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Ill.26 As the French and British governments ponder intervention, Punch argues the time is now.

Lord Palmerston reacted to the two announcements with a far cooler head than either Russell or Gladstone. All along he had been a proponent of mediation while the outcome of the war seemed obvious. But Lee’s check at Antietam, regardless of his miraculous escape across the Potomac, had revealed a serious weakness in the Confederate army. The prime minister’s confidence in the mediation plan was further shaken by a strong remonstrance from Lord Granville, the Liberal leader in the House of Lords, who argued in a letter to Russell on September 27 that any sort of interference in the war—no matter how good or charitable the intention—would only result in Britain becoming dragged into the conflict. “I return you Granville’s letter which contains much deserving of serious consideration,” Palmerston wrote to Russell on October 2. “The whole matter is full of difficulty, and can only be cleared up by some more decided events between the contending armies.”8

Ill.27 Punch portrays Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as a last desperate move.

Russell had come to the opposite conclusion. He wanted the cabinet meeting to discuss mediation brought forward by a week, from October 23 to the sixteenth. The news of Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation had convinced him that only Britain had the power to stop the humanitarian crisis unfolding in America. The answer to Granville’s objections, he thought, was to build an international alliance involving France and Russia to force the warring sides to agree to an armistice. “My only doubt is whether we and France should stir if Russia holds back,” he told Palmerston.9

Gladstone was also moved by his belief that a humanitarian crisis was at hand, though he saw two—the one in Lancashire as well as the one in Virginia. Unlike Russell and Palmerston, he did not think that the Confederates had suffered a significant setback at Antietam. “It has long been clear enough,” he wrote, “that secession is virtually an established fact.” When Gladstone talked about the undecided questions in America, he meant whether “Virginia must be divided, and probably Tennessee likewise.”10 He patiently brushed aside the Duchess of Sutherland’s objections, telling her that “Lincoln’s lawless proclamation” would be far more destructive to America than a separation between the states. When the duchess informed her son-in-law, the Duke of Argyll, about this latest twist to Gladstone’s view of the war, the duke sent him a blistering rebuke. “I would not interfere to stop [the war] on any account,” he wrote. “It is not our business to do so; and even short-sightedly, it is not our interest. Do you wish, if you could secure this result tomorrow, to see the great cotton system of the Southern States restored? Do you wish to see us almost entirely dependent on that system for the support of our Lancashire population? I do not.”11 The combination of his worries about Lancashire and his disgust with the Emancipation Proclamation pushed Gladstone over the edge. On October 7, the day after the Proclamation appeared in The Times, he went to Newcastle to attend a banquet in his honor. He had been thinking all day about “what I should say about Lancashire and America: for both these subjects are critical.”12 Gladstone later told his wife that the acoustics were terrible and he had struggled to make himself heard. It would have been better for him, perhaps, if he had not been heard at all. The words that caught everyone’s attention were these: “We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South, but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more difficult than either; they have made a nation.”

Gladstone’s startling announcement was telegraphed all over Europe almost before he had sat down. Ambrose Dudley Mann