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

by Amanda Foreman

  One of Seward’s few remaining friends on Capitol Hill had sneaked out of the Republican meeting to warn him of the impending coup. His immediate reaction was to resign first in order to deny his enemies the satisfaction of seeing him humiliated.58 By the time Lord Lyons heard about the senators’ attack, their delegation had already met with a clearly distressed Lincoln on December 18 and presented their demands for Seward’s removal and a reorganization of the cabinet.59 Lincoln had been able to parry their claim that the cabinet was divided, but he had no answer to Sumner’s accusation that Seward was sending “offensive dispatches which the President could not have seen, or assented to.”60 To buy time, he invited them to resume the discussion the following day.

  Lyons still regarded Sumner as a reliable ally in Anglo-American controversies, but he thought the Republican Party as a whole combined an unhealthy mix of zealotry and ignorance that made them unpredictable. “We may have to be ready for squalls,” he wrote to Lord Russell on the nineteenth. That evening, Lincoln received the Republican delegation for the second time. But he had a surprise for the plotters. He had invited the cabinet—with the exception of Seward—to hear their allegation that the secretary of state had usurped its powers. It was an awkward moment for Chase, who, even more than Sumner, had been the prime mover behind the attempted coup. He panicked over whether to portray himself as loyal to Lincoln, which would mean denying the senators’ allegations that the cabinet was disgruntled, or to throw in his lot with the delegation and support its claims. He lost his nerve and pretended to be surprised that there were rumors against Seward. His cowardice abashed several of the senators, but not Charles Sumner, who angrily repeated his previous complaints about Seward’s record. Still, when confronted with testimonials that the cabinet was united behind Lincoln, the majority of delegation felt too embarrassed to insist on Seward’s removal. The meeting adjourned at one in the morning with nothing actually decided.

  Lyons thought that the outcome would depend on whom Lincoln could least afford to lose; “a quarrel with the Republican Members of the Senate is a very serious thing for him.” As two more days slipped by without any definite news, Lyons pondered a future without his erstwhile nemesis: “I shall be sorry if it ends in the removal of Mr. Seward,” he wrote a little ruefully on Monday, December 22. “We are much more likely to have a man less disposed to keep the peace.… I should hardly have said this two years ago.”61 But that afternoon he paid a visit to the State Department, and to his relief he found Seward back at his desk, behaving as if nothing had happened. Over the weekend, just as Seward had started to accept the coup against him, and Lincoln had begun to rationalize to himself why his chief ally in the cabinet had to be sacrificed to placate the radicals, Chase had become frightened that Seward’s friends and supporters would take their revenge on him. To save himself, he offered his resignation in the hope that this would clear him of any imputation of harboring ambitions for the presidency. Lincoln realized that Chase had lost his nerve. In a deliberate show of authority, the president rejected his resignation, replied that both secretaries were indispensable, and declared all discussion about a cabinet reorganization at an end. The senators’ protest had achieved precisely the opposite effect of what they had intended. But it was obvious, Lyons wrote to Lord Russell on December 26, that “Mr. Seward was plainly not in a position to make any concessions at all to neutrals.”62 He would not dare risk his remaining political capital on helping Britain to obtain cotton, or indeed on helping Britain at all.

  —

  That same day, the twenty-sixth, President Jefferson Davis told Southerners to relinquish their hope for British intervention. He was speaking to the legislature in his home state of Mississippi at the end of a morale-boosting tour through the western parts of the Confederacy. Davis did not need to rouse his listeners’ indignation—many already had firsthand or secondhand knowledge of the devastation wrought by Union armies. Nor did he need to warn them against complacency: beyond Virginia, the South was shrinking as more and more territory came under Federal control. What the lean and shabbily dressed listeners required from their president was reassurance that the North might smash their homes but not their moral purpose. Davis damned Northerners as the blighted offspring of Cromwell’s fanatical Roundheads. It was in their blood to oppress others, he declared. Their ancestors “persecuted Catholics in England, and they hung Quakers and witches in America.” The liberty-loving South could never live in harmony with such monsters of intolerance. But having given his audience its dose of tonic, Davis proceeded to administer a series of bitter pills. The last, and most shocking to the once-mighty kings of cotton, was the fact of the South’s utter isolation. “In the course of this war our eyes have often been turned abroad,” admitted Davis:

  We have expected sometimes recognition, and sometimes intervention, at the hands of foreign nations; and we had a right to expect it … but this I say: “Put not your trust in princes,” and rest not your hopes on foreign nations. This war is ours; we must fight it out ourselves. And I feel some pride in knowing that, so far, we have done it without the good will of anybody.63

  The Marquis of Hartington was moved by Davis’s speech. He and his traveling companion, Colonel Leslie, had arrived in Richmond on December 23, five days after leaving Baltimore in the dead of night. Hartington had wanted to ask the U.S. government’s permission to cross into the South, but the legation had warned him against the idea. “They said they thought it was very doubtful,” he explained to his father, the Duke of Devonshire, “and if we were refused there would be more difficulty in going out on our own hook.” He promised they would not resist if they were captured during the attempt.64 Fortunately, with the assistance of the ubiquitous Maryland journalist W. W. Glenn, they had been able to travel from one safe house to the next without encountering any Federal patrols.

  The difference between the countryside of Maryland and that of Virginia was striking. “The country looks terribly desolated,” wrote Hartington. “The fences are all pulled down for firewood, a good many houses burnt, and everything looking very bare.” The contrast between Baltimore and Richmond was even greater. The Southern capital had doubled in size in less than two years, but it was worse off in every aspect. Hartington was surprised by the shoddy appearance of all classes. “They have had no new clothes since the war began,” he wrote, “and are not likely to get any till it is over.” Yet “these people say they are ready to go on for any length of time, and I believe many of them think the longer the better, because it will widen the breach between them and the Yankees, against whom their hatred is more intense than you can possibly conceive.”65

  Hartington had arrived in America in August with no strong feelings about the war. After a couple of weeks in New York, he felt “inclined to be more a Unionist than I was.” The moderation of New Yorkers impressed him, since “I believe, if they could lick them, and the South would come back to-morrow, they would be willing to forget everything that had happened, and go on as usual.” But as he saw more of the North he became less certain about the point of the war: “I understand nothing about it, and I can’t find anybody except Seward who even pretends that he does.… They mix up in the most perplexing manner the slavery question, which they say makes theirs the just cause, with the Union question, which is really what they are fighting for.”66 He found the Peace Democrats he spoke to in the North a rather unattractive lot, which made him waver: “I think their arguments are weak and their objects not by any means desirable,” he wrote from Chicago in mid-October.67

  But once Hartington reached Virginia, it took less than a week for him to be won over. Like Frank Vizetelly and Francis Lawley before him, he was smitten. “I hope Freddy [his younger brother, Lord Frederick Cavendish] won’t groan much over my rebel sympathies, but I can’t help them,” he wrote to his father on December 28, 1862. “The people here are so much more earnest about the thing than the North seems to be, that it is impossible not to go a good way with them, t
hough one may think they were wrong at first.”68 The Southerners were certainly putting on a good show for him. He was introduced to Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, who seemed like moderate and sensible men to him, fighting the laudable cause of self-determination; he had spoken with Lee and Jackson, who were modest in victory; and he had been shown a couple of carefully selected plantations. “The negroes hardly look as well off as I expected to see them,” he wrote afterward, “but they are not dirtier or more uncomfortable-looking than Irish labourers.” Southern fears of a “servile insurrection” inspired by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had proved to be unfounded.15.5 69 On the twenty-ninth, Lawley accompanied Hartington and Colonel Leslie to General Jeb Stuart’s headquarters. Forewarned by a telegram from Lawley, the officers ransacked their own belongings to provide the party with comfortable accommodation. Scarce luxuries like blankets and stoves were sacrificed for the visitors. The fattest turkey in the camp was killed and plucked for dinner. Hartington appreciated their efforts, and he endeared himself to his hosts by insisting “we should not make any change for them in our ordinary routine, but let them fare exactly as the rest.” To demonstrate his sincerity he helped to beat the eggs for “a monster egg-nog.”70 But as Hartington joined in the revelries, he suddenly realized the scale of suffering it would require to crush the spirit of rebellion. The South “can never be brought back into the Union except as conquered provinces,” he wrote, “and I think they will take a great deal of conquering before that is done.”71

  * * *

  15.1 The previous incumbent, William Brodie, had pleaded with the Foreign Office to send him anywhere so long as he could escape Washington.

  15.2 Jeb Stuart took a grim satisfaction from Wynne and Phillips’s reports: The “Englishmen here,” he wrote to General Lee’s eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, “who surveyed Solferino [the battle that inspired Henry Dunant to found the Red Cross] and all the battlefields of Italy say that the pile of dead on the plains of Fredericksburg exceeds anything of the sort ever seen by them.”

  15.3 Seward’s printed correspondence provided some of the most interesting reading the Foreign Office clerks had seen in years. But Lord Lyons adopted a judicious view of the letters. “[Seward’s] tone towards the Foreign Powers has, however, become much more civil than it appeared in the correspondence printed last year,” he pointed out to Lord Russell. As for Adams and his indiscreet comments, Lyons thought he showed “more calmness and good sense than any of the American Ministers abroad. He is not altogether free from a tendency to small suspicions—but this, I think, proceeds from his position, not from his natural character—it is, too, a very common mistake of inexperienced diplomats.”55

  15.4 The line that really upset Sumner was this: “The extreme advocates of African slavery and its most vehement opponents were acting in concert together to precipitate a servile war—the former by making the most desperate attempt to overthrow the federal Union, the latter by demanding an edict of universal emancipation.”56

  15.5 In New Orleans, Acting Consul George Coppell had tried to obtain permission for British subjects to arm themselves in case of a race riot against whites.

  SIXTEEN

  The Missing Key to Victory

  New Year’s Day—Heartbreak at Vicksburg—General Banks assumes command at New Orleans—The Alabama embarrasses the U.S. Navy—Seward returns to his old ways

  The English volunteer Dr. Charles Mayo finally took a break from work on New Year’s Day to attend a public reception at the White House. By the time he reached the front of the queue outside the Blue Room, Lincoln had been shaking hands for more than two hours without a break. “His presence is by no means majestic,” wrote Mayo, “and I could not but pity the poor man, he looked so miserable.”1 A journalist observing the occasion wrote that Lincoln’s gait had become “more stooping, his countenance sallow, and there is a sunken, deathly look about the large, cavernous eyes.”2 The president had also hosted the official reception for dignitaries, foreign diplomats, and politicians earlier in the day. It was the only occasion when the ministers were expected to wear their dress uniforms to the White House. Notwithstanding the finery on display, the atmosphere had been subdued. Seward hardly left Lincoln’s side, Lyons noticed, and made no attempt to engage his colleagues in conversation.

  Once the White House had emptied, Lincoln could concentrate on the immediate problem at hand: General Burnside had called in the morning to offer his resignation. Though the president had lost confidence in Burnside’s capabilities, he was not sure that it would be right to give the Army of the Potomac its third leader in three months. Over the past few days, telegrams had been arriving from out west that filled him with anxiety. The Federal armies in Mississippi and Tennessee both appeared to be on the brink of defeat.

  Ill.30 New Year’s Day reception at the White House, by Frank Vizetelly.

  —

  Only five months earlier, Lincoln had complained that Europe concentrated far too much on the North’s failures in the East and entirely ignored the great successes it enjoyed in the West, where Federal armies were “clearing more than a hundred thousand square miles of country.”3 But since then, the U.S. Navy had been unable to take control of the Mississippi River, and General Grant had failed to capture the river port of Vicksburg, his next objective. For as long as Vicksburg stayed in Confederate hands, the mighty Mississippi remained the South’s most precious supply route and means of communication between its eastern and western parts. The significance of the river as the economic backbone of America was no mere story to Lincoln; during his youth he had worked on it, traveling on flatboats from Illinois down to New Orleans. “Vicksburg is the key,” he had told his generals in 1861. “The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.… We can take all the northern ports of the Confederacy, and they can defy us from Vicksburg.”16.1 4

  Since that discussion, the Federal army had grown to just under a million men, twice the Confederate total of 464,000. Lincoln wanted this numerical superiority exploited; a week of Fredericksburgs would wipe out Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia but cause only a dent in the North’s fighting capacity.

  Vicksburg was roughly equidistant between Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans; the next fort was Port Hudson, 150 miles farther south, which guarded the approach to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nicknamed the “Hill City” before the war, but now referred to as the Gibraltar of the Mississippi,16.2 Vicksburg owed its defensive strength to the spectacular geography of the Mississippi Delta. Situated along a sprawling chain of hills overlooking a sharp bend in the river, surrounded by alligator-infested swamps and densely wooded bayous whose emerald-colored waters obscured a netherworld of poisonous snakes and snapping turtles, Vicksburg afforded few approaches that could not be defended from the town. Before the war, Vicksburg had been a thriving commercial center of four thousand inhabitants, with six newspapers, several churches of different denominations, and even its own synagogue. But now its purpose was simply strategic, to be defended or captured at all costs.

  The lack of progress in opening up the Mississippi River had political and military implications that Lincoln could not afford to ignore. The Democratic politician turned general John McClernand warned that if control of the river were not soon achieved, the Midwestern states of Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana might lead a second mass exodus from the Union, creating a separate Confederacy of the Northwest, which would make its own peace with the South.

  There was also the problem of General Ben Butler down in New Orleans. His eight-month rule had resulted in a profoundly alienated population as well as a raft of missed opportunities to gain more of the Mississippi. Lincoln decided to replace Butler with another political general, Nathaniel P. Banks. Though his military record was not inspiring—Stonewall Jackson had thrashed his first army in the summer of 1862—Banks was a popular and respected Massachusetts politician. From humble beginnings as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory, he had risen through hi
s own talents to become the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Banks’s leadership qualities were not in question, nor was his honesty—an important consideration after the accusations of corruption leveled against Butler.

  The immaculately dressed and well-spoken Banks (he had carefully erased all traces of his working-class roots) appeared to be the perfect choice. His political connections meant that he had no trouble working with the governors of New York and New England to recruit an entirely new army of volunteers; he had already displayed his tact and administrative skills after he was sent to quell unrest in Maryland in 1861; and he was ambitious for military glory. Lincoln gave Banks two objectives when he asked him to go to New Orleans in November 1862. Militarily, the general was to lead his army up the Mississippi, sweeping away Confederate resistance as he proceeded, until he joined forces with General Grant at Vicksburg, some 225 miles to the north. Politically, he was to ensure the election of a new, pro-Northern legislature in Louisiana that would enable the state to be readmitted to the Union.

  Lincoln adopted the same pragmatic approach when General McClernand asked permission to raise an army of volunteers from the Midwest with the sole aim of attacking Vicksburg. The president believed that the political gains to the administration from McClernand’s project outweighed any potential annoyance that might be felt by the army chiefs.