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at 10:00 A.M., but this had to be the final meeting, he told Seward. The official protest would be presented on Monday, and the United States would have seven days to respond. That afternoon, Lincoln told Senator Browning that Seward had asked Lyons to read the demands to him in two days’ time. The president had “an inkling of what they were,” reported Browning, unaware that Lincoln knew exactly what they were since Seward had been keeping him informed from the beginning. After Seward’s first meeting with Lyons, Lincoln had approached the editor of the Philadelphia Press for his help in “preparing the American people for the release of Mason and Slidell.”65 But Lincoln was being pulled in different directions; Sumner had also come by the White House to show him letters from John Bright and others that supported arbitration. Frustrated by his three-way conversation with Lyons, Lincoln asked Sumner why he could not speak to the minister himself. “If I could see Lord Lyons, I could show him in five minutes that I am heartily for peace,” he said.66 But Sumner would not allow it, saying without justification that a meeting between the president and a minister would be a breach of protocol. Sumner went further and not only extracted a promise from Lincoln to show him any correspondence before it was sent to Lord Lyons, but also set him up to defy Seward.

On the twenty-third, Lord Lyons went to the State Department for the third time, wondering if the meeting with Seward would be their last together. There was little for them to say to each other after he presented Lord Russell’s letter; but Lyons could not help feeling sorry for Seward. He knew that the secretary of state was carrying an immense burden. Lyons had tried to make the situation easier for him by granting the extra time; if the transatlantic cable had still been working, he would not have had the discretion, but as it was, Lyons boldly made the decision in his belief that Seward would do his utmost to prevent a war. “You will perhaps be surprised to find Mr. Seward on the side of peace,” Lyons explained to Lord Russell. But “ten months of office have dispelled many of his illusions … he no longer believes … in the ease with which the United States could crush rebellion with one hand, and chastise Europe with the other.” Lyons was optimistic that Seward had learned his lesson and would never again regard relations with England as “safe playthings to be used for the amusement of the American People.”67

Seward persuaded Lincoln to call a cabinet meeting for ten o’clock on Christmas morning. The secretary of state began by passing around copies of Lord Russell’s “seven-days” letter. As he talked, however, it became clear that the cabinet remained opposed to releasing the Confederate commissioners.68 Sumner, who was also present, spoke after Seward; he had come armed with letters from England. John Bright’s was particularly eloquent about the aristocratic mob screaming for war. Sumner outlined to the cabinet what he had previously told Lincoln: since capitulation was politically impossible, an offer to go to arbitration was the government’s only option. Otherwise Britain and probably France would break the blockade. The ironclad ships of the Royal Navy would smash the wooden U.S. fleet, the North would in turn be blockaded and its ports destroyed. The Confederacy, in the meantime, would sign a free trade agreement with England, “making the whole North American continent a manufacturing dependency of England.”69

Sumner was still speaking when the door opened and a messenger brought in the official French response to the crisis. The dispatch unambiguously denounced Wilkes’s act as a violation of international law. For a second, Seward was crestfallen, until he realized that his case had just been made for him. Edward Bates, the attorney general, was the first to see that Sumner’s proposal for arbitration was hardly less dangerous than retaining the commissioners. Bates recorded in his diary: “I … urged that to go to war with England is to abandon all hope of suppressing