserable,” Vizetelly wrote on the eighth. “After a drink of water and a biscuit for each man, the Federal force prepared to advance into the interior.”25 Cannon fire alerted Herbert that it would soon be his regiment’s turn to leave the makeshift camp. “Near the centre of the island it is very narrow and at the narrowest point a battery was erected,” he explained to his mother. “The road is in fact nothing but a cow path through fine woods and a thick growth of underbrush.”26 The men had to march along the track two by two in order to allow room for the stretcher bearers carrying the wounded back to the ships. “I remember after that,” commented a private in the regiment, “a sort of sickening sensation as if I was going to a slaughter-house to be butchered.”27

  “At last we came in front of the battery,” wrote Herbert. The order came to charge and they plunged into the knee-deep swamp that surrounded the Confederate position. Vizetelly watched as they hurled themselves up the slope of the battery. The men behaved, he continued, “in the most brilliant manner, dashing through the swamp and over the stumps of the pine-clearing, and into the battery, which the Confederates were hastily leaving.” When they reached the top, they discovered that the rebels had fled. The 9th took up the chase for four miles and finally cornered the defenders at the northern tip of the island, in their own camp.

  Herbert was delighted to hear that a journalist from the Illustrated London News was with them, and he asked his mother to look out for his reports. A total of 264 Union solders and 143 Confederates had been killed in the attack; later, he would consider such casualty numbers remarkably small, but for now he thought he had survived a great battle. Vizetelly admitted to being impressed. “I will not attempt to prophesy a triumph for the Federalists,” he told readers at home, “but, seeing the improved condition in the morale of the Union forces, and feeling somewhat competent to give an opinion, I am inclined to believe that these first successes are not to be their last. I have watched the Northern army almost from its first appearance in the field. I have seen it a stripling … I now see it arrived at man’s estate.”28

  News of Burnside’s success on Roanoke Island reached Washington while the city was still under the rosy glow of Mary Lincoln’s triumphant White House ball held on February 5. The capital celebrated even harder when it learned that a great victory had been won in Tennessee. General Ulysses S. Grant had captured Fort Henry on the sixth and Fort Donelson on the fifteenth, giving him control of Tennessee’s two main rivers, the Cumberland and the Tennessee. An important water highway had been opened for the North, which ran from the north of Kentucky all the way down to Mississippi and Alabama.

  Lord Lyons wished in his heart he could escape while there was relative calm. “I don’t expect to be ever free here from troubles,” he wrote.29 There would always be another incident. “I have no doubt that for me personally this would be the moment to give up this place. I can never keep things in as good a state as they are,” he confided to his sister two days after the ball. “However, I cannot propose this to the Government, especially after the GCB—and of course feel bound to stay as long as they wish to keep me.”30 Lyons was referring to the Order of the Bath, which Lord Russell had arranged to have bestowed upon him for his handling of the Trent crisis. When he had learned of the honor, Lyons had written to Russell with his characteristic humility that he had done nothing “brilliant or striking;” “the only merit which I can attribute to myself is that of having laboured sedulously, though quietly and unobtrusively … to carry out honestly your orders and wishes.”31 He also commended his staff for their exemplary behavior during the crisis—although he would not have been able to say the same for them now. Since the resolution of the affair, the attachés and secretaries had been living up to their nickname of “the Bold Buccaneers.” Two of the more literary members of the group had decided to put on a play, and persuaded Lyons to allow them to perform it at the British legation.

  Ill.16 The 9th New York Volunteers (Hawkins’s Zouaves) and the 21st Massachusetts in a bayonet charge on the Confederate fieldworks on Roanoke Island, by Frank Vizetelly.

  The attachés’ youth and high spirits insulated them from the subdued atmosphere that pervaded Washington after the sudden death of Lincoln’s middle son, Willie, on February 20. The precocious eleven-year-old, who had reigned as the undisputed favorite of the family, was suspected to have died of typhoid fever. Mary Lincoln withdrew into her own private agony of grief, leaving her devastated husband with the burden of caring for their other boy still at home, seven-year-old Tad, who was battling the same illness that had killed his brother. The Spectator’s correspondent Edward Dicey was introduced to Lincoln not long after Willie’s funeral and noted the “depression about his face, which, I am told by those who see him daily, was habitual to him, even before the recent death of his child.” During their short interview Lincoln earnestly interrogated him about English public opinion. “Like all Americans,” commented Dicey, he “was unable to comprehend the causes which have alienated the sympathies of the mother country.”9.1 32

  The same question about England’s sympathies was being asked
in the South. “Seward has cowered beneath the roar of the British Lion,” bemoaned John Jones, a clerk in the Confederate War Department. “Now we must depend upon our own strong arms and stout hearts for defense.”33 Even the shrewd and unflappable diarist Mary Chesnut had given in to her optimism during the Trent affair. For a brief moment she had shared the belief so prevalent in the South that the Royal Navy would appear off the coast and blow the blockade to smithereens. Now she wondered if the British were laughing at them, “scornful and scoffing … on our miseries.”34 Despite the brouhaha over their release, she feared that Commissioners Slidell and Mason were chasing a chimera. “Lord Lyons has gone against us. Lord Derby and Louis Napoleon are silent in our hour of need,” she wrote. The loss of Roanoke and the forts in Tennessee caused an uproar in Richmond. Someone had to bear the blame for these dreadful and unexpected defeats, and who better than the Confederate secretary of war, Judah Benjamin? “Mr. Davis’s pet Jew,” as his critics called him, was accused of having sacrificed Roanoke Island by refusing to send reinforcements. Benjamin’s stint at the War Department had been hampered from the start by his lack of rapport with the military, and this latest crisis would make his position untenable. However, the truth in the case of Roanoke, which out of loyalty he never revealed to Davis, was that there were neither arms nor men to spare.35 Two or three arms shipments a month from England were not enough to maintain one army, let alone several across hundreds of miles.

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  The freedom experienced by the four ex-prisoners on board HMS Rinaldo as she crossed the Atlantic in early January was far worse than the dull confinement the Confederate commissioners had endured at Fort Warren. To walk on the icy deck was to risk a thousand deaths. Huge icicles dangled above their heads. Any person not wearing a safety rope was liable to slip or be blown out to sea. Before the journey’s end, many of the sailors had suffered frostbite. “If you have no news of ‘Rinaldo,’ I fear she is lost—horrible to think of,” William Howard Russell wrote to Delane on January 16. Horrible but somehow not unexpected, considering the appalling misfortunes that had already blighted the Southerners’ mission.36