A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [125]
The same question about England’s sympathies was being asked in the South. “Seward has cowered beneath the roar of the British Lion,” bemoaned John Jones, a clerk in the Confederate War Department. “Now we must depend upon our own strong arms and stout hearts for defense.”33 Even the shrewd and unflappable diarist Mary Chesnut had given in to her optimism during the Trent affair. For a brief moment she had shared the belief so prevalent in the South that the Royal Navy would appear off the coast and blow the blockade to smithereens. Now she wondered if the British were laughing at them, “scornful and scoffing … on our miseries.”34 Despite the brouhaha over their release, she feared that Commissioners Slidell and Mason were chasing a chimera. “Lord Lyons has gone against us. Lord Derby and Louis Napoleon are silent in our hour of need,” she wrote. The loss of Roanoke and the forts in Tennessee caused an uproar in Richmond. Someone had to bear the blame for these dreadful and unexpected defeats, and who better than the Confederate secretary of war, Judah Benjamin? “Mr. Davis’s pet Jew,” as his critics called him, was accused of having sacrificed Roanoke Island by refusing to send reinforcements. Benjamin’s stint at the War Department had been hampered from the start by his lack of rapport with the military, and this latest crisis would make his position untenable. However, the truth in the case of Roanoke, which out of loyalty he never revealed to Davis, was that there were neither arms nor men to spare.35 Two or three arms shipments a month from England were not enough to maintain one army, let alone several across hundreds of miles.
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The freedom experienced by the four ex-prisoners on board HMS Rinaldo as she crossed the Atlantic in early January was far worse than the dull confinement the Confederate commissioners had endured at Fort Warren. To walk on the icy deck was to risk a thousand deaths. Huge icicles dangled above their heads. Any person not wearing a safety rope was liable to slip or be blown out to sea. Before the journey’s end, many of the sailors had suffered frostbite. “If you have no news of ‘Rinaldo,’ I fear she is lost—horrible to think of,” William Howard Russell wrote to Delane on January 16. Horrible but somehow not unexpected, considering the appalling misfortunes that had already blighted the Southerners’ mission.36
“Mr. Slidell,” declared a Northern journal, “is the ideal of a man who would think it a privilege to get into a scrape himself, if he could only involve his host and patron too.” Mr. Mason, on the other hand, was “more of a bull-dog, ready to fasten on friends and foes alike.”37 Yet, until the Trent affair, there had been nothing in their previous histories to suggest that either James Murray Mason or John Slidell was the type of man whose fate would move armies. They so neatly fitted into Southern stereotypes as to be walking caricatures of a Virginia aristocrat and a Louisiana politician. Mason, who had been brought up amid elegant surroundings and liveried servants, could trace his family back to the English Civil War, in which one of his Cavalier ancestors commanded a regiment at the Battle of Worcester. Slidell, on the other hand, was the son of a moderately successful New York candle maker who had fled the city after a scandal involving a pistol fight and reinvented himself as a successful lawyer in New Orleans.38 Slidell had few hatreds, but one of them was for New Yorkers who refused to forget his humble beginnings.39 He was happier in New Orleans, where he could lift his finger and see his puppets raise their hands.
William Howard Russell