19. South Carolina Historical Society, Feilden-Smythe MSS, 47, Feilden to Julia, April 6, 1865.
20. With the exception of Judah Benjamin, no one thought that this was even a remote possibility.
21. Frederick W. Seward (ed.), Seward at Washington (New York, 1891), p. 270.
22. Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War (New York, 1913), p. 274.
23. Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (Boston, 1911), vol. 2, p. 284, April 14, 1865.
24. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 806.
25. Ibid., p. 814.
26. Seward, ed., Seward at Washington, p. 278.
27. I am indebted to Derek Mayhew for supplying me with this information about his ancestor. Source for the footnote is Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 4 (Richmond, Va., 1877), ed. Rev. J. W. Jones, p. 22. Conolly’s return to Ireland was reported in the Donegal Advertiser, which noted acidly: “Here again, we have him impressing upon the Donegal electors how much better it was for him to go to America than to stay like ordinary members and attend to the dull routine of his parliamentary duties.” NARA, Dispatches, U.S. Consuls in Sheffield, Consul Abbot to Seward, May 15, 1865.
28. South Carolina Historical Society, Feilden-Smythe MSS, 48, Feilden to Julia, May 4, 1865.
29. Keith Robbins, John Bright (London, 1978), p. 175.
30. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, April 26, 1865.
31. Alan Hankinson, Man of Wars: William Howard Russell of “The Times,” 1820–1907 (London, 1982), p. 182.
32. George S. Wykoff, “Charles Mackay: England’s Forgotten Civil War Correspondent,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 26 (1927), pp. 59–60.
33. Economist, April 29, 1865.
34. Oscar Maurer, “Punch on Slavery and the Civil War,” Victorian Studies (Sept. 1957), pp. 4–28.
35. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 2, p. 1419, April 30, 1865.
36. NARA, M.T-185, roll 8, vol. 8, Consul Zebina Eastman to Mr. Hunter, Acting Secretary of State, May 8, 1865; Liverpool RO, Durning-Holt MSS, Diary of Emma Holt, 902 Dur 1/4, May 8, 1865.
37. Virginia Mason, The Public Life and Diplomatic Correspondence of James M. Mason (New York, 1906), p. 562.
38. Library of Congress, Mason MSS, private letterbook, Mason to Wood, April 21, 1865.
39. Louis Martin Sears, “A Confederate Diplomat at the Court of Napoleon III,” American Historical Review, 26, 2 (Jan. 1921), p. 278, Slidell to Mason, April 26, 1865.
40. Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel (eds.), Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 vols. (Secaucus, N.J., 1985), vol. 3, p. 764.
41. James M. Morgan, Recollections of a Rebel Reefer (Boston, 1917), p. 238.
42. Frank E. Vandiver (ed.), The Civil War Diary of General Josiah Gorgas (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1947), p. 184, May 4, 1864.
43. The money was taken from Davis when he was captured. A typical rate on the Inman line between New York and London was £5 per adult.
44. ORN, ser. 1, vol. 16, p. 333, report of Commander Reynolds, May 16, 1865.
45. James J. Barnes and Patricia P. Barnes (eds.), The American Civil War Through British Eyes, vol. 3 (Kent, Ohio, 2005), p. 302, Bruce to Russell, May 16, 1865.
46. William Watson, The Adventures of a Blockade Runner (College Station, Tex., 2001), p. 823.
47. Margaret Leach, Reveille in Washington (Alexandria, Va., 1962, repr. 1980), p. 379.
48. News and letters were trickling in from the South. Consul Arthur Lynn was finally rescued from his Crusoe-like existence in Galveston. He had continued to send his dispatches, never knowing if they had reached their destination. Miraculously, a few did eventually arrive. The Foreign Office, on the other hand, had written him off as lost until further notice more than a year earlier. Lynn now learned that his sister had been trying to contact him for the past eighteen months with questions arising from their late father’s estate. PRO FO5/976, draft, Foreign Office to Messrs. Brown and Dunlop, Glasgow, Solicitors, January 4, 1865.
49. Edward Waldo Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club (New York, 1918), p. 405.
50. PRO 30/22/38, ff. 186–89, Bruce to Russell, April 20, 1865.
51. PRO 30/22/38, ff. 198–99, Bruce to Russell, April 27, 1865.
52. James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes (eds.), Private and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers to the Foreign Secretaries (Selinsgrove, Pa., 1993), p. 362, Bruce to Russell, May 22, 1865.
53. South Carolina Historical Society, Feilden-Smythe MSS (49), Feilden to Julia, May 30, 1865.
54. Columbia University, Blackwell MSS, Elizabeth Blackwell to Barbara Bodichon, May 25, 1865.
Epilogue
1. The second largest army, the Prussian, was roughly half the size at 484,000; the French had about 343,000; and the British Army no more than 220,000 regulars plus 370,000 volunteer and militia soldiers.
2. Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, 4 vols., vol. 4: The Organized War to Victory, 1864–1865 (New York, 1971), pp. 367–68.
3. Craig L. Symonds and William J. Clipson, The Naval Institute Historical Atlas of the U.S. Navy (Annapolis, Md., 1995), p. 105.
4. The reopening of communications with the South meant release for the many families in Britain held fast in the agony of limbo. Joseph Burnley received definite proof of Frederick Farr’s death. He also began fresh inquiries about Robert Livingstone and Stephen Smelt, the Manchester boy who had run away with his best friend in 1863. Nothing was forthcoming with regards to Robert; Livingstone had been so optimistic that he had visited the American legation on March 11 to make sure Charles Francis Adams had not forgotten his son. But there was positive news in Stephen’s case. Burnley learned that the boy had been wounded at the Battle of Olustee and captured by the Confederates. The Federal authorities thought he was still alive. Mr. Smelt, Stephen’s father, learned that his son had been found but was not coming home after all. Stephen had discovered a taste for army life. “I have the honor to state that I have no desire to leave the U.S. service as I wish to serve out my term of enlistment and become a citizen of the U.S. since I joined from a Prisoner of War my health was never better, as the surgeon’s certificate will show.” NARA, Stephen Smelt, in camp in Raleigh, N.C., July 9, 1865, to Lieutenant J. O’Connel, Adjutant, 47th New York State Volunteers. I am grateful to Mike Musick for bringing these letters to my attention.
5. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), pp. 211–13.
6. Colonel Currie had married an American woman in 1864, Harriet Caroll Jackson, a granddaughter of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. After the war he became a special agent for the Post Office, overseeing the delivery of diplomatic mail en route between San Francisco and Hong Kong. On his retirement, the couple moved to Britain to live on the Isle of Wight.
7. A. S. Lewis (ed.), My Dear Parents (New York, 1982), pp. 159, 169.
8. Isle of Man Examiner, October 2, 1897.
9. The total cost of the war could have bought the freedom of every slave, given each one 40 acres and a mule, and provided a bounty for a hundred years of lost earnings. See E. B. Long with Barbara Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 (New York, 1971; repr. New York, 1985), appendix.
10. Frances Leigh, Ten Years on a Gerogia Plantation Since the War (London, 1883), pp. 52–53.
11. The consular records show that there were 352 British residents still living in Charleston in May 1865. Some of them were blockade runners who had no means of getting home.
12. South Carolina Historical Society, Feilden-Smythe MSS, Trevor-Battye MSS, n.d.
13. Robert Summers, The Fall and Redemption of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd (n.p., 2008), p. 56.
14. Sir Frederick Bruce was relieved that the amnesty included the discharge of all military prisoners still awaiting trial. But there was a catch for foreign prisoners of war. Henry O’Brien sent a plaintive letter to
the legation, asking for help because he did not want to swear allegiance to the United States, since “by doing so I expatriate myself.… I am aware that I did wrong in joining a foreign army without Her Majesty’s Licences and consequently have born humiliation and insult without any hope of redress, but now as the war is over and all the prisoners of war being released and as I only ask to be allowed to leave the U.S., I hope you will at least obtain for me some decision by the Washington Military Authorities.” PRO FO115/448, f. 402, Henry O’Brien to legation, June 14, 1865.
15. Lonnie A. Burnett, Henry Hotze, Confederate Propagandist (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2008), p. 30.
16. New York Times, June 26, 1878.
17. James T. Hubbell and James Geary (eds.), Biographical Dictionary of the Union (Westport, Conn., 1995), p. 360.
18. Jay Luvaas, The Military Legacy of the Civil War (Lawrence, Kans., 1988), p. 122.
19. Letters of Queen Victoria, ed. George E. Buckle, 3 vols. (London, 1930–32), vol. 1, p. 594, Lord Clarendon to Queen Victoria, May 1, 1869.
20. Bancroft was so gratuitously rude about Lord Palmerston, who had been dead for less than four months, that an official protest was lodged by the Foreign Office with the American legation: “Lincoln took to heart the eternal truths of liberty … Palmerston did nothing that will endure; Lincoln finished a work which all time cannot overthrow.… Palmerston … was attended by the British aristocracy to his grave, which, after a few years, will hardly be noticed.… Lincoln [will] … be remembered through all time by his countrymen, and by all the peoples of the world.”
21. MHS, Argyll Letters, p. 86, Duchess of Argyll to Charles Sumner, July 4, 1865.
22. The easiest route to winning Seward’s trust was to behave toward him as if he were still the most powerful politician in Washington. “He is vain,” wrote the British minister, Frederick Bruce, on May 2; “to show deference to his judgment … is a species of subtle flattery which is not without weight.” James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes (eds.), Private and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers to the Foreign Secretaries (Selinsgrove, Pa., 1993), p. 378.
23. PRFA, I (1868), p. 83, Charles Francis Adams to Seward, May 2, 1867.
24. The Dominion of Canada was a semiautonomous state under the sovereignty of the Crown. In theory, its parliament was answerable to the Imperial Parliament in London, but in practice the Canadians were left to govern their internal affairs, though not their external relationships with foreign countries, including America.
25. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, April 25, 1867.
26. Correspondence Concerning Claims Against Great Britain, vol. 3 (Washington, 1869), p. 674, Seward to Adams, May 2, 1867.
27. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life, 4 vols. (New York, 1889), vol. 4, pp. 205–9.
28. Lord Russell, quoted in ibid., p. 210.
29. Correspondence Concerning Claims Against Great Britain, vol. 3, p. 683, Seward to Adams, November 16, 1867.
30. Letters of Henry Adams, ed. Jacob Clavner Levenson (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), vol. 1, p. 498, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., July 14, 1865. He remained the same stiff and isolated figure who had arrived in 1861. “I am continually puzzled to know how we get along together,” complained his son Henry. “I find the Chief rather harder, less a creature of our time than ever. It pains me absolutely … to see him so separate from the human race. I crave for what is new.… He cares nothing for it, and a new discovery in physics or in chemistry, or a new development in geology never seems to touch any chord in him.”
31. Martin Duberman, Charles Francis Adams (New York, 1961), pp. 330–31.
32. Frederick W. Seward (ed.), Seward at Washington (New York, 1891), p. 538.
33. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (repr. Boston, 1973), p. 246.
34. New York Nation, 3 (1866), p. 234.
35. Calculations based on http://www.measuringworth.com.
36. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals (New York, 2005), p. 711.
37. Maureen Robson, “The Alabama Claims and the Anglo-American Reconciliation,” Canadian Historical Review, 42/1 (1961), p. 22.
38. Baxter, “June Meeting: The British High Commissioners at Washington in 1871,” p. 350.
39. Mary Sophia Hill, A British Subject’s Recollections of the Confederacy (Baltimore, 1975), p. 66.
40. Richard Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 1865–1898 (London, 1999), p. 114.
41. Bruce Herald, March 28, 1873.
42. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (New York, 2003), p. 640.
43. William Michael Rossetti, “English Opinion on the American War,” Atlantic Monthly, 17 (Feb. 1866), p. 129.
44. Ella Lonn’s magisterial studies of foreign volunteers (published between 1940 and 1951) shed much-needed light on their numbers, but placing the volunteers alongside the other aspects of Britain’s role in the war was outside the scope of her work.
45. An essential reading list for the Civil War and Anglo-American diplomacy would include: Ephraim D. Adams, H. C. Allen, Richard J. M. Blackett, Kinley Brauer, Duncan Andrew Campbell, Adrian Cook, D. P. Crook, Hugh Dubrulle, Norman B. Ferris, Charles M. Hubbard, Brian Jenkins, Howard Jones, Dean B. Mahin, Robert E. May, Frank Merli, Philip Myers, Frank Owsley, Jay Sexton, Warren F. Spencer, Brian Holden Reid, Philip Van Doren Stern, and Robin Winks.
46. Gladstone, for example, later blamed his support for the South on his inability to see the issue in its entirety: “That my opinion was founded upon a false estimate of the facts was the very least part of my fault. I did not perceive the gross impropriety of such an utterance from a cabinet minister, of a power allied in blood and language, and bound to loyal neutrality; the case being further exaggerated by the fact that we already, so to speak, under indictment before the world for not (as was alleged) having strictly enforced the laws of neutrality in the matter of the cruiser. My offence … illustrates vividly … an incapacity of viewing subjects all round, in their extraneous as well as in their internal properties.” John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 1809–1872, 2 vols. (London, 1908), vol. 2, p. 82.
47. Rossetti, “English Opinion on the American War,” p. 149.
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Glossary
adjutant—A staff officer assigned to handle administrative duties for a commanding officer.
battery—A Union artillery battery had six cannons with more than one hundred men, Confederate batteries usually had four; a position where cannons were mounted.
blockade runner—A swift vessel used by the Confederates to evade the Federal naval blockade of Southern ports; the captain of a blockade runner.
bombproof—A shelter from artillery attack, often built with timber and packed earth.
bounty—A cash bonus paid to entice men into the army.
breastwork—A chest-high barricade built to shield defenders from enemy fire.
canister—A tin can containing twenty-seven iron balls packed in sawdust; when fired from a cannon, the can ripped open and showered the balls at the enemy.
contraband—A term popularized by General Benjamin Butler in 1861 for fugitive slaves who crossed into Northern territory.
corduroy road—A road constructed with logs, often in otherwise impassable muddy areas.
crimping—The forced enlistment of soldiers or sailors by trickery or coercion.
division—A force of approximately 12,000 soldiers in three or four brigades. A brigade generally consisted of four to six regiments. A regiment was composed of about a thousand officers and men divided into ten companies.
A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War Page 114