A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (55 page)

With remarkable persistence, James Mason presented the Foreign Office a week later with a formal demand for recognition of the Confederacy. The document was accepted without comment. Yet the debate had helped to shape public opinion in a way that was advantageous to the South. First, as Adams complained to Seward, the Confederates had succeeded in positioning themselves as the underdogs and victims in the war.
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Second, and more dangerous still, they had made the idea of British mediation seem like a humanitarian duty to end the bloodshed. Make the war about slavery, Adams urged Seward, otherwise the British government could end up caving in to pressure.
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After the debate, Lord Russell admitted to Lyons that he was astonished by the passions it had stirred. “The great majority are in favour of the South,” he concluded. Furthermore, “nearly our whole people are of [the] opinion that separation wd be [of] benefit both to North and South.”
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Russell’s concern about national sentiment may have blinded him to more practical and immediate issues such as the Confederates’ violations of the Foreign Enlistment Act. Charles Francis Adams had repeatedly asked him to investigate reports of a formidable cruiser that was under construction at Lairds shipyard. His consul in Liverpool, Thomas Haines Dudley, had amassed such damning evidence that only an outright partisan—as the customs collector of Liverpool happened to be—could claim with a straight face that the mysterious No. 290 at Lairds was simply a merchant ship of unusual design.
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The vessel was ready to depart before Russell finally realized the danger, and he ordered all the relevant documents to be delivered immediately to the law officers. This was on July 23. Over the next six days a tragicomedy unfurled without anyone realizing its true importance until it was too late. The papers arrived at the house of the Queen’s Advocate, Sir John Harding, on the day he suffered an irreversible nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, an anonymous Confederate sympathizer in the Foreign Office alerted James Bulloch that his ship was about to be seized. Harding’s illness created a bureaucratic vacuum; in the ensuing muddle of confused responsibilities and departmental paper shuffling, the Confederates bribed a local customs official and quietly sneaked No. 290 out of Liverpool. By the time the telegram ordering her arrest reached Liverpool on July 31, the steamer was on her way to the Azores. There she would receive her guns, a new captain, and a new name: CSS
Alabama.
Northern shipping was about to face its greatest threat since the War of 1812.

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Lord Russell still thought the best hope for ending slavery was for the North and South to separate.
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Like many Englishmen, he assumed that the effect of international moral pressure and enlightened domestic opinion would eventually force Southern leaders to abolish slavery, just as Czar Alexander II had abolished serfdom in 1861. Gladstone shared his view; he was one of the few members of the British cabinet who had actually read James Spence’s
The American Union,
and the debate on July 18 sent him spinning further into the Confederates’ arms. Gladstone had fallen in love with the humanitarian argument. “It is indeed much to be desired,” he wrote to a friend on July 26, “that this bloody and purposeless conflict should cease.” Four days later, a mutual acquaintance succeeded in placing Henry Hotze next to him at dinner. The evening passed like a dream for Hotze; Gladstone hung on his every word. By the end of the night they were discussing where the boundary ought to lie between the two Americas, and whether it would be better to divide the border states in half.
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Gladstone would not be the first English politician or the last to fall under the spell of a foreign agent, but the way Henry Hotze played him was especially masterful. In his report after their “chance” meeting, Hotze described to Judah Benjamin how he carefully drove the conversation to make it seem as though Gladstone was in control. “I purposely abstained from introducing any topic,” he wrote on August 6; he allowed Gladstone to waffle on about “supposed difficulties” over the Confederacy’s border. Then, when he thought the moment was right, Hotze casually referred to the South’s (nonexistent) intention to revalue its currency to make it more favorable for the pound, “a prospect which I knew would be peculiarly agreeable to him.” Over the next few days he commissioned sympathizers to write articles that discussed the South’s economic policies, hoping that they would keep Gladstone’s interest alive. This was Hotze’s usual tactic. “Thanks to friends,” he continued, he knew which arguments appealed to individual cabinet members, “and to these from week to week I devoted myself.” The results appeared to be promising. “Just as I close this,” finished Hotze, “a reliable friend steps in to inform me that there have been three successive cabinet meetings … and that each time the cabinet was evenly divided, Mr. Gladstone leading the party in favor of recognition.”
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Hotze’s “reliable friend” had given him an accurate report of the state of opinion in the cabinet. Leading the faction against immediate recognition was the pugnacious Duke of Argyll, who resented Gladstone’s attempt to browbeat them with fallacious moral arguments. “I retain my opinion unchanged,” wrote the duke after a bruising correspondence with Gladstone; no war “has been more just or more necessary.… It is not inconsistent to sympathize with revolts which are just, and to fight against other revolts which are unjust.” In his usual blunt way, Argyll informed Gladstone that he was deceiving himself if he believed that separation was good for the “anti-slavery cause.”
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Argyll’s reproach stung Gladstone, but the latter was mollified by his success with Palmerston, who “has come exactly to my mind,” he told his wife after the final cabinet meeting of the session.
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Palmerston did not in fact share Gladstone’s moral qualms, and he certainly did not wish to fight a war on behalf of the South. But if the Confederates continued their run of victories, and the North proved obdurate, he could see no reason why the question should not be considered. The French had been advocating October—when the cotton season was normally in full swing—as the time for Europe to decide, which seemed reasonable to Palmerston.
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Gladstone had also succeeded in pricking Russell’s conscience. Though he saw the complications and subtleties of the question that the crusading chancellor of the exchequer conveniently ignored, Russell was also becoming bewitched by the siren call of the humanitarian argument. On August 6, Russell suggested to Palmerston that they try to bring the opposing sides to an armistice. But, he asked on reflection, “On what basis are we to negotiate?” It seemed to him there was little hope that Lincoln “and his Democracy will listen to reason.”
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The deliberations in the cabinet soon leaked out;
The New York Times
reported that the Great Powers were contemplating mediation. France and Russia were said to be keen; England was apparently undecided.
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Without Lord Lyons to reassure him, Seward assumed the worst. Senator Orville Browning bumped into him at Lincoln’s office and asked him point-blank “if there was any danger of intervention in our affairs by England and France. He said there was,” recorded Browning, “unless volunteering went on rapidly, and our army was greatly increased.”
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Seward sent one of his wrap-the-world-in-flames dispatches to Adams, hoping that it would scare the British into inaction. He also rather cleverly sent out a circular on August 8 to all consuls in Europe offering inducements to immigrants seeking work opportunities in America.

The circular, No. 19, seemed innocent enough, but it was actually a back-door route for army recruitment. Consulates were encouraged to display information on the cash bounties awarded to volunteers. Seward knew the game he was playing. “Nobody is authorized to do anything or pay anything, for once entering into this kind of business there would be no end of trouble,” he warned his consul in Paris, since official recruitment was illegal; but “to some extent this civil war must be a trial between the two parties to exhaust each other. The immigration of a large mass from Europe would of itself decide it.”
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Throughout August, every utterance and report from England was picked over and analyzed for clues. It was at this precise moment that the irascible John Roebuck decided to try his hand at Anglo-American relations. The Liberal MP was growing old, and change frightened him. Anything that retarded the modernizing, democratizing tendencies of the United States seemed like a cause worth supporting. Forgetting that the South was also a democracy, he championed its independence because separation would hurt the North. On August 14, Roebuck and Palmerston attended the same banquet in Sheffield. Knowing that the prime minister’s presence would ensure that the speeches were reported in the press, Roebuck theatrically turned to Palmerston and exhorted him to admit that the South’s time had come. “The North will never be our friends,” he bellowed, to a few “hear, hears.” “Of the South you can make friends. They are Englishmen; they are not the scum and refuse of Europe.” The mayor of Manchester leaped to his feet and shouted over the boos and cheers, “Don’t say that; don’t say that.” Roebuck responded: “I know what I am saying. [The South] are Englishmen, and we must make them our friends.”
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Reports of the Manchester banquet confirmed Northern fears and revived Southern hopes. Palmerston was no longer “considered [by Southerners] as the personal enemy of the confederacy—a most rabid abolitionist—who is suppressing the sympathies, which England would otherwise show for the south.”
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All over the South, people waited anxiously for foreign news, believing that their fate hung on his change of view.

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McClellan’s failure to capture Richmond had convinced Lincoln that there was no real substance or drive to the general. McClellan looked and talked the part, he realized, but lacked the will to act. Without even bothering to consult him, Lincoln announced McClellan’s demotion on July 11. He lost his position as general-in-chief of the U.S. armies, which was given to Henry “Old Brains” Halleck, whose commanders out west had produced the victories at Shiloh and Island No. 10; and he was ordered to merge his army with General John Pope’s army, which was fighting in northern Virginia. Pope, not McClellan, would command this new mammoth army.

Lincoln had to have a military victory; volunteering practically ceased after the Seven Days’ Battles, and the 600,000 extra soldiers he requested were not stepping forward without the lure of large bounties. Furthermore, he knew that if he played the emancipation card while the North appeared to be losing the war, it would be interpreted at home and abroad as the desperate move of a floundering government—in Seward’s words, “our last shriek on the retreat.”
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Lincoln had accomplished as much as he could for the moment: Washington was now in line with the rest of the North, free of the taint of slavery; among the recent bills passed by Congress was a law prohibiting the return of fugitive slaves to their masters, and another allowing “persons of African descent” to join the army. But Lincoln had not been able to persuade the border states to accept emancipation in return for compensation for their slaves; slavery remained legal in the United States.

Notwithstanding the installation of Henry Halleck as the new general-in-chief, August turned out worse for the North than July. Despite the capture of three important Southern ports, the “Anaconda” strategy of a total blockade of the South’s coastline was far from being achieved.
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Nor had the North (with the exception of New Orleans) been able to extend its control of the Mississippi River beyond the border states. Worse, even gains had slipped into losses. Kentucky and Tennessee looked vulnerable once more.

Jefferson Davis had replaced the popular General Beauregard following his retreat from Corinth with the widely disliked Braxton Bragg. At the end of July Bragg had taken his army on a seven-hundred-mile maneuver into Kentucky, where he intended to install a pro-Southern governor. If the Confederacy could secure this border state, he reasoned, the others might follow. Halleck had sidelined Grant after Shiloh and put his faith in General Buell, whose timely arrival on April 6 had saved the Federal army from defeat. But Buell was fretting uselessly, sending his troops hither and thither without actually trying to intercept Bragg. Robert Neve of the 5th Kentucky Volunteers had vivid memories of the relentless marching: of the thirst, the hunger, and the ever-present dust. He recalled with sadness a man they “found dead on the road who had died through excessive fatigue. As the army passed along there, he laid like a dog as if no one cared who he was. It was,” he wrote, “a bad sight to see a poor soldier die in such a way.”
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While Neve and thousands like him labored to keep moving under the broiling sun, Confederate raiders preyed on Buell’s weaker outposts.

On the far eastern side of Kentucky, the small Federal force that had wrested the Cumberland Gap from the Confederates was itself surrounded. Colonel De Courcy’s commander sent a desperate telegram to the War Department on August 10 warning that their supplies would last three weeks at best. That was his last communication with the outside world. A few hours later, Confederate guerrillas organized by John Hunt Morgan and his English staff officer, Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell, cut their telegraph line. The beleaguered Federals had no way of knowing whether help would come; still, when the Confederates ordered their surrender, they replied defiantly: “If you want this fortress, come and take it.”
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Morgan and his raiders ignored the challenge, confident that starvation would do the work for them.