A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [188]
Russell was still feeling put upon when Lord Cowley sent him the news that the emperor had ordered his new foreign minister to approach Britain with a proposal of Anglo-French intervention. Russell was delighted. Once again he could be an angel of peace and prevent any further bloodshed in America. “Was there ever any war so horrible?” he asked Cowley rhetorically.32 Now he could call a new cabinet meeting and his plan would have to be discussed. Palmerston had the opposite reaction. If the North wished to waste the lives of thousands of emigrant Germans and Irishmen, it was not, he decided, England’s business to interfere. Moreover, his suspicion of anything French made him skeptical of the proposal. The French have no morals, he told Russell, and would probably agree to all kinds of egregious provisions for slavery. “The French Government are more free from the shackles of principle and of right and wrong on these matters, as on all others than we are,” he insisted.33
By November 7, rumors about the emperor’s proposal had leaked to the press. Adams’s spirits sank in proportion to the rise among Confederates. Russell was like a child anticipating a birthday. After reading that a mass meeting of cotton workers in Oldham had passed a resolution in favor of intervention, Russell could not help asking the mayor what had changed in the district. Nothing, the mayor replied; the gathering was small compared to previous American war meetings in Oldham, and it had been intentionally packed with Confederate supporters. (James Spence’s agents provocateurs, Aitken and Grimshaw, were so disheartened by their inability to form a genuine social movement that they ceased their activities shortly afterward.) But in London, James Mason was growing more optimistic. “The cotton famine,” he was pleased to report, “is looming up in fearful proportions.” He added that 700,000 workers were currently living off charity and that typhoid appeared to be on the rise. “The public mind is very much agitated and disturbed at the fearful prospect for the winter, and I am not without hope that it will produce its effects on the counsels of the Government,” he wrote.34
Ill.28 Punch’s characterization of Louis-Napoleon advocating a joint approach—Palmerston holding back, November 1862.
The effects were not as great as he believed: every economic indicator showed that the country was absorbing the cotton shock, and civic and church leaders were confident that mass unemployment in Lancashire could be alleviated if private individuals throughout the country donated sufficient funds to help the workers. Lord Derby set the example with a donation of £12,000, the largest ever given by one person to a particular cause at that time. He was the chairman of the Central Relief Fund that was overseeing the efforts of 143 committees to collect money and clothing. The workers were unemployed, but many were not sitting idle; Harriet Martineau and others were organizing schemes to help them learn new trades and skills. The sewing and cooking schools, she noted, were proving to be especially popular with the women.35
Charles Francis Adams had been so satisfied with Lord Russell’s explanation that he saw no reason to alter his holiday plans. He was in Tunbridge Wells with his family when the cabinet met on November 11 to debate the French proposal. Benjamin Moran was equally sanguine. “Lord Russell gave Mr. Adams assurances at their last interview that nothing would be done without notifying him,” Moran wrote in his diary on the eleventh. “I rest undisturbed … I infer the French proposal will