A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (32 page)

Delane’s sarcastic reply to Russell showed how little attention he was paying to the journalist’s reports. By the beginning of October, McClellan had equipped and trained more than 100,000 soldiers who, even if he felt they were not yet ready to be deployed, would never drop their arms and stampede off the battlefield as they had done at Bull Run.
⁷⁵
The humiliation suffered in July had made the North determined to crush not only the South but also her perceived allies. The treatment of blockade runners became harsher. When Edward Archibald, the British consul in New York, went to Fort Lafayette to check on the welfare of an imprisoned crew from a captured blockade runner, he found thirty men squeezed into a small, airless cell with barely enough headroom to stand. A bucket in the corner was the only lavatory, a small basin on a table their only access to water. Archibald took down their statements by the light from the doorway “using my hat for a desk. The men had lost everything except for the clothes on their backs and these were filthy and infested.” The prisoners were so dejected that he arranged for new clothing to be sent to them at his own expense.
⁷⁶
The international treaty governing the application of blockades forbade the sentencing or imprisonment of foreign blockade runners; they could be held for questioning only. But the timing of their release was at the discretion of the authorities. It could take just three days or, if Archibald lodged a complaint, as long as five months.
⁷⁷

Bull Run also made Northern politicians more realistic about the challenges ahead. Seward quietly reserved his nationalism for his dispatches and began to encourage foreign officers to volunteer for the Union, knowing that the army would benefit from their experience.
⁷⁸
His open-door policy caused problems for the American legation in London, where would-be volunteers were constantly calling on Adams, expecting to be given a commission and free passage to America.
⁷⁹
But Seward was unrepentant; he would rather keep them “on the Northern side,” he told William Howard Russell, “lest some really good man should get among the rebels.”
⁸⁰

The New York Times
began to carry frequent reports of a major or colonel, late of the British Army, “who has tendered his services [to] the President.”
⁸¹
Major General Charles Havelock—the brother of the more famous Major General Henry Havelock of India—discovered that this was not always the best way, however. When Lincoln appointed him to McClellan’s staff, the general retaliated for the encroachment on his authority by refusing to acknowledge Havelock’s presence. Leonard Douglas Hay Currie, captain of the 19th Regiment of Foot and a distinguished veteran of the Indian and Crimean wars, had more success by applying to the governor of New York. “Thinking I might be of use,” he explained, “I was glad when an opportunity was offered me to place my services at the disposal of the government.”
⁸²
He was sent to Brigadier General W. F. “Baldy” Smith, who immediately took him on as his assistant adjutant general.

Seward was responsible for recruiting one of the least likely British volunteers to appear in Washington: Major John Fitzroy De Courcy, the British magistrate on San Juan Island during the “Pig War.” De Courcy lived for soldiering, and rather than molder on the island during the ongoing stalemate, he wrote to Seward to ask if he could lead a regiment. Amazed and delighted by the irony, Seward invited him to Washington. Frances and Fanny Seward were disappointed to have the brusque soldier thrust upon them during their brief visit to the capital. Fanny, Seward’s eighteen-year-old daughter, complained that De Courcy’s presence spoiled her last evening with her father. She might have forgiven him had he been handsome, but De Courcy’s face reminded her of a rocky beach and he suffered from “an imperfection in one of his eyes.” It was typical of Seward to sacrifice the needs of his family for a moment of transient importance; but he did follow through on his promise to De Courcy, who was made a colonel of the 16th Ohio Volunteers.

Ill.9
Reconnaissance made by General Stoneman, accompanied by the Comte de Paris and the Duc de Chartres, by Frank Vizetelly.

The hostility with which Britain was regarded in the North meant that none of the British volunteers received as much attention as the Comte de Paris, the Bourbon pretender to the French throne, and his brother the Duc de Chartres. The arrival of another set of French royalty (albeit the exiled kind whose only hope of gaining military experience was to go to America) was hailed as proof of the excellent relations between the two countries. Seward waived the rules so that they would not have to take the U.S. oath of allegiance. The count entered the army as plain “Captain Paris” and his brother as “Captain Charters.” Their uncle, the Prince de Joinville, who had accompanied his nephews on the journey in order to place his son in the U.S. Naval Academy, politely turned down the offer of a command in the navy.

—

Lord Lyons ignored the spectacle of Seward paying assiduous attention to the former British magistrate of San Juan Island. Of all the provocations he had endured since August, the welcome given to De Courcy was among the least troubling. Seward “is at present very wild with Lord Lyons,” William Howard Russell remarked to Delane in September, after the secretary of state had embarrassed Lyons by leaking to the press a portion of their correspondence—selectively edited to make the minister appear arrogant and Seward patriotic.

The letters in question concerned the arrests of British subjects on charges of sedition. Seward’s power over Lyons had increased dramatically during the summer. Every case of forcible enlistment and underage volunteering went through his office, and now, since Lincoln had suspended the writ of habeas corpus for a large section of the North, Seward had gained the additional power to detain indefinitely all persons suspected of treason. “I am afraid that he takes a personal pleasure in spying and arresting,” Lyons wrote to Lord Russell in a rare outburst after Seward harangued him for an hour before casually taking out his pen and signing the release of a British prisoner.
^6.3
83

Lyons was relieved that the arrests for sedition were not solely confined to British subjects, though they made up almost 15 percent of the suspects in prison.
⁸⁴
No one was exempt, he informed the Foreign Office. Lyons had heard from his friend the English actress Fanny Kemble, who remained tied to the United States because of her two daughters, that her former husband had been arrested in Philadelphia and incarcerated without trial at Fort Lafayette in New York. The family was discovering, as had Lyons, that “it is vain to resort to the Courts of law for redress.”
⁸⁵
Rose Greenhow was also arrested during one of Seward’s sweeps of rebel sympathizers in Washington; in deference to her status in Washington she was placed under house arrest rather than carted off to prison in a blaze of publicity.

Russell watched as the military authorities hounded Samuel Phillips Day out of Washington when the English journalist came through the lines on October 1. Edmund Monson, Lord Lyons’s private secretary, told Day that the offensive letters he had been sending to
The New York Times
put him beyond the help of the legation. Day sailed for home on October 12 on the
Young America,
already planning his revenge on the North. Russell envied him. “Could it not be possible to arrange for me to go home for a month?” he begged Delane two days later. He missed his family, but even if he wanted to stay, “It is impossible to express one’s opinion freely. The press and the politicians would desire nothing better than to hunt me out of this country.”
⁸⁶

Seward “will probably play out the play and send me my passports,” Lyons wrote to Lord Russell two weeks later. “If he is in his present mood, he will be glad to find a pretext for performing other half-violent acts of the same kind.” But, he added despondently, “this cannot go on forever.” Some incident would push the war of words into a war of arms; Lyons felt the crackling animosity in the air. William Howard Russell could sense it, too. A fury and desire to punish England was evident in the press, in politics, in the army, and among ordinary citizens. “The storm may blow over,” he wrote to Delane; “now it rages furiously.”
⁸⁷

^6.1
The Union and Confederacy often gave different names to their battles. The Confederates generally preferred the name of the nearest town, the Federals, the nearest river or landmark.

^6.2
Lord John Russell became Earl Russell in July and moved to the House of Lords.

^6.3
Seward’s bullying of Lyons on the subject of political arrests played into the hands of his critics. A story spread through Washington and into the history books that he boasted to Lyons, “My Lord, I can touch a bell on my right hand, and order the arrest of a citizen of Ohio. I can touch the bell again, and order the arrest of a citizen of New York. Can the Queen of England, in her dominions, do as much?” Seward’s “little bell” became famous throughout both North and South.

SEVEN
“It Takes Two
to Make a Quarrel”

An unlikely friendship—The
Fingal
escapes—The success of Confederate propaganda—Seward rues his mistake—Appointment of Mason and Slidell—Capture of the Trent

T
he departure of Samuel Phillips Day on the
Young America
from New York in the middle of October coincided with the escape of the
Theodora
out of Charleston. The cargo on board the swift blockade runner was not cotton, but the successors to Pierre Rost and William Yancey. Frustrated by their failure to secure diplomatic recognition after the victory at Manassas, Confederate president Jefferson Davis had selected two of the South’s most prominent and experienced politicians, Senators James Mason and John Slidell, to be the new Confederate commissioners in Europe. Slidell was to go to Paris, Mason was to remain in London, and Ambrose Dudley Mann would be transferred to Brussels.

In place of the broad suggestions given to the original commissioners, Mason carried with him a long and detailed set of instructions on how to approach the British government. In particular, the Confederate cabinet ordered him to ram home the illegality of the blockade under the Declaration of Paris, in the hope that this would encourage Britain to force the reopening of Southern ports. Without its own fleet, the Confederacy remained incapable of lifting the blockade. So far, just one cruiser had been launched: a converted passenger ship renamed CSS
Sumter,
whose limited capabilities made it effective only as a raider against merchant ships.

The chronic shortages caused by the blockade were forcing whole regiments to sit idle for want of arms and munitions. Even before the departure of Mason and Slidell, Davis had sent an agent to England, his instructions hidden for safekeeping inside the sole of his boot, imploring Caleb Huse to “send forward supplies as rapidly and as securely as possible.… You will not allow yourself to be governed by the political agents of the Government, but act upon your own responsibility.”
¹
Davis’s exhortation had been anticipated; frustrated by the slow pace of shipments, Edward Anderson and James Bulloch had pooled their funds and bought their own steamship, the
Fingal.

The challenge for the Confederates lay in keeping the identity of the
Fingal
from Henry Sanford’s spies; otherwise the U.S. Navy would have no difficulty in tracking and capturing the cargo before it reached Savannah. They were helped by one of Anderson’s most important suppliers, who had a relative in the Foreign Office. “Money will accomplish anything in England,” wrote Anderson. “The bait took, and every night before I retired to bed I was thoroughly advised of all [Charles Francis Adams’s] operations for the day.”
²
He was counting on the mole to give sufficient warning if the
Fingal
was discovered.