A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (104 page)

Slidell, the moment he heard she was to have an audience, was so afraid of the apparent influence of the woman … that she might injure him at Richmond by her letters, or on her return home, and thus perhaps effect his recall which he by no means desired, that he immediately went and left his card; and although he had declared she should not set … foot in his house or know his family, he sent Mrs. S. to call upon her too. When she went to have her interview, Mr. S. sent Eustis, his secretary of legation, with her to present her. She had them in fact all at her feet.
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Louis-Napoleon was not only charming and sympathetic—taking the Confederate heroine’s hand and gently seating her on a cushion next to him—but he also surprised her with the depth of his knowledge about the war. “Tell the President,” she recorded him as saying, “that I have thoughts on his military plans—he has not concentrated enough. The Yankees have also made true blunders. If instead of throwing all your strength upon Vicksburg you could have left that to its fate and strengthened Lee so as to have taken Washington, the war would have ended.” He continued to be charming even when she asked him directly whether he would recognize the Confederate States. “I wish to God I could,” Louis-Napoleon answered. “But I cannot do it without England.”
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At the end of their conversation, the emperor escorted Rose to the door and shook her hand. He seemed to be offering hope, and for a short while she was elated by the interview. She wrote in such glowing terms to Georgiana Walker in Bermuda that her friend recorded in her diary:

Mrs. G. is much delighted with her visit to Paris, & considers her mission to have been a successful one. She had an audience of the Emperor, & was treated with marked attention. She says she advocated our cause warmly & earnestly, & left not one point uncovered; that the Emperor received her as one directly from the President; & bade her tell the President that his sympathy was all with him, & that he should do all in his power to aid him. The Empress says, “His Majesty is not averse to interviews with beautiful escaped prisoners.” I have since heard that Mrs. Greenhow had attended a Ball at the Tuileries, & had supped in the room & perhaps at the table with their Majesties.
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But in reality the emperor had only uttered the same platitudes that Slidell had heard a dozen times before, and once Rose was able to reflect on the interview, she realized that she, too, had been fobbed off: “My belief is the stronger now that our only chance of recognition must now come from England and that, that is the place to which our efforts must be directed.” She returned to London on February 6, 1864. “I left my little one behind and my heart was heavy,” she wrote in her diary.
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James Bulloch, who had arrived in France on January 27, escorted her to the station, helped her onto the train, and deposited her in the carriage reserved for women traveling alone. Aware of the heavy burdens upon him, Rose was touched by his courtesy.

Bulloch was too discreet to unburden himself, but he was that day suffering “a greater pain and regret than I ever thought it possible to feel.”
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He had crossed the Channel in a last-ditch effort to save the rams, which were still being held at Lairds in Liverpool. Since they belonged to a French subject, M. Bravay, the emperor could, in theory, request their return to France. But Louis-Napoleon refused to intervene. Slidell assumed that the emperor was simply paying lip service to Northern demands, but Bulloch knew better. “There was a good deal said about the personal sympathy of the Emperor for the South; and his earnest desire that by some means or other we might get our ships out,” he wrote angrily after the war, but “the sympathy and hope were sheer mockery.”
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The day after Rose’s departure, on February 7, Bulloch sent a letter to Bravay authorizing him to sell the Lairds rams as quickly as possible. (It took several months, but after considerable haggling the Admiralty bought the ships for £180,000.) Bulloch’s distress was not only for the loss of the rams; Slidell had decided that the ship construction operation was jeopardizing his relationship with the emperor and ordered Bulloch to sell the unfinished ironclads in Bordeaux. Determined not to be thwarted, Bulloch pretended to acquiesce while he sought a broker who would agree to buy the vessels on paper only.

Even legitimate Confederate enterprises were buckling under pressure. The price of the Confederate cotton bond had dropped precipitously, from £70 to £34, after Grant’s victory at the Battle of Chattanooga and now fluctuated around the £50 mark. The cost of shipping supplies to the Confederacy and the increasing likelihood of capture were wiping out the profits of blockade running.
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For the first time since the war, the survival of Fraser, Trenholm and Co.—the Southern shipping firm and financial clearinghouse for the Confederacy in Europe—appeared to be in doubt. “Every consignment to us is closely scrutinized and anything at all suspicious would be seized at once,” Charles Prioleau in Liverpool explained to a would-be arms supplier. Nor could he extend further credit to the Confederate government, not even to purchase replacement blockade runners for the Ordnance Department. Prioleau calculated that if every available cotton bale arrived at Liverpool, the company would still be owed £70,000.

Six months earlier, the Confederate propaganda agent Henry Hotze had suggested to Benjamin that Richmond should assume control of all the Confederacy’s international dealings, from arms supplying to blockade running. Now he begged the secretary of state to do it before the market damned the Confederacy for good. “Prohibit the exportation of cotton, except for Government account,” he wrote. “Prohibit the importation of luxuries on any pretence, and import shoes and clothes as well for the citizens as the Army.” Most important of all, he urged him to void all contracts that had not been negotiated by Colin McRae, the South’s official purchasing agent.
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With cotton selling for more than 23 shillings a pound (five years before, it had been worth only 7 pence), there were vast profits awaiting the Confederate government if it could put an effective export system in place.

Hotze also wanted to be rid of the South’s official financial agent, Liverpool businessman James Spence, whose support for the abolition of slavery had become a burden and an embarrassment for the Confederates in England. The ardent supporter of Southern independence was roaring up and down the country in preparation for the opening of Parliament in February. Spence had studied the methods of the antislavery societies and was imitating them to good effect: publishing pamphlets before each meeting, preparing fact sheets for the local press, circulating petitions during the meeting, and creating local affiliates of his Southern Independence association.
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The aim, he told Lord Wharncliffe, the head of the Manchester affiliate, was to make it seem as though pro-Southern feeling was increasing, since nothing should be allowed to dampen the already fragile spirits “of our people who of late have had much to dismay them.” But all the good work had been ruined, in Hotze’s opinion, by the Association’s antislavery manifesto, which stated explicitly: “The Association will also devote itself … to a revision of the system of servile Labour, unhappily bequeathed to them by England, in accordance with the spirit of the age, so as to combine the gradual extinction of slavery with … the true civilisation of the negro race.”
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This, Hotze believed, was unacceptable and far outweighed Spence’s success in attracting four peers and nine MPs to the committee.

James Mason hastily wrote to Benjamin from France that he had been unable to prevent the antislavery manifesto: the Southern Independence Association represented the “views of Englishmen addressed to English people … it was in vain to combat their ‘sentiment.’ The so-called ‘antislavery’ feeling seems to have become with them a ‘sentiment’ akin to patriotism.”
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Mason’s defense was not enough to save Spence’s position as financial agent, and his operations were transferred to Colin McRae. But Benjamin was so flattering and apologetic in his letter of dismissal on January 11 that the Confederacy was able to retain the Liverpudlian’s goodwill. “As a man of the world,” Benjamin wrote, “I would meet you on the most cordial terms without the slightest reference to your views on this subject; but … ‘as a member of a government,’ it would be impossible for me to engage you in its service after the publication of your opinions.”
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It helped that Benjamin agreed to reimburse Spence for the money he had expended on propping up the South’s declining bonds.

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“It is a singular feature of this struggle in America that its merits should be debated at popular meetings held all over this kingdom,” Adams wrote to Seward shortly before the opening of Parliament. “The association of sympathizers with the Insurgents have of late been assiduously engaged in sending paid agents to deliver lectures in behalf of their cause at various places. This has given occasion to counter efforts. Frequently discussions are held by representatives of both sides. I very much doubt whether anything precisely similar ever took place before.”
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Adams knew that the Confederacy’s supporters were waiting for the new parliamentary session with great anticipation. The Liberal government appeared to be tottering toward collapse, and Palmerston had become mixed up in a bizarre divorce case.
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Seward had also contributed to the British government’s weakness. “That Solomon has … exercised his usual indiscretion,” raged Benjamin Moran on February 11, 1864, after Seward included in the official publication of the State Department’s correspondence for 1863 dispatches that were never sent to the Foreign Office, such as his provocative July letter on the Lairds rams.
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By playing fast and loose with the State Department record of official dispatches, Seward had made any British concession seem like weakness in the face of Northern threats.

Fortunately for the government, the Tories did not mind castigating Russell for his handling of the Northerners, but they had no desire to be seen as the defenders of slavery, or of rebellion.
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Nor were they by any means confident that their party had enough support in the House for a change of ministry.
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Confronted by the possibility of a change in government, Charles Francis Adams decided that he preferred Palmerston to survive. Adams still attended Lady Palmerston’s weekly parties with gritted teeth, but the sight of the eighty-year-old prime minister standing jauntily at the top of the grand staircase no longer oppressed him.

Adams’s usual cynicism about British politics was in partial abeyance owing to a happy family event. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., had at last taken his furlough and come to England. The term of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry had expired at the end of 1863, but Charles had encouraged his company to follow his example and reenlist. “They seem to think that I am a devil of a fellow,” he wrote. “These men don’t care for me personally. They think me cold, reserved and formal. They feel no affection for me, but they do believe in me, they have faith in my power of accomplishing results and in my integrity.”
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Benjamin Moran envied Charles Francis Jr.’s assured deportment. “He is a sturdy weather tanned man of about 30 years—stout and strong with a bald head; and is a good deal taller than either his father or his brother Henry [and] is coming to Europe to dip into English society,” he wrote in his diary. Moran’s hope that it would only be a little dip was soon dashed. “Mr. Adams can’t introduce his secretaries to their rights,” he thundered, “but he and his wife go out of their way to
stuff
their son into every possible house in London, when he really has no business there.”
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At a party given by Lady de Grey, Moran sidled up to a crowd that included the poet Robert Browning and the artist John Everett Millais. “When, Lo! Mrs. Adams appeared forcing her way through followed by the Captain at her apron string. I was disgusted,” he wrote. “She was in her element and talked as loud and vulgarly as ever. Holding her finger up and shaking it towards him, she said, ‘here Charley, here, here,’ and on his joining her presented him to Browning and Tom Hughes [the author of
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
]…. I got out of the way and went down stairs.”
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Moran was outraged when “the Captain” failed to pay a visit to the legation offices. “He is pure Adams,” Moran wrote spitefully. But his opportunity for revenge on the family came sooner than he expected. Charles Francis Adams wished to take both his sons to the Queen’s levee on March 2. “This morning,” wrote Moran on March 1, “Mr. H. B. Adams came into the Legation and rather insolently insisted that he was entitled to outrank us at Court.” Henry ought to have known that Moran would not allow a threat to his rank as assistant secretary to pass unchallenged. As a mere private secretary, Henry had no official rank.

“I even questioned the propriety of his going to Court at all—to say nothing about his right,” recorded Moran. With extraordinary timing, Sir Edward Cust, the Queen’s Master of Ceremonies, called at the legation at the height of the argument and confirmed that the right of attendance was extended only to daughters of ministers, not to sons or private secretaries. Naturally, exceptions were allowed, but unofficial private secretaries such as Henry Adams would certainly be ranked behind the last attaché or assistant secretary. Moran had been waiting to hear this ever since Henry’s arrival. The look of triumph on the secretary’s face was too much for Henry, and he swore never to go to court again. “I don’t think anyone will regret that decision,” wrote Moran smugly.
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