A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [437]
The second message to reach Newfoundland was from Queen Victoria to President Andrew Johnson, congratulating him “on the successful completion of an undertaking which she hopes may serve as an additional bond of Union between the United States and England.” At the moment it was just a hope: Austria’s recent defeat had added another layer of complexity to a relationship that was already tense as a result of the unresolved issues left by the Civil War. Prussia’s emergence as the dominant military nation among her neighbors was redrawing of the balance of power in Europe. France was now menaced by a credible threat, and the German Confederation no longer answered to Vienna but to Berlin. It was too soon to tell how these changes would affect Britain and America, but British politicians were worried that it would be the same old story of England facing two threats at once. “It is the unfriendly state of our relations with America that to a great extent paralyses our action in Europe,” Russell’s replacement as foreign secretary, Lord Clarendon, would shortly admit. “There is not the smallest doubt that if we were engaged in a Continental quarrel we should immediately find ourselves at war with the United States.”19
During a Commons debate on March 13, 1865, Prime Minister Lord Palmerston had tried to brush away the many crises of the past four years by putting them down to a family quarrel: “The North wished us to declare on their side and the South on theirs, and we wished to maintain a perfect neutrality.” But this simplification of the arguments between the two countries carried no weight outside the Commons, and little even there. According to The Times and a majority of the British public, both sides had behaved badly. The United States had never supported Britain in any war, including the Crimean, and yet neither the North nor the South had seen the contradiction in demanding British aid once the situation was reversed. Both had unscrupulously stooped to threats and blackmail in their attempts to gain support, the South using cotton, the North using Canada. Both were guilty in their mistreatment of Negroes, both had shipped arms from England, and both had benefited from British volunteers. In America, the perception that Lord Russell had behaved like a villain and that the British ruling classes had schemed with the Confederacy to overthrow the Union in the hope of destroying democracy was so pervasive that the historian George Bancroft digressed upon it during his eulogy on Lincoln before Congress on February 12, 1866.20 Like most Americans, he shared the belief that the declaration of neutrality had been nothing more than an underhanded attempt at recognizing the independence of the South; that the British government had connived with the Confederates to send out the commerce raiders; and that the blockade runners had been allowed to operate with impunity because they enabled the South to keep fighting long after its own supplies were exhausted.
Senator Charles Sumner played a discreditable part in promulgating the myth that Britain had acted maliciously and illegally by awarding belligerent status to the South. His friends in England, especially the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, felt betrayed by his attacks. “You know how heartily my Duke has been with you all through,” the duchess objected on July 4, 1865. “I protest again against your supposing it a proof of Lord Russell’s ill-will.… As to the haste, I suppose there would have been less of it, if the consequence attached to it by you had been foreseen.”21 Lord Russell was so incensed by Sumner’s slurs on his motives and intentions toward the North that he rejected Charles Francis Adams’s proposal in the summer of 1865 for an international arbitrator to consider American claims against Britain, complaining that his successes against the Confederates seemed to