A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (119 page)

Rose was, as usual, desperately seasick during the Channel crossing: “I got a bench on deck, and seated my maid and lay with my head on her lap.” She arrived back at 34 Sackville Street on August 1 to find London almost empty. “The season [is] over.… Houses shut up. Streets blocked with baggage,” she wrote with a tinge of regret. Georgiana Walker, the Confederate exile in Bermuda, had recently arrived with her children and was staying in lodgings on the floor below (she had come to England to consult an ophthalmologist about her younger daughter’s failing eyesight). The glamour surrounding Rose as she made her final farewells put Georgiana in awe of her: “The Lords and Ladies and Duchesses are her constant visitors,” she wrote in her diary, “and her invitations to dinner parties and balls innumerable.”
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James Mason was also leaving town: “I propose for the next two or three months to visit different points in England and in Ireland, not to return to London unless specially called,” he informed Benjamin on August 4.
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Charles Francis Adams was about to go on holiday as well, albeit with reluctance. He liked London when it was empty; “to me it is usually a period of the most pleasant relief and satisfaction,” he wrote in his diary. “Were my family contented I would cheerfully remain, at least during the warm weather.”
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But the family was most definitely not contented: “Mary and I are plotting to make sure that this be our last season,” Henry wrote to Charles Francis Jr. “All this however is as yet unknown to the family, and much depends on Loo.” Loo was Henry’s married sister, Louise Kuhn, who had come with her husband, Charles, in July for an extended visit.
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Ironically, Henry did not need his sister’s help to persuade their father. Adams was longing for a “release from a continuance at this post before another season.”
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Now that the era of perpetual crisis had passed, both Charles Francis Adams and Henry were restless. Neither felt that English society had learned to treat the Adams family with the proper respect. Rose Greenhow, at least, knew how to feed the Adams amour propre. Fearlessly, she visited the legation on July 11, shortly before her departure for the South, to procure a parole for Lieutenant Wilson, one of the
Alabama
’s officers who needed medical attention. Adams was unable to resist her flattery and handed her one of the few victories during her time in England.

Rose spent her final evening in London with her daughter Florence. “Until the last minute she had hoped that I would not go,” she wrote in her diary. “But alas, inexorable destiny seems to impel me on.”
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Mason accompanied Rose to Glasgow where the blockade runner the
Condor
—the newest addition to the blockade-running fleet of Alexander Collie, an English shipbuilder—was preparing to leave on August 10. The commander was Captain William N. W. Hewett, the captain who had taken Mason and Slidell to England after the conclusion of the
Trent
affair. He was using the alias Samuel S. Ridge. “I like his looks and am quite sure he will not lose his vessel if courage and coolness will save it,” decided Rose. Only when she was completely alone on board did the enormity of the decision to leave begin to weigh upon her. “A sad, sick feeling crept over me of parting, perhaps forever, from many very dear to me,” she wrote. “A few months before I had landed as a stranger; I will not say in a foreign land, for it was the land of my ancestors.… But I was literally a stranger in the land of my fathers and a feeling of cold isolation was upon me.”
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—

Henry Hotze had decided to leave England for a short while in order to expand his operations into Europe. He had pulled off a great triumph in France by cultivating Auguste Havas, the proprietor of the Havas Agency, the sole telegraphic and foreign news service in the country. “All translations from papers in other languages … are made for the whole French press [by] Havas,” Hotze explained to Benjamin. Its monopoly on foreign news was complete and unassailable.
²³

Hotze’s journal, the
Index,
was paying for itself. Circulation was increasing, as were revenues, and Hotze no longer had to write the majority of articles himself. The Southern poet John R. Thompson had agreed to come over from Richmond to help him, and Hotze had prevailed on John Witt, a nephew of the scientific racialist George Witt, to become the magazine’s new editor. “My work being thus, both in England and France, reduced within manageable dimensions,” Hotze told Benjamin, “I feel able … to devote some efforts to a field hitherto entirely neglected.” Hotze’s aim was to spread uncertainty in the European financial markets regarding the North’s ability to pay its bonds. He had also heard that Poles were being recruited in Germany to fight for the Federal army. This, he thought, he could deal with quite easily by sending across John Witt to entrap a recruiter. Hotze had already dispatched the amenable Witt to Ireland on a mission to expose the activities of Federal recruiters there. “One conviction for violation of the Foreign Enlistment Act would make considerable noise,” he explained to Witt. “Engage the services of a first rate detective … find some intelligent, non-commissioned officer … who could play the part of a decoy duck at the proper time.”
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Although British subjects were more likely to be forced into the Confederate than the Federal army, the South’s isolation from Europe meant that such reports rarely reached the outside world. As far as the British public was aware, the kidnappings, beatings, and torture of immigrants were all a Northern phenomenon.
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The perception that crimping was rampant in the North lent veracity to Robert Livingstone’s explanation to his father of how he became a Federal soldier. “I went to Cape Town where your agent Mr. Rutherford advised me to find employment on board a brig which brought me to Boston,” Robert wrote from his hospital bed. “Here I was kidnapped and one morning … I found myself enlisted in the US army.” He passed over his alias of “Rupert Vincent” by claiming, “I have changed my name, for I am convinced that to bear your name here would lead to further dishonour to it.” Robert swore to his father that he was an unwilling combatant and a penitent son.
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Dr. Livingstone tried to suppress his doubts and accept the letter at face value. “Our Robert is in the Federal Army … he was kidnapped he says,” he told a friend.
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Livingstone joined the queue of anxious relatives making inquiries at the legation. “We get daily applications as to the fate of persons in our army, and I have a great deal to do to answer them,” Benjamin Moran recorded in his diary. “At one time the letters all run on employment in the army—at another on free emigration—and now on the fate of relatives in our service.”
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He had noticed another change: for no apparent reason that he could discern, the public had gone wild over a petition addressed to the U.S. government asking for the bloodshed to end. London had been placarded with advertisements for the so-called Peace Address: Not only are the walls covered with big posters inviting people to sign,” he wrote, “but men are sent around from house to house in lanes and allies [
sic
] for signatures. The address is a most insulting one to the loyal American people, and is being extensively subscribed by children and fools. Shop girls and servants are inveigled into placing their names to it.”
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The U.S. consuls reported similar scenes in their districts. In Ireland, priests were reading the petition during the Sunday sermon and urging parishioners to sign. The Peace Address was in the form of a letter claiming brotherhood with the American people. The alleged author was Thomas Bentley Kershaw, a Manchester cotton factory foreman. Consul Eastman in Bristol thought Kershaw was the front man for an international conspiracy directed at wavering voters in the North. He commented to Seward on August 24, “You will observe that under all these rumours of peace, there lies coiled the insidious project of Southern independence.”
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Ill.54
Punch’s caricature Irishman is lured to fight for the Union (left), while the Church (right) urges him to stay.

Charles Francis Adams told Seward that the real instigators of the Peace Address had to be “the rebel emissaries themselves,” never imagining that the Confederate lobby was furious with Kershaw for diverting the public’s energy into a scheme that had no chance of achieving its goal.
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Spence had tried everything short of sabotage to discourage him. William Lindsay would never have allowed the peace petition to continue, but a stroke in August had disabled him and his recovery was uncertain. Hotze had initially refused to give Kershaw any assistance in collecting signatures. The master propagandist knew that a peace petition from England would incite Northern Anglophobia without adding a single vote to the Democrats in the upcoming national elections.
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Hotze was running his own peace campaign, writing letters and articles under various aliases for newspapers throughout the North. Kershaw’s only usefulness to the Southern cause was in his keeping the issue alive among the “shop girls and servants.” But even then, there were cheaper ways of attracting public sympathy than the £150 it cost to distribute the petition.
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(When Kershaw eventually arrived in Washington with his petition in October, he was told that the U.S. government did not accept foreign petitions from nonaccredited individuals. After waiting for a few days, he gave up and returned home.)

—

Hotze was one of the first people to see Belle Boyd when she arrived from Quebec in early August. Though she had destroyed her dispatches when the Federals captured the
Greyhound,
Belle still possessed Benjamin’s letter commending her to Hotze’s protection. It was only natural that she would seek him out now that she was friendless and penniless. In a surprising twist, Hotze was himself holding a letter for Belle. “Upon opening it, I found that it was from Mr. Hardinge, informing me that he had come to England,” wrote Belle in her memoirs, “but not being able to learn my whereabouts, had proceeded to Paris, in the faint hope of finding me there. I was deeply touched at this new proof of his honest attachment, and immediately telegraphed a message to him, stating where he would find me in London.”
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Belle and Acting Ensign Samuel Hardinge had spent a total of three weeks in each other’s company. They might well have married even without Hotze’s encouragement, but the propagandist worked so swiftly that neither was allowed the opportunity for second thoughts. Hotze arranged the entire wedding. He booked the church, invited the guests, and, most important of all, tweaked the interest of the press by portraying the young lovers as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. The nuptials took place at St. James’s, Piccadilly, on August 24, 1864. The main newspapers, including several in France, carried gushing accounts of the day, complete with a lengthy history of the brave and beautiful bride and her stalwart groom. Belle was inundated with wedding presents, which was fortunate, since the couple was beginning married life with nothing but the public’s goodwill.

Benjamin Moran noted the Confederate wedding in his diary: “It seems the rebel strumpet Belle Boyd was married at St James’ Church, Piccadilly, to-day to some poor idiot. He is said to be a deserter from our Navy by the name of Hardinge.”
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Moran was alone at the legation; the secretary, Charles Wilson, had left for Chicago on August 17, having decided that an honest day’s work could not be half as trying as another hour spent in Moran’s company. Naturally, Moran was frightened that Henry Adams was angling for the vacant post, unaware that Henry had not only refused it but also insisted to Seward that Moran was the only suitable candidate.

The Adams family returned to London on September 3, still anxious about Mary’s health.
^32.2
London would not begin to revive until the autumn and until then offered few distractions for the family. The most exciting part of the day was the arrival of the post, though the news from America made them despair. The North was suffering from war malaise, Charles Francis Adams wrote in his diary. “All accounts agree in saying that the President is deserted and his re-election in great danger.”
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