A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [436]
The former Confederate secretary of state Judah Benjamin also died abroad. He arrived in England in July 1865 after a harrowing escape from Florida and retrained as a barrister. He became an expert in commercial law and in 1868 he published a treatise on that topic, popularly known as “Benjamin on Sales”; the book’s immediate success assured his financial stability for the rest of his life. Striving to put the past behind him (and burdened by many secrets), Benjamin generally avoided the other Confederate exiles. He made no effort to see Henry Hotze despite their close relationship during the war. Hotze, for his part, had no interest in refashioning himself to suit the times; he remained an unapologetic supporter of slavery and the creed of white supremacy. But his hope of publishing a magazine dedicated to crushing the aspirations of freed blacks was soon quashed, and he became a propagandist for hire, working for any government or ruler who required his arts. He died in Zug, Switzerland, in 1887.15
Lord Lyons died a few months after Hotze, having served in the Foreign Office for forty-eight years—the last twenty of them as the British ambassador to France, the highest-ranking post in the diplomatic service. Once Lyons had recovered from the neuralgia that had forced him to leave Washington, he found that retirement was far worse than being overworked, and he eagerly accepted Lord Russell’s offer in October 1865 of the embassy in Constantinople. Lyons himself was too modest to recognize his altered standing in the Foreign Office, but instead of the lonely midlevel diplomat who had incited derision at Washington, he was now a highly respected representative of Her Majesty’s government whose dignified though conciliatory approach in delicate situations made him invaluable. After only a year in Constantinople, he was rewarded with the Paris embassy, and there he spent the remainder of his life, in great comfort and satisfaction, served faithfully by several of his former attachés from the Washington legation.
In his own way, Benjamin Moran also reached the summit of his capabilities—if not his ambitions—when in 1876, after twenty-three years at the U.S. legation in London, he was sent to run the legation in Lisbon in 1876, where he showed that he was not without talentz as a diplomat. That year, The New York Times described him as “one of the most capable and experienced diplomats in the service of the United States.”16 He ruled over his little kingdom for six years, gleefully bullying his staff, until his retirement in 1882, when he returned to England and passed the last four years of his life in Braintree, Essex. At his death, the humble printer’s son from Chester, Pennsylvania, was praised by The Times as the “ablest and most honest” representative the United States had ever sent to Great Britain.17
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On July 27, 1866, Cyrus Field stood on the deck of the Great Eastern watching through his binoculars as engineers hauled the transatlantic cable ashore at Heart’s Content, Newfoundland. Finally, after five attempts in nine years, a cable sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of the Atlantic was laid along the 1,800-mile undersea shelf between Ireland and Canada. The cable’s first message, sent through on the twenty-eighth, announced the signing of the armistice between Prussia and Austria. The Americans had been as surprised as the rest of Europe by the speed and efficiency with which Prussia had defeated Austria in the Seven Weeks’ War. The Battle of Sadowa on July 3 had involved nearly half a million soldiers, the largest concentration of troops to date in either Europe or America. The Prussian military observers in the United States during the Civil War had been impressed by how rapidly armies and artillery could be transported by railroad, and during the past year the Prussian war minister