“OH, LORD WHY did I do it?” William Howard Russell asked himself on the morning of March 19, 1861. He had been in the United States for barely forty-eight hours, and already he was the subject of more stories than he had written. Arriving in New York aboard the Cunard steamer Arabia on March 16, he’d allowed himself to get swept up in the vast Saint Patrick’s Day festivities on the seventeenth. Invited to “a little party” that night by his fellow Sons of Erin, he wound up among hundreds at the Astor House, where, well into his cups, he addressed the multitude. It seemed to him, he said, that the great contest taking shape was a test of republican institutions. Russell asked, in effect, whether a government of the people, by the people, and for the people could survive.
His bosses had warned him against making speeches. Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune quickly denounced Russell’s remarks as a typical British misapprehension of a conflict that was really only about freedom versus slavery, and slavery was the aggressor. Russell read about himself in paper after paper as a vain, middle-aged man with a cocked nose, blue eyes, grizzled hair, and a double chin.
So began what probably was the unhappiest year in William Howard Russell’s long career. His wife, Mary, had almost died in childbirth the previous autumn. He could not leave her and delayed his trip to America by several months until she seemed to be on the mend. The little boy she had borne was sickly and would die before Russell returned, and throughout his time in the United States Mary continued to suffer without him in England.
Russell’s editors and his many admirers hungered for his coverage of battle, his dissection of strategy, his depiction, for better or worse, of the grim reality in camps and hospitals. But even apart from his concerns about the infirmity of his wife and child, he had been reluctant to depart for America. There were British interests in this fight, no doubt about it, but there were no British soldiers involved. Was this really his war to cover?
Finally John Delane, the editor of the Times of London, put up enough money to make the American war worth Russell’s while. The correspondent would be paid £1,200 a year plus expenses, and since Russell already owed his wife’s doctor £500, this was, Russell had to admit, “a lucky sort of intervention.”
“You must go,” said William Makepeace Thackeray, who lived near Russell’s Sumner Place house in Kensington and often stopped by. “It will be a great opportunity.”
Over the summer Thackeray, who had so many American friends, had introduced Russell to one named Samuel Cutler “Sam” Ward, a famous bon vivant who was quite extraordinary company. He came from what had been a prosperous family and remained a socially impressive one. His sister, Julia Ward, gained fame as a poet (she eventually wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”), and her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, had a reputation as a fighter for righteous causes ranging from Greek independence to the education of the deaf and blind to support for John Brown. Sam Ward seemed to know just about anyone that anybody had ever heard of in the northern United States: senators, poets, philanthropists, adventurers. And Russell could see why. He was “refined, philosophical, and cosmopolitan” in ways that Americans were not supposed to be. Ward was a risk taker and had one of those great magnetic personalities that got him into trouble almost as often as it got him out. He had already acquired and lost two fortunes before landing in Washington, where he later became not only a lobbyist but “The King of the Lobby,” buttonholing and cajoling the men who made the laws.Ward promised to give Russell, if he came to the United States, a royal reception à l’américaine, and he kept his word. He and the increasingly influential New-York Evening Post editor, John Bigelow, another great friend of Russell’s, had been there at the dock to receive him when he got off the boat.
William Howard Russell at that moment probably had greater fame and influence than any journalist before or since. His dispatches from the Crimea—describing the by-then legendary Charge of the Light Brigade—and from India had been read around the world. Copyright laws were rare and their enforcement rarer, so articles in the Times of London showed up on broadsheets from Calcutta to Charleston, and Russell’s stories, full of facts no one else had reported in narratives more compelling than anything anyone else was writing, were required reading by anyone who wanted to appear in the know about the greatest conflicts of the time.
During Russell’s first weeks in the United States, his access to people in power amazed even him. All understood (as, indeed, Robert Bunch would come to understand) that if they could have Russell’s ear, they could gain the world’s attention. In Washington, Russell found himself dining with Sam Ward’s good friend William Seward, now the U.S. secretary of state and the man who would handle the nation’s delicate relations with the Crown. Seward had accepted the position as Lincoln’s de facto number two, if not indeed the government’s éminence grise, and he appeared a little more controlled in Washington than he had been at the drunken dinner with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Newcastle a few months before. Seward encouraged Russell to drop by the secretary of state’s office for a chat almost anytime he pleased, and when Russell had been in the capital for only two days, Seward took him to meet President Lincoln. The physically ungainly but utterly charming new head of state flattered Russell by telling him that “the London Times is one of the greatest powers in the world—in fact, I don’t know anything that has much more power, except perhaps the Mississippi. I am glad to know you as its minister.”
Russell met with everybody who was anybody, including the abolitionist firebrand Senator Charles Sumner, who was another close friend of Sam Ward. Dignitaries, members of Congress, and reporters flocked to meet Russell at the Willard Hotel, where he marveled, in passing, at the halls thick with office seekers and slick with spit from chewing tobacco.
One night the Lincolns invited Russell to dine at the White House along with Gen. Winfield Scott, now the commander of the Union Army, and several of the most important members of the cabinet. After dinner the men talked about the role of Britain in the crisis, hoping Russell would confirm their belief that “England was bound by her anti-slavery antecedents to discourage to the utmost any attempts by the South to establish its independence on a basis of slavery.” Russell hoped that might be so but knew there were many considerations. The interests of commerce and morality did not always coincide. The statesmen of Britain might need to be reminded what it was that so appalled them about the Southerners and their servants, but at that moment and for more than a year to come the Union that Lincoln and Seward wanted to preserve was to be one where slavery continued to exist. The idea that war would be waged to preserve what Bunch would call that “great fact in the history of the world,” the American experiment, was not nearly so compelling for the British public or its politicians.
Early on, Seward used Russell as a line of communication with the British public and with Her Majesty’s government. The Lincoln administration had been in office less than a month when Seward gave the Times man a long interview at the State Department. Seward knew that London and Paris had watched one state after another secede and then assemble into what seemed a whole as the Confederacy. Fort Sumter was under siege. The Federal government appeared to be paralyzed. But what the Europeans had to understand, Seward said, was that for four long months, from Lincoln’s election on November 6, 1860, to his inauguration on March 4, 1861, Southern sympathizers in the lame duck Buchanan administration had systematically laid traps for the incoming Republicans.
Seward was warming up to another of his bellicose threats. He wanted to make it clear to Britain and to Europe, through Russell’s dispatches, what a disastrous situation the new administration had inherited, and how determined the administration was to set it straight. He told Russell that Buchanan’s people had sent the U.S. Navy to far corners of the world and had stockpiled arms where Southern militias could seize them. They had stolen money from the national treasury. As Seward saw it, this was all part of a “deep conspiracy,” and as soon as Lincoln was elected, the men engaged in it set out to destroy the Union.
Seward told Russell to make no mistake: the Republican administration would not give an inch, and the Union would hold. But it would take time, and “the danger was that foreign powers would be led to imagine the Federal government was too weak to defend its rights, and that the attempt to destroy the Union and to set up a Southern Confederacy was successful.”
“In other words,” Russell told his readers, Seward feared that “Great Britain may recognize the Government established at Montgomery.” And then came the explicit challenge, so much like those Seward had made so many times before. He was ready, he said, “if needs be, to threaten Great Britain with war as the consequence of such recognition.”
Russell, when he wrote this up, had to question Seward’s grasp on reality. That same day Russell had watched newly enlisted Union troops parading around Washington with, as he saw it, precious little sign of military efficiency or fighting spirit. They were, he wrote, “starved, washed-out creatures.” All things considered, Russell found it “a matter of wonderment” that the secretary of state of “a nation which was in such imminent danger in its very capital, and which, with its chief and his cabinet, was almost at the mercy of the enemy,” had used such bellicose language in a report meant to be read by the most powerful governments in Europe. Yet, he concluded, “In all sincerity I think Mr. Seward meant it.”
When Russell dined with the Southern commissioners in Washington a few nights later, they told him they regarded Lincoln with contempt. They saw Seward as “the ablest and most unscrupulous of their enemies.” But in these early days of the war, before any shots had been fired, the Union secretary of state may have been outsmarting himself. His fear that Britain and other European nations might accept secession as a fait accompli was justified. But the great opponent of human bondage somehow failed to understand that the issue of slavery, and particularly the slave trade, was the most powerful tool he had to prevent British recognition of the South—if only he would use it. So sensitive was Seward to the risk that any talk of emancipation might inflame the critical slaveholding border states of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and parts of Virginia that he issued orders to his envoys in Europe prohibiting them from discussing the issue of slavery at all. Seward did not raise the question of slavery with Russell even in passing. But in the weeks ahead, William Howard Russell would not leave it alone.