A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [362]
While these somber proceedings were taking place in Lincoln’s office, across the parched park of Lafayette Square, Lord Lyons was writing his assessment of the president’s future. The situation was indeed bleak, but “there is still a possibility,” Lyons insisted to Lord Russell, “of some military successes before the winter, which might make a great change in public feeling.”21 Lyons had hoped for some sign of progress before he left for Canada to discuss with the governor-general, Viscount Monck, how to restrain Confederate operations in North America. The trip had been planned since July, but Lyons was loath to leave the legation before at least some of his cases were settled. “I heartily wish I could get away from Washington, and go at once to Canada,” he had written to Russell on August 9, “but with two Members of the Legation away on account of their health, and two more ailing, I am afraid the work cannot be done at all without me.”22
Those unresolved cases included that of Mary Sophia Hill, who had written again to the legation. She had been tried in a military court and a verdict apparently reached. “But no official statement has been made, or any public verdict given, nor can I get any satisfaction,” she wrote in a shaky hand on August 20:
I have been tried according to their own laws, and after four weeks, common justice, I should think, would demand a verdict … the shocks my nervous system has received from the confinement and from the rough treatment I received from my jailer and assistant, as well as the excitement of my trial, and now four weeks suspense as to result, will make me an invalid for life and has very nearly upset my reason. I am not, never ever have been, guilty of the charges brought against me.… But there seems a spirit of bitterness against HM’s subjects here, and very little law or justice for them.23
Lyons agreed that the law and justice were becoming two quite separate entities for British subjects. Whether Mary was as innocent as she claimed would make no difference, he was quite certain, in her treatment by the military authorities. It was only a gross injustice—resulting in the death of a conscripted Briton—that had recently forced a change in the War Department’s approach to disputed enlistments so that alleged British subjects were removed from the battlefield while their cases were under review.31.3
At the end of August, Lyons decided he could not take another day in the capital: “The thermometer in the House literally stands as high at midnight as at noon.” He ordered his two favorite attachés, Edward Malet and George Sheffield, to be ready to leave for Canada with him on the thirtieth. The new secretary, Joseph Burnley, would just have to do his best.
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The Canadian authorities had warned London that the Confederates in British North America were not only “hostile in spirit” to the North but also “prepared to give expression to that hostility in overt acts.”25 Fitzgerald Ross was astonished by the brash behavior of the Confederate community on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. He and Colonel Grenfell had arrived at Clifton House in mid-July to find the hotel awash with conspiracies. “The ‘season’ had hardly yet commenced,” wrote Ross, but the place was so busy that it seemed to be in midflow. Scores of survivors from John Morgan’s failed raid into Kentucky were hanging around the colonnaded hotel and were “delighted to meet their old Colonel again.” In his travel account, Ross tried to make the meeting sound coincidental and harmless. The Morgan raiders passed the time “talking Secesh politics and plotting mischief against the Yankees,” he wrote, as though the conspirators were nothing more than nostalgic veterans who liked to reminisce about the glory days and plan the occasional nuisance.26
Ross’s breezy memoir left out the real details of their stay