61. David Hollett, The Alabama Affair: The British Shipyards Conspiracy in the American Civil War (Wilmslow, 1993), p. 16.
62. OR, ser. I, vol. 4, no. 127, p. 577, L. P. Walker to Caleb Huse and Edward Anderson, August 17, 1861.
63. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 2, pp. 83–87, James Bulloch to Stephen Mallory, August 18, 1861.
64. Neill F. Sanders, “Lincoln’s Consuls in the British Isles, 1861–1865,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Missouri, 1971, p. 34.
65. Peter Barton, “The First Blockade Runner and the ‘Another Alabama’: Some Tees and Hartlepool Ships That Worried the Union,” Mariner’s Mirror, 81 (1995), pp. 45–64.
66. F. L. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy (2nd ed., Chicago, 1959), p. 233.
67. Stephen R. Wise, Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the Civil War (Columbia, S.C., 1988), p. 24.
68. Anthony Trollope, North America (repr. London, 1968), p. 20.
69. New-York Historical Society, Narrative of Ebenezer Wells, October 13, 1861. Despite the relative disappointment of Lewinsville, McClellan decided that the 79th merited the return of its colors. They were handed over during a solemn ceremony.
70. Vizetelly provided the Illustrated London News with a sketch of the wounded being greeted by General McClellan. The accompanying description was completely over the top: “He raised his hat as each poor fellow was borne from the ambulance to the hospital; and many whose eyes were fast glazing in death raised themselves … and smiled a last smile at their young and beloved General.”
71. Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 318, October 10, 1861.
72. Ibid., p. 313, September 11, 1861.
73. Crawford (ed.), William Howard Russell’s Civil War, p. 125, W. H. Russell to Delane, September 13, 1861.
74. John Black Atkins, The Life of Sir William Howard Russell, 2 vols. (London, 1911), vol. 2, p. 72.
75. Nevins, The War for the Union, vol. 1, p. 300. McClellan actually had 152,000, but one-third were absent, under arrest, or otherwise unfit for duty.
76. PRO FO5/779, desp. 131, Consul Archibald to Lord Russell, September 25, 1861. By late summer, Archibald was making the five-hour journey to Lafayette on a weekly basis. He discovered extreme malnutrition among the men. Their food allotment should have been worth 43 cents a day, but theft by the guards reduced this to 10. Eugene H. Berwanger, The British Foreign Service and the American Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 1994), pp. 53–54.
77. Ibid., p. 55.
78. On September 25, Benjamin Moran wrote: “We have some very fine young fellows to see us for service in our army.” Two days later, he wrote again: “There were several fine gentlemanly Englishmen here today.” Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, pp. 883, 884, September 27, 1861.
79. Adams wrote that he was plagued with visitors because of “the notice current in the papers that I have authority to engage officers for the American service. The wish for adventure and pay is great in all the countries of Europe. I see something of it from almost every nation.” MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, vol. 76, September 30, 1861. Adams had to be extremely careful lest he attract the same charge of recruiting that led to the English minister, John Crampton, being expelled from Washington during the Crimean War. As far as he was concerned, the would-be Federals could do whatever they wished so long as the legation was not made a party to their plans.
80. Russell, My Diary, North and South, p. 291.
81. One issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper listed the Count de Sayre, the Baron de Schonen, and Major General Charles F. Havelock of the Imperial Ottoman Army all arriving simultaneously in Washington. Ella Lonn has identified dozens of British officers and soldiers of fortune who held positions of responsibility in the Union army. Two of the most distinguished were Robert Johnstone and John Lambert. Ella Lonn, Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy (New York, repr. 1969), p. 283. Robert Johnstone was lieutenant colonel of the 5th New York Cavalry until August 1863. When questioned about his reasons for joining, he explained that all his life he had delighted in anything big, and that he could not remain idle while so big a nation was being split asunder. And John Lambert was a captain in the 33rd New Jersey Volunteers who later became acting inspector general on General David Hunter’s staff.
82. New York State Library, Edwin Morgan MSS, box 19, f. 11, L.D.H. Currie to Governor Morgan, March 2, 1863.
83. PRO 30/22/35, f. 229–24, Lord Lyons to Lord Russell, September 9, 1861. (The origin of the anecdote remains a mystery. Lord Lyons merely wrote: “Seward exercises upon the reports of spies and informers, the power of depriving British subjects of their liberty, or retaining them in prison, or liberating them, by his sole will and pleasure.”)
84. Berwanger, The British Foreign Service and the American Civil War, p. 53.
85. BDOFA, part I, ser. C, vol. 5, p. 307, Lord Lyons to Lord Russell, September 6, 1861.
86. Crawford (ed.), William Howard Russell’s Civil War, p. 150, Russell to Delane, October 14, 1861.
87. Ibid., p. 125, Russell to Delane, September 13, 1861.
Chapter 7: “It Takes Two to Make a Quarrel”
1. Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis: Confederate President, 3 vols. (New York, 1959), vol. 1, p. 141.
2. W. S. Hoole, Confederate Foreign Agent: The European Diary of Major Edward C. Anderson (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1976), p. 66, September 26, 1861.
3. Harriet Owsley, “Henry Shelton Sanford and Federal Surveillance Abroad, 1861–1865,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 48 (Sept. 1961), p. 215.
4. Joseph A. Fry, Henry S. Sanford: Diplomacy and Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Reno, Nev., 1982), p. 45.
5. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 2, p. 899, October 31, 1861.
6. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, September 21, 1861.
7. MHS, Charles Francis Adams, Notebook Reminiscences, September 18 1867. Russell was able to reassure Adams that Britain had no intention of going to war with Mexico.
8. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, vol. 76, October 1, 1861.
9. James D. Bulloch, The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe, 2 vols. (New York, 1884), vol. 1, p. 115.
10. Hoole, Confederate Foreign Agent, p. 82, October 15, 1861.
11. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 892, October 17, 1861.
12. PRO 30/22/35 ff. 295–300, Lyons to Russell, October 22, 1861.
13. Martin Crawford (ed.), William Howard Russell’s Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861–1862 (Athens, Ga., 1992), p. 159, Russell to J. C. Bancroft Davis, October 19, 1861.
14. PRO 30/22/35 ff. 229–40, Lyons to Russell, September 6, 1861.
15. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (London, 1988), p. 357.
16. These included a letter sent to all the governors of states that possessed a port or coastal city, telling them to be prepared for a foreign invasion.
17. Sumner certainly knew the truth about France. Harriet Martineau wrote to him, “I know that our Cabinet has had, and still has, the utmost difficulty in preventing the French and Spanish governments from breaking the blockade.” Deborah Logan (ed.), The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau, 5 vols. (London, 2007), vol. 4, p. 307, Martineau to Sumner, c. November 1861.
18. BDOFA, Part 1, ser. C, vol. 5, doc. 336, pp. 331–32, Lyons to Russell, October 28, 1861.
19. PRO 30/22/35 ff. 263–78, private, Lyons to Russell, October 4, 1861.
20. E. D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, 2 vols. in 1 (New York, 1958), vol. 1, p. 194.
21. PRO 30/22/35 ff. 340–44, Lyons to Russell, December 6, 1861.
22. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, vol. 1, p. 194.
23. University of Southampton, Palmerston MSS, PP/GC/LE/144, Lewis to Palmerston, September 3, 1861.
24. Reynolds’s New
spaper, September 29, 1861.
25. W. C. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), vol. 1, pp. 48–50, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., September 28, 1861.
26. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 911, November 25, 1861.
27. He gave one of his typical barnstorming speeches, eliciting cheers from the audience. However, Yancey overplayed his hand and referred to the South as “the land of the free and the home of the oppressed,” which prompted Punch to remind him that the whites were the free and the blacks were the oppressed. Winthrop Donaldson Jordan and Edwin J. Pratt, Europe and the American Civil War (New York, 1931), p. 23.
28. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, pp. 222–23, Yancey and Mann to Robert Toombs, July 15, 1861.
29. R.J.M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, La., 2001), p. 138.
30. “I often think of you, and wonder what your feelings are with regard to the fearful events now happening,” Wilding told Hawthorne. In a long letter, he analyzed the current situation thus: “The anti-slavery people profess to believe that slavery has nothing to do with the struggle; that the Federal Government are no more contending for the abolition of slavery than are the Confederates. They won’t see that the contest is for the abolition of slavery in the only way that reasonable men in America have ever supposed it possible, by confining it to its present limits; and that the South, rather than submit to that, will, if they can, destroy the Union. There are many reasons for this feeling in England. In the first place, I believe Englishmen instinctively sympathize with rebels—if the rebellion be not against England. A great many also desire to see the American Union divided, supposing that it will be less powerful, and less threatening to England. All the enemies of popular government—and there are plenty even in England—rejoice to see what they suppose to be the failure of Republican institutions.” Julian Hawthorne (ed.), Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, vol. 2 (Boston, 1884), pp. 165–66, Wilding to Hawthorne, November 14, 1861.
31. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, vol. 1, pp. 52–53, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, October 6, 1861.
32. Ibid., pp. 61–63, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., October 25, 1861.
33. Lord Russell told an audience in Newcastle on October 14, “I cannot help asking myself as affairs progress in the conflict, to what good can it lead?” According to The Times, Russell then warned his listeners that a moment might come when intervention in the American war would be inevitable. After all, the paper reported him as saying, the war was not about slavery but about one side fighting for “empire, and the other for independence.” (In fact, Russell had said “power” rather than “independence,” which was less inflammatory. But someone at the paper had decided the phrase was too anodyne.) Norman Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1976), p. 238, fn.
34. Illustrated London News, November 2, 1861.
35. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger (eds.), Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill., 1997), p. 26, October 12, 1861. Seward claimed absurdly to his wife on October 29 that the wicked machinations of Britain “made it doubtful whether we can escape the yet deeper and darker abyss of foreign war.”
36. The consuls in Belfast, Glasgow, and Dublin all wrote strong letters on the subject.
37. John M. Taylor, William Henry Seward: Lincoln’s Right Hand (New York, 1991), p. 192.
38. MHS, “Bright-Sumner Letters, 1861–1872,” October 1912, pp. 93–165, Bright to Sumner, November 20, 1861. But if the Leicester Guardian was anything to go by, there was still an opportunity to influence public opinion toward the North: “By the domestic fireside, on the exchange, and in the counting house … every tide of events has been anxiously watched,” it commented. The emotional response to the war was not “on account of the great commercial interests involved but the feeling that those taking part in the contest are bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh.” Blackett, Divided Hearts, p. 6.
39. Crawford (ed.), William Howard Russell’s Civil War, p. 165, Russell to J. C. Bancroft Davis, November 6, 1861.
40. Ibid.
41. PRO FO5/779, desp. 164, Archibald to Lyons, November 2, 1861. PRO FO282/9, f. 79, d. 163, Archibald to Lyons, November 1, 1861.
42. Seward has “the power,” Lyons added angrily, “of depriving British Subjects of their liberty, or retaining them in prison or liberating them by his own will and pleasure.” PRO FO282/9, f. 79, d. 163, Archibald to Lyons, November 1, 1861.
43. Anthony Trollope, North America (repr. London, 1968), p. 139.
44. Edward Chalfant, “A War So Near,” Journal of Confederate History, 6 (1990), p. 146.
45. Hoole, Confederate Foreign Agent, p. 88.
46. Stephen R. Wise, Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the Civil War (Columbia, S.C., 1988), p. 54.
47. New-York Historical Society, Narrative of Ebeneezer Wells (c. 1881), n.pp., c. November 9, 1861.
48. Hoole, Confederate Foreign Agent, p. 101.
49. James P. Gannon, Irish Rebels, Confederate Tigers (Mason City, Iowa, 1998), p. 10.
50. Mary Sophia Hill, A British Subject’s Recollections of the Confederacy (Baltimore, 1875), p. 60.
51. Quoted in Robert Douthat Meade, Judah P. Benjamin: Confederate Statesman (Baton Rouge, La., 2001), p. 182.
52. Hoole, Confederate Foreign Agent, p. 102.
53. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, vol. 76, November 2, 1861.
54. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 908, November 19, 1861.
55. Edward Chalfant, Both Sides of the Ocean (New York, 1982), p. 316.
56. PRO FO 198/21, p. 10, Lord Russell to Adams, November 28, 1861.
57. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (repr. Boston, 1973), p. 119.
58. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 913, November 27, 1861.
59. John Evan, Atlantic Impact (London, 1952), pp. 83–84. Karl Marx was scathing about Seward. His article for Die Presse on November 28 claimed, “We regard this latest operation of Mr. Seward as a characteristic act of tactlessness by self-conscious weakness simulating strength. If the naval incident hastens Seward’s removal from the Washington Cabinet, the United States will have no reason to record it as an ‘untoward event’ in the annals of its Civil War.”
60. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, vol. 76, November 27, 1861.
61. Ibid., November 29, 1861.
62. The Times, November 29, 1861.
63. James Chambers, Palmerston: The People’s Darling (London, 2004), p. 487, Palmerston to the Queen, December 5, 1861.
Chapter 8: The Lion Roars Back
1. William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Eugene H. Berwanger (New York, 1988), p. 326, November 16, 1861. Russell made a mistake and called Macfarland, McClernand.
2. BDOFA, part I, ser. C, vol. 5, pp. 361–62, Lord Lyons to Lord Russell, November 19, 1861.
3. New York Times, November 18, 1861; Sunday Transcript, November 17, 1861.
4. For example, Seward’s son Frederick, who was assistant secretary of state, wrote to the U.S. consul in Havana on November 22: “It gives the Department pleasure to acknowledge the great importance of the service which has been rendered by Captain Wilkes to his country.” D. P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861–1865 (New York, 1974), p. 115.
5. Charles Wilkes was the great-nephew of “Wilkes and Liberty” John Wilkes, the cheery eighteenth-century rogue who, in spite of himself, became a martyr and hero for political radicals opposing George III.
6. Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, 4 vols.; vol. 1: The Improvised War 1861–1862 (New York, 1959), p. 388.
7. Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 327, November 19, 1861.
8. The Times, December
3, 1861.
9. B. J. Lossing, A Centennial Edition of the History of the United States (Chicago, 1876), p. 587.
10. Howard K. Beale (ed.), The Diary of Edward Bates (Washington, D.C., 1933), p. 202, November 19, 1861.
11. Stephen W. Sears, The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860–1865 (New York, 1989), p. 136, McClellan to Mary Ellen, November 17, 1861.
12. PRO 30/22/35, ff. 317–23, Lyons to Russell, November 22, 1861.
13. Although the South was collectively holding its breath, in South Carolina a lonely General Robert E. Lee sent a little bouquet of violets to his daughter, and the following advice to his wife: “You must not build your hopes on peace on account of the United States going into a war with England.… Her rulers are not entirely mad, and if they find England is in earnest … they will adopt [peace]. We must make up our minds to fight our battles and win our independence alone. No one will help us.” Robert E. Lee, Recollections and Letters (New York, repr. 2004), pp. 51–52.
14. Anthony Trollope, North America (repr. London, 1968), p. 138.
15. PRO FO 519/178, Lord Clarendon to Lord Cowley, November 29, 1861, quoted in Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, p. 131.
16. As the Duke of Argyll wrote from France: “If such an act as that committed by the San Jacinto be allowed, I see nothing which would prevent any European Government seizing on board of our ships any refugees from their revolted provinces, who might be coming to England (as many do) to excite popular sympathy with their cause.” George Douglas, Eighth Duke of Argyll (1823–1900): Autobiography and Memoirs, ed. the Dowager Duchess of Argyll, 2 vols. (London, 1906), p. 180, Duke of Argyll to Gladstone, December 7, 1861.
17. John Morely, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone: 1809–1872, 2 vols. (London, 1908), vol. 2, pp. 73–74, Gladstone to Argyll, December 3, 1861.
18. Sir Theodore Martin, The Life of his Royal Highness the Prince Consort, vol. 5 (New York, 1880), p. 349. Prince Albert continued: “We are therefore glad to believe that upon a full consideration of the circumstances, and of the undoubted breach of international law committed, they would spontaneously offer such redress as alone could satisfy this country, viz. the restoration of the unfortunate passengers and a suitable apology.”
A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War Page 101