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The following morning, Adams tucked into a celebratory breakfast at the legation with Weed, Bright, Forster, and several other supporters. Adams admitted to the group that he had ceased to worry about the debate once he learned of the Federal victories. “Mr. Gregory,” he announced, “could not have selected a more difficult moment for himself as the current of opinion is setting much the other way. Nothing shines so dazzling to the military eye of Europe as success.”68 Adams was allowing his cynicism too much rein. Moreover, if such success could sway political opinion, so could a cotton famine. Though it had not happened yet, Mason informed the Confederate State Department on March 11 that supplies “were now very low,” and the cotton workers were dependent on charity “to keep them from actual starvation.”69 The cause of the South in England, he assured them, was by no means lost.

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9.1 Dicey never realized how much his references to the “mother country” alienated Americans. His innocent, if tongue-in-cheek, comparison of New York with London caused great irritation. “Everything around and about me looked so like the Old Country,” he wrote. Landing on the docks, “Irish porters seized upon my luggage as they would have done at the Tower steps in London. Street newsboys pestered me with second editions of English-printed newspapers. An Old-fashioned English hackney coach carried me to my destination, through dull, English-looking streets, with English names; and the driver cheated me at the end of my fare, with genuine London exorbitance.”

9.2 Under the Declaration of Paris, when two belligerent ships arrived at a neutral port, their departure had to be separated by twenty-four hours to forestall the risk of a battle in the neutral country’s waters.

TEN

The First Blow Against Slavery

Ambiguous attitudes—Consul Dudley vs. James Bulloch in Liverpool—Henry Adams is embarrassed—Rise of the ironclads—Farewell to Russell—A brilliant maneuver

Not once during the blockade debate had any of the speakers referred to slavery. The issue was an embarrassment to both sides. Northern supporters were not allowed to claim that the war was to end slavery, and Southern supporters naturally could not say, as John Stuart Mill had so trenchantly put it in an essay published shortly before the debate, that the South was fighting for the right “of burning human creatures alive.”10.1 1 Nor would they, since every Confederate sympathizer in Britain assumed that the South would abolish the “peculiar institution” as soon as its economy could sustain free labor.

A speech by Gladstone to an audience in Manchester in April 1862—many of whom were being financially drained by the war—revealed the extent to which ambiguity over the slavery question benefited the South and damaged the North. Gladstone asked the question that was deeply troubling his listeners: Were they suffering for nothing? There was “no doubt,” he declared, “if we could say that this was a contest of slavery and freedom, there is not a man within the length and breadth of this room, there is, perhaps, hardly a man in all England, who would for a moment hesitate upon the side he should take.”3

Ill.18 Punch reminds the British that the South was fighting to keep its slaves.

The Duke of Argyll berated Gladstone for allowing himself to be blinded by fashionable opinion. “That this war is having a powerful, a daily increasing effect on the hold of slavery over opinion in America is, in my judgment, a fact so evident … that I cannot understand its being in question,” he wrote impatiently.4 But Gladstone felt vindicated for expressing his doubts after he received a letter from a Liberian diplomat named Edward Wilmot Blyden, who declared that he was “very glad of the position which England maintains with reference to the war.… Both sections of the country are negro-hating and negro-crushing.”5

Seward’s interdiction against calling the conflict a war for abolition was so strict that Adams was placed