A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [412]
Russell was so anxious about the apparent rise in Northern hostility toward England that he asked Lord Lyons to cut short his recuperation and return immediately to Washington. But to his surprise, instead of dutifully agreeing, Lyons resigned from the diplomatic service. “Lord Russell has been extremely kind to me, and so indeed has every one,” Lyons wrote to his former secretary of the legation, William Stuart. Seward’s subsequent letter especially moved him: “I accept your farewell with sincere sorrow,” the secretary of state wrote on March 20. “But I reconcile myself to it because it is a condition of restoration of your health.” Seward promised that Anglo-American relations would prosper after the war, although it saddened him that Lyons would not be around to enjoy the moment when the two countries “are reconciled and become better friends than ever.… But God disposes.” It was bittersweet for Lyons to read these words. “I confess that I do not feel so much relief or even pleasure as might have been expected,” he told Stuart. “I seriously thought of offering to go back immediately when I heard the decision of the Cabinet.” That decision was the appointment of Sir Frederick Bruce, the former minister to China, as the new head of the Washington legation. It was not Bruce that troubled Lyons but the reality of being replaced. He even missed “my Washington Mission.” In Lyons’s reply to Seward, he reflected on “the friendly and unconstrained terms on which we were” and how much good they had produced. “I am most anxious that my successor’s intercourse with you should be placed at once on the same footing.”52
“You are about to proceed to Washington at a very critical period,” Russell informed Sir Frederick Bruce on March 24, 1865.53 He warned Bruce on no account to mention the Alabama or allow Seward to speak to him about reparations for the Confederate cruisers built in Britain. If Seward brought up the Confederate cruisers, Bruce was to declare the subject beyond his remit.54 That night, Benjamin Moran encountered Lyons and Bruce together at the French embassy ball. Lyons smiled wryly when Moran asked how he had enjoyed Washington, and he replied with monumental understatement that “he had had a very satisfactory time in the US, although rather hard worked.”55
Charles Francis Adams was amused by the government’s “singular panic in regard to what will be done by us, after restoration [of the Union]. A week or two since you could not drive the notion out of their heads that we were not about to pounce at once upon Canada.”56 But Adams took the greater satisfaction from seeing the humiliation of his former adversaries:
One thing seems for the present to be settled. That is, that no hope is left for any aid to the rebel cause. England will initiate nothing to help them in their critical moment.… The voluminous intrigues of the rebel emissaries have been completely baffled, their sanguine anticipations utterly disappointed. They have spent floods of money in directing the press, in securing aid from adventurers of all sorts, and in enlisting the services of ship and cannon builders with all their immense and powerful following, and it has been all in vain. So far as any efforts of theirs are concerned, we might enter Richmond tomorrow. This act of the drama is over.57
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36.1 One letter came from police constable Joseph Taylor, late of Company F, 5th Louisiana, who wrote to Lord Wharncliffe