• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7000 0

in Brussels wrote to Richmond that same night: “This clearly foreshadows our early recognition.”13 Thirty-four years later, Gladstone admitted that his speech was a mistake of “incredible grossness.” “I really, though most strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness to all America to recognize that the struggle was virtually at an end.” He hated to think of the damage he had caused, “because I have for the last five and twenty years received from the … people of America tokens of goodwill which could not fail to arouse my undying gratitude.”14.1 14 But at the time he was unrepentant, until Russell pointed out to him that he had created a controversy where none had existed.

Benjamin Moran worked himself up into one of his customary rages after he read the morning news on October 8. Adams was not sure what to think. He knew enough about British politics now to realize that it would be highly unusual for a change in cabinet policy to be announced in this way. The press seemed hesitant as well. When Adams saw William Forster four days later, he revealed that Seward had given him secret instructions that he was to withdraw from his post if recognition or intervention became government policy. Forster thought this was something the Foreign Office ought to know before it made any irretrievable decisions. But, Adams wondered, was this the Foreign Office at work, or just Gladstone? Feeling depressed, he cheered himself up with a trip to the theater to see Our American Cousin. “The piece has no literary merit whatever,” he wrote. “I laughed heartily and felt better for it.”16

It seemed to Adams that his question about the British cabinet’s intentions was answered a week later when Sir George Cornewall Lewis gave a speech in Hereford contradicting Gladstone’s claim that the South was an established nation. His speech received favorable comment in the North and caused uproar in the South. Gladstone’s “made a nation” remark was forgotten. Britain was the clear leader in Europe, complained the influential Richmond Enquirer: Lewis had extinguished the light and closed “the last prospect of European intervention.”17 At home, a relieved Adams decided that Gladstone had spoken only for himself in Newcastle and “had overshot the mark.”

After these two conflicting statements, there were no more public comments by any of the cabinet. But furious arguments were taking place behind the scenes. Gladstone and Lewis had long been rivals. Only one of them could become Palmerston’s heir, and each was conscious of the other’s near presence. Allowing his emotions to cloud his judgment was exactly what the aloof and scholarly Lewis expected of Gladstone. Russell, whenever he thought that the liberal Whig traditions of the house of Bedford were at stake, did the same, and this, Lewis knew, was their weak point.

Russell issued a memorandum to the cabinet on October 13 that laid out why they should intervene and settle the war. Lewis pounced on it and wrote a scathing countermemorandum on the seventeenth, pointing out that it was not a debating club that would be receiving the mediation proposal but “heated and violent partisans,” who would reject it in an instant. The South would not be grateful for the help, thought Lewis, and the North would swear vengeance on Britain.18

Many years later, Henry Adams decided that the real reason why the cabinet fell into such a muddle over the American question was because the English were, by habit, eccentric:

The English mind took naturally to rebellion—when foreign—and it felt particular confidence in the Southern Confederacy because of its combined attributes—foreign rebellion of English blood—which came nearer ideal eccentricity than could be reached by Poles, Hungarians, Italians or Frenchmen. All the English eccentrics rushed into the ranks of the rebel sympathizers, leaving few but well-balanced minds to attach themselves to the cause of the Union.… The “cranks” were all rebels.… The Church was rebel, but the dissenters were mostly with the Union. The universities were rebel, but the university