AT THE END OF JULY 1861, William Henry Trescot saw the train rolling into Gordonsville, Virginia, on its journey from the Battle of Bull Run back to Richmond. The wounded filled the cars, their groaning a chorus of pain. Some of them lingered on the verge of death. Many had died along the way. Any victory has its hideous faces, and these were some from the triumph at Manassas. Already there were recriminations about Beauregard’s failure to advance on Washington after the battle, but, in truth, his forces were spent.
Trescot, following up on his conversation with Bunch and de Belligny, had traveled for two days from Charleston to Richmond, only to be told that Jefferson Davis, the man he had come to talk to, had gone to the battle. Trescot was on his way to find him there, when he learned at Gordonsville that Davis was on the train that had just passed by, accompanying the wounded. Trescot turned around and headed back.
When he finally caught up with the president of the Confederacy and presented the proposal given him by Consuls Bunch and de Belligny, Davis was suspicious. The first thing he wanted to know was why the British weren’t raising this issue with his official representatives in London. Trescot reminded him that those commissioners had not yet been received officially. Seward had insisted that receiving them officially would be tantamount to recognition of the Confederacy, and recognition was the same as an alliance with the rebels, which would mean war between Britain and the United States—hence, this mission through back channels.
None of this did much to improve Davis’s dim view of the affair. So Trescot suggested that Davis let it be known informally that he favored the proposal about maritime rights, and then his formal representatives in London could deliver the official word and be received, and that could set in motion the recognition and the alliance that the South so badly needed. Still, Davis was noncommittal, referring the matter to his cabinet and the Confederate Congress. It wasn’t the solution Trescot had sought, which would, indeed, have opened negotiations between the Crown and the Confederacy. But from London’s point of view, it worked.
The Confederate Congress approved the measures a couple of weeks later, recognizing three of the four key points in the 1856 Declaration of Paris. The South would not abolish privateering, but it would respect neutral flags, it would respect neutral goods, and it would recognize that a blockade, in order to be binding, must be maintained with sufficient force to prevent access to the coast.
—
CHARLESTON WAS HELL in August, but Robert Bunch was, more or less, in heaven. He had been entrusted with a hugely important diplomatic assignment, a secret one that had to be handled with enormous tact. For a man of such relentless ambition, this was a moment to be savored and exploited. Already he saw this as the ticket he needed to promotion, perhaps to his own legation. He had taken the initiatives that were needed and had ignored those that were not, fending off the foolish idea from London that he should make the idiot Governor Pickens his emissary. He had turned to his old friend William Henry Trescot, and Trescot had done a masterful job. Nobody who did not need to know would know about the mission, and those who did know would thank Bunch for it.
“We guarded as scrupulously as it was possible against the possibility of our action being traced,” Bunch wrote to Lyons. Jefferson Davis had had to agree to keep the initiative under wraps before he was even allowed to know what it was. “We also made a positive stipulation that France and England were not to be alluded to,” Bunch wrote. Lyons believed the job was well done.
—
AS OCCASIONALLY HAPPENED, Lord Palmerston seemed to be thinking out loud in the House of Commons. On this particular day, July 26, 1861, Palmerston had been listening to a raucous debate about the slave trade around the world and what must be done to stop it. There was talk of Indian coolies smuggled by the French to the island of Réunion; there was talk about whether to pay to put a consul in Mozambique to try to keep the Portuguese in line; and there were many strong opinions, of course, about the impact of the widening “disruption of the American Republic” on the future of slavery and the slave trade.
The Radical UP William Edward Forster took a direct shot at the South and said that he would “look forward with great fear to the revival of the slave trade” if the Southern states should succeed in breaking away from the Union. He pointed to the fact that “Mr. Yancey, the leading Commissioner to Europe of the so-called Southern Confederacy,” had proposed in years past to do away with the American laws against the slave trade.
Finally, Palmerston rose to speak, rambling on a bit about coolies, about France, and about Spain before finally turning his sights on America. He recited all the frustrations Britain had faced as slavers flew the American flag, the British were barred from searching them, and U.S. Navy cruisers failed to capture them.
“It was the spirit of the South which animated these expeditions,” said Palmerston, and if the North should triumph, he had hopes that such a victory would end American involvement in the trade. But Palmerston added, “I do not believe that there is any real importation of slaves in the Southern States of America.” It was clear he did not want to consider that possibility. “Cuba is now the only plague spot in the world,” he said.
The reporting of Bunch, the reminders from Lyons, and the remonstrances of Radicals such as Forster seemed to have made little impression.
A day or so later William Howard Russell’s account of the Battle of Manassas reached London, and Palmerston scrawled a note that was forwarded to Lyons. “The defeat at Bulls [sic] Run, or rather at Yankees [sic] Run, proves two things,” he said. “First, that to bring together many thousand men and put uniforms on their backs and muskets in their hands is not to make an army. Disciplined, experienced officers and confidence in the steadiness of their comrades are necessary to make an army fight and stand. Secondly, that the unionist cause is not in the hearts of the mass of the population of the North.”
“The Americans are not cowards,” said Palmerston. Individually they were as brave as anyone, “and it is not easy to believe that if they had felt they were fighting for a great national interest, they would have run away as they did from the battle or that whole regiments would have quietly wandered away home just before the fight was to begin. The truth is, the North are fighting for an idea chiefly entertained by newspaper writers and by professional politicians, while the South are fighting for what they consider, rightly or wrongly, vital interests.”
And yet, despite Palmerston’s doubts about the slave trade to the Confederate states, and despite this lukewarm assessment of the Union fighting forces, Her Majesty’s government was not going to give the South the support it needed unless insults and provocations by the North forced it to do so.