A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [162]
Benjamin was still hoping that he could bribe France with cotton, but he could not be sure. The emperor Napoleon’s invasion of Mexico also raised the interesting possibility that France might need Southern help in securing its conquest. The problem for Benjamin was his inability to communicate with his commissioners in a timely fashion. James Mason had yet to receive a single dispatch (although one sent in April eventually arrived in late June), and Slidell was in a similar position.23 Benjamin was obtaining most of his news from journals and old newspapers. He was pleased to see, however, that even without his supervision, the commissioners and propaganda agents were making great strides in their efforts to influence public opinion. James Spence and Henry Hotze had become a formidable team. Spence had offered his services to Mason back in April. All he asked for in return was the promise that after independence the South would appoint him as its financial agent, which would help him to recoup some of his losses caused by the 1857 panic. “I assume,” he had written boldly,
that it will be of value to your Government to have on this side a man of intellect, zealous in their cause, fertile in expedients, vigorous in action, of wide mercantile experience; one accustomed to deal with large and difficult things, able to influence public opinion through the press, and not afraid of any encounter as a speaker. In what measure I may claim to possess some of these, it is not for me to say. I simply state facts, easily verified, from which to draw your conclusions.12.1 24
Liverpool was the perfect arena for Spence’s genius as a propagandist and social organizer. “We are southern almost to a man,” a Liverpudlian friend confirmed to the MP Richard Monckton Milnes. “There is even a secret club here—they call it the ‘Wig-Wam’ … in this club all the Southern news is discussed, southern newspapers find their way and arrangements are made for sending arms and ammunitions.… No club was ever more practical or more secret: large contributions are constantly coming in.”26 The manufacturing areas around the city were also fertile territory; Spence engaged two veteran strike leaders, William Aitken and Mortimer Grimshaw, to organize mass demonstrations in the worst-hit cotton districts. Their motives may have been tinged by a desire to revive their glory days, but they were also passionately against the sacrifice of English cotton workers for the benefit of Northern capitalists.
Hotze naturally gave the protest meetings great prominence in his new weekly, the Index. He had started the journal at the end of April with the help of donations from friends in order to have his own vehicle for reporting Anglo-American matters. It was designed to be cosmopolitan and worldly, as though its Southern sympathies were an inconsequential and harmless feature rather than the sole raison d’être of the paper. Hotze explained to a potential writer that for the Index to be respectable it had “to be tolerant and yet not indifferent; to be moderate and yet have strong convictions, to be instructive and yet not dull.” Above all, the information had to be dressed “in the most attractive manner” and displayed “in the most accessible way.”27
The Index did not require a large circulation so long as it was read in all the clubs and by MPs. Hotze sought out contributors with deliberate calculation. He wanted writers with connections to other newspapers rather than ardent partisans. The more they wrote for him, he reasoned, the more they would absorb Confederate views that would in turn carry over into their articles for other newspapers. British journalism was a small enclave within the already small world of educated society.28 Once inside the charmed circle, Hotze discovered it was easy to influence content