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Throughout August, every utterance and report from England was picked over and analyzed for clues. It was at this precise moment that the irascible John Roebuck decided to try his hand at Anglo-American relations. The Liberal MP was growing old, and change frightened him. Anything that retarded the modernizing, democratizing tendencies of the United States seemed like a cause worth supporting. Forgetting that the South was also a democracy, he championed its independence because separation would hurt the North. On August 14, Roebuck and Palmerston attended the same banquet in Sheffield. Knowing that the prime minister’s presence would ensure that the speeches were reported in the press, Roebuck theatrically turned to Palmerston and exhorted him to admit that the South’s time had come. “The North will never be our friends,” he bellowed, to a few “hear, hears.” “Of the South you can make friends. They are Englishmen; they are not the scum and refuse of Europe.” The mayor of Manchester leaped to his feet and shouted over the boos and cheers, “Don’t say that; don’t say that.” Roebuck responded: “I know what I am saying. [The South] are Englishmen, and we must make them our friends.”72

Reports of the Manchester banquet confirmed Northern fears and revived Southern hopes. Palmerston was no longer “considered [by Southerners] as the personal enemy of the confederacy—a most rabid abolitionist—who is suppressing the sympathies, which England would otherwise show for the south.”73 All over the South, people waited anxiously for foreign news, believing that their fate hung on his change of view.

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McClellan’s failure to capture Richmond had convinced Lincoln that there was no real substance or drive to the general. McClellan looked and talked the part, he realized, but lacked the will to act. Without even bothering to consult him, Lincoln announced McClellan’s demotion on July 11. He lost his position as general-in-chief of the U.S. armies, which was given to Henry “Old Brains” Halleck, whose commanders out west had produced the victories at Shiloh and Island No. 10; and he was ordered to merge his army with General John Pope’s army, which was fighting in northern Virginia. Pope, not McClellan, would command this new mammoth army.

Lincoln had to have a military victory; volunteering practically ceased after the Seven Days’ Battles, and the 600,000 extra soldiers he requested were not stepping forward without the lure of large bounties. Furthermore, he knew that if he played the emancipation card while the North appeared to be losing the war, it would be interpreted at home and abroad as the desperate move of a floundering government—in Seward’s words, “our last shriek on the retreat.”74 Lincoln had accomplished as much as he could for the moment: Washington was now in line with the rest of the North, free of the taint of slavery; among the recent bills passed by Congress was a law prohibiting the return of fugitive slaves to their masters, and another allowing “persons of African descent” to join the army. But Lincoln had not been able to persuade the border states to accept emancipation in return for compensation for their slaves; slavery remained legal in the United States.

Notwithstanding the installation of Henry Halleck as the new general-in-chief, August turned out worse for the North than July. Despite the capture of three important Southern ports, the “Anaconda” strategy of a total blockade of the South’s coastline was far from being achieved.12.4 Nor had the North (with the exception of New Orleans) been able to extend its control of the Mississippi River beyond the border states. Worse, even gains had slipped into losses. Kentucky and Tennessee looked vulnerable once more.

Jefferson Davis had replaced the popular General Beauregard following his retreat from Corinth with the widely disliked Braxton Bragg. At the end of July Bragg had taken his army on a seven-hundred-mile maneuver into Kentucky, where he intended to install a pro-Southern governor. If the Confederacy could