A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [119]
Among the guests at Seward’s was Anthony Trollope, who was oblivious to the drama unfolding in front of him.75 Charles Sumner was unusually quiet and left the talking to Senator Crittenden, who made disparaging comments about Florence Nightingale to Trollope, no doubt unaware that the woman whose reputation he was trashing had recently donated her sanitation reports and hospital plans to the U.S. War Department.76 Seward played the genial host to the hilt; after dinner, he invited the four senators at the table to accompany him to his study. He bade them all sit down while he took out the dispatches from London and Paris. To these he added his twenty-six-page reply to Lord Russell, his dispatch to Charles Francis Adams, and his response to the French foreign minister. Sumner and the others then had to sit in silence while Seward read out every line.77
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A week later, on January 1, 1862, the two Confederate commissioners and their secretaries sailed for England on board the warship HMS Rinaldo. “[The Americans] are horribly out of humour,” Lyons wrote to Lord Russell on December 31. He did not think this was the end of the story, but for now they could put their faith in Seward. “For he must do his best to maintain peace, or he will have made the sacrifice … in vain.”78 Seward had triumphed, but only just, and only for the moment. His reply to Russell, which Seward had composed with his domestic audience firmly in mind, failed as a legal document or as a new elaboration of U.S. foreign policy, but it successfully appealed to Northern readers, especially the part where he claimed that because of the Trent case, Britain would never again attempt to impress American sailors (a practice last used in 1812).
Sumner tried to diminish Seward’s victory by claiming that the president had preferred arbitration but the need for a quick decision had forced him into a hasty act.79 There was perhaps some consolation to him in the vitriolic and bitter speeches that enlivened Congress during the first week of January. On the ninth, Sumner gave a long speech in the Senate that was meant to explain and justify the government’s decision. All the press, most of the president’s cabinet, nearly every senator, and all the foreign ministers—except Lord Lyons—went to hear the performance. Senator Sumner had dressed for the occasion. Afterward, he was remembered as much for his olive-green gloves and tailored suit as for what he said. It was notoriously hard to follow Sumner. “He works his adjectives so hard,” a journalist once commented, “that if they ever catch him alone, they will murder him.”80 He spoke for three and a half hours, flatly contradicting many of the arguments Seward had employed in his dispatch to Lord Russell.
The public’s response exceeded all Sumner’s expectations. There were tributes and editorials in the press. People who usually avoided him because of his abolition politics were eager to shake his hand.81 Sumner’s previous criticisms of Seward’s reckless diplomacy were repeated and turned into the reason for Britain’s “overreaction.” The remarkable courage and patriotism Seward had displayed in forcing the cabinet to make an unpopular decision were brushed aside.
Ill.13 Punch crows after the Union backs down, January 1862.
Lord Lyons knew what it was like to have one’s intentions maligned and efforts discounted, and he was among the few people in Washington who secretly applauded Seward for his bravery. The shy minister did not know it, but he, too, had gained an admirer on account of his behavior during the crisis. As “one who witnessed the difficulties of Lord Lyons’s position here, and how his pathway was strewn with broken glass,” wrote Adam Gurowski, the State Department’s chief translator, “[I] must feel for him the highest and most sincere consideration.