Military history

Wicked Designs

Chapter 37

THE JULY HEAT IN WASHINGTON was wet and stifling, and the slightest current of air was welcome, so Lord Lyons and his staff dined early at the legation, then sat out in the garden with William Howard Russell to hear about his travels through the South. While the correspondent had been away, the capital of the United States had become a precarious armed camp, with a restive Maryland at its back and a growing Confederate force in Virginia not far beyond the Potomac.

As fears in the U.S. capital rose, Seward’s temper and his judgment seemed to fray. The more powerful the Confederates appeared, the more Seward “assumes higher ground, and becomes more exacting and defiant,” Lyons said, and the more aggressive he became toward Britain. Lyons was disheartened by Seward’s rants, and as W. H. Russell looked at the British minister in the fading light amid the infernal humidity of the garden, the reporter was struck by how “careworn and pale” Lord Lyons had become.

Seward was sending dispatches to his American envoys in London and Paris that “amounted to little less than a declaration of war against Great Britain,” Lyons complained, and the letters were leaked to the American press before they’d made it halfway across the Atlantic. But those were nothing compared to the “violent language” that Seward used face-to-face.

It seemed impossible to believe that the U.S. secretary of state really wanted to plunge the country into a war with England and France. Either power alone would be far too much for the Union Navy; together they would be overwhelming. They could sweep aside the feeble blockade of the Southern ports; at the same time they could shut down the North’s ports on the Atlantic and the Great Lakes—and that would be just the beginning. But Seward, cornered, seemed capable of anything. On June 6, Lyons had sent a telegram in cipher to Lord Russell. “No new event has occurred, but a sudden declaration of war by the United States against Great Britain appears to me to be by no means impossible, especially as long as Canada seems open to invasion.”

ON THE FOURTH of July, the day the United States celebrated its independence from Great Britain, William Howard Russell went to the State Department to see William Seward for himself. The secretary looked much more haggard than he had three months before, and he made his bitterness perfectly clear.

“We are dealing with an insurrection within our own country, of our own people, and the Government of Great Britain have thought fit to recognize that insurrection before we were able to bring the strength of the Union to bear against it,” Seward said. Then it was as if Seward just couldn’t hold back anymore. “We have less to fear from a foreign war than any country in the world,” he said. “If any European Power provokes a war, we shall not shrink from it. A contest between Great Britain and the United States would wrap the world in fire, and at the end it would not be the United States which would have to lament the results of the conflict.”*

It was quite a show, and reflecting on it after he walked back onto the street full of July Fourth celebrations, Russell was bemused. “I could not but admire the confidence—may I say the coolness?—of the statesman who sat in his modest little room within the sound of the enemy’s guns, in a capital menaced by their forces, who spoke so fearlessly of war with a power which should have blotted out the paper blockade of the Southern forts and coast in a few hours and, in conjunction with the Southern armies, have repeated the occupation and destruction of the capital.” (Nobody had forgotten the destruction wrought by the British in the War of 1812.)

And yet, the Confederates were no longer so optimistic about their chances of winning the Crown’s support. William Yancey, the great fire-eater who had ripped like a blazing comet through the Democratic Party’s convention in Charleston, was now in Europe as the head of the Confederate commission seeking diplomatic recognition and material assistance. But he soon discovered that the oratory that had brought delegates and spectators to their feet in Charleston moved very few people on the far side of the Atlantic. His defenses of slavery and the slave trade fell on deaf ears, or very hostile ones. Indeed, he quit making them, and then he pretended he never had. In May, Yancey and the two other commissioners had an unofficial meeting with Lord Russell at his house in London, trying to persuade him that the main reason why the Southern states seceded was not slavery at all but the high Federal tariffs imposed on manufactured goods from abroad in order to protect the industries of the North. This rationale completely contradicted South Carolina’s stated reasons for secession published fewer than five months before, but Russell did not debate; he just listened. And Russell did not askthe Confederate commissioners about the question of the slave trade to Africa. But then the Confederate delegates brought it up themselves. They knew how sensitive the issue was. They wanted to address it. They pointed out the article in their new constitution that made it illegal.

Lord Russell wondered about that. Since the commissioners had insisted on bringing up the matter, the Foreign Secretary said he’d heard that if the slave states found they could not compete successfully with the cotton of other countries, “they would revive the slave trade for the purpose of diminishing the cost of production.” This was, in fact, part of the gospel in the pro-slavery crusade that Bunch had reported on since the mid-1850s; this was precisely the argument that Governor Adams had made in his stunning speech attacking Great Britain’s use of “free slaves” to grow cotton in India and Egypt. But Yancey and his fellow commissioners insisted there was no proof to support such a notion, and, anyway, they insisted once more, their constitution forbade it. Lord Russell went back to listening and made no commitments whatsoever during this unofficial meeting with an unrecognized delegation.

Yancey was no fool. He knew his mission was failing. In June he wrote from Paris that “the government of England simply wants to see which shall prove strongest, and that it is sincere in its expressed design to be neutral.” The Confederate commissioners concluded that their government had no chance of recognition and support unless and until their army had a major success on the battlefield.

All of the South was waiting as rumors circulated of the decisive fight about to begin, but then called off. “The long expected battle in Virginia seems to be deferred,” Bunch wrote at the end of June. “Will not Congress do something to stop this wretched war?” But there was no turning back.


* Charles Francis Adams, writing fifty years later, would call Seward’s remarks a “singularly visionary and delusive hallucination” but argue that Seward probably did believe that the United States, with its vast interior spaces, would have an advantage over the British with their far-flung colonies and extended supply lines.

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