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The commissioner had come armed with statistics that proved it was a blockade on paper only. True, the records stopped at the end of October, but they nevertheless showed that more than six hundred vessels had succeeded in getting through since April. The first step was to bring Mason together with Lord Russell. Gregory helped Mason draft a note, asking for an unofficial interview. He reminded Mason to use the correct form: “The Right Hon. Earl Russell, Foreign Office. I should not address your letter to his private house.”48 While they were waiting for Russell’s reply, James Spence, the pro-Southern author of The American Union, introduced himself to the group. The Liverpudlian businessman had realized that there were social and financial opportunities to be gained from befriending the nascent Confederacy; in a bid to prove his usefulness, Spence offered to help Mason prepare for his meeting with Lord Russell.

Russell had no wish to see Mason. “What a fuss we have had about these two men,” he exclaimed.49 He had heard that William Gregory and William Lindsay had decided to force a debate on the blockade after the opening of Parliament on February 6. Russell already had a fair idea of the number of ships getting through from the diligent reports of the local consuls, but he balked at challenging its legality. There was no telling when Great Britain might find herself in the similar position of mounting a feeble blockade.50 At the meeting on February 10, Russell resorted to his usual method with the Confederates and forced Mason to do most of the talking. Mason noticed that the foreign secretary “took very little part in the conversation,” and he felt that he had been played throughout the interview. “On the whole,” wrote Mason, “it was manifest enough that his personal sympathies were not with us, and his policy inaction.”51 This was true. “At all events, I am heart and soul a neutral,” Russell wrote to Lord Lyons just before the meeting.52

The Confederate lobby’s obstinacy exasperated Palmerston and Russell. Both were highly sensitive as to how it would appear to the North if Parliament debated whether to disregard its blockade. Coming so soon after the Trent affair, it would add credence to the charge that Britain was simply looking for an excuse to turn on the United States. No one in the cabinet believed that the war could last much longer. Why irritate either side, was the general consensus, when all they had to do was wait for perhaps only three more months? The Lord Chancellor, Lord Westbury, expressed himself in his customary splenetic way: “I am greatly opposed to any violent interference.… Let them tear one another to pieces.”53 To try to forestall a debate, Russell invited James Spence to attend a meeting at the Foreign Office, since it was known that he was held in high esteem by the Confederates. Spence was delighted with his newfound importance. He listened gravely as Russell explained why he should use his influence to stop the Confederates from forcing a vote. As soon as the interview was over, Spence hurried to the commission’s headquarters on Piccadilly to urge the group to redouble its efforts.

Charles Francis Adams had heard that the Confederates’ political friends were pushing the blockade question. He wrote to Seward on February 7 urgently requesting any facts and statistics he could pass on to the North’s supporters in Parliament. It was embarrassing personally and diplomatically, he hinted, for the State Department to leave him so ill informed. Adams had become reconciled to Thurlow Weed’s presence, “but my patience is gradually oozing out of me at this extraordinary practice of running me down with my own colleagues,” he wrote in his diary. “Mr. Seward was not brought up in the school of refined delicacy of feeling or he would not have continued these inflictions.”

What they needed, Weed told Seward, was a host of unofficial representatives whose sole purpose was to shape public opinion. Adams was a good man but useless for anything other than strict diplomacy. “We may want the good-will of England