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“offended by what is said against them, and will care but little for what is said for them; and that all Americans will say that the British Parliament has no business to meddle with American affairs.” He reported to Lord John Russell that Gregory “admitted the truth of much I said, but said he had pledged himself to Mr. Mann, the Southern envoy.… Perhaps your talking to Gregory, either privately or in the House, might induce him to put his motion off.”8 Russell was anxious about being pushed to make a public statement ahead of events. George Dallas had shown that he was as ignorant of the situation as the Foreign Office. During his last interview with Russell on May 1, he had insisted that a blockade was not under consideration, since there was no mention of the fact in the latest State Department instructions; it had to be a fabrication of the New York press. But Russell discovered the next day from Lord Lyons’s dispatches that the idea was very much under consideration.

The day after Palmerston’s confrontation with Gregory, the British government learned that the Confederates had captured Fort Sumter. The initial newspaper reports were brief, but it appeared as though the South had won an easy victory. (The Thompson family in Belfast became the envy of the neighborhood after they received a long account of the battle from their son, a Union private in the Sumter garrison.)9 “We cut a sorry enough figure indeed,” complained Moran as he read through the dailies. “Everybody is laughing at us.” Many papers described the news as “a calamity” and “a subject of regret, and indeed of grief,” but Moran’s attention was held by the Illustrated London News, which printed a pious editorial in favor of peace and “no coercive measures,” next to an announcement that Frank Vizetelly, the paper’s star artist, war reporter, and brother of the editor, was taking the next steamer to New York.10 The tutting and clucking in the British press about the demise of the democratic experiment and the sorry state of “our American cousins” also grated on Moran’s nerves. The Economist recalled Britain’s futile reaction to the American Declaration of Independence and advised the North to settle the dispute with grace; to continue fighting now, its editor, Walter Bagehot, scolded, would be “vindictive, bloody and fruitless.”11 The conservative Saturday Review could not resist making a dig at Seward, who, “though he cannot keep the Federal fort at Charleston, has several times announced his intention of annexing Canada.”12

Ill.6 Punch depicts the North and South as a mismatched couple.

Lord John Russell had still not spoken to William Gregory when the Southern commissioners Yancey and Rost finally reached London on April 29, a week after Mann. Unaccustomed to foreign travel, they had passed two miserable days in Southampton and had arrived in the capital feeling bewildered and frightened. Rather than pausing for a moment to consider the best way of contacting the Confederate community, they sent a telegram to the American legation addressed to Ambrose Dudley Mann. “The unblushing impudence of these scoundrels,” ranted Moran, “to send their message to the US Legation for one of their fellow traitors.”13 The timing and announcement of their arrival was fortunate for Lord John Russell, since it gave him a bargaining chip with Gregory, who agreed to postpone his motion to June 7 in return for a Foreign Office meeting with the Southerners on May 3.

Russell was not making a great concession, since it was standard Foreign Office practice to receive representatives from breakaway countries. These meetings never carried official weight, nor were the emissaries accorded diplomatic rank. Russell assumed that Dallas had lived in England long enough to know this, and that Charles Francis Adams could have it explained to him when he eventually arrived. Russell was disturbed by the thought of Confederate privateers roaming the seas, and, at his request, the Admiralty was already taking precautionary measures to reinforce the North Atlantic squadron. The prospect