A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [85]
Faulkner’s arrest was not the only diplomatic upset of that week. On August 16, Lyons was called to the State Department by Seward, who informed him, with a gleam in his eye, that one Robert Mure, a naturalized American of Scottish birth, had been arrested in New York as he was about to sail for Liverpool. Mure had been caught with treasonable correspondence hidden inside a diplomatic bag he was carrying from the British consulate in Charleston. So began a long-drawn-out affair that caused Lyons many sleepless nights. Seward pestered him with alleged crimes committed by British subjects who were said to be in cahoots with the rebels. Lyons suspected that much of Seward’s professed outrage was bluster, but he could not deny there was an element of truth about some of the British consuls. One or two were highly partisan—especially Consul Bernal in Maryland.14
An investigation by Lyons revealed that Consul Bunch in Charleston, however, was not one of the alleged Southern sympathizers. Bunch had entrusted his diplomatic pouch to Robert Mure, who was heading to England via New York, because the Northern blockade prevented its going directly by sea from South Carolina and the Southern ban on “commercial intercourse” meant there was no post between the states. It was Mure who made the egregious error of allowing the bag to be contaminated with private letters and documents. Seward had been waiting for one of the British consuls to make a slip and was amply rewarded by the contents of this bag. He graciously allowed the sealed dispatches to be sent to London unopened, but the rest he passed on to the press. Not surprisingly, many of the letters contained vitriolic comments about the North.15
There was a fresh outcry for Lyons’s expulsion that almost made him wish for his own removal. “I am getting a longing for home which it will be difficult to gratify,” he confided to his sister on August 23, “for I don’t see how can I well get out of the scrape of happening to be the Minister here just now.… I don’t believe the Americans mean to quarrel with us and I would rather not be removed in consequence of making some blunder—and I see no other means of getting away.”16 William Howard Russell dined at the legation that evening and was shocked by the sadness emanating from Lyons.
Russell felt guilty because he suspected that his own actions had contributed to Lyons’s difficulties. The first copy of his Bull Run report in The Times arrived in New York on August 18. Within forty-eight hours nearly every newspaper in the North carried front-page denunciations of Russell. He was branded a liar and Confederate sympathizer. One newspaper claimed he was never at Bull Run; another, that he had incited the panic himself.17 The New York Times derisively called him “Bull Run Russell.” He received hate mail and death threats; shop owners would not serve him; the Lincolns ignored his greeting when their carriage passed by. Seward received a mass petition from Philadelphia, demanding Russell’s expulsion. Sherman and other senior officers assured him that his description of the rout was perfectly fair, but the feeling among the lower ranks was implacably hostile. A German soldier leveled his gun at Russell, shouting, “[B]ull Run Russell! You shall never write [B]ull’s Runs again!” Somewhat recklessly, Russell rode up to the man and challenged him. Although the soldier later claimed it was a “choake,” “as his rifle was capped and loaded and on full cock, with his finger on the trigger, I did not quite see the fun of it.” General Irwin McDowell commiserated with him, saying he was “very much rejoiced to find that I was as much abused as he had been.”18
From Beauregard’s headquarters