A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [129]
For the upcoming debate in Parliament, Weed and Adams looked to William Forster rather than John Bright to outmaneuver William Gregory and the small but growing Confederate lobby. “On the whole Mr. Forster has been our firmest and most judicious friend,” Adams admitted privately. “We owe to his tact and talent even more than we do to the more showy interference of Messrs. Cobden and Bright.”57 The latter seemed to relish his powers of alienation. On February 17, Bright made a blistering speech in the Commons against aristocratic supporters of slavery, which struck his listeners as ludicrous considering that Lord Shaftesbury was leading a national campaign to reunite a fugitive slave named Anderson with his wife and children. One MP commented afterward, “I don’t think the people of England like [Bright] and his policy better than they do his friends the Yankees.”58
“We are miserably prepared to meet and answer objections,” Weed grumbled to Seward on February 20. “Members of Parliament beset me for materials, and I cannot get anything official. I have picked what could be found of the Newspapers.”59 Although still chastened by his recent exposure in the press, Henry Adams discreetly tried to aid his father by pushing Frederick Seward, Seward’s son, to send over any reports that could be of use. “The truth is, we want light here,” Henry told him. “Our friends have got to be stuffed with statistics and crammed with facts.… The Southerners will parade a great number of vessels which have run it. Our side must show an equal or greater number either captured, or chased, and must have at hand any evidence.” Otherwise, he warned, the Confederates would argue that the fourth provision of the Declaration of Paris was not being met—that the blockade actually exist and be effective—and therefore the blockade was illegal.60
As the day of the debate approached, Adams noticed a rise in the number of newspaper articles sympathetic to the South. He blamed the “unscrupulous and desperate emissaries” who were prepared to spread any number of lies—even that slavery in the South would be abolished after independence—on a credulous British public.61 The “emissaries” were actually one agent, Henry Hotze, a journalist from Mobile, Alabama, who had been appointed by the Confederate State Department to liaise between the commission and the press. Hotze had arrived in England on the same day as Mason and Slidell, but he had not traveled with them. Although he was only twenty-seven years old, Hotze exuded the confidence of someone twice his age. He was fluent in French and German, having spent his childhood in Switzerland. His charm and powers of conversation were still legendary in Brussels, where he had served as the secretary of the American legation during the late 1850s.62
The mission to England had been Hotze’s own idea. During the autumn he had spent a few weeks in London on behalf of the War Department checking on the progress of arms shipments. This was long enough to convince him that the South needed to “educate” the English press, and that he was the person to do it. Although Hotze despised Mason and abhorred his tobacco habit, he accepted that he was dependent on Mason’s contacts until he could make his own.63 Fortunately, Mason had no idea of Hotze’s feelings toward him, and during their first weeks in London he invited the journalist to accompany him everywhere he went. In this way Hotze forged many useful acquaintances and learned