A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [120]
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8.1 It may have disappointed Northerners to know that the prisoners ate far better and had larger rooms than the regulars at Willard’s.
8.2 Gladstone was posturing for effect; Wilkes had clearly violated international law both by taking the Confederates off the ship and by acting as his own court of law in determining that they could be taken instead of going to a prize court, which alone had the authority to make such a ruling. The prize court would have set the Trent and the Confederates free, since people can’t be kidnapped willy-nilly off the high seas. Wilkes’s argument, that the Confederates were a living, breathing dispatch, which made them in legal terms “contraband of war,” would have been laughed out of court. But the likelihood is that Wilkes would have precipitated a crisis even if he had sailed to a prize court, because England would have demanded an apology from the United States for stopping a British mail ship without cause, and the apology would have become the sticking point.
8.3 Years later, Queen Victoria wrote of the memorandum: “This draft was the last the Beloved Prince ever wrote.”
NINE
The War Moves to England
Hard times in Lancashire—Burnside captures Roanoke—The sorrows of Lincoln—A victory at last—Mason and Slidell arrive in Europe—Dawson joins the Nashville—Southern propaganda—The debate in Parliament
“We are beginning the New Year under very poor prospects,” recorded a cotton spinner named John Ward from Clitheroe on January 1, 1862. Twenty-seven thousand workers in Lancashire had been fired and another 160,000 were, like him, surviving on short time. Families on his street were selling their furniture to buy food. “A war with America” would be the final straw, wrote Ward, “as we will get no cotton.… Every one is anxious for the arrival of the next mail, which is expected every day.”1
In Liverpool, crowds gathered each morning on the quayside waiting for America’s response. The arrival of the Africa on January 2 caused brief excitement, but she carried only newspapers in her hold. The telegrapher Paul Julius de Reuter came to see Charles Francis Adams on Monday the sixth to ask if the minister would be so kind as to alert him the minute there was news. “He little imagines how entirely my government keeps me without information,” Adams wrote angrily.2 Two days later, it was Reuter who did Adams the kindness; his office had received an early telegram announcing the commissioners’ release. Weed came an hour later to confirm that it was all over London. Adams’s relief was tempered by his vexation at being the last to know.
Benjamin Moran rushed to St. James’s, the club of the diplomatic corps on Charles Street and probably the only club in London that would have him. For once he was the center of attention as two dozen minor diplomats and secretaries “sprang to their feet as if electrified,” he wrote. Several even shook his hand before running off to the telegraph office. “In a few minutes messages were flashing over the wires to all the Courts of Europe.” In the West End theaters, evening performances were already under way, but as soon as the curtains fell on the first act the news was announced, causing audiences to rise spontaneously and cheer.3 Within the British cabinet, however, reactions were rather more mixed: “The Admiralty is flat and dull, now there is to be no war,” the Duke of Somerset wrote sarcastically to his son, Lord Edward St. Maur.4
Ill.14 Punch depicts the United States as a recalcitrant child in need of a whipping.
More than £2 million had been spent in the scramble to get ships and troops to America. It would be some time before soldiers came home. Jonny Stanley wrote to his parents from Montreal to say that he was safe although lonely. The infinite forests and frozen lakes of Canada were “very dull, and the people, however