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back for the moment. Adams, however, had no way of knowing that Seward was actually quite sanguine about the rams. “The English Ministry are our friends,” Seward had recently admitted to the navy secretary, Gideon Welles. The very day Adams poured out his fears to the duke, Seward told Welles to cease worrying because “the armored vessels building in England will not be allowed to leave.”6 Adams’s continual fretting about the rams ruined the enjoyment of his visit to Inveraray Castle, and he left for London on August 31 thinking he would never see Scotland again. This, he decided, would not be a great loss: “Half of it is fit only for the habitation of the beasts and the birds. The other half has nothing especial to recommend it either.”7

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Benjamin Moran was hysterical when Adams arrived back at the legation on September 3. One of the Lairds rams had actually been taken out for a test run, yet Lord Russell had replied to Adams’s latest protest with what seemed to him the usual empty assurances. The legation was reliving the escape of the Alabama. The effect on Adams was dramatic. He sent a warning to Russell that day, and a stronger one the next. On the fifth, having received nothing but a bland note in reply, he lost his temper. “This is war,” he wrote to Russell, war by stealth and deceit. If the government allowed the two rams to depart, to destroy New York and Boston at will, the United States would retaliate. If the circumstances were reversed, Adams declared, Britain would do the same. He would communicate his government’s response forthwith.8

Adams assumed that Lord Palmerston was interfering—or, worse, restraining Lord Russell from responding properly. It would have been far better for his peace of mind and the future of Anglo-American relations had he been kept informed of the strenuous efforts of the Home and Foreign office clerks to find a legal way of stopping the rams. Since June, the government had been secretly conducting an international investigation into their true ownership. The British consul in Egypt had been ordered to pry the truth out of the pasha as to how he had become mixed up with the Confederates. The information trickling in only heightened Russell’s suspicions about Bravay and Company. Palmerston agreed that he, too, was worried about “this ship building business.” Yet there was no obvious remedy: Seward’s threats and Adams’s letters made it politically impossible for them to amend the Foreign Enlistment Act without appearing to bow to U.S. pressure.

The British cabinet’s concern had increased in August after Richard Cobden shared with them his most recent correspondence from Charles Sumner. The senator, reported Cobden, had made a volte-face about England, and instead of being her chief ally in the U.S. capital was now her loudest critic. Sumner appeared to be so bent on revenge for Britain’s accumulated wrongdoings that Cobden had felt constrained to remind him, “We have been the only obstacle to what would have been almost a European recognition of the South.”24.2 10 The more Russell heard about the state of opinion in the North, the less he agreed with the advice of the law officers to wait until there was positive proof against the rams. Finally, on August 31, the Foreign Office received a telegram from the British consul in Egypt confirming that the pasha story was a ruse. Yet still the legal advisers to the Customs and Treasury departments rejected his entreaties for action.

Although he was still on holiday in Scotland, Russell telegraphed his undersecretary for foreign affairs, Austen Henry Layard, on September 3 to say that he would return to London for a confrontation with the law officers if necessary. Palmerston concurred with Russell: the Confederates were dragging the government into “neutral hostility.” He considered the possibility of having to pay damages to Lairds to be worth the risk—it would certainly be cheaper than a war with the United States.11 Layard obediently sent the detention order that day. Fearful that his telegram might lose itself—in the way that unpopular