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the senior members of the legation. But it cannot be said that Adams made the most of the opportunity. Afterward he wrote, “The same old crowd and the same people whom I did not know.”21 Although Adams often spoke as though he cared nothing for social advancement, Benjamin Moran was not fooled: “One of the leading characteristics, if not the leading one of English society,” he wrote in his diary, “is its perfect exclusiveness. To get through this barrier is almost impossible. Americans who try it once and fail, generally stop; but not the Adamses. Their desire to get thro’ the charmed wall and into the circle is a disease … altho’ they are constantly pretending they are indifferent to it.”22

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The Confederate commissioner James Mason had never seen the inside of Cambridge House and was thus denied the luxury of being bored by the Palmerstons’ parties. During the past twelve months, Mason’s most intimate encounter with the higher echelons of government had been the thirty minutes he had spent in Lord Russell’s office shortly after his arrival. On the other hand, Mason could boast that he had seen the Egyptian Hall of Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor in the City of London, many more times than Adams, since the South enjoyed strong support from financial institutions with historic ties to the cotton industry.

The Lord Mayor’s banquet on February 11, 1863, came just at the right time for Mason. Russell had become more elusive than ever. Mason did not know what to make of this “strange contumacy from such a quarter.” To make sure his correspondence was not falling victim to Federal skulduggery, he had had his secretary personally deliver the last Confederate letter to the Foreign Office. That had been more than a month ago. The banquet at Mansion House appeared to confirm Mason’s belief that the foreign secretary was out of step with the rest of the country. “When my name was announced by the Mayor, it was received with a storm of applause,” Mason wrote in his diary. When he was unexpectedly invited to address the hall, almost every sentence he spoke elicited loud cheers, especially when he referred to the commercial ties between the City and the South, and he thought he had acquitted himself rather well. One of James Spence’s friends had been among the guests and was convinced that he had witnessed a momentous event. “My dear Spence,” he wrote the next day,

Ill.34 Great emancipation meeting held at Exeter Hall, March 1863.

I was at the Mansion House last night and heard the Lord Mayor virtually recognize the South in the quietest and most inoffensive way that could be imagined.… As I came out I rubbed shoulders with Captain Tinker, Grinnell’s partner and I said, jocularly, “Well, you see the Lord Mayor has been and gone and done it.” He laughingly replied, “Oh yes, it’s all over now.” Depend on it, this expression of opinion from the heart of England’s middle classes must tell. It will reverberate thro’ the land and find an echo.23

The only Southerner in England who did not rejoice after the Lord Mayor’s banquet was Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury, who thought Mason was wasting his time. “Many of our friends here have mistaken British admiration of Southern ‘pluck,’ and newspaper spite at Yankee insolence as Southern sympathy. No such thing,” Maury had written to a friend in late January. He was adamant: “There is no love for the South here. In its American policy the British Government fairly represents the people.… There is no hope for recognition here, therefore I say withdraw Mason.” After the banquet Maury wrote: “We are gaining ground here, it is true, but before we can expect any aid or comfort we must show our ability to get along without it—then it will be offered right and left.”24

Matthew Maury would have been a much better Southern commissioner than William Yancey or James Mason. He was one of the Confederacy’s few international heroes, having received six honorary knight-hoods, a clutch of medals and seals, and membership in several royal societies for his contribution to