• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He reached Charleston on April 16, 1861, two days after the federal garrison had surrendered to the elaborately named Confederate general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. The boisterous celebrations on the city’s streets reminded him of Paris during the last revolution there. Russell did not pretend to understand the South, but “one thing is for certain,” he asserted to Lyons, “nothing on earth will induce the people to return to the Union.”44 Russell was surprised when the British consul in Charleston, Robert Bunch, revealed that less than a quarter of the Southern population owned all 3.5 million slaves. Even if slavery were abolished tomorrow, calculated Russell, fewer than 300,000 whites would be affected out of a population of 5.5 million. Yet every conversation demonstrated a support for slavery and independence that was inextricably entwined with a hatred of the North.

Robert Bunch had been the consul in Charleston since 1853 and was regarded by many as a permanent fixture in Southern society. He gave a dinner for Russell on April 18 that was singular in the brutal frankness with which the guests predicted Britain’s swift humiliation by the South if she did not immediately recognize the Confederate government. Only the day before, Virginia had provisionally voted to join the Confederacy, raising the number of seceded states from seven to eight. Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee looked certain to follow. Mr. Bunch’s Southern guests were exultant. “It was scarcely agreeable to my host or myself,” wrote Russell, to be told that England owed allegiance to the “cotton kingdom.” “Why, sir,” sneered one of the guests, “we have only to shut off your supply of cotton for a few weeks, and we can create a revolution in Great Britain. There are four millions of your people depending on us for their bread.… No, sir, we know that England must recognize us.” Russell and Bunch maintained a polite silence as all the Southern guests present voiced their agreement.45

Two days later, the Charleston papers reported that a local shipping company was starting its own direct line to Europe. Almost as an aside, the papers noted that Jefferson Davis had invited civilian ships to apply for “letters of marque” and that Abraham Lincoln had declared a blockade of Southern ports.3.3 When Russell questioned a businessman about the wisdom of launching a shipping line in the midst of a blockade, he was told, “ ‘If those miserable Yankees try to blockade us and keep you from your cotton, you’ll just send their ships to the bottom and acknowledge us. That will be before autumn, I think.’ It was in vain I assured him he would be disappointed.”46

—

Lincoln’s cabinet in Washington had argued furiously over whether to blockade the South. The president’s decision in April to call for 75,000 volunteers had been universally approved, but the blockade issue thrust Seward squarely into a challenge against his foe Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy. Welles and his supporters in the cabinet wanted Southern ports closed by federal mandate rather than blockaded by the U.S. Navy. He pointed out that a blockade was bound by a set of legal definitions and practices. First and foremost, a country could not blockade itself. A blockade was a weapon of war between two sovereign countries, or “belligerents” in technical terms. By formally blockading the South, the North would in effect be granting it belligerent status, which would be extremely useful to the Confederacy. This quasi-recognition of its existence conferred on the South the power to raise foreign loans and purchase supplies from neutral nations. Its navy would have the right of search and seizure on the high seas. It would also be able to enlist foreign volunteers in countries that had not declared neutrality. These would be no mere trifles.

Welles argued that Europe would almost certainly go the next step and recognize the existence of the Confederacy. Nevertheless, it was Seward who prevailed, although whether he truly understood