A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [203]
But once Hartington reached Virginia, it took less than a week for him to be won over. Like Frank Vizetelly and Francis Lawley before him, he was smitten. “I hope Freddy [his younger brother, Lord Frederick Cavendish] won’t groan much over my rebel sympathies, but I can’t help them,” he wrote to his father on December 28, 1862. “The people here are so much more earnest about the thing than the North seems to be, that it is impossible not to go a good way with them, though one may think they were wrong at first.”68 The Southerners were certainly putting on a good show for him. He was introduced to Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, who seemed like moderate and sensible men to him, fighting the laudable cause of self-determination; he had spoken with Lee and Jackson, who were modest in victory; and he had been shown a couple of carefully selected plantations. “The negroes hardly look as well off as I expected to see them,” he wrote afterward, “but they are not dirtier or more uncomfortable-looking than Irish labourers.” Southern fears of a “servile insurrection” inspired by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had proved to be unfounded.15.5 69 On the twenty-ninth, Lawley accompanied Hartington and Colonel Leslie to General Jeb Stuart’s headquarters. Forewarned by a telegram from Lawley, the officers ransacked their own belongings to provide the party with comfortable accommodation. Scarce luxuries like blankets and stoves were sacrificed for the visitors. The fattest turkey in the camp was killed and plucked for dinner. Hartington appreciated their efforts, and he endeared himself to his hosts by insisting “we should not make any change for them in our ordinary routine, but let them fare exactly as the rest.” To demonstrate his sincerity he helped to beat the eggs for “a monster egg-nog.”70 But as Hartington joined in the revelries, he suddenly realized the scale of suffering it would require to crush the spirit of rebellion. The South “can never be brought back into the Union except as conquered provinces,” he wrote, “and I think they will take a great deal of conquering before that is done.”71
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15.1 The previous incumbent, William Brodie, had pleaded with the Foreign Office to send him anywhere so long as he could escape Washington.
15.2 Jeb Stuart took a grim satisfaction from Wynne and Phillips’s reports: The “Englishmen here,” he wrote to General Lee’s eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, “who surveyed Solferino [the battle that inspired Henry Dunant to found the Red Cross] and all the battlefields of Italy say that the pile of dead on the plains of Fredericksburg exceeds anything of the sort ever seen by them.”
15.3 Seward’s printed correspondence provided some of the most interesting reading the Foreign Office clerks had seen in years. But Lord Lyons adopted a judicious view of the letters. “[Seward’s] tone towards the Foreign Powers has, however, become much more civil than it appeared in the correspondence printed last year,” he pointed out to Lord Russell. As for Adams and his indiscreet comments, Lyons thought he showed “more calmness and good sense than any of the American Ministers abroad. He is not altogether free from a tendency to small suspicions—but this, I think, proceeds from his position, not from his natural character—it is, too, a very common mistake of inexperienced diplomats.”55
15.4 The line that really upset Sumner was this: “The extreme advocates of African slavery and its most vehement opponents were acting in concert together to precipitate a servile war—the former by making the most desperate attempt to overthrow the federal Union, the latter by demanding an edict of universal emancipation.”56
15.5 In New Orleans, Acting Consul George Coppell had tried to obtain