A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (129 page)

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The fall of Fort Fisher, by Frank Vizetelly.

Julia may have been safe in Greenville, but she was living in the most primitive conditions, without winter shoes or proper undergarments. It was nevertheless easier for her to obtain flour and wood than it was for the inhabitants of Richmond. “We have famine, owing to the incapacity of the government, and the rapacity of speculators,” complained John Jones on January 19. The city was swirling with rumors. He had heard that Secretary of War James A. Seddon had resigned—which was true—and that Jefferson Davis was going to be replaced by General Lee—which was not, although the Confederate Congress voted to make Lee “Commander-in-Chief” of all Southern forces. Four days later, on the twenty-third, Jones wrote, “It is rumored that a commissioner (a Louisianan) sailed to-day for England, to make overtures to that government.”
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Kenner was not sailing for Europe; he had decided to make the three-hundred-mile journey to New York, and from there attempt to sneak onto one of the fast steamships. He set off on January 18 with two guides, who had been told that “Mr. Kinglake” was going to Canada to assist with the defenses of the Confederate prisoners. Their orders were to make haste but also to take extra care to avoid capture. Neither knew that their charge’s identity was as fake as his brown wig, nor were they aware that the last messenger to attempt to reach Canada from the South had been captured in Ohio, tried by court-martial, and sentenced to death.
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In Canada, Lord Monck was fighting a rearguard action against pro-Southern prejudice and bureaucratic incompetence in order to preserve British neutrality in the region. Five of the St. Albans raiders, including Bennett Young, had been rearrested;
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the Montreal chief of police had been forced to resign; the original judge in the St. Albans case, Charles Coursol, suspended; the St. Albans banks indemnified for the money stolen; the law changed to allow for the expulsion of aliens; and hundreds of troops deployed along the border. On January 11, the judge in Montreal had granted the St. Albans raiders a thirty-day recess on the grounds that they needed more time to prepare their defense. But Monck hoped this setback would be viewed against the success of the Bennet Burley trial in Upper Canada, where Burley’s extradition had been ordered on January 20. Lord Monck signed the extradition papers, and on February 2, Burley was taken by special night train to Suspension Bridge station at Niagara Falls. Twenty armed guards rode the train, maintaining a vigil until the Union agents came on board to collect the prisoner.
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The secretary of the legation, Joseph Burnley, dismissed Burley as an undeserving case, just as he had done with the Chicago conspirator Colonel Grenfell. “If my cousin Charles would use his influence with Lord Lyons it might be of use to me,” Grenfell had written in December to the chief clerk of the family firm, Pascoe Grenfell and Co., in London, unaware that Lyons was about to return to England. “I cannot say more at present. I know not a soul here nor have I a friend.” He ended the note pathetically: “I leave it to you to inform my girls of my situation or not, just as you like.”
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Grenfell’s cousin, Charles Grenfell, MP, did ask for help from the Foreign Office, which in turn ordered Burnley to raise the case with Seward. The legation secretary doubted they could do anything for Grenfell, whose guilt was so obvious that “everything seems to militate against him,” but he asked the British consul in St. Louis, Mr. Wilkins, to make discreet inquiries.
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“You seem to be on such good terms with the Authorities,” he explained, “that I dare say you may be able to effect something privately when I should most likely fail officially.”
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Grenfell’s former commanding officer, General Joseph Wheeler, later claimed that the Englishman was innocent of the charges. Of the more than one hundred Confederate conspirators who had been arrested in November, only eight were put on trial in January, and Grenfell was one of them. “The trial of your grandfather, you must recall,” Wheeler wrote to Grenfell’s family, “was a time when there was most extreme and bitter partisan feeling, and the officials had around them a number of spies who were dishonorable men in the extreme, and who would commit any perjury to secure convictions.”
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Grenfell was in the most trouble because of the way he had tried to deceive the war secretary, Edwin Stanton, and his treatment in prison was undoubtedly the harshest, but he made his predicament far worse by his arrogant behavior. One of Grenfell’s greatest weaknesses—the reason his life had been a catalogue of disappointments and bitter feelings—was his delusion that he was a prince among pygmies. He believed he was more intelligent than everyone else, braver, more principled, and certainly more deserving of special treatment. Occasionally, he impressed people with his bravado, but more often he turned them into inveterate foes. If the judge advocate had any animus against Grenfell before the trial, it was increased tenfold after Grenfell mocked him with a silly salute when stating his “not guilty” plea.

But Grenfell’s British nationality would have worked against him even if he had been a model prisoner. Edwin Stanton wanted Britons in the Confederacy to suffer the same retribution as Southerners. Gideon Welles agreed and was disgusted with Seward’s reluctance to sanction the seizure of British property in Savannah. Stanton told Welles not to worry: Sherman was taking a robust approach toward British cotton merchants who were trying to protect their cotton by “asserting it had the British mark upon it.” Sherman told them in reply he had “found the British mark on every battle-field. The muskets, cartridges, caps, projectiles were all British and had the British mark upon them.”
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There were only eight objections to the resolution when the U.S. Senate voted to rescind its trade treaty with Canada on January 12, 1865. Charles Sumner’s anti-British rhetoric was incomprehensible to his friends in England, particularly his slurs against Lord Russell, which were so outrageous that John Bright was forced into the unfamiliar posture of defending the foreign secretary’s integrity.
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But Sumner’s position did not seem unreasonable, or unjust, to a Northern public still terrified that there were arsonists and insurgents ready to strike without warning.

When Davis’s envoy, Duncan Kenner, reached New York on February 6 after a hazardous trek through the back roads of Virginia and Maryland, he discovered that the slavery issue had been taken out of his hands. On January 21, the U.S. House of Representatives had finally voted—by 119 to 56—to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, thus abolishing slavery on American soil. The Confederate Congress, on the other hand, had voted against Davis’s proposal to arm the slaves. Kenner also learned that the two governments had engaged in halfhearted peace negotiations on February 3—known as the Hampton Roads Conference—which collapsed on the first day. These were all good reasons for him to give up, but he was determined to see the mission through to completion. He boarded the Southampton-bound
America
on February 11, posing as a Frenchman in order to confuse the detectives standing guard at the pier. Kenner believed the fate of the Confederacy lay in his hands: Wilmington was gone, Charleston was tottering, and Richmond was surrounded. But if Lord Palmerston could be persuaded that there was no longer any moral impediment to Southern recognition, Kenner still had faith that the combination of Britain’s navy and Confederate courage would win independence for the South.
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With great difficulty and expense, Jacob Thompson managed to send a message to Richmond using the latest techniques in photography. The message—a request for written evidence of Burley’s naval commission—was written in extralarge letters and photographed, and the negatives were reduced to the size of five thumbnails, which were then placed under the cloth covering of the messenger’s jacket buttons. “I (afterwards) met J. Davis at a dinner,” recalled the photographer. “I asked him if he remembered the button message, and he seemed much pleased to meet the author of it.” Stephen Mallory and Jefferson Davis both supplied the affidavits requested by Thompson. Davis claimed to have ordered the
Philo Parsons
expedition, and Mallory provided proof of Burley’s naval commission.

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Only one of the arsonists was caught and tried for the crime: Robert Cobb Kennedy, an Irishman, who was picked up by detectives in Detroit on December 29, 1864. He was tried in New York and sentenced to hang on March 25, 1865. Kennedy went to the gallows insisting that the plot was a legitimate act of war in retaliation for Northern atrocities, and that he had intended to destroy buildings rather than kill civilians.
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Anti-British feeling reached new heights. In Washington, for example, two policemen ambushed Arthur Seymour, one of the junior assistant secretaries at the legation, beating him almost senseless. The two policemen—and the magistrate who acquitted them—were caught in a lie when they claimed that Seymour admitted in court he was drunk that evening. Seymour had actually just finished work and was on his way to dinner.

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Cleburne was the first Southern general to argue that the slaves should be promised their freedom if they fought in the army. On January 2, 1864, he wrote to General Joe Johnston: “Our country has already some friends in England and France, and there are strong motives to induce these nations to recognize and assist us, but they cannot assist us without helping slavery, and to do this would be in conflict with their policy for the last quarter of a century. England has paid hundreds of millions to emancipate her West India slaves and break up the slave trade. Could she now consistently spend her treasure to reinstate slavery in this country? But this barrier once removed, the sympathy and the interests of these and other nations will accord with our own, and we may expect from them both moral support and material aid. One thing is certain, as soon as the great sacrifice to independence is made and known in foreign countries there will be a complete change of front in our favor of the sympathies of the world.”
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Kenner was the largest slave owner in the Confederate Congress, but this had not prevented him from trying to persuade Davis in early 1863 to ask Britain for recognition in return for gradual emancipation. Like General Patrick Cleburne, Kenner had realized that no British government would sully its antislavery record by recognizing the South while she remained a slave-owning nation. In 1863, when her fortunes were at the high-water mark, he believed the South could have made the offer from a position of strength and probably dictated her own terms.

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Jacob Thompson tried to obtain copies of their commissions, just as he had done Burley’s, but none of his messengers had succeeded in reaching Richmond.

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General Grant made a similar complaint to Seward, forwarding to him “specimens of fuses captured at Fort Fisher … and the statement of Col. Tal P. Shaffner that the same were manufactured at the Woolwich Arsenal, England, an arsenal owned and run by the British Government.”

THIRTY-SIX
“Richmond Tomorrow”

The truth cannot be hidden—A late success for Bulloch—Hysteria over Canada—Arrival of Davis’s envoy—A hard line—Lord Lyons retires (temporarily)

L
ord Lyons had been miserable for much of the journey home. Almost worse than the headaches was the persistent feeling that he had failed. He feared that he had ruined his prospects by leaving Washington and doubted that the relationship of mutual respect he had built laboriously between the legation and the State Department would survive his absence. Lyons’s former attachés were also anxious about their chief’s legacy undone. The “Buccaneers,” as they had once styled themselves, had complained constantly of overwork while they were there, but their new assignments made them miss the camaraderie of the legation. “When we were very jolly in the evening we always used to sing, ‘yonder lies the whiskey bottle empty on the shelf,’ ” sighed Malet.
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Lyons looked so ravaged when he arrived at the Foreign Office on Christmas Eve 1864 that Lord Russell was startled. He promised Lyons that his post in Washington would remain open until either his health was restored or he chose to give it up of his own volition. This reassurance lifted a great weight off Lyons; for the first time in many weeks he did not feel as though he had thrown away his career in a moment of weakness. A few days after the interview, Lyons composed his final report on American affairs, and wrote letters of recommendation for his long-suffering staff. There was much he regretted about the war, but it had served a purpose, he told Russell. Amid all the horrors and iniquities “there appears to be one gleam of consolation,” he thought, for “slavery seems to be doomed.”
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