• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

30. “I often think of you, and wonder what your feelings are with regard to the fearful events now happening,” Wilding told Hawthorne. In a long letter, he analyzed the current situation thus: “The anti-slavery people profess to believe that slavery has nothing to do with the struggle; that the Federal Government are no more contending for the abolition of slavery than are the Confederates. They won’t see that the contest is for the abolition of slavery in the only way that reasonable men in America have ever supposed it possible, by confining it to its present limits; and that the South, rather than submit to that, will, if they can, destroy the Union. There are many reasons for this feeling in England. In the first place, I believe Englishmen instinctively sympathize with rebels—if the rebellion be not against England. A great many also desire to see the American Union divided, supposing that it will be less powerful, and less threatening to England. All the enemies of popular government—and there are plenty even in England—rejoice to see what they suppose to be the failure of Republican institutions.” Julian Hawthorne (ed.), Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, vol. 2 (Boston, 1884), pp. 165–66, Wilding to Hawthorne, November 14, 1861.

31. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, vol. 1, pp. 52–53, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, October 6, 1861.

32. Ibid., pp. 61–63, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., October 25, 1861.

33. Lord Russell told an audience in Newcastle on October 14, “I cannot help asking myself as affairs progress in the conflict, to what good can it lead?” According to The Times, Russell then warned his listeners that a moment might come when intervention in the American war would be inevitable. After all, the paper reported him as saying, the war was not about slavery but about one side fighting for “empire, and the other for independence.” (In fact, Russell had said “power” rather than “independence,” which was less inflammatory. But someone at the paper had decided the phrase was too anodyne.) Norman Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1976), p. 238, fn.

34. Illustrated London News, November 2, 1861.

35. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger (eds.), Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill., 1997), p. 26, October 12, 1861. Seward claimed absurdly to his wife on October 29 that the wicked machinations of Britain “made it doubtful whether we can escape the yet deeper and darker abyss of foreign war.”

36. The consuls in Belfast, Glasgow, and Dublin all wrote strong letters on the subject.

37. John M. Taylor, William Henry Seward: Lincoln’s Right Hand (New York, 1991), p. 192.

38. MHS, “Bright-Sumner Letters, 1861–1872,” October 1912, pp. 93–165, Bright to Sumner, November 20, 1861. But if the Leicester Guardian was anything to go by, there was still an opportunity to influence public opinion toward the North: “By the domestic fireside, on the exchange, and in the counting house … every tide of events has been anxiously watched,” it commented. The emotional response to the war was not “on account of the great commercial interests involved but the feeling that those taking part in the contest are bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh.” Blackett, Divided Hearts, p. 6.

39. Crawford (ed.), William Howard Russell’s Civil War, p. 165, Russell to J. C. Bancroft Davis, November 6, 1861.

40. Ibid.

41. PRO FO5/779, desp. 164, Archibald to Lyons, November 2, 1861. PRO FO282/9, f. 79, d. 163, Archibald to Lyons, November 1, 1861.

42. Seward has “the power,” Lyons added angrily, “of depriving British Subjects of their liberty, or retaining them in prison or liberating them by his own will and pleasure.” PRO FO282/9, f. 79, d. 163, Archibald to Lyons, November 1, 1861.

43. Anthony Trollope, North America (repr. London, 1968), p. 139.

44. Edward Chalfant,