A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [115]
The arrival of the British newspapers on Friday, December 13, brought an abrupt end to all the speculation and celebrations that had been allowed to proliferate unchecked since November 16. The angry leaders and articles demanding reparation left no doubt as to how the British regarded Wilkes’s act. On Monday morning in New York there were rowdy scenes at the stock exchange as investors dumped their bonds and rushed to buy commodities such as gold, saltpeter, and gunpowder. A run on the banks suspended all business, including the payment of a loan to the Treasury that Secretary Chase had been expecting in mid-December. The New York offices of Barings and Rothschild’s closed their doors, and Rothschild’s transferred their American holdings to France to safeguard them from confiscation by the U.S. government.56
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell took a brief rest from her teaching duties at the New York Infirmary to explain to her friends in London that it was all a terrible mistake. “Indeed, I have never before had cause for so much gloom,” she wrote. “The Trent affair was no intentional insult to the English flag—on the contrary … the whole thing is marked more by the ill-breeding of Americans and a reckless ignoring of consequences than by … deliberate insults which England attributes to her.” Her friends and relatives were keenly divided on the issue. “With part of our own family furiously American and part as furiously English—disapproving as we do of the conduct of both countries—it is a terrible trial of feeling,” she admitted.57
In Washington, Seward was aghast, having received over the weekend the first of Adams’s dispatches regarding the British response to the Trent affair. A plaintive letter had also come from the Duchess of Sutherland begging him to stay true to his ideals: “I do not know if you will recollect me; but I think so. I liked much having known you. Your feeling toward England seemed so friendly. Your aspirations, your earnestness against slavery were so great, I rejoiced in hearing you speak,” she wrote.58 The letters so shook him that he ran across the street to the White House. He burst in on Lincoln, who was entertaining a few friends, to announce that Britain was preparing for war. “I don’t believe England has done so foolish a thing,” declared Orville Browning, one of the senators present. After Seward had read out Adams’s dispatch, their incredulity turned to outrage. Browning jumped up and urged Lincoln to “fight to the death.”59
More newspapers arrived on the sixteenth, with reports that Britain was backing up her demands with thousands of “crack troops.” Perhaps almost as disturbing for Seward was the discovery that Sumner and Lincoln had been discussing the Trent affair behind his back. Seward realized he had three choices: to press for war, to follow Sumner’s lead and support arbitration, or to argue for the correct but unpopular course demanded by England. Seward hated all three options. That night he went to the Portuguese minister’s ball looking bloodshot and disheveled. He ruined his attempt to appear relaxed by swearing and speaking too loudly. Toward the end of the evening Seward unsteadily approached a group of guests, which included William Howard Russell and the Prince de Joinville, and began boasting of what would happen to Britain if she forced the United States into war. “We will wrap the whole world in flames!” he exclaimed. “No power so remote that she will not feel the fire of our battle and be burned by our conflagration.”60
William Howard Russell assumed that Seward