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By Root 6871 0

sure that he could stand living in Washington for much longer. He particularly missed the company of Henri Mercier, who had returned to France on New Year’s Eve. (“His wife was so miserable here that she could bear it no longer,” Lyons told his sister.)22 Without the Merciers, Lyons’s intimate social circle had contracted to the Russian minister, Baron Stoeckl, and his American wife, Elisa. More seriously, Lyons had grown to dislike his work at the legation. In early spring Lyons wrote a frank letter to Lord Russell expressing concern that he was no longer fit for the post. “I am worn out, and utterly weary of the whole thing,” he confessed. “The people here too are beginning to get very tired of me; and I feel that if I can by any means get through this summer without breaking down in health, and without getting in to any very serious scrape, it will be as much as I shall be able to do.”23 Russell replied sympathetically and emphatically that Lyons belonged in Washington.

The legation staff were also tired, and demoralized by their inability to help or make contact with British subjects in the South. The anguish of ignorance was a common lament among families in Britain with relatives in Confederate prisons. Dr. William Farr had tried every possible approach to obtain news of his son, Frederick, who had been captured the previous December. After being informed by the legation that there was no communication between Washington and Richmond, he had befriended the Confederate community in England in the hope that someone would be able to pass along information. In late February, an agent working with the purchasing agent Caleb Huse wrote to the assistant commissioner of exchange in Richmond, Captain William Hatch, saying that “a good friend of our cause” was seeking to know if his son was still alive.24 There were more than twenty prisons in and around Richmond. It would take some time for Captain Hatch to discover the whereabouts of Private Frederick Farr and, even if he was found, to convey the news to England. While the Farrs waited for news, not even knowing if the search was indeed under way, young Frederick became ill with typhus—a disease endemic in the filthy and overcrowded Southern prisons—and died on March 23, 1864.

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“Suppose I were ill for a week,” Lyons’s attaché Edward Malet wrote despairingly to his mother. “I think it is rather hard upon me, for a Legation ought not to be left in such a condition that it cannot get on without one man.”25 The Foreign Office had refused to increase the number of attachés and yet had denied them holiday leave on the grounds that the legation was dangerously overstretched.26 Most of the new work was coming from a steep rise in forced enlistment cases and arrests of British subjects for desertion. “Every effort has been made by us to obtain redress for those which have appeared to be well founded,” Lyons assured Lord Russell. “In few cases, however, have our efforts produced any satisfactory results.” The form was always the same:

The remonstrances addressed by me to the Sec of State are duly acknowledged and transmitted to the War or the Navy Department. The Department orders an investigation.… I do my best to elicit the truth, and to obtain evidence—a controversial correspondence between the US government and me ensues. The Department always claims that the men were willing volunteers; the Government accepts the statement, and the men are retained.27

Lyons cited as an example the case of sixteen-year-old Henry Usher, the grandson of Admiral Usher, who was kidnapped by crimpers while on his way to a job interview at the British consulate in New York. With the legation’s help, Consul Archibald had eventually tracked Usher down in Beaufort, South Carolina, where the boy had been enlisted in the 5th New York Heavy Artillery as “John Russell.”28 This had been in January, and four months later the War Department was still dragging its feet.

If it required strenuous efforts for the overworked legation to rescue a British subject from the armed services, the circumstances had