A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [330]
The Confederate government’s willingness to violate British neutrality in Canada had increased after the unexpected arrival on April 1 of a special messenger sent by Lord Lyons carrying a letter from Lord Russell to Jefferson Davis. Seward had permitted this first and only direct communication between London and Richmond, no doubt amused by its humiliating content for the South. Russell had written a remonstrance to Davis for using British ports to build Confederate warships, and in his inestimable way he had managed to prick every sensitive part of Southern pride. The worst insult for Davis was Russell’s continual references to “the so-called Confederate States.” It was a week before Davis could bring himself to answer Russell’s letter, and even then he was so offended that he had his private secretary write on his behalf. In future, Davis dictated to the secretary, any communication containing the phrase “so-called Confederate States” would be returned without a reply. British neutrality, he raged, was nothing more than “a cover for treacherous, malignant hostility.”10
That same day, April 7, Davis sent a wire to Colonel Jacob Thompson, a former cabinet secretary under President Buchanan and a veteran of Vicksburg, who had returned to his plantation in Oxford, Mississippi, after its surrender. It read: “If your engagements will permit you to accept service abroad for six months, please come here immediately.”11 Thompson arrived a few days later and accepted the appointment of “Commissioner for Special Service in Canada.” The post was quite unlike Mason and Slidell’s in Europe. Davis was not interested in playing diplomatic games. Instead, Thompson’s mission was to foment anti-Northern feeling in Canada until it created a crisis in Anglo-American relations. Davis also wanted him to supervise Thomas Hines’s propaganda operations in the Northwest. The existence of the secret pro-Southern society the Knights of the Golden Circle and its recent offshoot, the Sons of Liberty, had convinced Benjamin and Davis that there were tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of disaffected Midwesterners who, with the right encouragement and sufficient funds, would take up armed resistance against the Republican administration.12
Jacob Thompson was an intelligent man but a poor judge of character and given to impulsive behavior. With proper oversight and a sufficiently large organization behind him, he might have been a good choice for the post. But the deputy selected by Davis was Clement C. Clay, a popular Alabama senator before the war, whose poor health and obsession with appeasing his spoiled wife made him an unsuitable candidate for any sort of clandestine operation. Thompson needed a stronger and steadier hand than Clay’s, someone with more caution and a more cynical attitude toward the self-described Confederate agents currently making a nuisance of themselves in Canada. Davis had also entrusted Thompson with $1 million in gold, far too large a sum to be under the control of one person.
Thompson and Clay ran the blockade at Wilmington on May 5 without encountering any particular difficulty, despite Judah P. Benjamin’s indiscreet letter to Slidell in Paris. “We have sent Jacob Thompson of Mississippi and Clement C. Clay of Alabama to Canada on secret service,” he had written on April 30, “in the hope of aiding the disruption between the Eastern and Western States in the approaching election at the North. It is supposed that much good can be done by the purchase of some of the principal presses, especially in the North-West.”13
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A second important decision Jefferson Davis made in April was to recall General Beauregard from Charleston. Although Davis still loathed the Creole general, he had bowed to his friends