A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [292]
Adams was disappointed that few people in England other than his own son gave him credit for stopping the rams. But a bruised ego was the least of his worries. On September 28, Moran recorded that the legation messenger had grievously swindled the family. Letters had been intercepted, Adams’s wine cellar ransacked, money taken, even checks forged. Feeling that their sanctuary had been violated, Mrs. Adams was already pining to leave London when an anonymous letter arrived at the legation:
Dam the Federals
Dam the Confederates
Dam you both
Kill you damned selves for the next 10 years if you like; so much the better for the world and for England. Thus thinks every Englishman with any brains.
NB.PS. We’ll cut your throats fast enough afterwards for you if you aint tired of blood, you devils.23
This decided the matter. Adams found a large seaside retreat for rent in St. Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings. There, he led Henry and Brooks into the slate-blue water for bracing plunges before breakfast.24 It was a relief to leave behind the chaos and discord of the legation. “My state of depression of spirits is becoming chronic,” he wrote in his diary in a rare moment of self-reflection. “This way of living does not suit me, and the condition of public as well as of my private affairs at home is not satisfactory.”25
Adams’s chief solace was that his difficulties paled beside those of the Confederates in London. Mason had announced on September 21 that he was closing the commission. Benjamin Moran was almost sorry to see him go: “Mr. Mason was the unfittest man they could have sent here, and has proved an ignominious failure.”26 Mason’s English friends had feared just such a reaction to his departure and had entreated him to stay; the press, including The Times, considered his resignation ill judged. But Mason was acting on Judah Benjamin’s instructions. The Confederate secretary of state had ordered him to relocate to France under the new designation of “special commissioner to the Continent” and to give as his reason for the move Southern dissatisfaction with Britain.27 Yet the state of affairs in France was no better for the Confederates. A disgruntled clerk at the offices of Bravay and Company had passed incriminating documents to the U.S. legation. The French authorities naturally professed to be shocked to learn that the Confederates were using their dockyards, and the foreign minister, Drouyn de Lhuys, glibly assured William L. Dayton, the U.S. minister in Paris, that there would be a thorough investigation into the matter. The deception granted Bulloch a reprieve, but it was no guarantee that his construction program would be allowed to continue.
There was a funereal atmosphere at James Mason’s house in Sackville Street when Rose Greenhow arrived for dinner on September 17. She had seen him the day before. “He was very kind—and we had a long talk,” she wrote in her diary.28 Mason apologized for leaving her in such an awkward position. She had been expecting to make a life for herself in London as the Confederate commission’s political and social hostess, re-creating her role in Washington before the war, and his departure would deprive her of an essential platform for her mission. Mason had also performed a vital function for the Confederates and their sympathizers in England by containing the personal differences between them to a sustainable level. It had not mattered quite so much that Spence dismissed Henry Hotze’s propaganda journal, the Index, as a waste of time and money, or that Hotze considered Spence to be a deluded abolitionist, when there was a third party to keep them apart. How they would work together once he was in France had not been resolved. Spence and Hotze vied with each other to help Rose. Spence took her to Richard Bentley and Sons, Charles Dickens’s publishers, who eagerly acquired the memoir she had been writing in Richmond, My Imprisonment and the First