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

by Amanda Foreman

  21. PRO FO5/830, ff. 346–48, Lord Lyons to Lord Russell, May 30, 1862.

  22. Seward dispatched a trusted representative to New Orleans to examine each claim of judicial abuse. It came as no surprise to Butler’s critics when every one of his cases was overturned.

  23. William Watson, Life in the Confederate Army: Being the Observations and Experiences of an Alien in the South During the Civil War (London, 1887; repr. Baton Rouge, La., 1995), p. 371.

  24. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (London, 1988), p. 416.

  25. Watson, Life in the Confederate Army, p. 361.

  26. “The Journal of Robert Neve,” private collection, p. 40.

  27. Shelby Foote, The Civil War, 3 vols. (New York, 1986), vol. 1, p. 385.

  28. Halleck proclaimed a blanket ban on all journalists and noncombatants on May 13, on the grounds that Confederate spies were among them.

  29. Illustrated London News, April 26, 1862.

  30. Ibid., June 14, 1862.

  31. E. B. Long, with Barbara Lond, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 (New York, 1971; repr. New York, 1985), p. 726.

  32. Illustrated London News, July 19, 1862.

  33. Ibid., July 26, 1862.

  34. Camp Douglas was originally a training camp for volunteers; after the capture of Fort Donelson in February, the temporary barracks had been converted to hold enlisted prisoners of war; officers were sent to a separate prison. There, Stanley shared a straw pallet with W. H. Wilkes, a Southern nephew of the notorious Charles Wilkes.

  35. Hughes, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, p. 141.

  36. Ibid., p. 146.

  37. PRO FO115/300, ff. 151–52, Lyons to Russell, May 5, 1862.

  38. See, e.g., OR, ser. 2, vol. 4, S. 117, William Hoffman to Edwin Stanton, June 28, 1862.

  39. Hughes (ed.), Sir Henry Morton Stanley, p. 148. Hughes notes that George Levy, the author of the most comprehensive study of Camp Douglas, has serious doubts about Stanley’s account. However, there is sufficient evidence to accept that he was there, and did join the 1st Illinois Light Artillery.

  40. OR, ser. 1, vol. 10/1, p. 73, Report of Col. John F. De Courcy, June 20, 1862.

  41. Hugh Dubrulle, “A Military Legacy of the Civil War: The British Inheritance,” Civil War History (June 2003), pp. 153–80. The military observers were genuinely impressed, however. Sir George Seymour wrote to Lord Russell on May 9, 1862: “I have just seen a letter from an English officer (a man who has seen a great deal of service) who has been taking a look at the Federal army. A finer one—or one better provided with all things necessary he never—he says—saw—and he adds … ‘that it would require a force of 100,000 men to keep them out of Canada.’ Meanwhile he says that he does not trace much hostile feeling towards us, and that he has met with a great deal of civility from the Federal Officers.” PRO 33/22/39, f. 163.

  42. Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction (1879, repr. New York, 1992), p. 21.

  43. He claimed to be the son of Brigadier Sir Charles Wyndham of the 5th Light Cavalry, and a Frenchwoman named Zoë Vauthrin. His mother allegedly gave birth to him in the middle of the English Channel, on board the Arab. But there was no HMS Arab in commission in 1833, nor did the Royal Navy have a Captain Charles Wyndham. Nor was he the son, illegitimate or otherwise, of Lord Leconsfield, although there was a Captain Charles Wyndham, killed in action at Jagdalak on October 29, 1841.

  44. Edward G. Longacre, Jersey Cavaliers (Hightstown, N.J., 1992), p. 47.

  45. Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction, p. 53.

  46. Ruth Scarborough, Siren of the South (Macon, 1997), p. 53. This same Henry Kyd Douglas has been accused of being the man responsible for Robert E. Lee’s Antietam battle plans falling into Federal hands. Wilbur D. Jones, “Who Lost the Lost Order?,” Civil War Regiments: A Journal of the American Civil War, 5/3 (1997).

  47. Mary Sophia Hill, A British Subject’s Recollections of the Confederacy (Baltimore, 1875), pp. 19, 20.

  48. Wyndham’s lieutenant colonel reported: “All the officers, as far as I could see, behaved bravely in trying to rally their men, but to no avail. They retreated without order and in the greatest confusion—for the most part panic-stricken.” OR, ser. 1, vol. 15/1, p. 680.

  49. Longacre, Jersey Cavaliers, p. 92.

  50. Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants, 3 vols. (repr. New York, 1970), vol. 1, p. 432.

  51. James I. Robertson, Jr., Stonewall Jackson (New York, 1997), p. 429.

  52. Ibid., p. 449.

  53. Wilmer Jones, Generals in Blue and Gray (New York, 2006), p. 80.

  54. PRO 30/22/36, ff. 87–90, Lyons to Russell, May 6, 1862. “So strongly have I been impressed with the necessity of being at the seat of Government, that with the exception of the two months … attendance upon the Prince of Wales, I have been only four nights absent from Washington,” he wrote apologetically.

  55. West Sussex RO, Lyons MSS, box 300, Lord Lyons to Augusta Lyons, May 6, 1862.

  56. When Lyons called on Seward to say goodbye, Lyons reassured him that it would be far better for him to spend his holiday in England than at an American resort, cut off from both capitals. Seward agreed, reported Lyons. “There was, [Seward] was happy to say, no difficult question pending between the two governments.” PRO FO 5/831, ff. 171–74, Lyons to Russell, June 9, 1862.

  57. The legation often acted as a missing persons bureau. Instructions like this one to the consulate in New York were not uncommon: “to insert in the New York Herald and New York Tribune the following advertisement: ‘Ashley Norton Jones, otherwise called George Temple, who is believed to be serving in the United States Army, is earnestly entreated, for the sake of his afflicted parents to communicate at once with the Reverend Rush Buel, 44 William Street, Providence, RI. His parents will consult his wishes on all matters. Officers or comrades are requested to call his attention to this notice’. Notice should appear every alternative day for a month.”

  58. Bayly Ellen Marks and Mark Norton Schatz, Between North and South: A Maryland Journalist Views the Civil War. The Narrative of William Wilkins Glenn, 1861–1869 (Cranbury, N.J., 1976), pp. 64–65, June 15, 1862.

  59. Just before he left, on June 13, Lyons informed the Foreign Office that Congress had voted to recognize the Republics of Haiti and Liberia. Previous administrations had declined because “those Republics are governed by men of Negro descent.”

  60. Lord Newton (ed.), Lord Lyons: A Record of British Diplomacy, 2 vols. (London, 1914), vol. 1, pp. 85–86, Lyons to Russell, May 16, 1862.

  61. Letters of Lord St. Maur and Lord Edward St. Maur (London, 1888), p. 251, Lord Edward St. Maur to Duke of Somerset, June 9, 1862; p. 254, to Duchess of Somerset, June 19, 1862.

  62. Ibid., p. 260. It became a Southern myth that Lord Edward St. Maur “fought” alongside General Longstreet in the Seven Days’ Battles. By the same token, Lord Edward returned home believing that Southern Anglophobia was a Northern myth.

  63. Cueto had arrived in America at around the same time that W. H. Russell gave up trying to follow the Army of the Potomac. Put off by Russell’s tangle with officialdom, Cueto decided he would work as a free agent, traveling without passes or letters to wherever the action seemed most exciting. He did not get very far. A Yankee civilian remembered meeting him while they were both imprisoned in Castle Godwin. “Soon after I learned … that Cueto had died of typhoid fever in New York City.” George Washington Frosst, A South Berwick Yankee Behind Confederate Lines (Part II). Cueto was in a Confederate prison in North Carolina for eight months before he was able to smuggle out a letter to Consul Bunch in late November 1862. The consul immediately sent a letter of protest to Judah P. Benjamin, who ordered an investigation into Cueto’s arrest.

  64. But when Major George Longley started a fight with a Federal officer while traveling on a Northern train, and was arrested for breaching the peace, The Times awarded him ample space to complain about his treatment. William Stuart, secretary of the legation, was m
uch less sympathetic. He refused to protest on Longley’s behalf, saying that he had failed to mention, “as stated in Mr. Bernal’s dispatch … that you had remarked to Colonel Massey, that you believed the South to be in the right … which must have given just grounds to a Federal Officer with whom you were unacquainted.” PRO FO115/340, f. 36, Stuart to Major Longley, September 28, 1862.

  65. Catherine Cooper Hopley, Life in the South from the Commencement of the War by a Blockaded British Subject (London, 1863, repr. New York, 1971), p. 348.

  66. Strode, Jefferson Davis, vol. 2, p. 260.

  67. Dawson, Reminiscences, p. 49.

  68. Ibid., p. 51.

  69. James M. Morgan, Recollections of a Rebel Reefer (Boston, 1917), pp. 226–27.

  70. Devon RO, 867B/Z36, entr. 14, July 5, 1862, unknown writer.

  Chapter 12: The South Is Rising

  1. William Watson, Life in the Confederate Army: Being the Observations and Experiences of an Alien in the South During the Civil War (London, 1887; repr. Baton Rouge, La., 1995), p. 398.

  2. Ibid., p. 407.

  3. Ibid., p. 413.

  4. W. C. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), vol. 1, p. 146, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., May 16, 1862.

  5. Ibid., p. 145.

  6. Ibid., p. 137, Charles Francis Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., April 17, 1862.

  7. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 2, p. 996, May 6, 1862.

  8. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, vol. 1, p. 145, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., May 16, 1862.

  9. Ibid., p. 141, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., May 8, 1862.

  10. Countess of Stafford (ed.), Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville, vol. 4 (London, 1905), p. 46, May 10, 1862.

  11. John Black Atkins, The Life of Sir William Howard Russell, 2 vols. (London, 1911), vol. 2, p. 173.

  12. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, vol. 1, p. 142, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., May 8, 1862.

  13. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, May 19, 1862.

  14. Illustrated London News, June 14, 1862.

  15. H. F. Bell, Palmerston, 2 vols. (London, 1936), vol. 2, p. 317.

  16. Edward Chalfant, Better in Darkness (New York, 1994), p. 39.

  17. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, June 12, 1862.

  18. Ibid., July 12, 1862.

  19. F. L. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy (2nd ed., Chicago, 1959), p. 145.

  20. Norman Longmate, Hungry Mills: The Story of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, 1861–5 (London, 1978), p. 95.

  21. D. P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861–1865 (New York, 1974), p. 198.

  22. The problem for the North and the South was that the cotton famine had been brought on by a complicated set of circumstances. The distress suffered by the workers was real, but the “famine” was a combination of overproduction during the previous three years, a surplus of some grades of cotton, and a dearth of other grades. As Howard Jones writes, “The initial surplus led to reduced work time, and its eventual depletion extended the layoffs.” Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009), p. 227. Also, in the first year of the war, the cotton glut in England was so great that Northern textile mills were actually able to buy surplus British stock and ship it over.

  23. Robert Douthat Meade, Judah P. Benjamin: Confederate Statesman (Baton Rouge, La., 2001), p. 248.

  24. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, pp. 402–4, James Spence to James Mason, April 28, 1862.

  25. Virginia Mason, The Public Life and Diplomatic Correspondence of James M. Mason (New York, 1906), pp. 271–72, Dispatch 9, Mason to Benjamin, May 2, 1862.

  26. Trinity College Library, Cambridge, Houghton MS CB36/2[3], Henry Bright to Lord Houghton, July 22, 1862.

  27. Library of Congress, Hotze Papers, Private Letter Book, Hotze to John George Witt, August 11, 1864.

  28. For example, as Dudley Mann wrote excitedly to Judah P. Benjamin on September 15, 1862, after Blackwood’s published a long article about Jefferson Davis, written by the Hon. Robert Bourke: “Blackwood stands in the same relation to the British periodical press as the Times does to the British newspaper press. They are wonderfully influential in molding European opinion; for their power is not confined to Great Britain.” ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, pp. 528–29.

  29. OR, ser. 4, vol. 2, pp. 23–25, Edwin De Leon to Judah P. Benjamin, July 30, 1862.

  30. Hotze’s competitor was a shabby little rag called the London American, edited by the eccentric George Francis Train. By coincidence, its offices were one door down, separated from the Index by a tobacconist’s. The Liverpool Mail once described Train as “our extremely fast Yankee cousin, famous for making galloping speeches, for writing galloping books, and galloping himself around the world” (February 4, 1860).

  31. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, vol. 1, p. 153, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., June 6, 1862.

  32. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, p. 326, Henry Hotze to Robert Mercer Hunter, February 1, 1862.

  33. Thurlow Weed, Harriet A. Weed, and Thurlow Weed Barnes, Life of Thurlow Weed, 2 vols. (Boston, 1884), vol. 2, p. 416, Weed to New York Common Council, July 1, 1862.

  34. Edward Dicey, Spectator of America, ed. Herbert Mitgang (Athens, Ga., 1971), p. 144.

  35. For example, on April 19, 1862, the Illustrated London News asked why it was that Americans were so sensitive about British criticism—and why the English had such a knack for provoking them with “ill-timed and unfair comment.” “The explanation,” it decided, “is to be found in their mutual ignorance of each other’s feelings and modes of thought. America does not understand England, and England does not understand America.”

  36. “I am disturbed by the state of feeling which is growing up between our two countries,” he continued. “It matters not how averse your government or ours may be to war, your people have become so inflamed against us by the daily ministrations of the press that no government will be strong enough to control their resentment.” National Library of Scotland, Tweeddale Mun./Yester MSS, (0439)MS14467, ff. 40–43, John Bigelow to Lord Russell, August 2, 1862.

  37. For example, on August 8, Secretary of War Stanton announced that citizens eligible for the draft (which called for 300,000 new soldiers) were forbidden to travel abroad. That day, the British legation sent a report that hundreds of British travelers were being hauled off trains and arrested at quaysides on the grounds of being “draft evaders.” Among the Britons forcibly removed from a Baltimore train was a Mr. Drury, the legation’s diplomatic messenger. PRO 30/36/1, desp. 150, William Stuart to Lord Russell, August 14, 1862. Letters of Lord St. Maur and Lord Edward St. Maur (London, 1888), p. 250, n.d, c. 1862.

  38. Countess of Stafford (ed.), Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville, vol. 4, p. 55.

  39. E. D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, 2 vols. (New York, 1958), vol. 1, p. 305–57.

  40. Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974, 1980), vol. 2, p. 88.

  41. R.S.M. Blackett, Divided Hearts, p. 173.

  42. E. D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, vol. 2, p. 20, Lyons to Stuart, July 5, 1862.

  43. “I know it will be said that this is giving them the means and money for a prolongation of the contest,” admitted the duke. “But its effect in this way would be comparatively small, whilst it would greatly tend to dissipate the danger which is really a growing one.” MHS, Argyll Letters, p. 99, Argyll to Sumner, July 12, 1862.

  44. However, Zebina Eastman obtained circumstantial evidence in November that Lindsay’s firm purchased the Calypso for blockade running. NARA, M. T-185, roll 7, vol. 7, Eastman to Seward, November 20, 1862.

  45. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, vol. 1, p. 163, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., July 4, 1862.

  46. Howard Jones, Union in Peril: The Cri
sis over British Intervention in the Civil War, p. 127.

  47. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, vol. 2, p. 20, Lyons to Stuart, July 5, 1862.

  48. MPUS, p. 133, Adams to Seward, July 11, 1862.

  49. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, p. 214.

  50. West Sussex RO, Lyons MSS, box 300, Lyons to sister, July 19, 1862. “I had a long talk with Lord Palmerston. I had also a sufficiently long conversation with Lord Derby at his own home.”

  51. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 1037, July 17, 1862.

  52. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, July 17, 1862.

  53. Jones, Union in Peril, p. 133.

  54. Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, vol. 2, p. 100.

  55. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, vol. 1, p. 167, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., July 19, 1862.

  56. OR, ser. 4, vol. 2, pp. 23–25, Edwin De Leon to Judah P. Benjamin, July 30, 1862.

  57. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 1044, July 19, 1862.

  58. Confederate propaganda had been so successful that the great humanitarian and social reformer Lord Shaftesbury was firmly pro-South on moral grounds. He told John Slidell that he “viewed it as a struggle, on the one hand, for independence and self-government, on the other, for empire, political power, and material interests.” ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, pp. 546–48, Slidell to Benjamin, September 29, 1862. Edwin De Leon claimed, “With the tide of public opinion running so strong in England that even Lord Shaftesbury and Exeter Hall now abandon their Yankee sympathies as untrue.…” OR, ser. 4, vol. 2, S. 128, De Leon to Benjamin, September 30, 1862.

  59. MPUS, p. 160, Adams to Seward, July 17, 1862.

  60. Quoted in Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, p. 219.