A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [93]
“The only thing that makes me stick out here,” Russell wrote to Delane on September 13, “is the determination not to show a white feather for these fellows.” He refused to follow the suggestion of Mowbray Morris, the managing editor of The Times, to seek safety in the British legation. The quickest way to stop the death threats and petitions against him, Russell told Delane, would be to tone down the anti-Northern bias in the newspaper: “I don’t want to ask you to sacrifice the policy of The Times to me, but I would like you if possible not to sacrifice me.”73 He warned Delane that his penchant for quoting the rabble-rousing New York Herald as though it were the chief mouthpiece of the Union would eventually rebound on The Times, but the editor denied he was baiting the Americans. It was, Delane wrote back, “simply that we don’t mean to be bullied by a so-called Power that can scarcely defend its capital against its fellow-citizens.”74
Delane’s sarcastic reply to Russell showed how little attention he was paying to the journalist’s reports. By the beginning of October, McClellan had equipped and trained more than 100,000 soldiers who, even if he felt they were not yet ready to be deployed, would never drop their arms and stampede off the battlefield as they had done at Bull Run.75 The humiliation suffered in July had made the North determined to crush not only the South but also her perceived allies. The treatment of blockade runners became harsher. When Edward Archibald, the British consul in New York, went to Fort Lafayette to check on the welfare of an imprisoned crew from a captured blockade runner, he found thirty men squeezed into a small, airless cell with barely enough headroom to stand. A bucket in the corner was the only lavatory, a small basin on a table their only access to water. Archibald took down their statements by the light from the doorway “using my hat for a desk. The men had lost everything except for the clothes on their backs and these were filthy and infested.” The prisoners were so dejected that he arranged for new clothing to be sent to them at his own expense.76 The international treaty governing the application of blockades forbade the sentencing or imprisonment of foreign blockade runners; they could be held for questioning only. But the timing of their release was at the discretion of the authorities. It could take just three days or, if Archibald lodged a complaint, as long as five months.77
Bull Run also made Northern politicians more realistic about the challenges ahead. Seward quietly reserved his nationalism for his dispatches and began to encourage foreign officers to volunteer for the Union, knowing that the army would benefit from their experience.78 His open-door policy caused problems for the American legation in London, where would-be volunteers were constantly calling on Adams, expecting to be given a commission and free passage to America.79 But Seward was unrepentant; he would rather keep them “on the Northern side,” he told William Howard Russell, “lest some really good man should get among the rebels.”80
The New York Times began to carry frequent reports of a major or colonel, late of the British Army, “who has tendered his services [to] the President.”81 Major General Charles Havelock—the brother of the more famous Major General Henry Havelock of India—discovered that this was not always the best way, however. When Lincoln appointed him to McClellan’s staff, the general retaliated for the encroachment on his authority by refusing to acknowledge Havelock’s presence. Leonard Douglas Hay Currie, captain of the 19th Regiment of Foot and a distinguished veteran of the Indian and Crimean wars, had more success by applying to the governor of New York. “Thinking I might be