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At the British legation, Russell encountered Lord Lyons politely fending off questions from a group of foreign ministers who had come ostensibly to offer their support, but really to ascertain England’s probable response. This, Lyons made clear, would have to come from London. He explained to Russell that his overriding concern was to prevent anything coming from himself or the legation that might help the warmongers. The staff had been given orders not to discuss the Trent with anyone, although Russell could see from the look on their faces that they thought war was inevitable.

The following day, Russell prepared his letter to The Times. “I rarely sat down to write under a sense of greater responsibility,” he admitted in his diary. 7 Russell assumed that his report would be “the first account of the seizure of the Southern Commissioners which will reach England,” and the thought of how the public would react to the news filled him with foreboding. He was no longer just describing the attack on the Trent, but also the North’s exultation and the U.S. government’s silence, which he feared would be as provocative to the English as Wilkes’s original act. Without excusing the Lincoln administration, Russell tried to explain the pressures placed upon it by democracy: “There is a popular passion and vengeance to be gratified by the capturing and punishment of Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell,” he wrote, “and I believe the Government will retain them at all risk because it dare not give them up.”8

Russell was only partially correct about the administration. Public opinion naturally played a role in its deliberations, but from the start virtually all the members of the president’s cabinet were adamantly opposed to releasing the commissioners. Lincoln allegedly complained to a journalist on November 16 about the embarrassment Wilkes had caused the country. “I fear the traitors will prove to be white elephants,” he reportedly said. “We must stick to American principles concerning the rights of neutrals. We fought Great Britain for insisting, by theory and practice, on the right to do precisely what Captain Wilkes has done.”9 If that is true, Lincoln would have been the only member of his administration, apart from Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general, to accept that Wilkes had violated international law and the only member to realize the grave threat to America’s moral reputation if the government supported him. The United States had fought the War of 1812 in part to defend its broad interpretation of “neutral rights.” It had protected the slave trade, allowing it to flourish, and had expelled the British minister, John Crampton, in 1856, risking a third Anglo-American war, for his perceived violation of these rights. The United States would be inviting the censure and mockery of the entire world if the government suddenly repudiated a fundamental principle of American foreign policy because it was no longer expedient to maintain.

Regardless of how Lincoln originally understood the issue, within twenty-four hours of hearing the news he had joined the celebrations. He wrote about the seizure with exclamation marks to Edward Everett, the former American minister in London. To General McClellan, who came to deliver a warning from the Prince de Joinville that England would demand an apology, Lincoln replied categorically that the commissioners were not going to be released. The cabinet, excepting Montgomery Blair, behaved shamefully. The worst offender was the attorney general, Edward Bates, who gave ill-judged and incorrect legal advice to his colleagues. “Some timid persons are alarmed, lest Great Britain should take offense at the violation of her Flag,” he wrote in his diary. “There is no danger on that score. The law of Nations is clear upon the point, and I have no doubt that, with a little time for examination, I could find it so settled by English authorities.”10

General McClellan also called on Seward to give