A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [107]
7.2 Cambridge House, wrote Sir George Trevelyan memorably, was “Past the wall which screens the mansion, hallowed by a mighty shade, / Where the cards were cut and shuffled when the game of State was played.”
EIGHT
The Lion Roars Back
Captain Wilkes seizes the Trent—Northern glee—Britain prepares for war—Prince Albert’s intervention—Waiting for an answer—Seward’s dilemma—Lord Lyons takes a risk—Peace and goodwill on Christmas Day
“A cold, raw day,” William Howard Russell noted in his diary on November 16, 1861. “As I was writing,” he continued, “a small friend of mine, who appears like a stormy petrel in moments of great storm, fluttered into my room, and having chirped out something about a ‘jolly row,’—‘Seizure of Mason and Slidell,’—‘British flag insulted,’ and the like, vanished.” Russell hastily grabbed his coat and followed him outside, where he bumped into the French minister, Henri Mercier, coming from the direction of the British legation. “And then, indeed, I learned there was no doubt about the fact that [on November 8] Captain Charles Wilkes, of the U.S. steamer San Jacinto, had forcibly boarded the Trent, a British mail steamer, off the Bahamas, and had taken Messrs. Mason, Slidell, [and their secretaries] Eustis, and Macfarland from on board by armed force, in defiance of the protests of the captain and naval officer in charge of the mails.”1
The American press was jubilant over the capture. “Rightly or wrongly, the American people at large look upon it as a direct insult to the British flag,” wrote Lord Lyons.2 But the opportunity to humiliate England was not the only reason behind the public’s excitement. Mason and Slidell had been needling the North from the Senate floor for many years, and their banishment to Fort Warren in Boston Harbor was deemed a fitting punishment.8.1 The New York Times’ first editorial on the affair called for Wilkes to be honored with a medal or a public holiday. The Philadelphia Sunday Transcript went further and committed the country to war, reminding its readers that American soldiers had routed “the best of British troops” in 1812 and would do so again. “In a word, while the British government has been playing the villain, we have been playing the fool,” the paper declared. “Let her now do something beyond driveling—let her fight. If she has a particle of pluck … if she is not as cowardly as she is treacherous—she will meet the American people on land and on the sea, as they long to meet her, once again, not only to lower the red banner of St. George … but to consolidate Canada with the union.”3
Ill.11 Punch sends a British warning to the United States, December 1861.
What was not clear to Russell, however, was whether Captain Wilkes had acted on his own or in accordance with secret U.S. government instructions. His visits to the State and Navy departments on November 18 were inconclusive, since the former was not prepared to comment, but the latter had obviously been taken by surprise.4 No one at the Navy Department had a good word to say in Wilkes’s defense. Although a renowned cartographer, he had the reputation of being a bully and a braggart.5 The command of the San Jacinto had been given to him with great reluctance; “he has a super-abundance of self-esteem and a deficiency of judgment,” warned an official in August. “He will give us trouble.”6 Since his appointment, Wilkes had been trawling the oceans in defiance of his actual orders on a personal hunting expedition for Confederate ships. It was sheer luck that he stumbled onto the Confederate commissioners, and it was pure Wilkes—his colleagues told William Howard