A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [95]
Russell watched as the military authorities hounded Samuel Phillips Day out of Washington when the English journalist came through the lines on October 1. Edmund Monson, Lord Lyons’s private secretary, told Day that the offensive letters he had been sending to The New York Times put him beyond the help of the legation. Day sailed for home on October 12 on the Young America, already planning his revenge on the North. Russell envied him. “Could it not be possible to arrange for me to go home for a month?” he begged Delane two days later. He missed his family, but even if he wanted to stay, “It is impossible to express one’s opinion freely. The press and the politicians would desire nothing better than to hunt me out of this country.”86
Seward “will probably play out the play and send me my passports,” Lyons wrote to Lord Russell two weeks later. “If he is in his present mood, he will be glad to find a pretext for performing other half-violent acts of the same kind.” But, he added despondently, “this cannot go on forever.” Some incident would push the war of words into a war of arms; Lyons felt the crackling animosity in the air. William Howard Russell could sense it, too. A fury and desire to punish England was evident in the press, in politics, in the army, and among ordinary citizens. “The storm may blow over,” he wrote to Delane; “now it rages furiously.”87
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6.1 The Union and Confederacy often gave different names to their battles. The Confederates generally preferred the name of the nearest town, the Federals, the nearest river or landmark.
6.2 Lord John Russell became Earl Russell in July and moved to the House of Lords.
6.3 Seward’s bullying of Lyons on the subject of political arrests played into the hands of his critics. A story spread through Washington and into the history books that he boasted to Lyons, “My Lord, I can touch a bell on my right hand, and order the arrest of a citizen of Ohio. I can touch the bell again, and order the arrest of a citizen of New York. Can the Queen of England, in her dominions, do as much?” Seward’s “little bell” became famous throughout both North and South.
SEVEN
“It Takes Two
to Make a Quarrel”
An unlikely friendship—The Fingal escapes—The success of Confederate propaganda—Seward rues his mistake—Appointment of Mason and Slidell—Capture of the Trent
The departure of Samuel Phillips Day on the Young America from New York in the middle of October coincided with the escape of the Theodora out of Charleston. The cargo on board the swift blockade runner was not cotton, but the successors to Pierre Rost and William Yancey. Frustrated by their failure to secure diplomatic recognition after the victory at Manassas, Confederate president Jefferson Davis had selected two of the South’s most prominent and experienced politicians, Senators James Mason and John Slidell, to be the new Confederate commissioners in Europe. Slidell was to go to Paris, Mason was to remain in London, and Ambrose Dudley Mann would be transferred to Brussels.
In place of the broad suggestions given to the original commissioners, Mason carried with him a long and detailed set of instructions on how to approach the British government. In particular, the Confederate cabinet ordered him to ram home the illegality of the blockade under the Declaration of Paris, in the hope that this would encourage Britain to force the reopening of Southern ports. Without its own fleet, the Confederacy remained incapable of lifting the blockade. So far, just one cruiser had been launched: a converted passenger ship renamed CSS Sumter, whose limited capabilities made it effective only as a raider against merchant ships.
The chronic shortages caused by the blockade were forcing whole regiments to sit idle for want of arms and munitions. Even before the departure of Mason and Slidell, Davis had sent an agent to England, his instructions