A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (153 page)

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Authors: Amanda Foreman

Tags: #Europe, #International Relations, #Modern, #General, #United States, #Great Britain, #Public Opinion, #Political Science, #Civil War Period (1850-1877), #19th Century, #History

2.
Ibid.

3.
BDOFA
, part I, ser. C, vol. 5, p. 162, law officers of the Crown to Lord John Russell, December 7, 1860.

4.
Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.),
The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865
, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 1, pp. 751, 753, December 7 and December 11, 1860.

5.
Ibid., p. 765, January 9, 1861.

6.
The Times
, January 9, 1861.

7.
Illustrated London News
, January 19, 1861.

8.
William S. Walsh,
Abraham Lincoln and the London Punch
(New York, 1909), p. 20.

9.
Brian Jenkins,
Britain and the War for the Union,
2 vols. (Montreal, 1974, 1980), p. 86. And
BDOFA
, part I, ser. C, vol. 5, pp. 169–70, Lord Lyons to Lord John Russell, December 18, 1860.

10.
Glyndon Van Deusen,
William Henry Seward
(Oxford, 1967), p. 240.

11.
Frederick W. Seward (ed.),
Seward at Washington
(New York, 1891), p. 487.

12.
Ernest Samuels (ed.),
Henry Adams: Selected Letters
(Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 32, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., December 9, 1860.

13.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr.,
Charles Francis Adams, 1835–1915: An Autobiography with a Memorial Address
(Boston, 1916), p. 82.

14.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., “The British Proclamation of May, 1861,”
Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings
, 48 (1915), pp. 190–241, at p. 216, Lord Lyons to Lord John Russell, February 4, 1861.

15.
PRO Kew, 30/22/35, ff. 16–19, Lyons to Lord John Russell, February 12, 1861. Lord Newton (ed.),
Lord Lyons: A Record of British Diplomacy,
ed. Lord Newton, 2 vols. (London, 1914), vol. 1, p. 30, Lord Lyons to Lord John Russell, January 7, 1861.

16.
BDOFA
, part I, ser. C, vol., 5, p. 181, Russell to Lord Lyons, February 20, 1861.

17.
Charles M. Hubbard,
The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy
(Knoxville, Tenn., 1998), p. 27.

18.
Doris Kearns Goodwin,
Team of Rivals
(New York, 2005), p. 316.

19.
Michael Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln
, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 2008), vol. 2, p. 98.

20.
Diary of Gideon Welles
, 3 vols. (Boston, 1911), vol. 1, pp. 134–40.

21.
BDOFA
, part I, ser. C, vol. 5, Lyons to Russell, March 18, 1861.

22.
Lynn M. Case and Warren F. Spence,
The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy
(Philadelphia, Pa., 1970), p. 130. Norman Ferris maintained that the various accounts of the dinner by the foreign ministers were too dissimilar to be trustworthy. I believe that the sense in all of them is the same: Seward did not like their answers and became aggressive. Norman B. Ferris, “Lincoln and Seward in Civil War Diplomacy: Their Relationship at the Outset Reexamined,”
Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association
, 12 (1991), p. 21.

23.
Newton (ed.),
Lord Lyons
, vol. 1, pp. 31–34, Lyons to Russell, March 26, 1861. Norman Ferris disputes Lyons’s account but his argument is not persuasive.

24.
David Donald,
Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War
(New York, 1961), p. 383.

25.
Adams,
Charles Francis Adams, 1835–1915
, p. 108.

26.
MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, March 28, 1861.

27.
David H. Donald,
Lincoln
(New York, 1995), p. 285.

28.
Interestingly, Jack Shepherd,
The Adams Chronicles
(New York, 1975), p. 358, Martin Duberman,
Charles Francis Adams
(New York, 1961), p. 257, Philip Van Doren Stern,
When the Guns Roared: World Aspects of the American Civil War
(New York, 1965), p. 35, and Donald,
Lincoln
, p. 321, take the account from Charles Francis Adams, Jr.’s biography of his father, but it differs in minor but significant aspects from Adams’s diary.

29.
Alan Hankinson,
Man of Wars: William Howard Russell of “The Times,” 1820–1907
(London, 1982), p. 152.

30.
C. Vann Woodward (ed.),
Mary Chesnut’s Civil War
(New Haven, 1981), p. 67, June 4–10, 1861.

31.
Hankinson,
Man of Wars
, p. 157, Mowbray Morris to Russell, April 4, 1861.

32.
Wiltshire and Swindon RO, 2536/10, Edward Best to Aunt Sophia, May 10, 1861.

33.
William Howard Russell,
My Diary North and South
, ed. Eugene H. Berwanger (New York, 1988), p. 42, March 26, 1861; dashes added for clarity.

34.
Ibid., p. 47, March 28, 1861.

35.
Ibid.

36.
MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, March 31, 1861.

37.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr.,
Charles Francis Adams, 1835–1915: An Autobiography
(Boston, 1916), pp. 112–13.

38.
Van Deusen,
William Henry Seward
, p. 270.

39.
Edward L. Pierce (ed.),
Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner
, 4 vols. (Boston, 1894), vol. 4:
1860–1870
, p. 29.

40.
The crux of his proposal was America’s engagement with Europe. Seward stated that he “would demand explanation from Spain and France, categorically, at once. I would seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada, Mexico and Central America, to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence on this continent against European intervention. And if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France, would convene Congress and declare war against them.” This was a scatter-gun approach, indicative of Seward’s state of mind. At least regarding Spain, he did have a valid issue. With extraordinary timing, Spain had just annexed Santo Domingo—a direct snub to the Monroe Doctrine. But the others were mere wishful thinking.

41.
Patrick Sowle, “A Reappraisal of Seward’s Memorandum of April 1, 1861, to Lincoln,”
Journal of Southern History
, 33/2 (May 1967), pp. 234–39.

42.
Russell,
My Diary North and South
, p. 66, April 9, 1861.

43.
Ibid., p. 77, April 15, 1861.

44.
Martin Crawford (ed.),
William Howard Russell’s Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861–1862
(Athens, Ga., 1992), p. 43, William Howard Russell to Lord Lyons, April 19, 1861.

45.
Russell,
My Diary North and South
, p. 92, April 18, 1861.

46.
Ibid., p. 95, April 20, 1861.

47.
There is still a lively debate as to whether the United States was right to have chosen a blockade over port closures. As Howard Jones has noted, the U.S. Constitution deemed that all ports must be treated on an equal basis. Lincoln did not have the legal power to close only the Southern ports and leave the Northern ones open. He would either have to shut every port in the country, or declare that Northern ports were exempt from closure since they were not part of the United States, which would have been absurd. Jones,
Blue and Gray Diplomacy
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009), p. 56.

48.
A letter of marque (marque meaning “frontier”) was a cheap way for countries without a navy to wage war against an enemy’s shipping. By international law, any captain with a vessel could become a privateer if issued with one. Thus shielded by the law, he could roam the sea, seizing enemy ships and taking them before an admiralty court. There it would be decided whether or not the ship was a legal prize and not, for example, the property of a neutral state. If judged a legal prize, the ship would be condemned and captain and crew entitled to the profits. Roland R. Foulke,
A Treatise on International Law
, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1920), vol. 2, p. 244. The last country to offer letters of marque was Mexico in 1847.

49.
The declaration had four salient points: 1. Privateering is, and remains, abolished; 2. The neutral flag covers enemy’s goods, with the exception of contraband of war; 3. Neutral goods, with the exception of contraband of war, are not liable to capture under enemy’s flag; 4. Blockades, in order to be binding, must be effective. Also, the declaration was only binding upon countries that had signed the treaty.

50.
Adams, “The British Proclamation of May, 1861,” p. 218.

51.
Ibid., p. 220, Lord Lyons to Lord John Russell, May 6, 1861.

52.
In Lyons’s words, “It may be impossible to deter this Government from offering provocations to Great Britain, which neither our honour nor our interest will allow us to brook.” Ibid., Lord Lyons to Lord John Russell, May 20, 1861.