A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [97]
Russell’s campaign to charm Adams was a complete success. “He was for the first time,” recorded Adams, “easy, friendly, I might almost call it genial … I liked him better the nearer I saw him.” Some of the misunderstandings and fears from the summer, which had seemed so intractable, simply melted away. “The result of this protracted interview was decidedly advantageous,” wrote Adams. “In the first place we tacitly grew into more confidence in one another.”7
Refreshed by his initiation into the pleasures of alfresco tea with Scotch eggs and boiled peat water, Adams’s good mood lasted until his return to the legation on September 27, where he found a scene of perfect chaos. Benjamin Moran was losing his temper at an unruly crowd of would-be volunteers and passport seekers while the secretary, Charles Wilson, who, if not drunk, was only recently sober, sat hunched behind his desk reading the newspapers. Only after the legation had been cleared and the latest surveillance reports retrieved from the piles of rubbish in Wilson’s corner did Adams learn that no progress at all had been made in finding Bulloch’s secret cargo ship. He was about to give up on the project when a stranger came to the legation on October 1 offering to sell information about the rebels. Much as it offended Adams’s sensibilities to pay him, he realized it was their best chance to thwart the Confederates: “The truth is,” he wrote in his diary, “of late they have been too cunning for us.”8
Ten days later, the Confederates’ mole in the Foreign Office sent word that Adams knew the name and the location of the Fingal. Anderson and Bulloch went down to Holyhead in Wales on October 15 but were too late to prevent a customs officer from boarding the Fingal, his pen and notebook in hand. Bulloch was aghast: “I thought of the rifles and sabres in the hold, and the ill-armed pickets on the Potomac waiting and longing for them.”9 The two men took a desperate risk. Anderson tricked the customs officer into leaving the steamer. Then, instead of sailing into dock as promised, Bulloch ordered the Fingal to weigh anchor and “we cracked on all the steam her boilers would bear.” They expected to be fired upon or chased by a customs ship, but nothing happened. “It was half past eight o’clock before we got fairly out to sea beyond the reach of batteries and pursuit,” wrote Anderson. “How my heart lightened as I looked at the blue water again and found myself on board a good staunch ship once more.”10
Shortly after the Fingal’s escape, the U.S. legation heard that the Bermuda had arrived at Savannah. “Wilson pretends to disbelieve it,” complained Moran on October 17. “But I fear it is fact.” Otherwise, he thought, there would not be so many advertisements in The Times for investors to buy shares in blockade-running ships. “John Bull would violate every law of honor and every principle of justice if he can secure his own ends thereby,” Moran declared.11 The same criticism was being leveled, with equal rancor, by the British government against Seward.
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“Mr. Seward appears to have deemed it advisable to get up a little excitement about the European Powers again” was how Lord Lyons wryly characterized the situation to Lord Russell on October 22.12 William Howard Russell was not constrained like Lyons by the language of diplomacy. Seward was up to “his usual tricks,” he noted in a letter to J. C. Bancroft Davis. “He is determined to resort to his favorite panacea of making the severed States reunited by a war with England.”13 Neither Lyons nor William Howard Russell thought it was a coincidence that Seward’s latest salvos against England had started when public confidence in the Lincoln administration was wavering. “A victory would do much to set things straight,” Lyons had written privately to Lord Russell