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The three U.S. warships dispatched by Secretary Welles had searched in vain for the arriving Confederate commissioners Mason and Slidell. One of the vessels, the James Adger, limped into Southampton on November 2 after being damaged in a storm off the coast of Ireland. The Adger’s unexpected arrival led Henry Sanford to consider using it against a Confederate cargo ship called the Gladiator, which was about to set sail from a London dockyard. Sanford’s plan was complicated and probably illegal: he thought that if he could bribe the Gladiator’s pilot to steer the ship into a mud bank on the Thames, the Adger could seize the cargo and the crew and steam away before the authorities had time to react.

Sanford hurried to the U.S. legation to share his idea, expecting some resistance from Adams but not the furious tirade that greeted him. Adams interrupted Sanford in midflow to reveal that his spy system was being shut down. “Whilst he was quietly sitting on the other side of the channel without any responsibility for the acts of the worthless people whom he was employing,” Adams told him, “the odium of their dirty conduct was inevitably fastened upon me.” But no more: he had obtained Seward’s agreement that from now on Sanford would have to confine his activities to Belgium, where he belonged. Shocked and bewildered, Sanford first protested, then pleaded, and finally tried bargaining with Adams, but the minister cut him off by rising from his chair. Mortified, Sanford followed suit, saying goodbye with as much dignity as he could muster; “but,” wrote Adams, “I imagine he will never forgive me.”53 Benjamin Moran had always envied Sanford, and his humiliation felt like justice served: “One million of dollars were placed at this man’s disposal for Gov’t purposes and it has been greatly squandered to our injury,” Moran wrote in his diary. “With one half of what he threw away in odious espionage I could have bought the British Press … every newspaper writer in London can be purchased, from those of The Times down.… I do not mean to say that each would openly take cash; but each will take a consideration suitable to his taste.”54

Adams was still uncertain whether Sanford had left for good when a polite summons arrived from Lord Palmerston on November 12. Regardless of its tone, the request for an immediate meeting suggested trouble. Adams was filled with trepidation as he made his way to Cambridge House at 94 Piccadilly through another London fog. He had never been there during the day, but the yellow gloom that shrouded the city made the difference seem slight. Flaming pyres only partially illuminated the forecourt. Inside, gaslights threw off as much smoke as light.7.2 Palmerston was waiting for him in a library that was untenably dark by American standards. He was alone, and “at once opened on the subject then evidently weighing on his mind”: the government knew the true purpose of the James Adger.55 For a moment Adams thought that Sanford had carried out his plan, but as Palmerston talked it became clear that his concern had nothing to do with the Gladiator.

The British government, he said, had learned that the North was hunting for the Confederate commissioners Mason and Slidell, though its latest information on the duo was sketchy and contradictory. The Foreign Office could not be certain, but their reports suggested that the Confederates were traveling on a British mail ship, and that the Adger had been sent to intercept her. Palmerston was less concerned about the Adger’s right to seize the rebels—although he did consult the law officers on the question—than the obvious threat such an act posed to national honor, since an attack on a British ship could not pass unchallenged. The Confederates could send an entire fleet of commissioners to England, he informed Adams gravely, without its having the slightest effect on the British government’s actions. The North would do better to leave all British ships alone. Offended by Palmerston’s assumption that the United States would stoop to waylaying British mail packets, Adams explained