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By Root 7055 0

Washington on July 3, 1861. This time he stayed away from Willard’s and found lodgings in a private house on Pennsylvania Avenue. He regretted the decision as soon as he unlocked the door to his room and caught the stench of the privy beneath the window. Once he had changed his clothes, Russell called on Lord Lyons to give him a report on the South, glad for the excuse to escape his lodgings, if only for a few hours. The legation was almost as dark as his bedroom, since Lyons had ordered the gas lamps to be kept unlit in order to avoid adding unnecessary heat. “I was sorry to observe he looked rather careworn and pale,” Russell wrote afterward.49 One of the attachés whispered to Russell as he was leaving that “the condition of things with Lord Lyons and Seward had been very bad, so much so Lord L would not go near State Dept. for fear of being insulted by the tone and manner of little S.”50 Ever since the neutrality proclamation had become known, Seward had been threatening and plotting to force a reversal of the South’s belligerent status. Lyons was constantly on the watch against Seward’s stratagems to weaken Britain’s leadership and Mercier’s attempts to sabotage the blockade. Try as he might, Lyons could not make Seward understand that Europe was only respecting the blockade out of deference to Britain. Russell returned to his lodgings feeling depressed by Seward’s misguided behavior toward Lord Lyons. There was no other foreign minister in Washington, Russell wrote in his diary, “who watches with so much interest the march of events as Lord Lyons, or who feels as much sympathy, perhaps, in the Federal Government.”51

“Sumner makes it appear he saved the whole concern from going smash,” Russell wrote after he bumped into him on the street and had to stand for an hour in the blistering heat while Sumner gleefully enlarged on “the dirty little mountebankism of my weeny friend in office.”52 Russell was not sure whether to believe him until he called on Seward the following day and was subjected to another of his tirades. The secretary of state informed Russell that if he wished to go anywhere near the army, his passport would have to be countersigned by Lord Lyons, himself, and General-in-Chief Winfield Scott. He ended the interview with a lecture on the impropriety of Britain’s granting belligerent status to the Confederates: “If any European Power provokes a war, we shall not shrink from it. A contest between Great Britain and the United States would wrap the world in fire, and at the end it would not be the United States which would have to lament the results of the conflict.” Russell tried to appear serene during this outburst, but as he listened to Seward’s monologue he could not help seeing the funny side. There they were “in his modest little room within the sound of the evening’s guns, in a capital menaced by [Confederate] forces,” and yet Seward was threatening “war with a Power which could have blotted out the paper blockade of the Southern forts and coast in a few hours.”53

“Seward is losing ground in Washington and New York very fast,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., reported to his father on July 2. “Sumner has been here fiercely denouncing him for designing, as he asserts, to force the country into a foreign war.”54 It was true that Seward had not calculated on Sumner’s relentless plotting against him, or that Sumner would try to set himself up as a rival secretary of state from the Senate; but both William Howard Russell and Charles Francis Jr. had been misled by Sumner. Far from being humiliated, Seward was reemerging in triumphant form, as the crush at his parties attested. June had been a month of consolidation and reconciliation between the president and his wayward secretary; Lincoln had won Seward’s support through a combination of firmness and magnanimity in victory. Displaying more statesmanship than his detractors would admit, Seward recognized that Lincoln possessed the skills required in a president, “but he needs constant and assiduous cooperation.”55

The alteration in Seward’s attitude toward Lincoln