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

by Amanda Foreman

  “Mr. Slidell,” declared a Northern journal, “is the ideal of a man who would think it a privilege to get into a scrape himself, if he could only involve his host and patron too.” Mr. Mason, on the other hand, was “more of a bull-dog, ready to fasten on friends and foes alike.”37 Yet, until the Trent affair, there had been nothing in their previous histories to suggest that either James Murray Mason or John Slidell was the type of man whose fate would move armies. They so neatly fitted into Southern stereotypes as to be walking caricatures of a Virginia aristocrat and a Louisiana politician. Mason, who had been brought up amid elegant surroundings and liveried servants, could trace his family back to the English Civil War, in which one of his Cavalier ancestors commanded a regiment at the Battle of Worcester. Slidell, on the other hand, was the son of a moderately successful New York candle maker who had fled the city after a scandal involving a pistol fight and reinvented himself as a successful lawyer in New Orleans.38 Slidell had few hatreds, but one of them was for New Yorkers who refused to forget his humble beginnings.39 He was happier in New Orleans, where he could lift his finger and see his puppets raise their hands.

  William Howard Russell had met both men and found them tolerable. Mason was tall, heavyset, and crowned with a bouffant hairdo that was once leonine but had started to recede into a mohawk. His bright blue eyes and ruddy cheeks made him appear kindly, but out of his small, thin mouth came the most unashamedly racist and proslavery statements Russell had ever heard. His proudest achievement up to this point had been the drafting of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which denied escaped slaves any place of sanctuary in the United States. Mr. Mason, Russell informed readers of The Times on December 10, “is a man of considerable belief in himself; he is a proud, well-bred, not unambitious gentleman, whose position gave him the right to expect high office,” though, as would become apparent, not necessarily the talent. His ten years as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had left no discernible trace of experience on him. Mary Chesnut considered him to be one of the bigger imbeciles among her acquaintances: “My wildest imagination will not picture Mr. Mason as a diplomat,” she had written after hearing of his appointment. “He will say ‘chaw’ for ‘chew,’ and he will call himself ‘Jeems,’ and he will wear a dress coat to breakfast. Over here, whatever a Mason does is right in his own eyes. He is above law.” Mary knew the English horror of tobacco chewing, too. “I don’t care how he pronounces the nasty thing but he will do it,” she wrote. “In England a man must expectorate like a gentleman if he expectorates at all.”40 This last observation was certainly true, and it would count against Mason almost as much as his passionate belief in slavery.41

  By contrast, “Mr. Slidell,” Russell wrote in his diary, “is to the South something greater than Mr. Thurlow Weed has been to his party in the North.” Like Mason, he was tall and well built, but feline rather than bluff with “fine thin features, [and] a cold keen grey eye.”42 His French was excellent, thanks to his Creole wife, as was his taste in wine. His suave manner was the antithesis of Mason’s chomping heartiness. “He is not a speaker of note, nor a ready stump orator, nor an able writer, but he is an excellent judge of mankind, adroit, persevering, and subtle, full of device, and fond of intrigue … what is called here a ‘wire-puller.’ ”43 He could destroy a man or make him, as he did Judah Benjamin, who owed his entire political career to Slidell’s connections. If the attainment of power was a belief, then Slidell was a practicing zealot. On all other questions he was agnostic. Slidell’s urge to politick was so great, wrote Russell, that if he were shut up in a dungeon he “would conspire with the mice against the cat rather than not conspire at all.”44

  The Confederates arrived in England on January 29 to little fanfare. The press, including The Times, had warned the country against turning them into heroes; the Confederate commissioners were representatives of a government that was waging an undeclared war against Britain’s cotton industry. Mason asked his friend William Gregory, MP, whom he had not seen since Gregory’s visit to Washington in 1859, whether British resentment of the cotton embargo was the reason for the “harsh” treatment meted out to the Nashville and Captain Pegram, who had been forbidden to make any military alterations to his ship or stay longer once his repairs were completed. Gregory told him that, on the contrary, this was in accordance with the neutrality proclamation.

  The Nashville set sail from Southampton on February 3, cheered on by thousands of well-wishers. (William Yancey’s departure, on the same day but in a different ship, went unremarked.) With her Confederate flags and black-painted hull, the ship managed to look warlike and dashing at the same time. HMS Shannon—with gun ports open and engines running—stood guard between the Nashville and Tuscarora. There could be no engagement between the warring vessels in British waters. Much to Captain Craven’s chagrin, the Tuscarora would have to wait twenty-four hours before she could begin her pursuit of the Nashville.9.2

  Unbeknown to Captain Robert B. Pegram, a young man who called himself Francis Dawson had joined the crew under false pretenses as its fifty-first member. Pegram had thought he was dealing with a boy of sixteen or seventeen when Dawson first asked to come on board. He offered him a position “as a sailor before the mast,” meaning the lowest rank of seaman, and assumed that this would be the last he saw of him. Dawson boarded the ship with the help of one of the master’s mates. But he was no teenage runaway; he was in fact a twenty-one-year-old who had failed to break into the theater as a playwright and was looking for a new occupation. His real name was Austin Reeks; his father had ruined the family through one idiotic financial speculation after another, leaving his mother dependent on the charity of relatives. A widowed aunt who paid for Austin’s education was the inspiration for his new name: Francis Warrington Dawson. Mrs. Dawson’s late husband, William Dawson, had been an officer in the Indian Army. The change of identity and the leap into an adventure was not untypical behavior for Austin. He had never wanted to be himself, living in poverty with a father who made him ashamed and a mother he pitied. “My idea simply was to go to the South, do my duty there as well as I might, and return home to England,” Dawson wrote in his reminiscences. One of his great strengths was that he believed his own stories. Once he had claimed that he was motivated to fight for the South by idealism, it became true.

  He needed every shred of his sense of duty to survive his difficult initiation into life at sea. On his second day, Dawson’s trunk was broken open and his belongings stolen. The old sea hands disliked the interloper who spoke fine English and said his rosary at night. They resented even more his obvious rapport with the ship’s officers, and they punished him with the worst jobs. After nearly three weeks of hazing from the crew, Dawson decided that his life was “truly a hard one. I could not have borne it but that I know how judicious is the step I have taken.… Time does not in the least reconcile me to the men in the forecastle! More and more do I detest and loathe them.” Fortunately, once Captain Pegram discovered Dawson’s presence, he took pity on him and gave orders for his bunk to be moved to the upper deck. He soon felt an avuncular concern for the impetuous youth and was overheard saying that he would do something for Dawson once they reached home. Dawson hoped so. “I am told that I may make a fortune in the South if I chose,” he wrote his mother. “God grant that I may for your sakes.”45

  Dawson was part of a small but growing number of potential recruits who were trying to reach the South in spite of the blockade. “There may be some whose experience in the field or for drill may be useful,” Mason wrote to Richmond after several ex-officers called at the new headquarters of the Confederate commission at 109 Piccadilly. “Will you please advise me what I am to say to such applicants.”46 While he waited, Mason was careful to be encouraging without committing himself or the commission to anything illegal under the Foreign Enlistment Act. The British authorities’ punctiliousness over the Nashville had shown him that there would be no leniency as far as the law was concerned. Slidell could
afford to be less fastidious. Soon after his arrival in Paris, he received a visit from a tall, leather-faced Englishman in his mid-fifties who declared his intention of joining the Confederate army. Impressed by the man’s soldierly past and bearing, Slidell agreed to supply him with letters of introduction. In late spring the Knoxville Register announced that an English volunteer, Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell, had arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, on board the blockade runner Nelly.47

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  In Parliament, William Gregory was pleased to learn that Richmond had instructed Mason to challenge Britain’s observance of the blockade; safeguarding the country’s economy would be taken much more seriously by MPs than independence for slave owners. The commissioner had come armed with statistics that proved it was a blockade on paper only. True, the records stopped at the end of October, but they nevertheless showed that more than six hundred vessels had succeeded in getting through since April. The first step was to bring Mason together with Lord Russell. Gregory helped Mason draft a note, asking for an unofficial interview. He reminded Mason to use the correct form: “The Right Hon. Earl Russell, Foreign Office. I should not address your letter to his private house.”48 While they were waiting for Russell’s reply, James Spence, the pro-Southern author of The American Union, introduced himself to the group. The Liverpudlian businessman had realized that there were social and financial opportunities to be gained from befriending the nascent Confederacy; in a bid to prove his usefulness, Spence offered to help Mason prepare for his meeting with Lord Russell.

  Russell had no wish to see Mason. “What a fuss we have had about these two men,” he exclaimed.49 He had heard that William Gregory and William Lindsay had decided to force a debate on the blockade after the opening of Parliament on February 6. Russell already had a fair idea of the number of ships getting through from the diligent reports of the local consuls, but he balked at challenging its legality. There was no telling when Great Britain might find herself in the similar position of mounting a feeble blockade.50 At the meeting on February 10, Russell resorted to his usual method with the Confederates and forced Mason to do most of the talking. Mason noticed that the foreign secretary “took very little part in the conversation,” and he felt that he had been played throughout the interview. “On the whole,” wrote Mason, “it was manifest enough that his personal sympathies were not with us, and his policy inaction.”51 This was true. “At all events, I am heart and soul a neutral,” Russell wrote to Lord Lyons just before the meeting.52

  The Confederate lobby’s obstinacy exasperated Palmerston and Russell. Both were highly sensitive as to how it would appear to the North if Parliament debated whether to disregard its blockade. Coming so soon after the Trent affair, it would add credence to the charge that Britain was simply looking for an excuse to turn on the United States. No one in the cabinet believed that the war could last much longer. Why irritate either side, was the general consensus, when all they had to do was wait for perhaps only three more months? The Lord Chancellor, Lord Westbury, expressed himself in his customary splenetic way: “I am greatly opposed to any violent interference.… Let them tear one another to pieces.”53 To try to forestall a debate, Russell invited James Spence to attend a meeting at the Foreign Office, since it was known that he was held in high esteem by the Confederates. Spence was delighted with his newfound importance. He listened gravely as Russell explained why he should use his influence to stop the Confederates from forcing a vote. As soon as the interview was over, Spence hurried to the commission’s headquarters on Piccadilly to urge the group to redouble its efforts.

  Charles Francis Adams had heard that the Confederates’ political friends were pushing the blockade question. He wrote to Seward on February 7 urgently requesting any facts and statistics he could pass on to the North’s supporters in Parliament. It was embarrassing personally and diplomatically, he hinted, for the State Department to leave him so ill informed. Adams had become reconciled to Thurlow Weed’s presence, “but my patience is gradually oozing out of me at this extraordinary practice of running me down with my own colleagues,” he wrote in his diary. “Mr. Seward was not brought up in the school of refined delicacy of feeling or he would not have continued these inflictions.”

  What they needed, Weed told Seward, was a host of unofficial representatives whose sole purpose was to shape public opinion. Adams was a good man but useless for anything other than strict diplomacy. “We may want the good-will of England before our troubles are over, and it can be had on easy terms,” he wrote. “I believe now that nine tenths of the English People would rejoice to see us successful.”54 But this was hinged on precarious foundations. It did no good for Seward to argue that slavery was de facto abolished in the small areas of the South held by the Federal army. He would have to say publicly that this was a war for abolition.55 Could not Seward help them a little, Weed asked, by at least granting passports to free blacks? It would help counter the claim that the North was just as racist as the South and hypocritical as well.56

  For the upcoming debate in Parliament, Weed and Adams looked to William Forster rather than John Bright to outmaneuver William Gregory and the small but growing Confederate lobby. “On the whole Mr. Forster has been our firmest and most judicious friend,” Adams admitted privately. “We owe to his tact and talent even more than we do to the more showy interference of Messrs. Cobden and Bright.”57 The latter seemed to relish his powers of alienation. On February 17, Bright made a blistering speech in the Commons against aristocratic supporters of slavery, which struck his listeners as ludicrous considering that Lord Shaftesbury was leading a national campaign to reunite a fugitive slave named Anderson with his wife and children. One MP commented afterward, “I don’t think the people of England like [Bright] and his policy better than they do his friends the Yankees.”58

  “We are miserably prepared to meet and answer objections,” Weed grumbled to Seward on February 20. “Members of Parliament beset me for materials, and I cannot get anything official. I have picked what could be found of the Newspapers.”59 Although still chastened by his recent exposure in the press, Henry Adams discreetly tried to aid his father by pushing Frederick Seward, Seward’s son, to send over any reports that could be of use. “The truth is, we want light here,” Henry told him. “Our friends have got to be stuffed with statistics and crammed with facts.… The Southerners will parade a great number of vessels which have run it. Our side must show an equal or greater number either captured, or chased, and must have at hand any evidence.” Otherwise, he warned, the Confederates would argue that the fourth provision of the Declaration of Paris was not being met—that the blockade actually exist and be effective—and therefore the blockade was illegal.60

  As the day of the debate approached, Adams noticed a rise in the number of newspaper articles sympathetic to the South. He blamed the “unscrupulous and desperate emissaries” who were prepared to spread any number of lies—even that slavery in the South would be abolished after independence—on a credulous British public.61 The “emissaries” were actually one agent, Henry Hotze, a journalist from Mobile, Alabama, who had been appointed by the Confederate State Department to liaise between the commission and the press. Hotze had arrived in England on the same day as Mason and Slidell, but he had not traveled with them. Although he was only twenty-seven years old, Hotze exuded the confidence of someone twice his age. He was fluent in French and German, having spent his childhood in Switzerland. His charm and powers of conversation were still legendary in Brussels, where he had served as the secretary of the American legation during the late 1850s.62

  The mission to England had been Hotze’s own idea. During the autumn he had spent a few weeks in London on behalf of the War Department checking on the progress of arms shipments. This was long enough to convince him that the South needed to “educate” the English press, and that he was the person to do it. Although Hotze despised Mason and abhorred his tobacco habit, he accepted that he was dependent on Mason’s contac
ts until he could make his own.63 Fortunately, Mason had no idea of Hotze’s feelings toward him, and during their first weeks in London he invited the journalist to accompany him everywhere he went. In this way Hotze forged many useful acquaintances and learned a great deal in a short amount of time.

  On February 23, Hotze gleefully informed the Confederate State Department that his attempts to cultivate the press had succeeded far beyond his initial expectations. After only three weeks in London he had placed his first editorial in an English newspaper—a feat Henry Adams had failed to achieve in nearly a year. Furthermore, the newspaper was the Morning Post, Lord Palmerston’s own mouthpiece. “With this I have acquired the secret of the ‘open sesame’ of the others I may need,” he wrote from his new lodgings in Savile Row. He had expected weeks, if not months, of disappointment. “Although this success is due to an accidental combination of fortunate circumstances which I could not have concerted … it has nevertheless greatly encouraged me.”64

  In the days running up to the debate, Hotze and James Spence helped several of the Southern supporters with their speeches. Meanwhile, the American legation was still frantically putting together a rebuttal of the Confederates’ statistics. Benjamin Moran spent every waking hour with William Forster coaching him on his answers, hoping that Forster’s debating skills were more polished than his manners. Moran was flabbergasted to discover that the MP was married, and his wife “a nice and ladylike person.”65