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recommended expulsion, ducking, riding rails, and other cognate modes of insuring a moral conviction of error.” He would not have allowed himself to be cowed by these threats, but he accepted defeat “when to the press and populace of the United States, the President and the Government of Washington added their power.” Sam Ward tried hard to dissuade Russell from leaving, and he complained to Seward that Stanton had “tomahawked” the North’s most valuable foreign asset.42 The secretary of state paid scant attention to Russell’s departure. Stanton’s appalling blunder of driving away the world’s most famous war correspondent would only become clear later on when the North had no foreign journalists reporting from its side.

Russell set sail for England on April 9 on board the China. “I saw the shores receding into a dim gray fog,” he wrote; “our good ship pointing thank Heaven, towards Europe.”43 His wife and children had not seen him in more than a year, his financial affairs were in a deplorable state, and his career, so it seemed to him, was crumbling. Russell used his final dispatch from New York, on April 3, to explain to readers why he was abandoning his assignment. They were probably more forgiving than his employers, John Delane and Mowbray Morris, who both sent frantic letters begging him to continue at his post. “It is lamentable that at such a time we should be practically unrepresented,” grumbled Delane, since J. C. Bancroft Davis had also resigned, on grounds of ill health. The Times did agree to reimburse the £1,340 that Russell had paid out of his own pocket while in America, but took nearly two years to verify every receipt and expense.44

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Years later, Lord Lyons told William Howard Russell that his presence in Washington during the first year of the war had greatly enlivened the British legation and that the capital was a duller place after he left. Lyons’s irritation with Russell over the telegram scandal had had less to do with the offense than with its timing. Lyons was in the middle of secret negotiations with Seward on a joint slave-trade treaty when the New York Herald published its accusation against Russell. Lyons could not afford to have the legation dragged into a disreputable row when so much depended on discretion and staying out of the public eye.

Lyons had always believed that an antislavery treaty between the two countries was impossible. Only three years before, the mere possibility that the Royal Navy might try to stop an American vessel to search for slaves was sufficient to provoke threats of war. Britain had backed down, and the slave trade had flourished. There was scant hope in London that the Lincoln administration would have congressional support to revisit so contentious an issue. In May 1861, Seward had tried to skirt Congress by offering to sign a secret memorandum allowing the Royal Navy to stop and search suspected American slavers. But since the offer had coincided with his menacing dispatches to Adams, Lyons and Lord Russell had agreed that Seward’s word was “worth little or nothing” when it came to Anglo-American relations.45 They had misjudged the sincerity of Seward’s intentions, however. The secret memorandum idea was no trick on his part, even if he had not thought through the impact on the public if a Royal Navy vessel sailed into New York Harbor with a captured slaver in tow.

The slave trade issue was revived when Captain Nathaniel Gordon was sentenced to death on February 7 by a New York court for the crime of participating in the Atlantic slave trade. It was the first successful prosecution of a slave trader in forty-four years, and the outcry for Lincoln to pardon Gordon was considerable, though not deafening. Lord Lyons wondered whether this was a sign that he should speak to Seward about a treaty. Slave trading was on the increase again, since blockade duty had taken away U.S. Navy ships that had been patrolling the west coast of Africa.46 The only practical way to stop it was to give Royal Navy ships the right to challenge slavers flying the American flag.

With