WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL AND SAM WARD left Charleston at the end of April on an expedition to the plantation, deep in the Low Country among the rice fields near Beaufort, of William Henry Trescot. Trescot had not, in the end, become a Southern envoy to the Court of St. James’s and had come back to the gloomy comforts of his estates among the slaves, the alligators, and the Spanish moss. Russell, on his way there, was more fascinated by the journey than by the destination. The roads were rudimentary, and part of the trip was in a slave-rowed skiff in the dark of night, the slaves singing mournfully about laying their bodies down and giving up their souls, while the stream “flowing between the silent, houseless, rugged banks…put me in mind of the fancied voyage across the Styx.” When, finally, they arrived at the plantation, Mrs. Trescot was just back from the slave quarters, where she had delivered a baby. “When people talk of my having so many slaves, I always tell them it is the slaves who own me,” she said.
The daytime diversion organized for guests at Trescot’s was angling for drum fish. But that wasn’t really of much interest to Russell or, for that matter, to Trescot. They spent their time talking about their mutual friends at London clubs and, of course, about the war, until an old-timer from the marshes who’d come along on the trip told tales about harpooning the devilfish in those waters and nearly being carried away. When they got back to the plantation, they found that Edmund Rhett, another son of the fire-eater and brother of the editor of the Mercury, was paying a visit. He was “one of the most ultra and violent speakers against the Yankees I have yet heard,” Russell remembered. Rhett declared confidently that Britain must recognize the South before the cotton harvest of October.
The deeper Russell and Ward got into Dixie, the more they heard the refrain about British dependence on slave-grown Southern cotton repeated ad nauseam; and the more they discovered the ways the Southerners rationalized their peculiar institution, the more Russell learned to hate slavery with a passion he hadn’t felt before—the same passion that had arisen in the Charleston consul in the early days of his posting. “The misery and cruelty of the system,” Russell wrote in one of his letters to the Times, “are established by the advertisements for runaway Negroes, and by the description of the stigmata on their persons—whippings and brandings, scars and cuts.” (Very probably Bunch had shown him his collection of clippings.)
By the time Russell reached the Confederate capital, which was then still at Montgomery, Alabama, he could scarcely contain himself. He despised the city: “I have rarely seen a more dull, lifeless place; it looks like a small Russian town in the interior.” He loathed his hotel, the Exchange, where five men were crowded into a room with three beds and mattresses on the floor: “Had it not been for the flies, the fleas would have been intolerable, but one nuisance neutralized the other.” And the spectacle the next morning of a small-time slave trader auctioning off some field hands by a public fountain turned Russell’s stomach.
The sheer banality of the scene made it all the more vile. A few bystanders and a couple of interested customers looked on while the auctioneer touted a slave’s virtues as if he were a horse, then decided his fate for a fistful of dollars. “That nigger went cheap,” said one of the spectators. “Yes, sir! Niggers is cheap now, that’s a fact.” But Russell made no observation on the sudden decline in the price of Negroes. What ate at him was the same sense of personal, national, and religious humiliation that Bunch wrote about so often when he considered that these Southern monsters claimed some link to British heritage. “The use of the English tongue in such a transaction, and the idea of it taking place among a civilized Christian people, produced in me a feeling of inexpressible loathing and indignation,” wrote the man of the Times.
When Russell got to the faux Greek temple where the Confederate Congress met, he was brooding over what he’d just witnessed and just how much he detested the planter class he had come to know over the previous few weeks. “Assaulted by reason, by logic, argument, philanthropy, progress directed against his peculiar institutions, the Southerner at last is driven to a fanaticism—a sacred faith which is above all reason or logical attack in the propriety, righteousness, and divinity of slavery.”
A few minutes after Russell arrived in the chamber of the Confederate Congress, the speaker called for the session to be held in secret, and Russell was about to leave. But Congressman Edmund Rhett, the same fire-eater’s son he’d met on Trescot’s plantation, asked Russell to stay. “If the Times will support the South, we’ll accept you as a delegate,” he said. Russell, so furious he was barely able to speak, left the chamber.
Russell paid a call on Jefferson Davis in Montgomery, in a makeshift office with a piece of paper reading “President” pinned to the door, and was not impressed, so he wandered down the hall to the office of Attorney General Judah P. Benjamin, who struck him immediately as “clever, keen and, well, yes!”
“Mr. Benjamin is the most open, frank, and cordial of the Confederates whom I have yet met,” Russell wrote. “He is a short, stout man, with a full face, olive-colored and most decidedly Jewish features, with the brightest large black eyes.” His manner was “brisk, lively, agreeable.” Benjamin was ready to talk about all the issues of the day, and, like the renowned litigator—and card player—that he was, he intended to see how far he could push before someone pushed back.
The issue of the moment, as Bunch would have reminded Russell discreetly, was the authorization of privateers to fly the Confederate flag and pillage Yankee shipping. Russell said that when the North caught up with them, they’d be hanged as pirates.
“We have an easy remedy for that,” said Benjamin. “For any man under our flag whom the authorities of the United States dare to execute, we shall hang two of their people.”
Russell took this for the bluff that it was. But the larger question of how Europeans would handle those privateers, and whether the privateers would respect the British flag, was increasingly critical to London. For Great Britain, the basic purpose of the maritime power wielded by the Royal Navy was to assure the security of maritime commerce, and it worked hard to impose its vision of international law on all the seven seas. Britain’s ferocious opposition to the slave trade was part of that picture: if it banned the commerce in humans, then so must everyone else.
In many other ways, as well, the question of what flags, what navies, what rules must be respected was critical to the way Britain organized its business and its Empire. Five years before, when Lord Clarendon had negotiated the end of the Crimean War, the leading powers of Europe had joined in the Declaration of Paris: no privateers, respect for neutral shipping, and no acceptance of blockades that were not actively enforced by naval power. It was a declaration plainly biased in favor of those nations such as Britain and France that had very large navies, could therefore enforce blockades, and had no need for privateers. At the time, the United States had refused to sign on, and the Confederacy, of course, had not existed.
The chances were just about nil that the Royal Navy would recognize the validity of the licenses being handed out by Jefferson Davis to would-be buccaneers, much less respect the protection they were supposed to gain from the Confederate ensign. So Russell put the question to the Confederate attorney general in the simplest terms: What if Britain refuses to recognize the Confederate flag?
“If England thinks fit to declare privateers under our flag pirates, it would be nothing more or less than a declaration of war against us,” said Benjamin, “and we must meet it as best we can.”
“So Great Britain is in a pleasant condition,” Russell wrote afterward. “Mr. Seward is threatening us with war if we recognize the South, and the South declares that if we don’t recognize their flag, they will take it as an act of hostility.”
—
AT MONTGOMERY, RUSSELL boarded the Southern Republic for the long voyage down the Alabama River to Mobile, and it was on that ship made of kindling that he saw firsthand the evidence he’d been looking for of the transatlantic slave trade: the survivors of the voyage of the Clotilda presented to him by the contemptuous Captain Meaher.
“Well, now, you think those niggers I have aboard came from Africa? I’ll show you,” Meaher had said, calling to a young boy with tribal scars and filed teeth. “What’s your name?” the captain asked.
“Bully,” said the boy.
“Where were you born?”
“Born in South Carolina, sir.”
“There, you see,” said the captain. “I’ve got a lot of these black South Carolina niggers aboard.”
—
WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL went to Louisiana, Mississippi, and back into the North at Cairo, Illinois. He spent long hours with the British consuls he met along the way, and he met everybody who was anybody, including John Slidell, the puppet-master of the national Democratic convention in Charleston. There was no shortage of information, opinion, and gossip, and from it all Russell came away with two firm conclusions, which he repeatedly conveyed to his readers and which aligned directly with the analysis of Consul Bunch.
First, the Southerners would fight, and as hard and as long as they possibly could. Many Northerners, notably Seward, had tried to convince themselves otherwise. The Confederates, they said, were like wayward children who would come back to the family soon enough. But they were wrong. Russell figured that the secessionist Southerners—or “Seceshers,” as he called them—would have to be defeated utterly and absolutely if the Confederate states were ever to be reunited with the North.
Second, the Southerners would cling to the institution of slavery, which Russell called “a cancer.” He also believed that, whether in secret or in public, they would reopen the Middle Passage from Africa. Again he repeated a refrain that Bunch had made his own in confidential correspondence. “Of one thing there can be no doubt,” Russell told his readers, “a slave state cannot long exist without a Slave Trade.”