A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [288]
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Captain Maffitt would not have sailed the battle-scarred Florida into Brest, France, had he known that his arrival would attract the attention of Federal agents, putting in jeopardy the six Confederate raiders under construction at Nantes and Bordeaux.24.1 James Bulloch had moved his operations across the Channel after the detention of the Alexandra in the spring. The emperor had given his permission for the switch to France with the proviso that if the United States uncovered the existence of the Confederate ships, the authorities would deny all knowledge of the program.4 Lucien Arman, owner of the largest shipbuilding firm in the country, was building four Alabama-style raiders for Bulloch in Bordeaux and had also helped to arrange the contract for the two smaller ships at Nantes.
The obliging Arman—whose wealth and position had grown in step with the emperor’s desire to modernize his navy—also introduced Bulloch to the brokerage firm of Bravay and Company. Monsieur Bravay agreed to buy the Confederate rams nearing completion at Lairds shipyard in Liverpool for a nominal sum (plus a large commission) and maintain that they were destined for his client, the pasha of Egypt. The intricate web of deception had been working well until the Florida sailed imprudently into Brest with its Confederate flag flying from the mast. The foreign minister, Drouyn de Lhuys, was furious, and proceeded to sit on Captain Maffitt’s request to use the port’s repair facilities for four days before reluctantly assenting on the condition that the visit be kept secret from the American legation.
In London, the Florida’s arrival went almost unremarked amid the furors over the imminent departure of the Lairds rams. Charles Francis Adams had warned Lord Russell that their very existence presented the greatest threat to Anglo-American relations since the Trent affair. Two ram raiders could not, of course, win the war for the Confederacy, but they could threaten the Federal stranglehold on Charleston or Wilmington. Moreover, argued Adams, if the rams were allowed to leave, there would be nothing to prevent the Confederacy from building twenty more in Britain. War between America and England would be unavoidable if the government failed to clamp down on all Confederate violations of British neutrality; and this, he was convinced, would never happen under Lord Palmerston.
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U.S. consul Thomas Haines Dudley in Liverpool had uncovered every aspect of the Confederates’ operations: how they recruited sailors, who paid them and when, how they procured supplies, and on which vessels the cargoes sailed. But he had failed to unearth a single piece of written evidence against the rams that could be presented in a court of law. The Lord Mayor of London warned the Home Office that it would be a waste of time sending government agents to investigate Lairds, since nothing would be found. But Lord Russell ignored the advice, which he believed to be tainted by the Lord Mayor’s pro-Southern bias, and sent the agents anyway. The hostility experienced by pro-Northerners in Liverpool could be overwhelming at times: “I have … done myself a great deal of damage,” complained one of Dudley’s informants.5
The Duke of Argyll noticed Charles Francis Adams’s agitation when the U.S. minister and his family went to stay in Scotland in the middle of August. One morning after breakfast, Adams had a frank conversation with the duke about the probability that the North would declare war if the government allowed the rams to depart. He was surprised to discover that he was not the first to say so. “He said that he had received a letter from Sumner,” wrote Adams on August 28, 1863, “dwelling very strongly on the danger of war.” Adams was too circumspect to discuss Seward’s latest dispatch (the threatening and bombastic letter Lord Lyons had seen earlier in August), but he hinted that there were instructions he was deliberately holding