A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [305]
Washington was more welcoming toward Admiral Milne. Seward once again set aside his work for the mixed pleasure of escort duty, and Gideon Welles suspended his loathing of Britain for the hour he sat next to Milne at a dinner at Willard’s. The navy secretary had a good memory for courtesies as well as slights: the previous July, HMS Phaeton had happened to sail past the U.S. Virgin Islands on Independence Day. Mindful of Milne’s order to show respect when in American waters, the captain had surprised the Federal warship moored in the harbor by hoisting the U.S. flag and firing a twenty-one-gun salute.
Admiral and Lady Milne sailed back to Canada on October 12. “I believe my visit has done much good in many ways, and I would strongly recommend that such visits should be repeated,” he wrote to the Duke of Somerset.37 The British weekly newspaper in New York, the Albion, thought Milne deserved official praise for his courage in forcing the issue. “And now that the ice is broken, we trust that hereafter and in happier times, the British Admiral commanding … may make frequent visits to this port.”38 He could see that Americans cared about British opinion to an astonishing degree. Yet this vital part of diplomatic relations was left solely to the whim of the press. If nothing else came from Milne’s visit, his sober assessment of Britain’s unpopularity gave credibility to Lyons’s repeated warnings to the Foreign Office. As if to underline the point, the treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, made a bizarre speech in Ohio shortly after Milne’s visit about wanting to seize “Old Mother England by the hair” and give her a good shaking.
Lyons and, lately, the Foreign Office had come to believe that Seward was Britain’s best hope for keeping relations level between the two countries, and both were rooting for him in his ongoing battles with Gideon Welles and Charles Sumner.39 (No one outside the British government knew that Seward was giving Lyons off-the-record advice on how to forestall some of the congressional attacks on British interests.)40 Contemplating the immediate future, Lyons saw only dangerous corners and looming obstacles now that he knew for certain “that Mr. Sumner and the ultras will make another onslaught on Mr. Seward when Congress opens.”41 Worse still was Baron Mercier’s revelation that he had requested a leave of absence. His wife had put up with Washington for his sake, Mercier explained to Lyons, but she could stand it no longer. Lyons could not help himself, but he hoped that the French Foreign Ministry would share his anxiety and consider Mercier too important to be replaced.
When trouble for Lord Lyons did come, it was from the South rather than the North. On October 23, he read in the National Intelligencer that the four remaining British consuls had been ordered to leave the Confederacy in retaliation for Britain’s alleged support for the North.42 The consuls’ unceasing efforts on behalf of conscripted Britons had been an irritant to the Confederate State Department for more than a year, and they made convenient scapegoats that Judah Benjamin had no scruple about using. Acting consul Allan Fullarton in Savannah had provided the excuse when on October 3 he sent to Richmond a belligerent protest on behalf of six drafted British subjects. Four days later, on October 7, Benjamin convened a special cabinet session to discuss the consuls. Jefferson Davis was conveniently in Tennessee with General Bragg and therefore protected from any international outcry that might follow. The decision to expel them was apparently unanimous.43 If Benjamin did not gain any popularity by the move, at least he did not lose any, and he doubted that the Confederacy would suffer, either.
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The troubles endured by the Scotsman William Watson showed the importance of the consuls to the British community.