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THREE

“The Cards

Are in Our Hands!”

Seven states secede—“Slaveownia”—Seward rises to the occasion—Bluster—Adams is offended—William Howard Russell at the White House—The April Fool’s Day memorandum—The Confederate cabinet—The fall of Fort Sumter—Lincoln declares a blockade—Southern confidence

“It seems impossible that the South can be mad enough to dissolve the Union,” Lyons wrote to the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, after Lincoln was elected president on November 6, 1860. Yet South Carolina had already announced it would hold a special convention to decide whether to secede, and the news sent the price of shares tumbling on the New York Stock Exchange. The financial markets suffered another blow when a merchant vessel departed from Charleston, South Carolina, on November 17 with only the state flag flying from its mast. President Buchanan pleaded in vain with his proslavery cabinet to agree on a united response.

Lord Lyons cursed the little pig from San Juan Island and its penchant for Farmer Cutlar’s potatoes. He wished he had been able to settle San Juan’s boundary dispute during the Prince of Wales’s visit. With the secession crisis gathering momentum and Buchanan growing increasingly feeble in the face of his colleagues, he doubted that the issue could be resolved before Lincoln’s inauguration. Lyons suspected that the Republicans would be far less inclined than the Democrats to agree on a compromise. He had noticed that the Republican Party as a whole—not just Seward—tended to pander to anti-British sentiment as a way of showing that its abolition platform was independent of foreign opinion. It was important not to give the Republicans a reason to complain, Lyons wrote to Lord John Russell, and he suggested that the government refrain from making any public statements about the current political turmoil in America.

Lord John Russell received Lyons’s letter on December 18, the same day the South Carolina convention began its debate on the question of secession. The British cabinet had become increasingly concerned by the South’s reaction to Lincoln’s victory. Palmerston assumed it meant a second American Revolution was at hand. “There is no saying what attitude we may have to assume,” he wrote with concern to the Duke of Somerset, “not for the purpose of interfering in their quarrels, but to hold our own and to protect our Fellow subjects and their interests.”1 Lyons’s insistence that Britain stand aloof seemed eminently sensible. “I quite agree with Lord John Russell and Lord Lyons,” Palmerston stated in a memorandum for the cabinet. “Nothing would be more inadvisable than for us to interfere in the Dispute.”2 The law officers of the Crown assured Russell that the South Carolina ship flying its state flag could dock at Liverpool without any fuss. Customs officials there would treat the questionable flag as though it were a bit of holiday bunting, beneath anyone’s notice and certainly not a matter for official comment.3

The imperative to stay out of America’s troubles was one of the few issues that united Palmerston’s fractious cabinet. The other was Giuseppe Garibaldi’s campaign to unite Italy. Here, too, the cabinet had agreed in July that the best course was to remain neutral and allow Garibaldi to fail or succeed on his own. Since setting out in the spring of 1860 to lead the Sicilian revolution against the Bourbon monarchy, Garibaldi had inspired hundreds of British volunteers to join his brigade. Dozens of officers had taken a leave of absence from the army in order to don the famous red shirt. Two ships from the navy’s Mediterranean squadron were almost emptied as sailors left en masse to form their own battery. Even the Duke of Somerset, Palmerston’s First Lord of the Admiralty, could not dissuade one of his own sons from running away to join the English battalion. The willingness of so many volunteers to help the Italians left the army and navy chiefs with little doubt that they would have a problem on their hands if war erupted in America, where both sides spoke English