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without comment. Yet the debate had helped to shape public opinion in a way that was advantageous to the South. First, as Adams complained to Seward, the Confederates had succeeded in positioning themselves as the underdogs and victims in the war.58 Second, and more dangerous still, they had made the idea of British mediation seem like a humanitarian duty to end the bloodshed. Make the war about slavery, Adams urged Seward, otherwise the British government could end up caving in to pressure.59 After the debate, Lord Russell admitted to Lyons that he was astonished by the passions it had stirred. “The great majority are in favour of the South,” he concluded. Furthermore, “nearly our whole people are of [the] opinion that separation wd be [of] benefit both to North and South.”60

Russell’s concern about national sentiment may have blinded him to more practical and immediate issues such as the Confederates’ violations of the Foreign Enlistment Act. Charles Francis Adams had repeatedly asked him to investigate reports of a formidable cruiser that was under construction at Lairds shipyard. His consul in Liverpool, Thomas Haines Dudley, had amassed such damning evidence that only an outright partisan—as the customs collector of Liverpool happened to be—could claim with a straight face that the mysterious No. 290 at Lairds was simply a merchant ship of unusual design.61 The vessel was ready to depart before Russell finally realized the danger, and he ordered all the relevant documents to be delivered immediately to the law officers. This was on July 23. Over the next six days a tragicomedy unfurled without anyone realizing its true importance until it was too late. The papers arrived at the house of the Queen’s Advocate, Sir John Harding, on the day he suffered an irreversible nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, an anonymous Confederate sympathizer in the Foreign Office alerted James Bulloch that his ship was about to be seized. Harding’s illness created a bureaucratic vacuum; in the ensuing muddle of confused responsibilities and departmental paper shuffling, the Confederates bribed a local customs official and quietly sneaked No. 290 out of Liverpool. By the time the telegram ordering her arrest reached Liverpool on July 31, the steamer was on her way to the Azores. There she would receive her guns, a new captain, and a new name: CSS Alabama. Northern shipping was about to face its greatest threat since the War of 1812.

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Lord Russell still thought the best hope for ending slavery was for the North and South to separate.62 Like many Englishmen, he assumed that the effect of international moral pressure and enlightened domestic opinion would eventually force Southern leaders to abolish slavery, just as Czar Alexander II had abolished serfdom in 1861. Gladstone shared his view; he was one of the few members of the British cabinet who had actually read James Spence’s The American Union, and the debate on July 18 sent him spinning further into the Confederates’ arms. Gladstone had fallen in love with the humanitarian argument. “It is indeed much to be desired,” he wrote to a friend on July 26, “that this bloody and purposeless conflict should cease.” Four days later, a mutual acquaintance succeeded in placing Henry Hotze next to him at dinner. The evening passed like a dream for Hotze; Gladstone hung on his every word. By the end of the night they were discussing where the boundary ought to lie between the two Americas, and whether it would be better to divide the border states in half.63

Gladstone would not be the first English politician or the last to fall under the spell of a foreign agent, but the way Henry Hotze played him was especially masterful. In his report after their “chance” meeting, Hotze described to Judah Benjamin how he carefully drove the conversation to make it seem as though Gladstone was in control. “I purposely abstained from introducing any topic,” he wrote on August 6; he allowed Gladstone to waffle on about “supposed difficulties” over the Confederacy’s border. Then, when he thought the moment was right, Hotze