A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (66 page)

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Washington was in an uproar over Fredericksburg, and General Burnside was accused of criminal stupidity. “What astonishes me is that such a battle should ever have been fought,” the new attaché Edward Malet wrote to his father. “I do really think that all those men who fell were murdered.”
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Lincoln’s reputation as a war leader suffered a serious blow. The president wrung his hands as he listened to accounts of the battle, repeatedly asking, “What has God put me in this place for?”
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To many people, not just in the capital but also throughout the country, the answer was obvious: it was time for Lincoln to make way for a successor. The treasurer of the Sanitary Commission, George Templeton Strong, wrote in his diary on December 18 that “Old Abe’s grotesque genial Western” jokes simply nauseated him now; “if these things go on we shall have pressure on him to resign.”
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Three days later, Strong recorded with surprise that it was Seward and not Lincoln who had resigned. “Edward Everett and Charles Sumner are named as candidates for the succession. I do not think Seward a loss to government,” he wrote. “He is an adroit, shifty, clever politician, he believes in majorities, and it would seem, in nothing else.”
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A campaign to oust Seward had been gaining momentum for several months. The previous September, Lincoln had fended off an anti-Seward delegation from New York that claimed to represent the wishes of five New England governors by declaring that the administration would collapse without the secretary of state. The statement was debatable, since Seward’s power had shrunk considerably since the heady days in December 1860 when he boasted to his wife that the future of the government rested on his shoulders.
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Seward had successfully forged a close relationship with Lincoln as his second in command and confidant, but his relations with the rest of the cabinet had actually worsened during the past two years. The other members resented the way Seward had managed to insinuate himself into Lincoln’s inner circle. They disliked arriving at cabinet meetings and finding him already there, or, when they left, watching him stay behind for a private “chat.” Gideon Welles’s diary was peppered with fulminations against Seward and his wish “to direct, to be the Premier, the real Executive.”
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The treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, whose views on emancipation were far more radical than Seward’s, loathed him so heartily that he seized every opportunity to undermine the secretary of state. He repeatedly used the phrase “back-stairs influence” when referring to Seward, until it took on a life of its own and became a universal cry.

Charles Sumner had been hoping for some time that Seward would make a mistake that would finish him permanently. He believed that such a moment had come after the publication in early December of the State Department’s diplomatic correspondence for the first half of 1862. By now the State Department was overseeing 480 consulates, commercial agencies, and consular agencies abroad, and the literature Seward offered to the public was extensive. The British section contained letters from Charles Francis Adams that the minister had never imagined would become public. Benjamin Moran arrived at the legation on December 22 to find Adams mortified to the point of tears after the London press gleefully published some of the juicier anti-British dispatches, which included his complaints about
The Times
“and the sympathies of the higher classes,” whom Adams accused of “longing to see the political power of the United States permanently impaired.”
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Seward’s decision to publish every letter was “almost amounting to insanity,” Moran declared savagely. “Mr. Adams thinks his usefulness at this post is destroyed.… At one time during the day I thought he seriously contemplated resigning, and I told him he could not be spared—that it was his duty to remain.… This he agreed to … but that he would be more guarded in his future Dispatches to Mr. Seward.” Where, Adams wondered, was Seward’s sense of tact or diplomacy? “I scarcely imagine it wise in diplomatic life to show your hand in the midst of the game.”
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Now that the whole country knew that he accused the aristocracy of wishing “to see the Union shattered,” Adams doubted if polite society would ever receive him again.
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Sumner was interested in only one letter—a dispatch sent to Adams on July 5, 1862, in which Seward betrayed his contempt for the hard-line abolitionists and their universal emancipation agenda.
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This, Sumner believed, would be sufficient to ruin Seward in the eyes of the radical wing of the Republican Party. All he needed was an event or catalyst to mobilize his fellow senators—which had been provided by the disaster at Fredericksburg.

On the evening of December 16, the thirty-two Republican senators gathered for a meeting in the Senate reception room to discuss their response to the defeat. Lincoln did not escape censure, but the general feeling in the chamber was that the president’s mistakes were—as Chase repeatedly charged—the direct result of Seward’s baleful influence. Ironically, Seward’s deliberate attempt to foster an aura of power and mystique about himself, which William Howard Russell had noticed in 1861, now told against him. By the end of the meeting, all but four of the senators had agreed that Lincoln should be confronted about Seward. In Sumner’s view, the secretary of state’s own words had damned him by revealing his lack of commitment to the war. But there was a deeper intent among some of the senators: Seward would be only the first casualty. The other moderates in the cabinet would follow, and then Lincoln himself, leaving the way clear for Chase to become president with a cabinet of fellow radicals.
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One of Seward’s few remaining friends on Capitol Hill had sneaked out of the Republican meeting to warn him of the impending coup. His immediate reaction was to resign first in order to deny his enemies the satisfaction of seeing him humiliated.
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By the time Lord Lyons heard about the senators’ attack, their delegation had already met with a clearly distressed Lincoln on December 18 and presented their demands for Seward’s removal and a reorganization of the cabinet.
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Lincoln had been able to parry their claim that the cabinet was divided, but he had no answer to Sumner’s accusation that Seward was sending “offensive dispatches which the President could not have seen, or assented to.”
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To buy time, he invited them to resume the discussion the following day.

Lyons still regarded Sumner as a reliable ally in Anglo-American controversies, but he thought the Republican Party as a whole combined an unhealthy mix of zealotry and ignorance that made them unpredictable. “We may have to be ready for squalls,” he wrote to Lord Russell on the nineteenth. That evening, Lincoln received the Republican delegation for the second time. But he had a surprise for the plotters. He had invited the cabinet—with the exception of Seward—to hear their allegation that the secretary of state had usurped its powers. It was an awkward moment for Chase, who, even more than Sumner, had been the prime mover behind the attempted coup. He panicked over whether to portray himself as loyal to Lincoln, which would mean denying the senators’ allegations that the cabinet was disgruntled, or to throw in his lot with the delegation and support its claims. He lost his nerve and pretended to be surprised that there were rumors against Seward. His cowardice abashed several of the senators, but not Charles Sumner, who angrily repeated his previous complaints about Seward’s record. Still, when confronted with testimonials that the cabinet was united behind Lincoln, the majority of delegation felt too embarrassed to insist on Seward’s removal. The meeting adjourned at one in the morning with nothing actually decided.

Lyons thought that the outcome would depend on whom Lincoln could least afford to lose; “a quarrel with the Republican Members of the Senate is a very serious thing for him.” As two more days slipped by without any definite news, Lyons pondered a future without his erstwhile nemesis: “I shall be sorry if it ends in the removal of Mr. Seward,” he wrote a little ruefully on Monday, December 22. “We are much more likely to have a man less disposed to keep the peace.… I should hardly have said this two years ago.”
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But that afternoon he paid a visit to the State Department, and to his relief he found Seward back at his desk, behaving as if nothing had happened. Over the weekend, just as Seward had started to accept the coup against him, and Lincoln had begun to rationalize to himself why his chief ally in the cabinet had to be sacrificed to placate the radicals, Chase had become frightened that Seward’s friends and supporters would take their revenge on him. To save himself, he offered his resignation in the hope that this would clear him of any imputation of harboring ambitions for the presidency. Lincoln realized that Chase had lost his nerve. In a deliberate show of authority, the president rejected his resignation, replied that both secretaries were indispensable, and declared all discussion about a cabinet reorganization at an end. The senators’ protest had achieved precisely the opposite effect of what they had intended. But it was obvious, Lyons wrote to Lord Russell on December 26, that “Mr. Seward was plainly not in a position to make any concessions at all to neutrals.”
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He would not dare risk his remaining political capital on helping Britain to obtain cotton, or indeed on helping Britain at all.

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That same day, the twenty-sixth, President Jefferson Davis told Southerners to relinquish their hope for British intervention. He was speaking to the legislature in his home state of Mississippi at the end of a morale-boosting tour through the western parts of the Confederacy. Davis did not need to rouse his listeners’ indignation—many already had firsthand or secondhand knowledge of the devastation wrought by Union armies. Nor did he need to warn them against complacency: beyond Virginia, the South was shrinking as more and more territory came under Federal control. What the lean and shabbily dressed listeners required from their president was reassurance that the North might smash their homes but not their moral purpose. Davis damned Northerners as the blighted offspring of Cromwell’s fanatical Roundheads. It was in their blood to oppress others, he declared. Their ancestors “persecuted Catholics in England, and they hung Quakers and witches in America.” The liberty-loving South could never live in harmony with such monsters of intolerance. But having given his audience its dose of tonic, Davis proceeded to administer a series of bitter pills. The last, and most shocking to the once-mighty kings of cotton, was the fact of the South’s utter isolation. “In the course of this war our eyes have often been turned abroad,” admitted Davis:

We have expected sometimes recognition, and sometimes intervention, at the hands of foreign nations; and we had a right to expect it … but this I say: “Put not your trust in princes,” and rest not your hopes on foreign nations. This war is ours; we must fight it out ourselves. And I feel some pride in knowing that, so far, we have done it without the good will of anybody.
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The Marquis of Hartington was moved by Davis’s speech. He and his traveling companion, Colonel Leslie, had arrived in Richmond on December 23, five days after leaving Baltimore in the dead of night. Hartington had wanted to ask the U.S. government’s permission to cross into the South, but the legation had warned him against the idea. “They said they thought it was very doubtful,” he explained to his father, the Duke of Devonshire, “and if we were refused there would be more difficulty in going out on our own hook.” He promised they would not resist if they were captured during the attempt.
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Fortunately, with the assistance of the ubiquitous Maryland journalist W. W. Glenn, they had been able to travel from one safe house to the next without encountering any Federal patrols.

The difference between the countryside of Maryland and that of Virginia was striking. “The country looks terribly desolated,” wrote Hartington. “The fences are all pulled down for firewood, a good many houses burnt, and everything looking very bare.” The contrast between Baltimore and Richmond was even greater. The Southern capital had doubled in size in less than two years, but it was worse off in every aspect. Hartington was surprised by the shoddy appearance of all classes. “They have had no new clothes since the war began,” he wrote, “and are not likely to get any till it is over.” Yet “these people say they are ready to go on for any length of time, and I believe many of them think the longer the better, because it will widen the breach between them and the Yankees, against whom their hatred is more intense than you can possibly conceive.”
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Hartington had arrived in America in August with no strong feelings about the war. After a couple of weeks in New York, he felt “inclined to be more a Unionist than I was.” The moderation of New Yorkers impressed him, since “I believe, if they could lick them, and the South would come back to-morrow, they would be willing to forget everything that had happened, and go on as usual.” But as he saw more of the North he became less certain about the point of the war: “I understand nothing about it, and I can’t find anybody except Seward who even pretends that he does.… They mix up in the most perplexing manner the slavery question, which they say makes theirs the just cause, with the Union question, which is really what they are fighting for.”
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He found the Peace Democrats he spoke to in the North a rather unattractive lot, which made him waver: “I think their arguments are weak and their objects not by any means desirable,” he wrote from Chicago in mid-October.
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