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By Root 6888 0

Adams confided miserably to a friend. “There never was any real good will towards us. Of course, you will keep these views to yourself. It is not advisable in these days for ministers abroad to be quoted.”28 It was just as well he was unaware of Palmerston’s quip that Bull Run should be renamed “Yankees Run.” Adams had finally settled in his new life when William Howard Russell’s report of the battle appeared in The Times. The legation had moved into new premises in Portland Place, the archives had been unpacked and a new cataloguing system put in place. Defeat robbed these improvements of their luster. Benjamin Moran sulked in the basement, and Adams’s doubts about his mission returned; recalling Seward’s threatening dispatches with embarrassment, Adams wrote in his diary “we deserve it all.”29 Harriet Martineau continued to write supportive articles in the Daily News and Morning Star, but she, too, had decided that Seward was the most dangerous politician she had ever encountered: “Seward in the Cabinet is enough to ruin everything,” she complained to a friend.30 She blamed him for having allowed the passage of the Morrill Tariff, since the bill was practically “inviting the world to support the Confederate cause.”31 The Rothschild’s agent, August Belmont, agreed; during the American banker’s unsuccessful visit to England to drum up interest in Union bonds, he was repeatedly asked to justify the attack on British trade. Palmerston told him at a private meeting shortly after Bull Run: “We do not like slavery, but we want cotton, and we dislike very much your Morrill tariff.”32 Even the pro-Northern Spectator appeared to have lost patience, complaining on June 15, “The Americans are, for the moment, transported beyond the influence of common sense. With all of England sympathizing, more or less heartily, with the North, they persist in regarding her as an enemy, and seem positively anxious to change an ally … into an open and dangerous foe.”

The eighteenth of August was Adams’s fifty-fourth birthday. That evening he was despondent. “My career in life is drawing on to its close,” he wrote in his diary, seeing no future for himself or his country. Yet the situation in Britain was not as desperate as he believed. Immediately after the Battle of Bull Run, Vizetelly’s Illustrated London News had sternly reminded readers “that the victory of the South places its cause in no better position in English eyes.”33 In Liverpool, the authorities ordered Southern ships to haul down the Confederate flags that had suddenly appeared after the battle. But the most significant development by far was the rejection of the Southern envoys’ request on August 7 for a formal interview with Lord Russell.6.2 Undeterred, the Confederates sent him a thirty-nine-page letter outlining the reasons why the South had attained the right to recognition. Russell’s reply was short and pointed. “Her Majesty,” he replied on August 24, “has, by her royal proclamation, declared her intention to preserve a strict neutrality between the contending parties in that war.”34

Russell’s rebuff brought the relations between the Confederate diplomats to a new low. They had been arguing among themselves for some time, and after this latest blow their disagreements became increasingly personal. Not only were they isolated in England, but weeks went by while they waited for instructions from Richmond. “Our sources of information are the New York and Baltimore papers,” the envoys complained to the Confederate secretary of state.35 Left to their own devices, Yancey became the odd man out as Rost and Mann turned to Edwin De Leon, the former U.S. consul in Egypt, whose arrival in London had caused Benjamin Moran so much heartache. De Leon, a journalist by training, had originally intended to plant a few articles in the press before going home. But he soon realized that Mann needed his help; Yancey had to be controlled. “He was not a winning or persuasive man,” wrote De Leon, “but a bold, antagonistic and somewhat dogmatical one; abrupt in manner, regardless of the elegancies and