A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [61]
In declaring neutrality, Russell was convinced he had chosen the best alternative; he had consulted the law officers of the Crown, as he always did when in doubt, and in their opinion the crisis in America was not a minor insurgency but a genuine state of war. The blockade could and should be recognized, they told him, and so should the right of the South to employ privateers. Russell endured some aggressive questioning in Parliament when he announced the government’s decision on May 6. He was also pressured by Gregory into seeing the Confederate envoys for a second time, on the grounds that the Northern blockade had not been confirmed at the first meeting. Russell suspected they would try to make more of the neutrality announcement than the government intended. Their exultant demeanor on May 9 showed that his instincts had been correct.19 The envoys were unaware, however, that even as they pressed their arguments on him, the law officers were composing an additional proviso to Britain’s declaration of neutrality that would make it illegal for a British subject to volunteer for either side in the war. Russell had meant it when he said “for God’s sake, let us if possible keep out of it.”
Yancey, Rost, and Mann were dumbfounded when they read the “Queen’s Proclamation of Neutrality” in The Times on May 14. A close examination of the wording showed that Russell had taken away many of the advantages that belligerent status had initially seemed to give to the Confederacy. He had invoked the rarely used 1819 Foreign Enlistment Act, under which British subjects were forbidden to volunteer for a foreign cause or encourage others to do so.20 The act also prohibited the selling or arming of warships to either belligerent; those who disobeyed the proclamation would be prosecuted, and the offending items confiscated.21 The more populous, industrial North would be able to overcome these obstacles on its own, but not the smaller, agrarian South.
The Southern envoys realized that their two interviews with Russell had failed to make the slightest impression on him. Yancey ascribed their failure to Russell’s prejudice against the “peculiar institution,” as Southerners euphemistically called slavery: “We are satisfied that the public mind here is entirely opposed to the Government of the Confederate States of America on the question of slavery,” he reported to Robert Toombs, the Southern secretary of state. “All we can do at present is to affect public opinion in as unobtrusive a manner, as well as we can.”22
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Charles Francis Adams also read the neutrality proclamation in The Times on May 14. He had arrived in London the night before, having endured the worst sea crossing of his life. The three children, Henry, Mary, and Brooks, had, like him, been prostrate with seasickness. Abigail, his wife, had stayed below deck for a different reason: Cassius Clay, Lincoln’s appointment to the legation in Russia, had embarrassed them by sauntering around the boat like a Punch caricature of the boorish American, with three pistols at his belt and a toothpick between his teeth.
Adams knew nothing of what had passed between Seward and Lyons. But even if he had, his outrage at the British government’s decision to act without waiting for his arrival and consulting him first would have been the same. “Charles Francis Adams naturally looked on all British Ministers as enemies,” acknowledged Henry Adams in his autobiography. “The only public occupation of all Adamses for a hundred and fifty years at least, in their brief intervals of quarrelling with State Street, had been to quarrel with Downing Street, and the British Government.”23
That first morning, Adams was ready to confront Lord John Russell, so he asked George