A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [278]
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“The fall of Vicksburg has made me ill all the week,” James Spence wrote to Mason.13 The Times downplayed the news at first, but on July 23, Charles Francis Adams noted that the paper “condescends to admit this morning that Vicksburg is taken.” Three days later, The Times was also forced to concede the Federal capture of the Mississippi River—Port Hudson had surrendered to General Nathaniel Banks on July 9 after a forty-eight-day siege.
As soon as Henry Hotze recovered from the shock of the news—no one had expected Vicksburg to surrender, let alone General Lee to falter—he began rallying his supporters in the press. It was imperative that they halt the now precipitous slide of Confederate bonds. “You will not be surprised that I am giving to my operations an extension which only the urgencies of the crisis could warrant,” he informed Judah Benjamin. Hotze had pulled off the extraordinary feat of persuading a religious publishing house to include in every publication, religious and nonreligious, for the next two months, a Southern pamphlet entitled “Address to the Christians Throughout the World.” Signed by the ninety-six clergymen of Richmond, the “Address” urged fellow Christians to protest against Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.14 Hotze estimated that it would be read by 2 million people.15 This and the obvious shock felt by the British public were his only comfort.
There was outrage in the legation at the lack of enthusiasm in England over the Northern successes. The Economist described Lee’s defeat as a tragedy because it meant a prolonging of the war.16 “The salons of this great metropolis are in tears,” Adams wrote cynically in his diary. “Tears of anger mixed with grief.” He was still smarting over the ignominious end to Mrs. Adams’s weekly parties; not even Benjamin Moran bothered to attend the final one.23.2 The assistant secretary had ceased to attend out of protest, having been cast into a jealous agony ever since George Sheffield, one of Lord Lyons’s unpaid attachés, visited the legation and innocently revealed that Lyons invited the junior diplomats to every dinner. Moran blamed Henry Adams for stealing his rightful place. Ironically, Henry had recently written to Seward’s son, Frederick, pleading for an increase in salary in recognition of Moran’s services: “He is an invaluable man,” he wrote, “a tremendous worker, and worth any ten ordinary officers to Government, but here he has borne nine tenths of the labour of the Legation for seven years, and gets for it a miserable pittance of $1500 a year; about enough to support a respectable cab-driver in this city.”17
Unaware of Henry’s intercession on his behalf, Moran behaved toward him with appalling rudeness and spite. It pained him to watch Henry slowly navigate his way into English society and start to enjoy a real life outside the legation. The younger Adams had become a member of the Cosmopolitan Club, which did not have permanent premises like Brooks’s or Boodles, but whose members were all notable figures on the literary or political stage. Henry was mystified why Lord Frederick Cavendish had championed his admission: “Whether he feels his conscience touched by the vagaries of his brother Hartington; or whether he desires to show a general and delicate sympathy with our position,” he wrote to Charles Francis Jr., “I don’t know and can’t guess.” But more important even than joining a club or being proposed by a peer, Henry had finally made a genuine friend, Charles Milnes Gaskell, known as Carlo, the son of James Gaskell, a Yorkshire MP and supporter of the North. They became lifelong friends.18
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The season was drawing to a close. “The streets are full of Pickford’s vans carting furniture from the houses, and Belgravia and May Fair are the scene of dirt and littered straw,”