A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [57]
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3.1 The taxation on foreign goods depended on the economic interests of various Northern states; sugar, raw wool, iron, flaxseed, hides, beef, pork, grain, hemp, coal, lead, copper, and zinc all received protection from outside competition—as did dried, pickled, and salted fish.
3.2 “He is obtrusive,” complained Welles, “assuming and presuming, meddlesome, and uncertain, ready to exercise authority always, never doubting his right until challenged; then he becomes timid, uncertain, distrustful, and inventive of schemes to extricate himself.… I think he has no very profound or sincere convictions.”20
3.3 A letter of marque was a government license allowing a civilian ship to attack the merchant shipping of an enemy in time of war. Ships that carried such letters were called privateers, to distinguish them from pirates. Davis had resorted to this old-fashioned method of sea warfare because it would be many months before the Confederacy had its own navy.
3.4 The treaty had been drawn up and signed by the seven Great Powers of Europe—Austria, France, Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire, Prussia, Russia, and Sardinia—after the Crimean War in order to establish a set of international laws governing both blockades and privateering. Ironically, America had not signed the treaty because President Franklin Pierce refused to relinquish the right to use licensed privateers.
FOUR
Expectations Are Dashed
Where is Adams?—Debate in the Commons—The neutrality proclamation—First interview with Lord John Russell—Seward’s horseplay—The power of Uncle Tom
A poem in Punch, on March 30, 1861, neatly expressed Britain’s cotton dilemma:
Though with the North we sympathize,
It must not be forgotten,
That with the South we’ve stronger ties,
Which are composed of cotton.
The journalist William Howard Russell’s revelation that the South hoped to exploit these ties, along with his poignant descriptions of slave life, provoked outrage in England when his reports started to appear in April. But the North gained less support than Southerners had feared, since, in his inaugural address on March 4, Lincoln had promised not to interfere with slavery. The Morrill Tariff, with its rampant protectionism and whiff of anti-British bias, was an even greater gift to the Confederacy.1
At the U.S. legation, Benjamin Moran read the angry protests against the new tariff and took it to mean that the country as a whole had turned against the North. But George Dallas, the outgoing American minister whose existence was barely acknowledged by Seward, was much more sanguine about the hostile opinion expressed in newspapers. Britain “cannot be expected to appreciate the weakness, discredit, complications, and dangers which we instinctively and justly ascribe to disunion,” he told Seward on April 9. “English opinion tends rather, I apprehend, to the theory that a peaceful separation may work beneficially for both groups of states and not injuriously affect the rest of the world.”2 He had obviously heard this said by many different people: even Thackeray had written to an American friend, asking, “In what way will it benefit the North to be recoupled to the South?” After all, at this time, England had not wanted “the Colonies” to go their own way, “and aren’t both better for the Separation?”3
Nor did Dallas believe there was anything to be feared from the British government. Lord John Russell had rebuffed Seward’s demand for a promise never to have any dealings with the South or its representatives, but “his lordship assured me with great earnestness that there was not the slightest disposition in the British government to grasp at any advantage,” Dallas reported to Seward.4 Far from looking for an advantage, the cabinet was approaching a state of panic over American affairs. Russell was shocked that six weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration