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By Root 6932 0

in Virginia, Samuel Phillips Day, the English correspondent for the Morning Chronicle, brought more ire on Russell by sending an inflammatory letter to The New York Times about Northern cowardice at Bull Run.19 The day after the letter was printed, a young English officer named Henry Ronald Hislop MacIver called at Russell’s lodgings asking if he knew how to find Mr. Day. MacIver bored Russell with stories of his military adventures in India and Italy until he realized the journalist had no intention of helping him, at which point he left rather crossly. A few days later Russell heard that MacIver had been caught trying to sneak across the lines into Virginia; he assured Lord Lyons that this was one arrest the legation could ignore.

“I feel it is my doom to be the best abused man in America on both sides,” Russell lamented to The Times’ New York correspondent, J. C. Bancroft Davis. Southern newspapers were being almost as vicious about him as those in the North. “He prefers to attribute Bull’s Run to Yankee cowardice rather than to Southern courage,” complained the diarist Mary Chesnut.20 In Richmond, Samuel Phillips Day was forced to deny that he had anything to do with The Times. Russell was furious with London editor John Thaddeus Delane for ignoring his request to preface the Bull Run report with others from American papers.21 But the opportunity to embarrass John Bright, who had finally announced his support for the North, was too great for Delane to resist; he not only printed Russell’s report without any additional commentary, but mischievously also placed the account next to a bombastic editorial from the New York Herald about the retribution coming to Europe once the war was won.22

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Since Frank Vizetelly’s last dispatch in the Illustrated London News had been so laudatory about Northern recruits, the contrast between his suggestion of an easy victory and Russell’s description of the Union army collapse was stunning. The effect on public opinion was just as Delane hoped. Prince Albert’s private secretary, General Charles Grey, whose views were typical of a certain kind of crusty conservative, celebrated Bull Run as a victory for England. “I confess I cannot help being pleased with the course things are taking in America,” he wrote to his brother, Earl Grey, “because I think it will before long put an end to the fighting and leave the world in a much safer state.”23 General Grey thought a divided America would be too busy quarreling with itself to bother with Britain. The Federal army’s collapse on the battlefield also appeared to vindicate those who claimed that the North was fighting the war out of vanity whereas the South was fighting for independence.24

The image of the rout was so powerful that no British bank was now prepared to invest in Union bonds. August Belmont, the American agent for Rothschild’s, the largest bank in the world at the time, was unable to convince his own employers, let alone any of its rivals. Bull Run also overshadowed the North’s subsequent successes in the following months. In late August, when the Union gained control of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina’s main route to the Atlantic, the victory was largely ignored by the English press. George Henry Herbert’s family was among the few who followed the campaign. Herbert’s regiment, the 9th New York Volunteers, was part of an amphibious attack on the two Confederate forts guarding the inlet. The rebels were shelled out of their position, leaving Herbert and the invaders to the poisonous snakes, toads, ticks, and mosquitoes that inhabited the forty-mile-long sandbank.25 Until recently, he had been the target of much mockery from his comrades, but the horrors of war had brought the men together.26 “I have now quite a love for my profession,” he wrote in a letter home after the battle.27

In London, the occupants of the American legation had their suspicions confirmed by the North’s vilification in some British newspapers. “I cannot conceal from myself the fact that as a whole the English are pleased with our misfortunes,” Charles Francis