Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (54 page)

“The American Eagle,” remembered the Confederate propagandist Edwin de Leon, “was a bird, they thought, whose wings would bear clipping,” and to the aristocrats, “the supposed failure of the American experiment was a source of joy.” British soldiers, among them Lieutenant Colonel Garnet Wolseley (who would eventually rise to become the most famous British general of the Victorian age) and Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Fremantle, slipped through the Union blockade to
attach themselves to the Confederate army as military observers. There they came to admire the lofty and chivalric principles of war they thought they saw practiced by the Southern generals. Fremantle found Robert E. Lee the very embodiment of a proper British officer, even down to his religion. “General Lee is, almost without exception, the handsomest man of his age I ever saw. … He is a perfect gentlemen in every respect.” Fremantle added with evident gratification that Lee “is a member of the Church of England.” Wolseley, too, was struck with admiration for Lee, and one of Wolseley’s aides described Lee in terms that bordered on beatification:

Every one who approaches him does so with marked respect, although there is none of that bowing and flourishing of forage caps which occurs in the presence of European generals; and, while all honor him and place implicit faith in his courage and ability, those with whom he is most intimate feel for him the affection of sons to a father. … When speaking of the Yankees he neither evinced any bitterness of feeling nor gave utterance to a single violent expression, but alluded to many of his former friends and companions among them in the kindest terms. He spoke as a man proud of the victories won by his country and confident of ultimate success under the blessing of the Almighty, whom he glorified for past successes, and whose aid he invoked for all future operations.
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Fremantle, after leaving the Confederacy in 1863, happily declared that “a people which in all ranks and in both sexes display a unanimity and a heroism which can never have been surpassed in the history of the world is destined sooner or later, to become a great and independent nation.”
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Nor were the British rejoicing alone. Eugénie, the French empress, laughed at the impossibility of taking the Union cause seriously: “Why is [the French-American scientist] Du Chaillu searching Africa for the missing link when a specimen was brought from the American backwoods to Washington?” Leopold of Belgium, the power broker among European monarchs, ardently hoped that the war would make it possible “to raise a barrier against the United States and provide a support for the monarchical-aristocratic principle in the Southern states.” In Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, who was only beginning the ascent to power which would make him and Germany the colossus of central Europe, admitted that “there was something in me that made me instinctively sympathize with the slaveholders as the aristocratic party.” He could not understand “how society could be kept in tolerable order where the powers of the government were so narrowly restricted and where there was so little reverence for the constituted or ‘ordained’ authorities.” Paul von
Hindenburg, who would serve in 1870 as a Prussian army subaltern and in World War I as one of the principal German overlords, could recite even in the 1930s “every detail” and “every place” involved in the campaigns of the Army of Northern Virginia; in the post–Civil War years “Lee, Jackson and Stuart” were “the favorite heroes” of Prussian officers.
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It was not just the aristocrats and generals who sympathized with the Confederacy. After all, the Confederacy could claim that its war was being waged on the basis of national independence and free trade. As a result, many English liberals admired the South’s fight as a struggle against money-grubbing Yankee overlordship and high protective tariffs, while others feared the political instability that massive unemployment and the disruption of trade would cause in England. The liberal stalwart and chancellor of the exchequer William Ewart Gladstone told a political dinner in Lancashire in October 1862 that they might as well recognize the inevitable success of the Confederacy now, rather than wait for the blockade to inflict more of its “frightful misery on British workers.” “We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation.” (In Paris, John Slidell bolted upright on hearing about Gladstone’s speech: “If this means anything, it means immediate recognition!”)
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Nor was Gladstone seeing ghosts for bedsheets in that “frightful misery.” Only 497 of the 1,678 cotton-spinning mills in Manchester had enough cotton to operate at full capacity; 298 were shuttered entirely, and 80,000 mill workers were out of work. “I need hardly say that now there is great distress from want of employment—the result of your horrid war,” a Methodist preacher wrote to the American evangelist Charles Grandison Finney. Another English friend advised Finney, “We have been working short time at the mill… & we seem to get worse & worse weekly & from all human appearances we can see no end to it after all.” By December 1862, almost 15 percent of English textile workers were out of work entirely, and another 70 percent were working reduced shifts. “Better fight Yankees,” read one workers’ newspaper, “than starve operatives.”
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The blockade also inflicted damage on the French economy, and with some of the same results in French public opinion. And the French emperor, Napoleon III,
had reasons based on colonial ambition for preferring an independent Southern Confederacy. In December 1861 England, France, and Spain sent troops into Mexico to enforce the collection of debts owed by the bankrupt Mexican Republic. This was not the first time the European monarchies had schemed to reestablish themselves in the New World: the British had established a protectorate in Nicaragua, the Belgians set up a quasi-colony in Guatemala, both the French and the Spanish had repeatedly put their oars into Mexican affairs, and even the north German states had their eyes on Central America for “emigration and colonization” in the 1850s. But intervention in Mexico in 1861 was the most serious effort yet, since Napoleon intended to use the debt crisis as a pretext for deposing the Mexican president, Benito Juárez, and installing a puppet ruler who would rule Mexico, for all intents and purposes, as a French colony. The English and the Spanish withdrew once it became clear that this was Napoleon’s game, and in 1863, Napoleon recruited an Austrian archduke, Ferdinand Maximilian (the brother of the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef), as the new “emperor” of Mexico.
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The chief threat to this scheme was the United States, which publicly warned Napoleon not to intervene in Mexican affairs. By 1862 the United States was in no position to obstruct Napoleon’s ambitions in Mexico, and Napoleon hoped that the division of the American republic would permanently eliminate the United States as an obstacle to French colonization in Central America. The Confederate agents in Europe, headed by John Slidell, decided to play on Napoleon’s desires and offered Confederate support for his Mexican adventure, plus a renewed supply of cotton, if the emperor would grant French diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy and aid the Confederates in breaking the blockade. Napoleon pulled shy of accepting the Confederate offer, but he did create a favorable climate in France for Confederate agents to obtain loans and other assistance. The French banking house of Emile Erlanger underwrote the sale of $14.5 million of Confederate bonds in March 1863, and Confederate purchasing agents were able to buy up substantial amounts of war supplies to run through the blockade.
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The most damaging pieces of war equipment that the British and French allowed the Confederates to buy from them were ships, especially armed commerce raiders. In March 1861 the Confederate government appointed a former U.S. naval
officer named James Bulloch as its civilian naval agent, and by June Bulloch had set himself up in Liverpool to arrange contracts for building or buying ships for the Confederacy. Bulloch turned out to be an extremely adroit and successful bargainer, as well as a careful reader of the terms of Britain’s Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819, which forbade even recognized belligerents to “equip, furnish, fit out, or arm… any Ship or Vessel, with Intent or in order that such Ship or Vessel shall be employed in the Service of any Foreign Prince, State, or Potentate.” The act threatened violators of the law with seizure of these vessels, but the law also provided little in terms of the proof required beforehand to demonstrate that a ship was being built or fitted out with belligerent intent. It became easy, therefore, for Bulloch to build or purchase English ships through registered agents or English partners, sail them out of British waters, and then outfit them for their real military purposes somewhere else.
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Bulloch’s first commission, a steamer named
Oreto
, sailed from Liverpool in March 1862 as a merchant ship with what appeared on the records as an English captain and crew and registry with the tiny Kingdom of Palermo. The builders “may … have had a tolerably clear notion that she would at some future time, and by some subsequent arrangement, pass into the possession of the Confederate Government,” Bulloch snickered, “but they never mentioned their suspicions, and they undertook nothing more than to build and deliver in Liverpool a screwsteamer, according to certain specified plans and conditions, fitted for sea in every respect, but without armament or equipment for fighting of any kind whatever.” Having fulfilled the letter of British neutrality, Bulloch then ordered the
Oreto
to a rendezvous on a deserted island in the Bahamas, where she was equipped with naval guns, a Confederate crew, and a new name, CSS
Florida
. The
Florida
then set off on a two-and-a-half-year career of commerce raiding that sent thirty-eight Yankee merchant ships to the bottom or into refit to emerge as Confederate raiders themselves.
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The
Florida
was not the only ship Bulloch would slip out of England through the cracks in the laws. In the summer of 1861 Bulloch negotiated with another firm, Laird Brothers, for the construction of a sleek steam cruiser known only by its yard number,
290
. The U.S. consul in Liverpool, Thomas Haines Dudley, suspected from the beginning that Bulloch was planning another
Oreto
, and amassed considerable evidence that the
290
was intended for purposes other than peaceful trade. The British government was slow to follow up on the charges, and by the time an
order to impound the ship was issued in July 1862, Bulloch had already bundled it out to sea.

It was now the turn of Charles Francis Adams to send barely contained statements of outrage to the Foreign Office. Given the
290
’s “peculiar adaptation to war purposes, there could have been no doubt by those engaged in the work, and familiar with such details, that she was intended for other purposes than those of legitimate trade,” in blithe disregard of the Foreign Enlistment Act. Even worse, the
290
, “although commanded by Americans in her navigation of the ocean… is manned almost entirely by English seamen, engaged and forwarded from that port by persons in league with her Commander”—yet another violation of the Act. It was all to no avail. The
290
sailed blithely to the Azores, where this vessel, too, was outfitted with guns and stores and took on the most dreaded name in the entire gallery of American ships—CSS
Alabama
.
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By the autumn of 1862, the Confederacy had come as close as it was ever to come to obtaining outright cooperation and recognition from France and Britain. The effects of the cotton blockade, the unpleasant consequences of the
Trent
affair, and other blockade incidents, and especially the surprising success of the Confederate armies under Lee and Bragg in Virginia and Kentucky, persuaded both Lord Palmerston and Napoleon III that the time had at last arrived to intervene in the American mess. Palmerston knew that recognition of the Confederacy could easily bring on the war with the United States that he had avoided in 1861, since the Confederacy would not be “a bit more independent for our saying so unless we followed up our Declaration by taking Part with them in the war.”
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But by late summer 1862 the North appeared exhausted anyway. In June Palmerston had surprised Charles Francis Adams with a savage note denouncing Union occupation practices in New Orleans, and Adams took the note as a signal that the Palmerston government was about to open a campaign for intervention and mediation. In July, James Mason, as the Confederacy’s representative in London, pressed Earl Russell with “a direct and vigorous effort to obtain recognition of the Confederacy … ending with a formal demand.” Later in June and again in July, debate erupted in Parliament over Southern recognition, with one pro-Southern member of Parliament, William Lindsay, loudly proclaiming that he wanted Britain to grant diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy and then present an ultimatum for mediation because he “
desired the disruption of the American Union, as every honest
Englishman did
, because it was too great a Power and England sh’d not let such a power exist on the American continent.”

In August, Earl Russell began sounding out the French about the possibility of a joint Anglo-French intervention to stop the war. Finally, on September 14, 1862, Palmerston drafted a short note to Russell that asked whether it might not “be time for us to consider whether… England and France might not… recommend an arrangement upon the basis of separation?” If mediation was rejected by the Lincoln administration, would it not be time for Britain “to recognize the Southern States as an independent State” and force some kind of arbitration on the North? Three days later Russell responded favorably to Palmerston’s suggestion, observing that “the time is come for offering mediation to the United States Government, with a view to the recognition of the Independence of the Confederates.” Palmerston should call for a cabinet meeting on October to discuss the offer, Russell said, and he added hopefully that “if the Federals sustain a great defeat, they may be at once ready for mediation.”
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