A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (22 page)

Yancey, Rost, and Mann were dumbfounded when they read the “Queen’s Proclamation of Neutrality” in
The Times
on May 14. A close examination of the wording showed that Russell had taken away many of the advantages that belligerent status had initially seemed to give to the Confederacy. He had invoked the rarely used 1819 Foreign Enlistment Act, under which British subjects were forbidden to volunteer for a foreign cause or encourage others to do so.
²⁰
The act also prohibited the selling or arming of warships to either belligerent; those who disobeyed the proclamation would be prosecuted, and the offending items confiscated.
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The more populous, industrial North would be able to overcome these obstacles on its own, but not the smaller, agrarian South.

The Southern envoys realized that their two interviews with Russell had failed to make the slightest impression on him. Yancey ascribed their failure to Russell’s prejudice against the “peculiar institution,” as Southerners euphemistically called slavery: “We are satisfied that the public mind here is entirely opposed to the Government of the Confederate States of America on the question of slavery,” he reported to Robert Toombs, the Southern secretary of state. “All we can do at present is to affect public opinion in as unobtrusive a manner, as well as we can.”
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—

Charles Francis Adams also read the neutrality proclamation in
The Times
on May 14. He had arrived in London the night before, having endured the worst sea crossing of his life. The three children, Henry, Mary, and Brooks, had, like him, been prostrate with seasickness. Abigail, his wife, had stayed below deck for a different reason: Cassius Clay, Lincoln’s appointment to the legation in Russia, had embarrassed them by sauntering around the boat like a
Punch
caricature of the boorish American, with three pistols at his belt and a toothpick between his teeth.

Adams knew nothing of what had passed between Seward and Lyons. But even if he had, his outrage at the British government’s decision to act without waiting for his arrival and consulting him first would have been the same. “Charles Francis Adams naturally looked on all British Ministers as enemies,” acknowledged Henry Adams in his autobiography. “The only public occupation of all Adamses for a hundred and fifty years at least, in their brief intervals of quarrelling with State Street, had been to quarrel with Downing Street, and the British Government.”
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That first morning, Adams was ready to confront Lord John Russell, so he asked George Dallas, who arrived at the hotel after breakfast, to escort him to Russell’s house. To his dismay, the foreign secretary was not at home; a footman informed them that the family had been called suddenly to Woburn Abbey. Russell’s brother, the Duke of Bedford, had collapsed and was not expected to recover. Forced to delay his confrontation for a few days, Adams turned his attention to the family’s living situation. London had changed so much that he barely recognized it from the memories of his childhood. The city seemed ostentatious and gaudy; “shops fail in taste in everything here,” he wrote.
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His disapproval of English exhibitionism did not blind him to the fact that Dallas’s residence was far too modest for its purpose; the family would have to remain at the hotel until something grander was found. He was also irritated with Dallas for having neglected to renew the legation’s lease, which was ending in five days’ time.
²⁵
Adams responded to these twin challenges with stoicism, but Abigail’s fragile courage deserted her. Benjamin Moran was called to the hotel to reassure her that the Adamses would not be made social pariahs. Unconvinced, she insisted that he give the family a course in social etiquette. “Altogether I feel pretty sick and tired of the whole thing,” Henry Adams complained to Charles Francis Jr.
²⁶

Adams’s first invitation was from an MP named William Forster. Dallas’s inquiries about him revealed that Forster belonged to the Liberal Party and had been an MP for all of three months. Like John Bright, Forster was a Quaker from a northern mill town, in his case Bradford, whose wealth came from manufacturing. But there the similarities ended. Bright was not interested in small acts or minor details; in Anthony Trollope’s damning judgment, “It was his business to inveigh against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business.”
²⁷
Forster was a modest and sincere man who sought neither power nor popularity. These attributes inclined the House to be gentle toward the newcomer. His maiden speech on the slave trade had been listened to without interruption (although afterward he was informed by a fellow MP that in London one said
la-MENT-able,
not
LA-ment-able
).

Forster’s father had twice visited the United States to preach against slavery, in some places risking his life to be heard. Forster Sr.’s experiences had provided his son with an unsentimental attitude toward the South’s desire for secession. “A Mr. Gregory, MP, for Galway, who lately travelled in the South,” Forster wrote to a friend in America, “has returned well humbugged by the Southerners.” Gregory was talking all sorts of nonsense without anyone’s daring to challenge him: “I wish it had fallen into the hands of a member of more experience to stand up for the North and the Union; but I must do what I can.”
²⁸
Forster decided his first step should be to organize a meeting of pro-Northern MPs.

Adams accepted Forster’s invitation even though the date was set for May 16, the day of his presentation at court. When he arrived at Forster’s house, he was disconcerted to discover that there were only seven people at the meeting, three of whom were Americans. Neither John Bright nor Richard Cobden had bothered to come. Cassius Clay and the historian John Lothrop Motley were the other Americans. Forster introduced the first two MPs so quickly that Adams missed their names. But the third, Richard Monckton Milnes, impressed Adams at once. “One might discuss long whether, at that moment, Milnes or Forster were the more valuable ally, since they were influences of different kinds,” recalled Henry Adams.

Monckton Milnes was a social power in London … who knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of men—of a great many men. A word from him went far. An invitation to his breakfast-table went farther.… William E. Forster stood in a different class. Forster had nothing whatever to do with May Fair [the fashionable center of London]. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was quite the opposite of Milnes. He had at that time no social or political position; he never had a vestige of Milnes’s wit or variety; he was a tall, rough, ungainly figure.… Pure gold, without a trace of base metal; honest, unselfish, practical.
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“I found them all very tolerably informed and strongly inclined to the anti-Slavery side,” Adams wrote in his diary. However, Milnes declared he had come “mainly for the abominable selfishness of the South in breaking up a great country”; Adams could not decide whether that was English irony or a genuine statement.
³⁰
John Motley informed the meeting that he had received a letter from the Duke of Argyll, who insisted that the British government had no alternative but to declare neutrality. “When the American colonies revolted from England we attempted to treat their privateers as pirates, but we very soon found this would be out of the question,” he wrote. “The rules affecting and defining the rights and duties of belligerents are the only rules which prevent war from becoming massacre and murder.”
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Cassius Clay refused to be persuaded of England’s good intentions. He was already tired of the country, with its rude servants and hotels that claimed not to have his reservation. Adams was also dubious, though he might have felt less wretched about the small number of MPs around the table had he known that the Southern envoys were in no better position. Gregory had managed to introduce Yancey to only two MPs, John Laird, owner of one of the largest shipbuilding firms in the country, and William Schaw Lindsay, a self-made shipping magnate. Both professed interest in helping the South achieve independence, but only on the understanding that slavery would eventually be abolished.

Adams went home after the meeting to change for his presentation at court. This was not the time, he told Moran, “for indulging oddities of any kind,” nor for wearing clothes that made them look like servants caught on the wrong side of the green baize door.
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The plain black uniform mandated by the State Department was to be put away; under his tenure, the legation would attend royal functions in the usual brocade and breeches of the diplomatic corps. Dallas and Adams arrived at Buckingham Palace twenty-five minutes early, giving Adams the chance to study the paintings in the Great Saloon while he steadied his nerves. “I reasoned with myself with severity,” he wrote in his diary.
³³
Queen Victoria received him with a few gracious words and then asked with polite disinterest whether he had ever been to England before. Keeping his composure, Adams replied that he had, when young.

George Dallas and his son left for Southampton immediately after Charles Francis Adams’s presentation. Adams wrote in his diary, “From this time I take the burden on my shoulders.”
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He was justifiably uneasy about his staff; the legation secretary, Charles Wilson, displayed a lingering disappointment at being denied the Chicago Post Office. Benjamin Moran’s open hostility toward Dallas was also an ill omen. “I part with the whole lot with joy,” Moran crowed when the two Dallases set sail. He felt they had taken him for granted, never asking about his late wife during her illness, nor bothering to include him at legation dinners. His job was all he had, and he clung to it with ferocious desperation. Moran did not know that retaining him at the legation had been Henry Adams’s idea or that he was the one who arranged it with the State Department.
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From the moment Moran set eyes on Henry he regarded him as a rival, even though the young Adams was only his father’s private secretary with no official standing at the legation.

—

Minister Adams received his first dispatch from Seward on May 17. Its tone and the peremptory demands of the British government worried him, but he obeyed Seward’s orders and requested an interview with Lord John Russell, who had returned to London following the death of the Duke of Bedford. Russell replied with an offer of lunch that day if Adams was prepared to come to his house, Pembroke Lodge, in Richmond Park. In his haste, Adams arrived at the house before his message of acceptance, which caused Russell to greet him with more reserve than he had intended. Both men were struck for a moment by the physical similarities between them. Their small stature, coupled with their bald crowns, meant that from the back they could be taken for twins. Since neither had the least facility for small talk, the meeting quickly escalated into an acrimonious debate about the neutrality proclamation. Each thought the other rude and arrogant, and each set out to prove his superior knowledge of diplomatic history. They continued arguing after the bell rang for lunch. However, by the end of the meal their animosity had given way to a grudging respect. Russell showed his goodwill by inviting Adams for a stroll around the grounds. “I like Adams very much,” he wrote a few weeks later, “though we did not understand one another at first.”
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When he reflected on the interview, Adams thought he had acquitted himself reasonably well, but he was less positive about the state of relations between the two countries.
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He never imagined the sense of emergency he had created in Lord John Russell. During the closing days of May, the British cabinet spent many hours trying to divine Seward’s real purpose. The Duke of Newcastle’s conversation with him the previous October was again analyzed. It was recalled how Napoleon had always reacted to failure with aggression; was Seward of the same mold, they wondered? If the South became independent, would he try to deflect public anger by attacking Canada? The question became not whether but how many regiments they should send to reinforce the Canadian border. The Duke of Argyll agreed to warn Charles Sumner about the effect of Seward’s threatening behavior. “Mr. Seward knows Europe less well than you do,” Argyll explained in his letter of June 4; “he may be disposed to do high-handed and offensive things which would necessarily lead to bad blood, and perhaps finally to rupture.”
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“The great question of all is the American,” Lord John Russell wrote to Lord Cowley, the British ambassador in Paris, “and that grows darker and darker every day. I do not expect that Lyons will be sent away, but it is possible. Seward and Co. may attempt to revive their waning popularity by a quarrel with Great Britain, but if we avoid all offence, I do not see how they can do it.”
³⁹
Since Russell was blind to his remarkable ability to make speeches that offended all parties, his confidence was perhaps misplaced. The cabinet had made a decision on privateering that it hoped would soothe Northern irritation with the belligerency issue: they had stretched the meaning of neutrality as far as it could go by closing British ports in every part of the globe to privateers and their captures. Since the North had no need of privateers, the new prohibition affected only the South and its ability to wage war at sea.