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Adams was astonished by the passion in Russell’s voice; “he read it over slowly and deliberately,” the minister recorded in his diary. During the subsequent conversation, Russell agreed with Adams “that it looked ill” when Canadian and English juries repeatedly acquitted Confederate offenders. “People here now took sides, almost as vehemently on our questions as we did ourselves. It was to be regretted, but there was no help for it,” Russell had argued, which received the blunt riposte from Adams that if Britain had become embroiled in the Prussian-Danish war, “in two months, Prussia would have been fitting out fast steamers in the port of New York, and we should not have been able to stop them. His Lordship candidly enough admitted that the idea had occurred to him.”34 “This conference was one of a most friendly character,” Adams wrote to Seward, “and convinced me that whatever might be the desires of the French emperor, nothing but the grossest mismanagement on our part would effect any change in the established policy of this ministry towards us.” Over the next few days, Adams repeated his warnings with greater vehemence.35

Adams wondered whether Seward was even bothering to read his reports, since the secretary of state rarely responded to specific points and had ignored Adams’s request to leave London.36

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The news that the U.S. Congress had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, had an even greater effect on British public opinion than the North’s recent military victories. No amount of sneering by Henry Hotze in the Index could diminish the moral grandeur of emancipation. He had been counting on the memoirs of Fitzgerald Ross and of Belle Boyd to create a sensation—and a diversion—but neither book was ready for publication. “I can do no better though I have tried very hard,” Ross explained to his publishers. “Is it the general experience of authors that the preface is the most difficult part of the book to write?”37 Belle Boyd was being helped with her book by the writer George Augustus Sala, who may also have become her lover; if he did, the affair was suddenly complicated by the return of Belle’s husband, Sam Hardinge, who had been released without explanation from Fort Delaware on February 8 and had arrived in London with his health completely broken down.36.4 Belle included Hardinge’s prison diary in her memoirs, but there is no record of what happened to him once he reached England; he simply disappeared and was never mentioned again. She was similarly tight-lipped about the birth date of her daughter, Grace.39

James Mason was in Paris with Mann and Slidell composing a joint response to Lord Russell’s protest when Duncan Kenner arrived on February 24.40 The commissioners could not believe that the South they remembered would genuinely consider emancipation; to them, slavery was the core of Southern identity.41 Yet Mason had recently received a letter from his eldest son, Lieutenant James M. Mason, Jr., who fully embraced the idea of offering freedom to the slaves in return for their fighting for the Confederacy: “With proper discipline they will fight as well as any mercenaries,” he insisted. His regiment, the 42nd Virginia Infantry, had almost starved while fighting General Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, and it was hardly better off in Petersburg. He doubted any of them could survive another winter of such suffering: “If the North continues her present energy, the long night of ruin, misery and agony will surely come unless indeed, you in Europe, do something for our aid.”42

Kenner had risked his life to deliver Davis’s proposal of emancipation in return for recognition, and it did not matter to him whether the commissioners were relieved or outraged.43 Slidell realized that they had no choice, and on March 4 he had an interview with the emperor, who repeated his condolences and sent the commissioner on his way. But Mason still could not bring himself to accept the truth; he accompanied Kenner to London and tried to keep him distracted with