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Ill.57 The Federal Phoenix rises again, according to Punch, from the flames of states’ rights, free press, and the Constitution.

The needless suffering of prisoners was a frequent accusation hurled at both administrations. But Lincoln and Grant were also blamed for deliberately sacrificing thousands of Northern soldiers in order to prevent the South from replenishing its empty ranks. The Regius Professor of History at Oxford University, Goldwin Smith, was on a lecture tour of the United States and took the opportunity to visit a Union-run prison camp in Chicago and a prison hospital in Baltimore. He thought neither unduly harsh, whereas the sight of returning Federal prisoners from Andersonville made him shudder: “I put my finger and thumb round the upper part of a large man’s arm,” he wrote. “It must be said that Grant was partly responsible, if, as was understood, he refused to exchange prisoners. No laws of war surely can warrant the retention of prisoners whom a captor cannot feed.”34.7 36

Goldwin Smith’s popularity in the United States was second only to John Bright’s on account of his vigorous pamphleteering in support of the North, and he was entertained during his tour by a plethora of senators and generals.37 Before the election, he stayed with Charles Sumner, who ranted so obsessively about Seward’s blunders as secretary of state that Smith was glad to escape. Afterward, when Smith was in Washington, he stayed with Seward and realized that not all of Sumner’s criticisms were unfair. Seward had fallen into the old habit of drinking and talking too much; he is “the least cautious of diplomatists,” recorded Smith. With regard to Lincoln, Smith noted that the English perception of the president as an “ungainly and grotesque” figure was largely correct, “but on the face instead of levity, sat melancholy and care.”38

The escalating tension along the Canadian border was a significant factor in Seward’s return to bad habits. He needed to talk to Lord Lyons and was frustrated by his mysterious illness. In the beginning he had heard that it was typhoid; then the diagnosis changed to neuralgia or dyspepsia or a combination of both. Whatever it was, the minister was unable to leave his room or receive visitors. Seward had taken Lyons for granted for so long that he was shocked to discover how quickly matters could deteriorate when the British minister was absent. Seward broke protocol by writing directly to Lord Monck, rather than via the British legation in Washington, urging him to act swiftly and publicly before John Yates Beall’s latest Lake Erie venture—known to be centered on an armed and reinforced steamship—created a mini-war on the Great Lakes.39 Monck did not appreciate being accused of dilatoriness when he was devoting the greater part of his day to thwarting the Confederates (he even sent a chronology to Lyons showing how and when he had responded to each event), but he was not as attuned to Northern public opinion as Seward. The secretary of state knew there was trouble brewing long before The New York Times came out in favor of a retaliatory war: “Let it come,” declared the newspaper. “We were never in better condition for a war with England.”40 Seward could only hope that his letters were being put into Lord Lyons’s hands.41

Seward could at least take satisfaction from the growing dissension within the Confederate Congress over the war; calls for peace were appearing in the Southern press with increasing frequency. He was heartened, he wrote to his wife, “in the discovery that division is at last breaking out among the rebels.”42 Davis had been traveling through the remnants of the Confederacy giving speeches to the public and meeting with state governors in private, several of whom were on the verge of withdrawing their cooperation. Desertion was endemic, yet 85 percent of Mississippi’s white adult male population was in the army, which made a mockery of Davis’s exhortation to Confederate women in his speech to the congress on November 7 to “use your influence to send all to the front.”43 Varina Davis