• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The court’s decision against the Confederate warship Alexandra had been overturned on appeal, but Bulloch knew it was too late to resurrect his dream of a British-built Confederate navy.29.1 In France, the Marine Department had ordered the two unfinished vessels in Nantes to be detained. “Every pledge has been violated, and we have encountered nothing but deception and duplicity and are now their victims,” Bulloch wrote indignantly of the French.5 He understood better than Slidell that the Confederacy was simply a pawn in the emperor’s grand designs for Mexico. Only three raiders remained afloat: the Georgia, currently undergoing refurbishment in Cherbourg; the Alabama, whose last known whereabouts put her near Cape Town; and the Florida, which was thought to be near Bermuda. Bulloch hoped to keep them all at sea, if only to deter investors from using U.S. shipping firms. He would rather have sold Matthew Maury’s unseaworthy Rappahannock, still at Calais, and used the money to repair the Georgia, but he was overruled by the senior Confederate naval commander in Europe, Commodore Samuel Barron, who decided to do the opposite, strip the Georgia of her fittings and use them on the Rappahannock.

The empty Georgia crept out of Cherbourg on a moonless night and arrived in Liverpool on May 2. “She was a poor miserable little tin kettle of a craft, but I loved her,” wrote Lieutenant James Morgan. “My life, as the youngest of her officers, and the only one of my grade, had been very lonely, still she had been the only home I had known for thirteen months.”6 On his first night ashore he went to the theater; “as soon as my gray uniform was noticed a whisper went through the audience that the Alabama had arrived in the port. Someone proposed three cheers for the Alabama, and they were given with a will.”7 An evening of applause—and then only because of mistaken identity—was Morgan’s chief reward for the nine vessels captured by the Georgia. The ship was decommissioned on May 10. The crew assembled on the quarterdeck as the Confederate flag was lowered for the last time. “We bade good-bye to our shipmates,” wrote Morgan, who was more determined than ever to return home, “many of us never to meet again.”8 James Bulloch sold the Georgia for £15,000.29.2 It was not a bad sum, considering his options. He planned to purchase several more blockade runners with the money, hoping that the vessels would pay for themselves after a couple of runs or else be converted by Southern engineers into gunships.9

Ill.50 The Confederate cruiser Georgia.

The faithful William Schaw Lindsay, MP, wrote to James Mason after the Georgia’s sale begging him to return to England. The movement was adrift without him, he confided. Lindsay tried to instill a sense of urgency in his friend: “Matters seems to be coming to a crisis on the other side of the Atlantic … the question is quite ripe for fresh agitation, and from experience I find that that agitation must be started by a debate in Parliament.”10 The British government’s majorities in both houses were so slim that Palmerston was desperately casting about for allies. Two weeks later, Lindsay sent Mason stunning news. The prime minister had invited him to a private meeting on May 26 to discuss the wording of a resolution to offer mediation between the warring states. Lindsay never considered whether Palmerston might be trying to buy off the pro-Southern MPs in Parliament. “You should come here as soon after receipt of this letter as possible,” Lindsay begged Mason. Palmerston had even indicated he was open to a meeting with the Confederate commissioner, but Mason refused to come to London unless summoned by the prime minister himself.

The Confederate commissioner’s obduracy was shaken by a letter from the Reverend Francis Tremlett, the vicar of St. Peter’s, Belsize Park. Tremlett reminded Mason that he had started the Society for Promoting the Cessation of Hostilities in America a few months before, and “as you were good enough to get us a good lift some little time since … I feel