A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [121]
The press assumed that relations between the two countries would quickly return to normal. The Illustrated London News congratulated England for having dealt with the crisis so adroitly. “We are therefore clear of all blame in the whole transaction,” it opined on January 11, “and legally, morally, and even sentimentally, we have shown ourselves friends to the Americans.”7 This was not the view of 20 million Americans. Huddled in his frozen headquarters in northern Virginia, Union general George Meade wrote to his wife that “if ever this domestic war of ours is settled, it will require but the slightest pretext to bring about a war with England.”8 A congressman from Illinois swore on the floor of the House that he had “never shared in the traditional hostility of many of my countrymen against England. But I now here publicly avow and record my inextinguishable hatred of that Government. I mean to cherish it while I live and to bequeath it as a legacy to my children when I die.” From Paris, Seward’s unofficial emissary Archbishop Hughes exhorted him to remember that the “awful war between England and America must come sooner or later,—and in preparing for it, even now, there is not a moment to be lost.”9
Charles Francis Adams had neither the clarity of anger nor the cushion of complacency to comfort him. The news about the Trent had been followed by a letter from Charles Francis Jr. informing his family that he had joined the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry. The unexpected blow made ordinary business seem “utterly without interest,” wrote Adams.10 The upset to the family was not enough, however, to divert attention from an embarrassing gaffe by Henry Adams. On January 10 The Times revealed that “Mr. H. Adams,” the younger son and private secretary of the American minister, had published a mildly insulting article about English society for the American press. Henry had never intended to acknowledge “A Visit to Manchester” as his own, and so he had vented some of his frustrations about his social isolation in London society, pointedly remarking, “in Manchester, I am told, it is still the fashion for the hosts to see that the guests enjoy themselves. In London the guests shift for themselves … one is regaled with thimbles full of ice-cream and hard seed cakes.” Charles Francis Jr. had accidentally left Henry’s name on the manuscript when he sent it to the editor of the Boston Courier.11 Until then, Henry had been enjoying great success as the New York Times’ anonymous London correspondent. “The Chief,” as Henry called his father, gave his son a sharp dressing-down, so sharp that Henry briefly considered self-exile on the Continent.12 He was teased without mercy by Benjamin Moran, who repeated ad nauseam “it is not every boy of 25 who can in 6 mos. residence here extort a leader from The Times.”13
When he visited the Foreign Office on January 11 for his first meeting since the Trent crisis, Adams hoped that Lord Russell had not seen the Times article about his son. There was no cause for concern: Russell could be curiously obtuse about what he read in the papers. (Lady Russell had a far better understanding of the power of the press than her husband; she thought the American public had been goaded beyond endurance by the “sneering, exulting tone” in English newspapers after Bull Run.)14 The two men passed the first half of the interview congratulating each other on preserving the peace, after which it was down to business again. Russell’s current concern was the risk to peace posed by Union and Confederate cruisers. The Sumter had recently arrived at Cadiz, having destroyed a number of U.S. merchant ships along the way. The government expected a confrontation with a U.S. Navy ship but would not tolerate a free-for-all in British waters, which in Palmerston’s words would be a “scandal