A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [304]
Thompson arrived in Washington at the beginning of October, shortly after Stanton had ordered twenty thousand reinforcements to General Rosecrans at Chattanooga. He visited Seward on the second: “I was quite shocked by his appearance: he was so bowed,” he wrote to his brother Sam. “I was told afterwards that he has a son very ill just now with one of the armies. If I had known that before, I should not have gone.… The photographs of Seward look quite different from how he really appears now.”32 Thompson did not feel comfortable bothering Seward for a pass to Meade’s headquarters, nor did he try to impose himself on the president. His only sight of Lincoln was a glimpse of a cadaverous face through the window of a carriage, its wheels churning such a cloud of pale dust that the cavalry trotting behind looked like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Thompson was right to avoid the White House; the Lincolns were in silent mourning for the unmentionable side of Mary’s family. Her brother-in-law, Confederate general Todd Helm, had been killed at the Battle of Chickamauga. Three of Mary’s brothers had already died for the South.33 Thompson stayed only a few days in the city and then headed out west.
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Henry Yates Thompson’s departure from Washington coincided with the return of Lord Lyons from his holiday in Canada. The minister had spent the previous week in New York, taking the temperature of the city. “It is a pity I cannot come here oftener,” he told Lord Russell. “This is so much the best place for obtaining a knowledge of what is going on in the political world.”34 It was a strange time for Lyons to make a visit. Tiffany and Co. was flying the Russian flag on the front of its building, and American and Russian flags lined the whole of Broadway.
Two weeks earlier, four Russian warships had sailed into New York Harbor. Their appearance took the country by surprise. The press speculated that Czar Alexander II had sent the fleet as a goodwill gesture to the North. Some people even wondered whether the czar was making a covert offer of military aid—“Thank God for the Russians,” wrote Gideon Welles in his diary. But when Seward questioned the Russian minister, Baron Stoeckl, about the fleet’s visit, the baron was vague. The real reason the czar had sent his fleet to North America was in order to keep it ready in case Russia resumed hostilities against England and France. The Russian admiral of the fleet had orders to give every impression of military support short of actually lying.35
The city organized a parade and an elaborate banquet in honor of the Russian visitors. In the midst of the excitement, the arrival of Admiral Milne on the flagship HMS Nile was hardly reported in the press. It was the first visit by a British admiral since the War of 1812, and a genuine gesture of goodwill that Milne and Lyons had been planning for several weeks. But the Russian presence crushed their hopes of making a strong impression on the American public. In contrast to the throngs who visited the Russian ships, not a single vessel approached the Nile. The closest Milne came to a public honor was a dinner party given for him and his wife at Cyrus Field’s house in Gramercy Park. The admiral did not mind the indifference shown to his visit, though Lyons was disappointed, given the multiple occasions on which Milne had restrained his officers and punished those who displayed less than strict neutrality in the conflict. Milne instinctively warmed to the energy and spirit of the North.36
Before the end of Milne’s visit, the commander of the Brooklyn Navy Yard came to his senses and invited the admiral for a tour. Milne was introduced to Major General Irvin McDowell of Bull Run fame and other official dignitaries. “Although on our arrival there was evidently much coolness,