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Dr. Cravens, quoted in Confederate Veteran, 24 (1916), p. 207. Douglas B. Ball also exonerates Davis and instead blames the secretary of the treasury, Christopher Memminger, for being shortsighted and vacillating on the subject until it was too late: Financial Failure and Confederate Defeat (Champaign, Ill., 1991), pp. 88–96. Where the ships would have come from to ship 3 million bales, however, is not clear.

68. Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 130, May 7, 1861.

69. F. L. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy (2nd ed., Chicago, 1959), p. 24, June 4, 1861.

Chapter 4: Expectations Are Dashed

1. William S. Walsh, Abraham Lincoln and the London Punch (New York, 1909), p. 24.

2. MPUS, no. 330, Dallas to Seward, April 9, 1861.

3. Donald Bellows, “A Study of British Conservative Reaction to the American Civil War,” Journal of Southern History, 51/4 (Nov. 1985), pp. 505–26, at p. 511.

4. MPUS, no. 330, Dallas to Seward, April 9, 1861.

5. Brian Jenkins, “Sir William Gregory: Champion of the Confederacy,” History Today, 28 (1978), p. 323.

6. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., “The British Proclamation of May, 1861,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 48 (1915), pp. 190–241, at p. 209, Bunch to Russell, March 21, 1861.

7. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 1, p. 809, May 13, 1861.

8. PRO 30/22/21, ff. 469–71, Palmerston to Russell, April 27, 1861. They were flummoxed by having no American to speak to on the issue. On May 5 (f. 472), Palmerston wrote to Russell that he had received a visit from an agent of Rothschilds, who read a letter from August Belmont urging mediation: “I stated to him also the obvious objections to any step on our part at the present moment but I admitted the great importance of the matter and it desires to be fully weighed and considered.” Palmerston suggested they could try communicating “confidentially with the South by the men who have come over here from there; and with the North by Dallas who is about to return in a few days. Dallas, it is true, is not a political friend of Lincoln and on the contrary rather leans to the South, but still he might be an organ, if it should be deemed prudent to take any step.”

9. PRO NI T/1585A, Private John Thompson to father, April 28, 1861.

10. Illustrated London News, May 4, 1861.

11. Economist, May 4, 1861.

12. Saturday Review, March 30, 1861.

13. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 1, p. 796, April 5, 1861, p. 799, April 18, 1861, p. 802, April 27, 1861.

14. A. L. Kennedy (ed.), My Dear Duchess: Social and Political Letters to the Duchess of Manchester, 1858–1869 (London, 1956), p. 154, Lord Clarendon to Duchess of Manchester, May 8, 1861.

15. British Sessional Papers, 1861, vol. 63, Command Paper No. 2910, pp. 210–11, May 3, 1861.

16. Letters of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, ed. G. F. Lewis (London, 1870), pp. 395–96, G. C. Lewis to Sir Edmund Head, May 13, 1861.

17. K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998), p. 124, Duchess of Sutherland to Gladstone, May 25, 1861, BL Add. MS 44325, ff. 137–79, and Duchess of Sutherland to Gladstone, May 28, 1861, f. 144.

18. BL Add. MSS 44531, Gladstone to Duchess of Sutherland, May 29, 1861.

19. BDOFA, part I, ser. C, vol. 5, p. 199, Lord John Russell to Lord Lyons, May 11, 1861.

20. Even before the proclamation, the U.S. secretary of war, Simon Cameron, had to gently but firmly reject offers from Canadians who were eager to raise regiments for the North. OR, ser. 3, vol. 1, ser. 122, no. 6.

21. After the war, the United States claimed that Britain had acted without provocation and with malign intent. However, as D. P. Crook, C. F. Adams, Jr., and others argue, the cabinet had more than enough information and reason to take this route. Lord Russell knew by May 11, thanks to the consul in New York, that Lincoln had proclaimed the blockade and called for 75,000 soldiers—and that the Confederacy