A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman
On Friday, March 7, the combatants assembled in the Commons to watch their proxies fight. The Confederates appeared confident despite the news in the previous day’s papers of the Federals’ double victories at Roanoke and Forts Henry and Donelson. The House was more crowded than normal for a Friday evening and from his vantage point in the Diplomatic Gallery, Moran noticed there were a large number of ministers present. William Gregory’s pro-Southern speech was in his usual ebullient style. Every cheer from the House brought a smile to the Confederates and a grimace to their opponents. His claim that Britain was supporting an illegal blockade to the detriment of her own workers appeared to strike home with many members. After he sat down, a large number left for dinner, evidently having decided there was no need to listen to any more speeches in support of the motion. Forster was well into his speech when the House refilled. “We watched closely,” recorded Mason, “as Forster went on with his exposé, and reduced the tables down almost to nil.” To his surprise, Forster’s speech received an even more favorable reception than Gregory’s. Palmerston appeared to be listening intently, and Gladstone had actually turned around to watch Forster.
After Forster sat down, however, the Federal and Confederate observers realized that the ministry had merely been biding its time while it waited for the supporters of both sides to declare themselves. Sir Roundell Palmer now rose to speak on behalf of the government. A thin, pale man with an unfortunate lisp and squeaky voice, Palmer was no one’s choice as a debater, but as the solicitor general he was more qualified than anyone else present to speak on the legality of the blockade. Palmer’s shyness had always made him seem devoid of emotion—“bloodless,” his critics called him. Tonight, though, unmistakable moral outrage against the South and all that it represented ran through his speech. The government would remain neutral, he declared, because “honour, generosity and justice” demanded it “and because it was the only course consistent with the Divine law, that we should do to others as we would wish others to do to ourselves.” Years later, at the end of a long and illustrious career, he remembered the debate with pride. “The speech … gained me more applause than, perhaps, any other which I ever made.”66
There were more speakers—Thurlow Weed had primed at least twenty to speak on the North’s behalf—but it was obvious to all except Mason that the Confederates had lost the debate. When Gregory rose for the second time, it was to withdraw his motion. Weed was immediately surrounded by a dozen MPs who came over to shake his hand, while only a couple sauntered over to commiserate with Mason.67
Ill.17 Punch’s John Bull knows there is an alternative supply of cotton.
The following morning, Adams tucked into a celebratory breakfast at the legation with Weed, Bright, Forster, and several other supporters. Adams admitted to the group that he had ceased to worry about the debate once he learned of the Federal victories. “Mr. Gregory,” he announced, “could not have selected a more difficult moment for himself as the current of opinion is setting much the other way. Nothing shines so dazzling to the military eye of Europe as success.”68 Adams was allowing his cynicism too much rein. Moreover, if such success could sway political opinion, so could a cotton famine. Though it had not happened yet, Mason informed the Confederate State Department on March 11 that supplies “were now very low,” and the cotton workers were dependent on charity “to keep them from actual starvation.”69 The cause of the South in England, he assured them, was by no means lost.
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9.1 Dicey never realized how much his references to the “mother country” alienated Americans. His innocent, if tongue-in-cheek, comparison of New York with London caused great irritation. “Everything around and about me looked so like the Old Country,” he wrote. Landing on the docks, “Irish porters seized upon my luggage as they would have done at the Tower steps in London. Street newsboys pestered me with second editions of English-printed newspapers. An Old-fashioned English hackney coach carried me to my destination, through dull, English-looking streets, with English names; and the driver cheated me at the end of my fare, with genuine London exorbitance.”
9.2 Under the Declaration of Paris, when two belligerent ships arrived at a neutral port, their departure had to be separated by twenty-four hours to forestall the risk of a battle in the neutral country’s waters.
TEN
The First Blow Against Slavery
Ambiguous attitudes—Consul Dudley vs. James Bulloch in Liverpool—Henry Adams is embarrassed—Rise of the ironclads—Farewell to Russell—A brilliant maneuver
Not once during the blockade debate had any of the speakers referred to slavery. The issue was an embarrassment to both sides. Northern supporters were not allowed to claim that the war was to end slavery, and Southern supporters naturally could not say, as John Stuart Mill had so trenchantly put it in an essay published shortly before the debate, that the South was fighting for the right “of burning human creatures alive.”10.1 1 Nor would they, since every Confederate sympathizer in Britain assumed that the South would abolish the “peculiar institution” as soon as its economy could sustain free labor.
A speech by Gladstone to an audience in Manchester in April 1862—many of whom were being financially drained by the war—revealed the extent to which ambiguity over the slavery question benefited the South and damaged the North. Gladstone asked the question that was deeply troubling his listeners: Were they suffering for nothing? There was “no doubt,” he declared, “if we could say that this was a contest of slavery and freedom, there is not a man within the length and breadth of this room, there is, perhaps, hardly a man in all England, who would for a moment hesitate upon the side he should take.”3
Ill.18 Punch reminds the British that the South was fighting to keep its slaves.
The Duke of Argyll berated Gladstone for allowing himself to be blinded by fashionable opinion. “That this war is having a powerful, a daily increasing effect on the hold of slavery over opinion in America is, in my judgment, a fact so evident … that I cannot understand its being in question,” he wrote impatiently.4 But Gladstone felt vindicated for expressing his doubts after he received a letter from a Liberian diplomat named Edward Wilmot Blyden, who declared that he was “very glad of the position which England maintains with reference to the war.… Both sections of the country are negro-hating and negro-crushing.”5
Seward’s interdiction against calling the conflict a war for abolition was so strict that Adams was placed in the invidious position of having to turn away Northern supporters who wanted to help. When a deputation from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society visited the American legation in April, “expressing interest and sympathy with our cause,” he could only say a few platitudes about voluntary emancipation after the war.6 This “was not much to their liking,” according to Benjamin Moran.7 It was not enough for Adams to echo John Stuart Mill, that one set of people were fighting for independence in order to keep another in bondage; his listeners wanted him to promise abolition.
Although the slavery question was a persistent stumbling block for both sides in their bid to win public support in Britain, there was nothing to prevent them from waging unrestrained and barely concealed war on every other front. “Both the Northern and Southern parties have chosen to make this country a kind of supplemental fighting ground,” railed the Liverpool Mercury on April 10, 1862. “Their respective agents here have been extremely active in their efforts to promote their own cause, as well as to discover and thwart the plans of their opponents. Each party has a place here which may be styled its headquarters; each party has in its service a number of agents, scouts and spies.”
James Bulloch, the Confederate navy’s purchasing agent and architect of its overseas fleet, had returned to England on March 10 aboard one of Fraser, Trenholm’s commercial vessels. He had been expecting to hear that the Oreto—one of the two raiders commissioned the previous year—was already launched. Instead, he found the vessel bobbing uselessly in Liverpool harbor, in plain view
Bulloch was too late. Federal agents had known about the Oreto for several weeks and were already trying to have her seized for contravening the Foreign Enlistment Act. Now that Henry Sanford had been forced to confine his operations to continental Europe, Bulloch’s new adversary was Thomas Haines Dudley, a dour but intrepid Quaker from New Jersey. As a young lawyer, Dudley had actively fought against slavery, taking extraordinary risks such as disguising himself as a slave trader, complete with whip and pistols, and traveling to the South to rescue a free black family who had been kidnapped and forced into slavery. But at the age of thirty-six, Dudley narrowly survived a ferryboat fire that killed more than thirty people, leaving him with permanent physical and mental scars. After his recovery he concentrated on politics; Lincoln, who owed him a sinecure for his help in securing the Republican nomination, had offered him either the legation in Japan or the lower position of consul in Liverpool. Dudley had chosen Liverpool because he thought the doctors would be better in England. Yet he did not intend to ride out his appointment like the timeserving secretary Charles Wilson at the legation in London.8 Dudley’s experience on the ferryboat had left him determined to live the rest of his life with force and conviction.
His personal appearance pleased no less a critic than Benjamin Moran, who thought him “as intelligent as he looks.”9 Tall and wavy-haired, with a sad-looking face that was framed by a neatly trimmed beard, he seemed unthreatening to Moran; but then Moran was not on the receiving end of Dudley’s surveillance operations. Within six months of his arrival at the Liverpool consulate, Dudley had created a new intelligence network that far outstripped Sanford’s effort. The team consisted of himself, his vice consul, Henry Wilding, the London consul, Freeman H. Morse, and a large number of operatives under the direction of Matthew Maguire, Ignatius Pollaky’s more reliable replacement. It was expensive to find spies who were both effective and trustworthy, but this was one area where Seward was prepared to be generous.10
Dudley was able to insert his men only around the fringes of Confederate society, but it was enough to penetrate their defenses. One operative gained hold of the list of Confederate agents in Britain; another obtained proof that the suspicious ship with the capacity to carry sixteen guns in Liverpool was definitely one of Bulloch’s raiders.11 Charles Francis Adams forwarded Dudley’s report to Lord Russell, and the British government began quietly conducting its own investigation.12 By the middle of March, Dudley believed that he had all the information he needed to lodge a protest with the city’s customs officials. He could also prove that the Oreto was not destined for the Italian navy, as claimed by its builders, William C. Miller & Sons.
Bulloch was aware of Thomas Dudley’s scrutiny, however, and already had a strategy, based on the legal advice given to him the previous year, to thwart his attempts to have the vessel seized. An English captain and crew would sail the ship out of Liverpool without a single military component on board; once in neutral waters, the Oreto would rendezvous with the Bahama to receive her guns and supplies. Caleb Huse was put in charge of procuring the arms shipment for the Bahama. The timing could hardly have been worse for him. His funds had run out and he was forced to borrow small sums from friends in Liverpool—£200 here, £1,000 there—to cobble together the cargo, all the while being “watched by the agents of the United States wherever I may go,” as he complained to Major Josiah Gorgas of the Confederate Ordnance Bureau.13
When the Liverpool authorities inspected the Oreto at Dudley’s request, they found nothing that actually contravened the Foreign Enlistment Act, even though it was unusual for a merchant ship to have gun ports. They refused to impound her until Dudley could produce more concrete evidence. Bulloch was lucky, but it would only be a matter of time before something or someone incriminated them and the ship’s clearance would be revoked. On the chill, misty morning of March 22, the Oreto was slowly guided out of the harbor, ostensibly to test her engines. On board was a small party with female guests to give credence that the vessel was simply going on a Saturday outing. But as soon as she left the harbor, the passengers clambered down into the pilot boat and the Oreto steamed out to sea. From now on she would be known under her new name, CSS Florida.
Bulloch had taken a gamble by sending the Florida off without arms or a proper crew. Although the captain, James Duguid, knew the truth, since he was William Miller’s son-in-law, the rest of the English crew had been told they were bound for Palermo. Bulloch was relying on John Low, a Scotsman who had emigrated to the South in his early twenties, to protect his investment. Low was traveling on the Florida as a passenger, though in reality he had command of the vessel. His orders were to have the Florida delivered to Nassau in the Bahamas, where he was to hand the ship over to Lieutenant John N. Maffitt (whom Bulloch knew well and believed was resourceful enough to know what to do with her) or, in his absence, to any Confederate officer.
Thomas Dudley was convinced that the Liverpool customs officers had dragged their feet during the investigation into the Florida. A report in late March that the U.S. Navy had captured Captain Pegram and the Nashville off the coast of North Carolina cheered the Federals a little but did not lessen their sense of grievance against the British authorities, whom they suspected of ill-concealed bias toward the South. Adams went to see Lord Russell on March 25 to protest against England’s laxity over Confederate violations of the Foreign Enlistment Act. Russell listened sympathetically until Adams’s indignation took on such a strident tone that he undermined his case. “Adams has made one of his periodical blistering communications about our countenancing the South,” reported an internal Foreign Office communiqué after the meeting.14
Russell found the American minister’s charge of bias especially unfair after the British government’s myriad concessions to the North, not least its propping up the shaky legal foundations of the blockade.15 Their relations deteriorated further after Adams complied with Seward’s instruction to remonstrate once more against Britain’s declaration of belligerency. This was not some “local riot” of twelve months’ duration, expostulated Russell. Furthermore, he complained, when it came to blockade violations, why was Britain always being made out to be the villain when other nations were following the same practice?16
Ironically, while Adams was accusing Lord Russell of being insincere, the French emperor was playing a multiple hand between his own ministers and the rival American camps. Much to the annoyance of everyone except the Confederates, Napoleon held several private interviews in April with William Schaw Lindsay, MP (who was also a shipping magnate). Lindsay had played a significant role during Anglo-French negotiations of the 1860 trade treaty and was easily able to gain an audience with the emperor without exciting the suspicion of the British embassy. Napoleon said everything Lindsay wished to hear.17 John Slidell’s spirits soared when Lindsay reported back to him. “This is entirely confidential,” he wrote to James Mason in London, “but you can say to Lord Campbell, Mr. Gregory etc. that I now have positive and authentic evidence that France only waits the assent of England for recognition [of the South] and other more cogent measures.”18 Russell was so annoyed by Lindsay’s interference that he refused to meet him when the MP returned to England. The Confederates were elated, however, by the news from France; Consul Morse reported to Seward that the “Rebels here confidently predict two or three great Southern victories and the recognition of the Confederate States before the adjournment of Parliament.”19
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The commencement of Parliament had brought with it the resumption of Lady Palmerston’s “at homes.” Neither James Mason nor Henry Hotze was on the guest list, but Benjamin Moran was able to finagle an invitation for himself, Charles Wilson, and Henry Adams. He was one of the first guests to arrive at Cambridge House on March 22 and spent the early part of the evening gawking at h
“I have no doubt that if I were to stay here another year, I should become extremely fond of the place and the life,” Henry mused to his brother Charles Francis Jr. on April 11. But for now he had a “greediness for revenge.” He approved of the chief’s “putting on the diplomatic screws.” England should not be allowed to wriggle out of her responsibility for aiding the Confederates. At least the Nashville “has been taken or destroyed,” he added. Moreover, it turned out that the Harvey Birch, which Confederate captain Pegram had triumphantly claimed as his first capture, belonged to Confederate sympathizers. Writing on the same day, Bulloch warned the Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, that Pegram’s mistake had caused them considerable embarrassment. Indiscriminate attacks on Northern ships were perhaps not the best method of waging war.23