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By Root 6886 0

it meant the country was ready to recognize Southern independence. He invited Mason and Roebuck down to his estate in Surrey for a concentrated weekend of plotting. After the meeting, Roebuck wasted little time. In the first week of June he met with Benjamin Disraeli, who said all the things that an opposition leader would when offered the chance of attacking the government without actually committing himself or his party to a change in their policy of noninterference in the American war. But this was encouragement enough for Roebuck, who gave notice in the House of his intention to revisit the question of Southern recognition. The debate was slated for the end of June. The Confederates took the news with a degree of caution. Roebuck was an asset to the extent that the MP represented himself as a man of the people, but (in the words of one observer) vanity was “written all over his face when you came near it.” They trembled at the idea of letting Roebuck loose in the Commons without an explicit move by the French beforehand. John Slidell drew up a memorandum for Emperor Napoleon’s attention, which outlined all the reasons why an independent South suited French interests, and requested an interview.

When Mason returned to England, he found Waterloo Station placarded with posters depicting the British Union Jack crossed with the Confederate flag. Hackney cab drivers were displaying the emblems in miniature. Hotze was working at a feverish pace, distributing posters, placards, and circulars up and down the country. The Morning Herald and the Standard agreed to print editorials demanding recognition every other day until the debate. Spence was also in his element. During the past two years he had changed from being a businessman of no great talent or success into a canny political operator respected by the Southerners in England and feared by the Northern lobby. For the new push in Parliament, Spence formed two separate organizations. One was a respectable club, called the Manchester Southern Club, whose purpose was to distribute Confederate material in the north of England; the other was his own private army of agitators. The group successfully broke up an abolitionist meeting at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. “These parties are not the rich spinners but young men of energy with a taste for agitation but little money,” Spence wrote to Mason.

It appears to my judgment that it would be wise not to stint money in aiding this effort to expose cant and diffuse the truth. Manchester is naturally the centre of such a move and you will see there are here the germs of important work—but they need to be tended and fostered. I have supplied a good deal of money individually but I see room for the use of 30 or 40 pounds a month or more.12

Almost no one outside the legation had the least suspicion that public opinion was being cleverly manipulated. “The intelligence of the country is now unanimous in our favor,” Henry Hotze wrote proudly. He was exaggerating his success, but there had been an undeniable shift back toward the South since the initial excitement aroused by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of the year. Hotze’s genius lay in his understanding of who and what constituted fashionable opinion. He knew how to portray the South in ways that appealed to particular constituencies, such as the clergy, university students, journalists, actors, and artists, whom he considered to be natural proselytizers as well as role models.

The Ladies’ London Emancipation Society tried to beat Hotze at his own game by distributing more than a hundred thousand excerpts from Fanny Kemble’s plantation diary, but neither they nor the indefatigable Harriet Martineau could match Hotze’s tentacle-like connection with the press. By early May, Martineau had given up trying to change the North’s poor image in England and was concentrating on the message “that it is not necessary to admire the Yankees very much to be on their side in the quarrel.”13

Hotze was being helped, of course, by the absence of pro-Northern English journalists