A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [405]
35.2 Only one of the arsonists was caught and tried for the crime: Robert Cobb Kennedy, an Irishman, who was picked up by detectives in Detroit on December 29, 1864. He was tried in New York and sentenced to hang on March 25, 1865. Kennedy went to the gallows insisting that the plot was a legitimate act of war in retaliation for Northern atrocities, and that he had intended to destroy buildings rather than kill civilians.7
35.3 Anti-British feeling reached new heights. In Washington, for example, two policemen ambushed Arthur Seymour, one of the junior assistant secretaries at the legation, beating him almost senseless. The two policemen—and the magistrate who acquitted them—were caught in a lie when they claimed that Seymour admitted in court he was drunk that evening. Seymour had actually just finished work and was on his way to dinner.
35.4 Cleburne was the first Southern general to argue that the slaves should be promised their freedom if they fought in the army. On January 2, 1864, he wrote to General Joe Johnston: “Our country has already some friends in England and France, and there are strong motives to induce these nations to recognize and assist us, but they cannot assist us without helping slavery, and to do this would be in conflict with their policy for the last quarter of a century. England has paid hundreds of millions to emancipate her West India slaves and break up the slave trade. Could she now consistently spend her treasure to reinstate slavery in this country? But this barrier once removed, the sympathy and the interests of these and other nations will accord with our own, and we may expect from them both moral support and material aid. One thing is certain, as soon as the great sacrifice to independence is made and known in foreign countries there will be a complete change of front in our favor of the sympathies of the world.”20
35.5 Kenner was the largest slave owner in the Confederate Congress, but this had not prevented him from trying to persuade Davis in early 1863 to ask Britain for recognition in return for gradual emancipation. Like General Patrick Cleburne, Kenner had realized that no British government would sully its antislavery record by recognizing the South while she remained a slave-owning nation. In 1863, when her fortunes were at the high-water mark, he believed the South could have made the offer from a position of strength and probably dictated her own terms.
35.6 Jacob Thompson tried to obtain copies of their commissions, just as he had done Burley’s, but none of his messengers had succeeded in reaching Richmond.
35.7 General Grant made a similar complaint to Seward, forwarding to him “specimens of fuses captured at Fort Fisher … and the statement of Col. Tal P. Shaffner that the same were manufactured at the Woolwich Arsenal, England, an arsenal owned and run by the British Government.”
THIRTY-SIX
“Richmond Tomorrow”
The truth cannot be hidden—A late success for Bulloch—Hysteria over Canada—Arrival of Davis’s envoy—A hard line—Lord Lyons retires (temporarily)
Lord Lyons had been miserable for much of the journey home. Almost worse than the headaches was the persistent feeling that he had failed. He feared that he had ruined his prospects by leaving Washington and doubted that the relationship of mutual respect he had built laboriously between the legation and the State Department would survive his absence. Lyons’s former attachés were also anxious about their chief’s legacy undone. The “Buccaneers,” as they had once styled themselves, had complained constantly of overwork while they were there, but their new assignments made them miss the camaraderie of the legation. “When we were very jolly in the evening we always used to sing, ‘yonder lies the whiskey bottle empty on the