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had met both men and found them tolerable. Mason was tall, heavyset, and crowned with a bouffant hairdo that was once leonine but had started to recede into a mohawk. His bright blue eyes and ruddy cheeks made him appear kindly, but out of his small, thin mouth came the most unashamedly racist and proslavery statements Russell had ever heard. His proudest achievement up to this point had been the drafting of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which denied escaped slaves any place of sanctuary in the United States. Mr. Mason, Russell informed readers of The Times on December 10, “is a man of considerable belief in himself; he is a proud, well-bred, not unambitious gentleman, whose position gave him the right to expect high office,” though, as would become apparent, not necessarily the talent. His ten years as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had left no discernible trace of experience on him. Mary Chesnut considered him to be one of the bigger imbeciles among her acquaintances: “My wildest imagination will not picture Mr. Mason as a diplomat,” she had written after hearing of his appointment. “He will say ‘chaw’ for ‘chew,’ and he will call himself ‘Jeems,’ and he will wear a dress coat to breakfast. Over here, whatever a Mason does is right in his own eyes. He is above law.” Mary knew the English horror of tobacco chewing, too. “I don’t care how he pronounces the nasty thing but he will do it,” she wrote. “In England a man must expectorate like a gentleman if he expectorates at all.”40 This last observation was certainly true, and it would count against Mason almost as much as his passionate belief in slavery.41

By contrast, “Mr. Slidell,” Russell wrote in his diary, “is to the South something greater than Mr. Thurlow Weed has been to his party in the North.” Like Mason, he was tall and well built, but feline rather than bluff with “fine thin features, [and] a cold keen grey eye.”42 His French was excellent, thanks to his Creole wife, as was his taste in wine. His suave manner was the antithesis of Mason’s chomping heartiness. “He is not a speaker of note, nor a ready stump orator, nor an able writer, but he is an excellent judge of mankind, adroit, persevering, and subtle, full of device, and fond of intrigue … what is called here a ‘wire-puller.’ ”43 He could destroy a man or make him, as he did Judah Benjamin, who owed his entire political career to Slidell’s connections. If the attainment of power was a belief, then Slidell was a practicing zealot. On all other questions he was agnostic. Slidell’s urge to politick was so great, wrote Russell, that if he were shut up in a dungeon he “would conspire with the mice against the cat rather than not conspire at all.”44

The Confederates arrived in England on January 29 to little fanfare. The press, including The Times, had warned the country against turning them into heroes; the Confederate commissioners were representatives of a government that was waging an undeclared war against Britain’s cotton industry. Mason asked his friend William Gregory, MP, whom he had not seen since Gregory’s visit to Washington in 1859, whether British resentment of the cotton embargo was the reason for the “harsh” treatment meted out to the Nashville and Captain Pegram, who had been forbidden to make any military alterations to his ship or stay longer once his repairs were completed. Gregory told him that, on the contrary, this was in accordance with the neutrality proclamation.

The Nashville set sail from Southampton on February 3, cheered on by thousands of well-wishers. (William Yancey’s departure, on the same day but in a different ship, went unremarked.) With her Confederate flags and black-painted hull, the ship managed to look warlike and dashing at the same time. HMS Shannon—with gun ports open and engines running—stood guard between the Nashville and Tuscarora. There could be no engagement between the warring vessels in British waters. Much to Captain Craven’s chagrin, the Tuscarora would have to wait twenty-four hours before she could begin her pursuit of the Nashville.9.2