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Seward concluded his letter with the statement, “Whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it. Either the president must do it himself … or devolve it on some member of his Cabinet.… It is not in my especial province, but I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.” This was sheer flummery. Seward was making a last grab for power. He had forewarned Henry Raymond, the editor of The New York Times, and shown him the memorandum so that a positive story would accompany the sudden change in policy.41 As it happened, Raymond had nothing to report. Lincoln shrugged off Seward’s attempt to coerce him with magnificent indifference. The proud secretary of state was gradually being corralled. Once the cabinet decided upon a relief expedition to Fort Sumter, the only concession Seward was able to wrest from Lincoln was that the South Carolina authorities be forewarned. It was not much, but it would save him from appearing to have deliberately and recklessly misled the Southern negotiators about the president’s intentions.

By April 6, the time for deals and machinations had drawn to a close. A relief fleet bearing provisions for the hungry guards of Fort Sumter was making its way toward Charleston. The expectation in Washington was that its appearance would almost certainly provoke violence. William Howard Russell sent a note to Seward asking him for a definite answer regarding the truth about a relief expedition. He was rewarded with an invitation to dine on April 8. The evening began with a foursome of whist beside the fire. As the game progressed, Seward became more vehement in his pronouncements about the government’s intentions. Suddenly, he put down his cards and ordered his son to fetch his portfolio from the office. His daughter-in-law understood the hint and left the room. When they were alone, Seward handed Russell a cigar and removed a paper from the portfolio. It was, he told Russell, the dispatch he was about to send to Charles Francis Adams.

Seward proceeded to read the dispatch aloud, “slowly and with marked emphasis,” almost as though he were declaiming a speech in front of a large audience. “It struck me,” wrote Russell in wonderment,

that the tone of the paper was hostile, that there was an undercurrent of menace through it, and that it contained insinuations that Great Britain would interfere to split up the Republic, if she could, and was pleased at the prospect of the dangers which threatened it. At all the stronger passages Mr. Seward raised his voice, and made a pause at their conclusion as if to challenge remark or approval.42

Russell did not know what to make of such a performance. Ignorant of Seward’s conversations with Lyons, he was baffled why Seward should want to turn a potential ally into an enemy.

The following day, April 9, Davis’s Confederate cabinet agreed to attack Fort Sumter before the Federal relief fleet could arrive. In Washington, Russell scouted in vain for information, sloshing through the rain from one department to the next. He wanted to investigate conditions in the South before one or both sides imposed travel restrictions across the lines, but at the same time he was loath to leave the capital in case he missed something of importance. Finally, on the twelfth, he bought a train ticket for Charleston. As he paid a final round of calls to his new acquaintances, he received strong hints that something was about to happen. In fact, the first Confederate gun had fired on Fort Sumter at 4:30 that morning.

Lord Lyons was keen to hear from Russell during his travels, and invited him to rely on the consulates for his postal needs. The offer soon proved to be indispensable to Russell. He had noticed a certain ugliness creeping into the public mood as he progressed farther south. Virginia was relatively calm, but in North Carolina, he wrote, “the wave of the secession tide struck us in full career.”43 A “vigilance committee” in Wilmington demanded to know his sympathies and refused to let him telegraph his copy to New York. At subsequent train stops,