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18. Ibid., July 12, 1862.

19. F. L. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy (2nd ed., Chicago, 1959), p. 145.

20. Norman Longmate, Hungry Mills: The Story of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, 1861–5 (London, 1978), p. 95.

21. D. P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861–1865 (New York, 1974), p. 198.

22. The problem for the North and the South was that the cotton famine had been brought on by a complicated set of circumstances. The distress suffered by the workers was real, but the “famine” was a combination of overproduction during the previous three years, a surplus of some grades of cotton, and a dearth of other grades. As Howard Jones writes, “The initial surplus led to reduced work time, and its eventual depletion extended the layoffs.” Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009), p. 227. Also, in the first year of the war, the cotton glut in England was so great that Northern textile mills were actually able to buy surplus British stock and ship it over.

23. Robert Douthat Meade, Judah P. Benjamin: Confederate Statesman (Baton Rouge, La., 2001), p. 248.

24. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, pp. 402–4, James Spence to James Mason, April 28, 1862.

25. Virginia Mason, The Public Life and Diplomatic Correspondence of James M. Mason (New York, 1906), pp. 271–72, Dispatch 9, Mason to Benjamin, May 2, 1862.

26. Trinity College Library, Cambridge, Houghton MS CB36/2[3], Henry Bright to Lord Houghton, July 22, 1862.

27. Library of Congress, Hotze Papers, Private Letter Book, Hotze to John George Witt, August 11, 1864.

28. For example, as Dudley Mann wrote excitedly to Judah P. Benjamin on September 15, 1862, after Blackwood’s published a long article about Jefferson Davis, written by the Hon. Robert Bourke: “Blackwood stands in the same relation to the British periodical press as the Times does to the British newspaper press. They are wonderfully influential in molding European opinion; for their power is not confined to Great Britain.” ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, pp. 528–29.

29. OR, ser. 4, vol. 2, pp. 23–25, Edwin De Leon to Judah P. Benjamin, July 30, 1862.

30. Hotze’s competitor was a shabby little rag called the London American, edited by the eccentric George Francis Train. By coincidence, its offices were one door down, separated from the Index by a tobacconist’s. The Liverpool Mail once described Train as “our extremely fast Yankee cousin, famous for making galloping speeches, for writing galloping books, and galloping himself around the world” (February 4, 1860).

31. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, vol. 1, p. 153, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., June 6, 1862.

32. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, p. 326, Henry Hotze to Robert Mercer Hunter, February 1, 1862.

33. Thurlow Weed, Harriet A. Weed, and Thurlow Weed Barnes, Life of Thurlow Weed, 2 vols. (Boston, 1884), vol. 2, p. 416, Weed to New York Common Council, July 1, 1862.

34. Edward Dicey, Spectator of America, ed. Herbert Mitgang (Athens, Ga., 1971), p. 144.

35. For example, on April 19, 1862, the Illustrated London News asked why it was that Americans were so sensitive about British criticism—and why the English had such a knack for provoking them with “ill-timed and unfair comment.” “The explanation,” it decided, “is to be found in their mutual ignorance of each other’s feelings and modes of thought. America does not understand England, and England does not understand America.”

36. “I am disturbed by the state of feeling which is growing up between our two countries,” he continued. “It matters not how averse your government or ours may be to war, your people have become so inflamed against us by the daily ministrations of the press that no government will be strong enough to control their resentment.” National Library of Scotland, Tweeddale Mun./Yester MSS, (0439)MS14467, ff. 40–43, John Bigelow to Lord Russell, August 2, 1862.

37. For example, on August 8, Secretary of War Stanton announced that citizens eligible for the draft (which called for 300,000 new soldiers) were forbidden