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the rebellion.… The maritime superiority of Britain would sweep us from the Southern waters. Our trade would be utterly ruined and our treasury bankrupt. In short … we must not have war with England. There was great reluctance on the part of some of the members of the cabinet—and even the President himself—to acknowledge these obvious truths.”70 The situation was too galling, objected Salmon P. Chase, despite, or possibly because, the country was facing bankruptcy unless he could raise another loan. The markets had reacted almost as badly to the notion of arbitration as they had to that of the prisoners arriving in Fort Warren. Banks were nearly at the bottom of their reserves, government bonds were plummeting again, and gold was running high.71

The meeting adjourned at 2:00 P.M. with an agreement to reconvene the following day. Before he left, Lincoln turned to Seward and asked him to summarize his arguments on paper. The president would do the same for Sumner’s arbitration idea, and they would debate the two positions in the morning. Seward wrote all night; Lincoln made a half-hearted attempt before accepting that it was useless to delay the inevitable. When Senator Browning anxiously questioned him after dinner, Lincoln reassured him that there was not going to be a war with England.

By morning Seward had drafted a twenty-six-page response to Lord Lyons, which in effect dismissed the entire imbroglio as a consequence of Wilkes’s forgetting to take the San Jacinto to a prize court for adjudication. He hoped it answered all the cabinet’s objections, but he was too tired to judge. He left his house on Lafayette Square early and paid a surprise visit to Chase. If the secretary of the treasury could be persuaded, he thought, the others would follow his line. In fact, Chase, like Lincoln, had already begun to come around to Seward’s way of thinking. Seward showed him the letter and explained why his idea was so much better than Sumner’s. Rather than risk war by insisting on arbitration, they should pack the commissioners off to London and claim it as a victory for American neutral rights.72 Chase consoled himself with the thought that if that happened, revenge on England would only be postponed.

Emotions were running high in the Senate. A last-ditch attempt by Senator Hale to force a resolution against releasing the rebel commissioners prevented Sumner from attending the meeting on the twenty-sixth. His absence allowed Seward to explain his letter to a far less critical audience. Seward kept expecting Lincoln to offer his alternative, but the president said nothing, and after comparatively little discussion, the cabinet approved Seward’s proposal. He could hardly believe the sudden change of opinion. When the others had filed out, Seward turned to Lincoln and asked him why he had not made the case for arbitration. Because “I could not make an argument that would satisfy my own mind,” the president replied.73

The cabinet had agreed to say nothing of the matter until Lyons received Seward’s letter on the following morning, the twenty-seventh. That night, Sumner was in an ebullient mood when he attended a dinner given by William Howard Russell. After some diversionary talk about Prince Albert’s death, the discussion turned exclusively to the Trent. Even at this late stage, Russell told the group, he had not heard a single voice in favor of giving up the Southerners; the government would never be able to pull off something so unpopular. But Sumner corrected him. There was no need for the administration to do anything so drastic, he insisted. “At the very utmost,” he declared, “the Trent affair can only be a matter for mediation.” Russell assumed that he was hearing the official line, since Sumner was in “intimate rapport with the President.”74

The next day Russell was reading the Washington newspapers, which were still insisting that the rebels would never be given up, when he received a note from one of the secretaries at the British legation. “What a collapse!” he wrote, a trifle disappointed that it was back to business