A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (43 page)

Dawson was part of a small but growing number of potential recruits who were trying to reach the South in spite of the blockade. “There may be some whose experience in the field or for drill may be useful,” Mason wrote to Richmond after several ex-officers called at the new headquarters of the Confederate commission at 109 Piccadilly. “Will you please advise me what I am to say to such applicants.”
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While he waited, Mason was careful to be encouraging without committing himself or the commission to anything illegal under the Foreign Enlistment Act. The British authorities’ punctiliousness over the
Nashville
had shown him that there would be no leniency as far as the law was concerned. Slidell could afford to be less fastidious. Soon after his arrival in Paris, he received a visit from a tall, leather-faced Englishman in his mid-fifties who declared his intention of joining the Confederate army. Impressed by the man’s soldierly past and bearing, Slidell agreed to supply him with letters of introduction. In late spring the Knoxville
Register
announced that an English volunteer, Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell, had arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, on board the blockade runner
Nelly.
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In Parliament, William Gregory was pleased to learn that Richmond had instructed Mason to challenge Britain’s observance of the blockade; safeguarding the country’s economy would be taken much more seriously by MPs than independence for slave owners. The commissioner had come armed with statistics that proved it was a blockade on paper only. True, the records stopped at the end of October, but they nevertheless showed that more than six hundred vessels had succeeded in getting through since April. The first step was to bring Mason together with Lord Russell. Gregory helped Mason draft a note, asking for an
unofficial
interview. He reminded Mason to use the correct form: “The Right Hon. Earl Russell, Foreign Office. I should not address your letter to his private house.”
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While they were waiting for Russell’s reply, James Spence, the pro-Southern author of
The American Union,
introduced himself to the group. The Liverpudlian businessman had realized that there were social and financial opportunities to be gained from befriending the nascent Confederacy; in a bid to prove his usefulness, Spence offered to help Mason prepare for his meeting with Lord Russell.

Russell had no wish to see Mason. “What a fuss we have had about these two men,” he exclaimed.
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He had heard that William Gregory and William Lindsay had decided to force a debate on the blockade after the opening of Parliament on February 6. Russell already had a fair idea of the number of ships getting through from the diligent reports of the local consuls, but he balked at challenging its legality. There was no telling when Great Britain might find herself in the similar position of mounting a feeble blockade.
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At the meeting on February 10, Russell resorted to his usual method with the Confederates and forced Mason to do most of the talking. Mason noticed that the foreign secretary “took very little part in the conversation,” and he felt that he had been played throughout the interview. “On the whole,” wrote Mason, “it was manifest enough that his personal sympathies were not with us, and his policy inaction.”
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This was true. “At all events, I am heart and soul a neutral,” Russell wrote to Lord Lyons just before the meeting.
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The Confederate lobby’s obstinacy exasperated Palmerston and Russell. Both were highly sensitive as to how it would appear to the North if Parliament debated whether to disregard its blockade. Coming so soon after the
Trent
affair, it would add credence to the charge that Britain was simply looking for an excuse to turn on the United States. No one in the cabinet believed that the war could last much longer. Why irritate either side, was the general consensus, when all they had to do was wait for perhaps only three more months? The Lord Chancellor, Lord Westbury, expressed himself in his customary splenetic way: “I am greatly opposed to any violent interference.… Let them tear one another to pieces.”
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To try to forestall a debate, Russell invited James Spence to attend a meeting at the Foreign Office, since it was known that he was held in high esteem by the Confederates. Spence was delighted with his newfound importance. He listened gravely as Russell explained why he should use his influence to stop the Confederates from forcing a vote. As soon as the interview was over, Spence hurried to the commission’s headquarters on Piccadilly to urge the group to redouble its efforts.

Charles Francis Adams had heard that the Confederates’ political friends were pushing the blockade question. He wrote to Seward on February 7 urgently requesting any facts and statistics he could pass on to the North’s supporters in Parliament. It was embarrassing personally and diplomatically, he hinted, for the State Department to leave him so ill informed. Adams had become reconciled to Thurlow Weed’s presence, “but my patience is gradually oozing out of me at this extraordinary practice of running me down with my own colleagues,” he wrote in his diary. “Mr. Seward was not brought up in the school of refined delicacy of feeling or he would not have continued these inflictions.”

What they needed, Weed told Seward, was a host of unofficial representatives whose sole purpose was to shape public opinion. Adams was a good man but useless for anything other than strict diplomacy. “We may want the good-will of England before our troubles are over, and it can be had on easy terms,” he wrote. “I believe now that nine tenths of the English People would rejoice to see us successful.”
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But this was hinged on precarious foundations. It did no good for Seward to argue that slavery was de facto abolished in the small areas of the South held by the Federal army. He would have to say publicly that this was a war for abolition.
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Could not Seward help them a little, Weed asked, by at least granting passports to free blacks? It would help counter the claim that the North was just as racist as the South and hypocritical as well.
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For the upcoming debate in Parliament, Weed and Adams looked to William Forster rather than John Bright to outmaneuver William Gregory and the small but growing Confederate lobby. “On the whole Mr. Forster has been our firmest and most judicious friend,” Adams admitted privately. “We owe to his tact and talent even more than we do to the more showy interference of Messrs. Cobden and Bright.”
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The latter seemed to relish his powers of alienation. On February 17, Bright made a blistering speech in the Commons against aristocratic supporters of slavery, which struck his listeners as ludicrous considering that Lord Shaftesbury was leading a national campaign to reunite a fugitive slave named Anderson with his wife and children. One MP commented afterward, “I don’t think the people of England like [Bright] and his policy better than they do his friends the Yankees.”
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“We are miserably prepared to meet and answer objections,” Weed grumbled to Seward on February 20. “Members of Parliament beset me for materials, and I cannot get anything official. I have picked what could be found of the Newspapers.”
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Although still chastened by his recent exposure in the press, Henry Adams discreetly tried to aid his father by pushing Frederick Seward, Seward’s son, to send over any reports that could be of use. “The truth is, we want light here,” Henry told him. “Our friends have got to be stuffed with statistics and crammed with facts.… The Southerners will parade a great number of vessels which have run it. Our side must show an equal or greater number either captured, or chased, and must have at hand any evidence.” Otherwise, he warned, the Confederates would argue that the fourth provision of the Declaration of Paris was not being met—that the blockade actually exist and be effective—and therefore the blockade was illegal.
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As the day of the debate approached, Adams noticed a rise in the number of newspaper articles sympathetic to the South. He blamed the “unscrupulous and desperate emissaries” who were prepared to spread any number of lies—even that slavery in the South would be abolished after independence—on a credulous British public.
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The “emissaries” were actually one agent, Henry Hotze, a journalist from Mobile, Alabama, who had been appointed by the Confederate State Department to liaise between the commission and the press. Hotze had arrived in England on the same day as Mason and Slidell, but he had not traveled with them. Although he was only twenty-seven years old, Hotze exuded the confidence of someone twice his age. He was fluent in French and German, having spent his childhood in Switzerland. His charm and powers of conversation were still legendary in Brussels, where he had served as the secretary of the American legation during the late 1850s.
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The mission to England had been Hotze’s own idea. During the autumn he had spent a few weeks in London on behalf of the War Department checking on the progress of arms shipments. This was long enough to convince him that the South needed to “educate” the English press, and that he was the person to do it. Although Hotze despised Mason and abhorred his tobacco habit, he accepted that he was dependent on Mason’s contacts until he could make his own.
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Fortunately, Mason had no idea of Hotze’s feelings toward him, and during their first weeks in London he invited the journalist to accompany him everywhere he went. In this way Hotze forged many useful acquaintances and learned a great deal in a short amount of time.

On February 23, Hotze gleefully informed the Confederate State Department that his attempts to cultivate the press had succeeded far beyond his initial expectations. After only three weeks in London he had placed his first editorial in an English newspaper—a feat Henry Adams had failed to achieve in nearly a year. Furthermore, the newspaper was the
Morning Post,
Lord Palmerston’s own mouthpiece. “With this I have acquired the secret of the ‘open sesame’ of the others I may need,” he wrote from his new lodgings in Savile Row. He had expected weeks, if not months, of disappointment. “Although this success is due to an accidental combination of fortunate circumstances which I could not have concerted … it has nevertheless greatly encouraged me.”
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In the days running up to the debate, Hotze and James Spence helped several of the Southern supporters with their speeches. Meanwhile, the American legation was still frantically putting together a rebuttal of the Confederates’ statistics. Benjamin Moran spent every waking hour with William Forster coaching him on his answers, hoping that Forster’s debating skills were more polished than his manners. Moran was flabbergasted to discover that the MP was married, and his wife “a nice and ladylike person.”
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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.”
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