A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (53 page)

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On May 13, 1862, almost three weeks after Butler’s arrival in Louisiana, Henry Adams was surprised by the spectacle of his father performing a victory dance in the hall at London’s American legation. “We’ve got New Orleans!” his father shouted. Henry ran out of the house to look for Thurlow Weed. Finding him “near his hotel, I leaped out of the cab, and each of us simultaneously drew out a telegram which we exchanged.… I went round to the Diplomatic Club and had the pleasure of enunciating my sentiments.”
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That evening, Weed’s celebrations at the Reform Club were underscored by the shrill cry of newspaper boys who passed beneath the windows, shouting “Rumored Capture of New Orleans.” Even more gratifyingly, the next day
The Times
admitted that it had been “mistaken” in accepting Southern assurances that the city would never fall. William Howard Russell added spice to the mix by reminding readers of McClellan’s “magnificent army” that “hated them like the devil and would want to have something to do” once the war was over. Russell’s warning appeared to strike a chord. At a reception on May 15, John Bright wagged his pudgy finger at Henry, saying, “If you Americans succeed in getting over this affair, you mustn’t go and get stuffy to England. Because if you do, I don’t know what’s to become of us who stood up for you here.” Henry laughed and replied that Bright would be welcome as a member of Congress.
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News of the victory had reached London on the anniversary of Charles Francis Adams’s arrival in England. The coincidence seemed fitting; life in England had grown quite bearable of late. “There is just now,” Adams wrote to Charles Francis Jr., “nobody who professes to think well of the South.”
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It helped that they had moved to a new residence in Upper Portland Place. Situated between Regent’s Park and Regent Street, the house at No. 5 enjoyed unobstructed light that streamed through the full-length windows all day long. An invigorated Adams told his mortified secretaries that from now on they were going to behave like gentlemen and cease turning their offices into “slut holes.” Confident in her improved surroundings, and armed with a new cook, Mrs. Adams held her first “at home.” To the family’s relief, recorded Benjamin Moran, “it was quite largely attended.”
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With the social season in full swing and despite a house suitable for entertaining, Henry was disappointed by his lack of friends. “I can’t succeed in finding any one to introduce me among people of my own age,” he complained to his brother Charles.
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He sensed he had made a fool of himself when an acquaintance introduced him to William Howard Russell. Rather idiotically, Henry began blathering away about the pity of his returning to England. Russell looked “embarrassed” at this, and then laughed, remarking “that personally he was glad [to be home], but he regretted having lost the chance of showing his goodwill to us by describing our successes.”
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Russell ended the conversation by pointedly saying he would like to call on Henry’s father.

William Howard Russell was anxious to clear his name with Minister Adams. It was only once he arrived home that Russell realized the extent to which
The Times
had slanted his reports. The diarist Henry Greville, whose friendship with Fanny Kemble made him take an interest in American affairs, was shocked to learn of Russell’s belief “that the North will in the end carry all before them.” “If this be his opinion,” wrote Greville on May 10, “his correspondence must have been carefully cooked before insertion, for nothing that has appeared in it can bear this construction.”
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Delane had no use for Russell now that he was in England and stopped taking his articles on the war. The rebuke was not unduly troubling for Russell, however, since he was able to return to his job as editor of the
Army and Navy Gazette.
Nor did he regret his decision to leave America; less than a month after his arrival, he suffered the loss of his one-year-old son, Colin, and the total collapse of Mary, his wife. The children were now utterly dependent on him. Fortunately, Delane soon forgave Russell; “here you are and we must make the best of it,” he wrote, and
The Times
awarded Russell a pension of £300 a year for life.
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Delane resumed commissioning him for special assignments, but the ban on American subjects remained in place.

Charles Francis Adams now almost looked forward to his interviews with the other Russell, the foreign secretary. They were more like jousts than conversations; “about once a week,” joked Henry, “the wary Chieftain sharpens a stick down to a very sharp point, and then digs it into the excellent Russell’s ribs.”
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The foreign secretary enjoyed returning the compliment, and it was not uncommon for the meeting to conclude with an invitation to continue the argument over dinner. On May 19, all five members of the Adams family went to Pembroke Lodge for an outing with the Russells. “One year ago, yesterday,” the minister wrote in his diary, “I went over this same ground on a very chilly day.” Then, he had been nervous about meeting Lord Russell; but now, he decided, “Lord and Lady Russell are pleasanter as seen in their domestic life than elsewhere. No family is more thoroughly a home circle.”
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The harmonious relations between the legation and the Foreign Office were sufficiently encouraging for Henry to write to his brother on June 6 that the Confederate commissioner was no longer a threat to them: “I hear very little about our friend Mason.… He has little or no attention paid him except as a matter of curiosity.”

A week later, however, General Butler’s “Woman Order” became known. The British were shocked by the implication behind Butler’s promise to treat “any female” who insulted a Northern soldier as a “woman of the town plying her avocation.” The press was not appeased when Lord Russell explained, during a heated debate in the House of Lords, that Butler was probably extending a law already used to curb prostitution to include Southern women who breached the peace in other ways. Even papers that normally supported the North condemned the order. For Confederate sympathizers in Parliament, it was a gift that they shamelessly exploited. William Gregory conjured up for his fellow MPs images of women, not unlike their own wives and daughters, being thrown to the mercy of the very dregs of society. Lord Palmerston was unable to restrain himself. “Sir,” he declared, “an Englishman must blush to think that such an act has been committed by one belonging to the Anglo-Saxon race.” His sincere outrage struck a chord in the House of Commons; previously neutral MPs began to wonder whether Britain had a moral duty to intervene in the conflict.
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This latest innovation in modern warfare was, Palmerston told Russell, “without example in the history of nations.”
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The more he thought about it, the more he wished to make an official remonstrance to the North. When Russell would not agree, he went ahead anyway. “Even when a Town is taken by assault,” Palmerston protested in a letter to Charles Francis Adams on June 11, “it is the Practice of the Commander of the conquering army to protect to the utmost the Inhabitants and especially the Female Part of Them.” By contrast, Butler was handing over the women of New Orleans “to the unbridled license of an unrestrained soldiery.”
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The U.S. minister did not know what to make of the protest. The letter was marked “confidential,” and yet it did not seem like a private matter. A professional diplomat might have been more cautious in his response, but Adams had only his instincts and twelve months’ experience to guide him. Rather than try to avoid a row, as Lyons would have done, Adams bristled with self-righteous indignation. “My relations with the Prime Minister can never again be friendly,” he wrote in his diary.
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Over the next few days he badgered Palmerston with demands for a clarification of his comments. After Adams twice called at his office to complain, Lord Russell realized that the minister had been pushed to some sort of breaking point. At the second visit, Russell tried to calm him down by agreeing that “the thing was altogether irregular.” Adams went home elated. “I now saw that I had all the advantage,” he wrote on June 19. Meanwhile, Russell suggested to Palmerston that he withdraw his letter. But once the prime minister sensed that Adams was turning the incident into a battle of wills, he refused. The most he could stomach was an ambiguous reply that admitted nothing. Unfortunately, Adams could not resist having the last word. In his final letter, he declared that henceforth he would only accept letters from Palmerston that came through official channels.

Henry was proud that his father had forced Palmerston into a retreat. But in truth, it was a small victory. The next time the two men encountered each other, Adams noticed that Palmerston deliberately ignored him.
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Invitations to Lady Palmerston’s parties also ceased.

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Whatever the provocation, now was not the time for Adams to quarrel with the prime minister; the cabinet was assessing the economic damage caused by the cotton famine. A report by the Poor Law Board read to the Commons in May revealed a bleak picture of inadequate public help and growing private misery. In twelve months, the number of charitable cases in Britain had risen from 40,000 to 150,000. More than 400,000 workers were either unemployed or working part-time, causing great hardship for a further 1.5 million people whose care or livelihood was dependent on them.
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Journalists were beginning to write accounts of their tours to the hardest-hit towns, pricking consciences with their descriptions of once proud, industrious families who were forced by “the iron teeth of poverty” to accept weekly handouts of food and coal.
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The U.S. consuls’ descriptions of the suffering in Lancashire convinced Seward that the British would not hesitate to interfere in the war if the alternative meant starvation across wide swaths of England. Thurlow Weed had been urging him since the spring to show that the North was prepared to help Britain overcome the Southern cotton embargo. “Let the enemy refuse [to send] the cotton,” he advised him.
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In May, Seward declared the four Southern ports under U.S. control open for cotton export. But his scheme failed when the Treasury throttled the plan with too many regulations. The initiative therefore lay with the South, and Judah P. Benjamin was determined to use it. A year ago, the Confederate cabinet had attempted to wield cotton like a blunt instrument. No one had listened to Benjamin’s objections then. But now he was secretary of state and could introduce a more sophisticated cotton policy without hindrance or argument, since Southern coffers certainly needed the revenue.
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Benjamin was still hoping that he could bribe France with cotton, but he could not be sure. The emperor Napoleon’s invasion of Mexico also raised the interesting possibility that France might need Southern help in securing its conquest. The problem for Benjamin was his inability to communicate with his commissioners in a timely fashion. James Mason had yet to receive a single dispatch (although one sent in April eventually arrived in late June), and Slidell was in a similar position.
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Benjamin was obtaining most of his news from journals and old newspapers. He was pleased to see, however, that even without his supervision, the commissioners and propaganda agents were making great strides in their efforts to influence public opinion. James Spence and Henry Hotze had become a formidable team. Spence had offered his services to Mason back in April. All he asked for in return was the promise that after independence the South would appoint him as its financial agent, which would help him to recoup some of his losses caused by the 1857 panic. “I assume,” he had written boldly,

that it will be of value to your Government to have on this side a man of intellect, zealous in their cause, fertile in expedients, vigorous in action, of wide mercantile experience; one accustomed to deal with large and difficult things, able to influence public opinion through the press, and not afraid of any encounter as a speaker. In what measure I may claim to possess some of these, it is not for me to say. I simply state facts, easily verified, from which to draw your conclusions.
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Liverpool was the perfect arena for Spence’s genius as a propagandist and social organizer. “We are southern almost to a man,” a Liverpudlian friend confirmed to the MP Richard Monckton Milnes. “There is even a secret club here—they call it the ‘Wig-Wam’ … in this club all the Southern news is discussed, southern newspapers find their way and arrangements are made for sending arms and ammunitions.… No club was ever more practical or more secret: large contributions are constantly coming in.”
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The manufacturing areas around the city were also fertile territory; Spence engaged two veteran strike leaders, William Aitken and Mortimer Grimshaw, to organize mass demonstrations in the worst-hit cotton districts. Their motives may have been tinged by a desire to revive their glory days, but they were also passionately against the sacrifice of English cotton workers for the benefit of Northern capitalists.