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Du Pont’s fleet sailed into the harbor on April 7. At 3:00 P.M. urgent peals rang across the city, alerting the inhabitants to take cover. Confident in Beauregard’s defenses, many chose to watch from rooftops and balconies rather than hide in their houses. Frank Vizetelly ran from the Charles Hotel down to the Battery Promenade, where he jostled with the spectators for an unobstructed view of Fort Sumter. “I sketched the scene,” he wrote for the Illustrated London News, “and finished the drawing in the evening, while the garrison of Fort Sumter were repairing the damages.” Admiral Du Pont’s gloomy prediction that his fleet would be overwhelmed was soon fulfilled. The fight lasted a mere two and a half hours. But in that time his fleet was crippled and his best ironclad steamer, the Keokuk, was sunk.

“I don’t think the Yankees can capture Charleston, do what they will,” Henry Feilden wrote after the battle. “In six weeks more the unhealthy season will come on, and the scoundrels will die on this coast like rotten sheep.” It was his firm belief that the South would win its independence by Christmas. In the meantime, he planned to convert his entire savings into Confederate currency while it was still cheap to buy. Vizetelly was similarly ebullient about the South’s prospects of victory. “The fight may be renewed at any moment if the Federals have the stomach for the attempt,” he informed his readers back home, “but I think they have suffered too much.”4

The U.S. secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, was furious with Du Pont for failing to put on a better show. Embarrassed by yet another naval defeat, he wondered whether it was even worth making a further attempt: “Nothing has been done, and it is the recommendation of all, from the Admiral down, that no effort be made to do anything,” Welles wrote gloomily in his diary. “I am by no means confident that we are acting wisely in expending so much strength and effort on Charleston, a place of no strategic importance. But it is lamentable to witness the … want of zeal among so many of the best officers of the service.”5

Vizetelly’s triumphant reporting of the Union’s repulse contributed to the sour mood in Washington. The secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, was an avid reader of the English press, particularly those journals that were sympathetic to the South. Stanton would shut his office door, settle down on the sofa, and spend the afternoon discovering from Britain’s finest journalists why the North deserved no pity and why he, especially, was the worst sort of bungler. According to one of his clerks, it was almost a form of relaxation for him.6

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Contrary to Stanton’s belief that all of England sympathized with the South, support for the North was growing. The London consul, Freeman H. Morse, whose duties had expanded to include propaganda and public agitation, told Seward that there had been a “revolution” since Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.7 Despite the initial skepticism toward the Proclamation and the best efforts of The Times to portray it as a cynical ploy to encourage race riots—or at the very least force Southern soldiers to return to their homes to protect their families—the message that the war had a moral purpose seemed to be reaching the British public.

Among the initial signs was a rise in pamphlets and books putting forward the case for the North. James Spence’s seemingly unassailable arguments in The American Union for recognition of the South were picked apart to devastating effect by the economist John Elliot Cairnes in his book The Slave Power, which appeared in the autumn of 1862 and went through several editions after the Emancipation Proclamation. Cairnes was followed by the actress Fanny Kemble, who published her diary, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838 – 1839, written during her exile on her former husband’s slave plantation in Georgia, and William Howard Russell, whose account of his stay in America, entitled