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Parliament resumed business on February 7. “I have no reason to anticipate any modification in the policy of the ministry toward us,” wrote Mason to Judah Benjamin. “Still, as we have a large body of earnest friends and sympathizers in both houses, it may be that something will arise during the session of which advantage can be taken.”25 The “something” was the universal consternation over Congress’s repeal of the two treaties with Canada, particularly the Rush-Bagot Treaty, which limited the naval power on the Great Lakes. The hysteria over the issue in Parliament alarmed Adams, who warned Seward on February 9: “The insurgent emissaries and their friends are busy fanning the notion that this is a prelude to war the moment our domestic difficulties are over.” With uncharacteristic force, he charged the secretary of state to remember that the future of Anglo-American relations lay in his hands.26

Ill.59 Punch depicts Lincoln advising restraint on the move to punish Canada by ending the free trade treaty, February 1865.

All of Adams’s meetings with Lord Russell since December had been very satisfying. The foreign secretary had taken care to explain the government’s position regarding the Confederate operations in Canada and what steps had been taken to prevent them. They had both agreed that the two countries had survived far worse aggravations. “We had heretofore passed through so many troubles during this war,” Russell told Adams, “so we might safely get over this one.”27 But in late January, Russell’s tone had become anxious; he requested clarification on twelve U.S. steam launches under construction in British dockyards, and whether they were for military or civilian use. Adams realized that the government’s concern was whether they would be used not against the South, but on the Great Lakes against the British. Palmerston was genuinely alarmed. “There is something mysterious about these launches,” he wrote to Russell. “Could they have not got them sooner, more cheaply and as good in their own dockyards? What they are really meant for one cannot say. Their size is quite enough for carrying guns, and it is probable they are destined to cover the landing of troops on our shores in the Lakes.”28

The British cabinet agreed that Quebec should be fortified as quickly as possible; the navy’s budget was increased, and the Queen was warned on February 12 that the country was preparing for war. Her private secretary, Lieutenant General Charles Grey, argued unsuccessfully for a preemptive strike.36.3 29 Although the Queen deprecated the idea, she shared Grey’s anxiety, acknowledging in her diary “the impossibility of our being able to hold Canada, but we must struggle for it.”30 Lord Lyons was summoned to the palace to give his assessment of the United States’ intentions. Still in the grip of mental exhaustion and in great pain from his neuralgia, he could not help sounding bleak. Lyons “seemed bitterly disgusted with his post at Washington and with the dreadful people he has had to deal with—so insincere and ungentlemanlike,” the Queen recorded after the interview. “He thinks the position a dangerous one, but does not believe in a war [between the United States and] us, at least he hopes it may not come to it.”31

Lord Russell had been sincere when he told Adams in December that responsibility for preventing an Anglo-American war rested on the two of them finding “a safe issue from this, as we had from so many other troubles that had sprung up during this war.”32 In mid-February, he decided to send a protest to the Confederate government over its blatant abuse of British neutrality. Unlike the previous remonstrance sent in 1864, this one would be sent to Washington with a request that the U.S. government pass the letter on to Richmond. Russell showed the document to Charles Francis Adams. Addressed to Mason, Slidell, and Mann, it complained that Confederate acts in Britain and Canada had showed “a gross disregard of her Majesty’s character as a neutral power, and a desire