A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [58]
Benjamin Moran thought Dallas’s benign view of the British made him either an idiot or a crypto–Southern sympathizer. Dallas was certainly neither, but the knowledge that he was soon to go home may have made him apathetic when he should have been wooing potential Northern allies in Parliament. Moran also knew of at least one MP who was collaborating with the nascent Southern lobby in England. William Gregory, the MP for Galway, had given notice in the House of Commons that he was going to propose recognition of the South on May 1. Moran thought the move had been prompted by Gregory’s friend Robert Campbell, the American consul in London.4.1
Campbell was a genial though strident secessionist from North Carolina who had supplied Gregory with letters of introduction for his tour of the United States in 1859. In Washington, he had stayed in a boardinghouse popular with Southern senators; their “fire-eating talk” of independence, interspersed with liberal amounts of whiskey, had swept the MP into their ranks. Privately, he thought their humanity had been dulled by slavery, but Gregory accepted his new friends’ claim that emancipation was morally and economically impossible.5
Moran was furious with Dallas for failing to curb the pro-Southern activities of consuls who had not yet been replaced by Republican appointees, but he dared not speak when his own future seemed so uncertain. He remained in suspense until confirmation of his reappointment arrived on the fifteenth. Moran’s other fear—that he was the only loyal American official left in Britain—seemed a raging certainty after he caught one of the new Southern envoys, Ambrose Dudley Mann, sneaking into the legation to see Dallas.
The arrival of the Confederate envoys was not unexpected; their identities had been public knowledge for several weeks. Consul Robert Bunch wrote from Charleston to warn the foreign office that they were three of the rankest amateurs ever to have been sent on so sensitive a diplomatic mission. He attributed President Davis’s selection of such men to Southern arrogance and the belief that the Confederacy did not need proper advocates when cotton could do the talking. Mann had served as a U.S. minister to Switzerland but Bunch dismissed him as “a mere trading politician, possessing no originality of mind and no special merit of any description.” The second envoy, William Lowndes Yancey, had never been anything but a rabble-rouser. His campaign to reopen the slave trade, not to mention his support for expeditions against British territories in Central America, made him a peculiar choice to send to England. Bunch was particularly disdainful of Yancey: “He is impulsive, erratic and hot-headed; a rabid secessionist.” Bunch could not see a single reason for the appointment of the third envoy, Pierre Rost, apart from his friendship with Jefferson Davis’s family and his proficiency in Creole French.6
Moran despised Dallas’s excuse that Mann was an old and valued friend until he, too, was forced to choose between loyalty and patriotism. A few days after Dudley Mann visited the legation, Moran received a letter from a friend in London who asked him for the Confederate envoy’s address. The friend, Edwin De Leon, until recently the U.S. consul in Egypt, had invited him to his wedding two years earlier, but Moran was appalled at his request and wrote sorrowfully that “I would do anything in reason for him, but could not find it in my conscience to assist treason.”7
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Forcing a debate in the House of Commons had become William Gregory’s mission, and he would not be thwarted. Palmerston pulled the pro-Confederate MP aside in the Commons on April 26 and demanded to know why he saw fit to place the government in such an awkward position. He reminded Gregory that the speeches would be reprinted in Southern and Northern newspapers and that both sides would end up being