MORE THAN THREE YEARS OF war remained, but Britain never again experienced a moment of crisis that brought it so close to siding openly against the Union as the Trent Affair. One reason, certainly, is that, even with Robert Bunch sidelined, Lord Lyons would not let the slave-trade issue die. He continued to be the bearer of the inconvenient truth about it, and with his guidance the issue became, for the first time, a source of understanding instead of anger between the Union and the Crown.
In early 1862, as Lyons understood, the Lincoln administration needed to send some signals to a U.S. Congress increasingly dominated by radical abolitionists. The administration wanted to show it was willing to change the old status quo of slavery, even if it was far from ready to opt for emancipation, and the issue of the transatlantic trade was perfect for that purpose.
Already, months before, Seward had suggested the Federal government would drop objections to British warships searching suspected slavers flying the American flag. But Lyons had been suspicious of Seward’s commitment. Then, at the beginning of the year, Nathaniel “Lucky Nat” Gordon was put on trial in New York. The renegade sea captain from Maine who had narrowly evaded capture by a British man-o’-war in 1850 off the coast of Brazil, and who had lost 75 percent of his human cargo sailing to Cuba a decade later, had been captured on the Erie when it was intercepted by the Mohican and the San Jacinto off the coast of Africa. The court convicted Gordon of slaving, defined as piracy and a capital crime, and President Lincoln rejected all calls for clemency. “Any man who, for paltry gain and stimulated only by avarice, can rob Africa of her children to sell them into interminable bondage, I will never pardon,” he declared. In February 1862, Gordon became the first and the only American ship captain ever hanged for his crimes in the Middle Passage.
Lyons had learned to read Seward’s moods and his political needs, and after the Trent Affair he detected a certain sobering of the secretary’s attitude toward the British. “He is not at all a cruel or vindictive man, but he likes all things which make him feel that he has power,” Lyons told Lord John Russell. “I hope we may effect something practical as regards the Slave Trade while he is in the mood.” When the British proposed a treaty calling for mutual “visit and search,” which had always been the red line U.S. administrations refused to cross, Lincoln and Seward seized on it immediately. Their only caveat: they wanted to make it appear as if they had taken the initiative. In a matter of weeks Lyons reported that the treaty had a good chance of passing the Senate. “We are not likely to have so good a chance again,” he reported to Russell on March 31. “I think therefore that I shall be doing what you wish if I sign it at once.”
On April 25 Lyons wrote, “Yesterday was the anniversary of my arrival three years ago at Washington. I celebrated it by signing the Treaty for the Suppression of the Slave Trade.” The American flag—at least, the Union flag—would no longer provide protection for traffickers in human flesh. A few days later Lyons was even more exultant. “The Slave Trade treaty has met with much more general approval than I expected,” he said. “It has excited quite an enthusiasm among the anti-slavery party. I have never seen Mr. Seward apparently so much pleased. Mr. Sumner, who had had the management of it in the Senate, was moved to tears when he came to tell me that it had passed unanimously.”
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WHAT REMAINED TO be seen was how this new treaty would affect attitudes in the British cabinet. The Liberal MP William Edward Forster asked the government to state its view on the record for Parliament. The job was left to recently appointed Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir Austen Henry Layard. “The treaty is of a highly satisfactory nature,” he said. “It gives the right of search to British cruisers, and there is every reason to hope that the Slave Trade, which has been carried on to so great an extent lately under the United States flag, will be suppressed.”
Lord Palmerston, who was in Parliament that day, did not speak about the treaty. The county of Lancashire, at the heart of the British textile industry, was starting to feel the strain of cotton shortages. Moves to open up the Indian and Egyptian sources of fiber had not yet provided enough. The Confederate forces were continuing to rack up victories on the battlefield. Palmerston decided to reserve judgment.
The editorials in the London Times reflected these conflicting views and emotions. William Howard Russell’s astute observations of the war had been cut short after less than a year on the ground in the Americas. He could no longer get permission to travel with the Union military after his account of the debacle at Bull Run. His name was touched by scandal when his friend and traveling companion through the South, Sam Ward, was said to have profited from information about the war that Russell had sent him. Russell’s wife and children needed him desperately. And the editorial line taken by John Delane, editor of the Times, was so relentlessly pro-secession that it hardly seemed worth reporting contrary views. As early as September 1861, only eight weeks after Bull Run, Russell had written privately to Delane: “It is quite obvious, I think, that the North will succeed in reducing the South.” But Delane was not going to publish anything like that. Now the Times cast the slave-trade treaty not as a triumph for British and Union diplomacy, but as “the first fruit of secession” and a victory over the North, thanks to the pressures of the rebellion.
Lord Russell, now Earl Russell, had made his views on the conflict increasingly clear. He wanted stability. He wanted an end to the war. If there were an end to the upstart, arrogant American Republic, that would suit him as well. He wished the whole problem would just go away so he could turn his attention fully to pressing issues in Europe and Asia.
Palmerston’s position was much harder to figure.
In July, William Lindsay, one of the most strident pro-Confederate voices in Parliament, tried to push through a motion that called for Britain to “mediate” an end to a hopeless war. But Palmerston objected. He didn’t like the grandstanding or, as he put it, the expressions of opinion at inopportune moments. The South had not yet established its independence, he said, and, therefore, it could not be recognized. The motion, if it carried, would put England on the side of the South and make any future effort (or pretense) at mediation that much harder. When he finished speaking, the motion was withdrawn.
Behind the scenes, Palmerston had let Earl Russell persuade him—or let Earl Russell believe he had persuaded him—that a plan for mediation must go ahead. It would not be for show, but would be a substantive initiative backed enthusiastically by the French and very probably by the other great European powers as well. Throughout September Russell and Palmerston seemed in perfect accord as they pulled together their coalition of mediators. Yet Palmerston still hesitated. What he wanted, in fact, was a battlefield victory by the Confederates so convincing that it would settle the problem for him. Gen. Robert E. Lee was pushing into Maryland, and that action could provide it. He might flank Washington and force a settlement. But on September 17 near Antietam Creek 26,000 men were killed, were wounded, or went missing in a single day of fighting, and Lee fell back into Virginia.
The factory workers and small merchants of Lancashire were now in desperate condition. Talk of pain had turned to talk of famine. Hundreds of thousands of people were out of work, and there was no hope that the winter would be anything but bleak.
The partisans of the South took encouragement from the much-quoted remarks of Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone in October 1862: “There is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an Army; they are making, it appears, a Navy; and they have made—what is more than either—they have made a Nation.” But Gladstone’s speech did not start the wheels of industry rolling in Lancashire. It actually stopped those few that still were turning. Factory owners did not want to pay high prices for cotton, only to see the market open up suddenly, destroying their profits, which is what would happen in the short term if Britain declared for the Confederacy. So they waited, and more people lost their jobs. As Bunch and the other consuls were reporting, the unreliability of supplies was tied less to the Union blockade in the early years of the war, which was not very effective, than to the continuing embargo on cotton supported by Southern planters and politicians convinced they could squeeze Lancashire until London would bend to their will. This strategy did not endear them to the British government.
As the cabinet meeting to decide on mediation was postponed and then postponed again, even Earl Russell began to grow more cautious. The Confederates had created a nation, perhaps, but the chances that nation would get the alliance with Britain that it so desperately needed were dwindling rapidly.
Palmerston was listening to other voices now, among them that of Lord Lyons, who had finally taken a break from Washington and was in England dividing his time between London and Arundel Castle. Within the cabinet itself, Palmerston looked to Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Secretary of War, as his commonsense anti-slavery conscience. And in that small circle of powerful men another figure loomed large, one who had not been in the cabinet for years but whose presence was felt by all: Lord Clarendon, who had worked so closely and so well for so long with Consul Bunch, and for longer still with Palmerston. It had been to Clarendon, in fact, that Bunch had addressed his Dispatch No. 10 in 1857 on the price of Negroes and the near certainty that Southern states would, if they could, reopen the slave trade with Africa. Clarendon and Secretary of War Cornewall Lewis were brothers-in-law, and very close friends, and they worked together in private to sway the government against intervention.
Palmerston, at just this moment, also turned to Clarendon to act as a critical go-between with the Earl of Derby, leader of the Conservatives in Parliament. Would they support British mediation? Clarendon came back with the message that Derby thought a British intervention of any sort in the American war “premature.”
Clarendon could read Palmerston’s moods like no one else. He knew that it would be fruitless to argue any case as a friend of the North. Seward, among others, had made that almost impossible. The debate would hinge on what made sense in Britain in domestic political terms, as well as what made sense economically. And in the background, always, would be the deep residual dislike, which did not need to be stated too crassly or too often, for the slave-owning and very probably the slave-trading South.
“Johnny [Russell] always loves to do something when to do nothing is prudent,” Clarendon wrote to Lewis, congratulating him on making clear to the cabinet “the idiotic position” in which Britain would find itself when the North rejected the plan, as it certainly would, and when the British government showed that, really, it had no follow-up strategy short of starting a war it did not want to fight.
News had arrived of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation announced on September 22, but at first it was not seen as a clear blow for freedom. Instead, it seemed a bid by the Yankees to provoke the dreaded “servile insurrection” in the South. The British might have come to this sinister conclusion on their own. After all, Palmerston had suggested that Great Britain could do precisely that as part of military strategy if it had gone to war against the United States in 1856, and Cornewall Lewis had held similar views back then. But in 1862 it was, once again, U.S. secretary of state William Seward who had undermined to the point of implosion any moral capital the Emancipation Proclamation might have had.
Seward had made the common American mistake of believing that Her Majesty’s government at all times and in all ways was focused on nothing but money and cotton. Over the summer Seward had used emancipation not as a promise but as a threat, suggesting that if the British tried to meddle in the war, Washington would indeed incite the dread “servile insurrection,” and then there would be no cotton for British mills for a very long time. Seward occasionally even insisted he wanted to bring the South back into the Union with its slaves still in bondage so they could produce cotton for Britain, as if that would buy off British opinion. As a result, even Lyons at first doubted the sincerity and the morality of the September Emancipation Proclamation. Within the cabinet, certainly, the North gained no sympathy with its plans for emancipation in the South.
But Secretary of War Cornewall Lewis, wisely, turned the issue on its head. If a slave rebellion was, indeed, what the Union meant to incite, then that showed the extreme bitterness that existed between North and South, which made impossible any “calm consideration” by the belligerents of Russell’s plans for mediation or armistice. Now Lewis had Palmerston’s ear. If the North should by some miracle concede the independence of the South, he said, Great Britain would be midwife to a slaveholding republic. Therefore, the only policy that could be justified would be strict neutrality. Palmerston listened closely and told Russell he was inclined to agree.
Palmerston was bothered by “the difficulty about slavery,” he wrote to Russell in early November. He recalled the way Southerners had demanded that slaves who landed on British territory—whether Canada, the Bahamas, or elsewhere—must be returned to their owners. There was no way the British people could ever support such a thing, Palmerston said. Lord Russell tried to make the argument that if Britain did not take the lead on this mediation effort to end the war (in the Confederacy’s favor), then France would step forward. Palmerston said he was ready to let that happen. “The French Government are more free from the shackles of principle and of right and wrong on these matters,” said Palmerston, than his government was.
Finally, after almost two months of maneuvering, the cabinet met formally on November 11, and Earl Russell made his case for Britain to advocate a six-month armistice in the American conflict. When Palmerston spoke, he did so only briefly, talking mainly about his wish to alleviate the suffering of the people of Lancashire.
“The proposal was now thrown before the Cabinet, who proceeded to pick it to pieces,” Cornewall Lewis wrote afterward. Except for Gladstone and a couple of others, “everybody present threw a stone at it of greater or less size.” Since the proposed solution would have involved a lifting of the blockade, it was so obviously pro-Southern that it was never going to be accepted, at least not peacefully. “After a time, Palmerston saw that the general feeling of the cabinet was against being a party to the representation, and he capitulated. I do not think his support was very sincere. It certainly was not hearty.” Palmerston’s main motive, in Lewis’s view, was “to seem to support” Russell.
There would be no mediation; there would be no armistice. There would be, almost certainly, no British intervention in the war.
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THROUGH ALL THE weeks of diplomatic maneuvering in the fall of 1862, the specter of the Middle Passage and its millions of victims lingered in the background and could not be dispelled. The shackles of right and wrong held fast, and the message Bunch had pushed on Clarendon and Lyons—that the Confederates would reopen the Middle Passage with all its horrors no matter what they said officially or unofficially—had kept Britain chained to its principles.
At the same time, the Southerners behaved as if they were working from Robert Bunch’s script for Confederate suicide.
Even the cosmopolitan SJudah P. Benjamin refused to realize that his government’s insistence not only on keeping slaves, but on keeping open the possibility of the slave trade with Africa, would cost the Confederacy everything.
One week before the final cabinet meeting about Russell’s armistice proposal, the Confederate envoy to London, James Mason, wrote to Benjamin about what was to him a very disturbing conversation. He had dined with Lord Donoughmore, a Conservative whom he thought “a very intelligent gentleman, and a warm and earnest friend of the South.” But Donoughmore had told Mason bluntly that if by some chance the Crown did move toward recognition of the Confederacy with the usual treaty of “amity and commerce,” the government would “require as a sine qua non the introduction of a clause stipulating against the African slave trade.”
One can imagine Mason, at that point, looking for someplace to spit out his tobacco. Because even Mason, who had been a potent symbol as a prisoner from the Trent but a disaster as a diplomat in London, was wise enough to see that Donoughmore was telling him something very important. And Donoughmore, lest Mason miss the point, was perfectly blunt: “Lord Palmerston will not enter into a treaty with you unless you agree in that treaty not to permit the African Slave Trade.”
Mason knew the boilerplate response and gave it: the Confederate constitution banned the slave trade with Africa.
Donoughmore said that was all well and good, and everybody understood the official position, but it wasn’t enough: “The sentiment of England on this subject is such that no minister could hold his place for a day if he negotiated a treaty without such a clause.” As Bunch and Lyons had reported from the time the Confederate constitution was written, its guarantees against the African trade were legally ephemeral and at any rate unenforceable among such a loose agglomeration of sovereignties. If South Carolina or Louisiana or any other state wanted to reopen the gruesome trade with Congo, there would be very little that the Confederate government could or would do about it. So the British would accept nothing less than an explicit commitment to the Crown that no slaves would be imported, and even that might not be enough.
Donoughmore continued to be blunt: even if the Palmerston government fell, and the Tories went in, any treaty recognizing the Confederacy would have to have that unequivocal stipulation that the African trade would not be reopened.
Mason could not guarantee that his government would sign such a document. And Benjamin, who was now the Confederate secretary of state and still a bit too much the lawyer, would not budge on the point after he received Mason’s letter. Benjamin declared that the South’s position on the issue was clear enough in its constitution. To go beyond that, or reiterate it, was unconstitutional and unacceptable, and any further amendments would be for the individual member states of the Confederacy to decide. Benjamin could not have known about the dispatches from Charleston and Washington that had discredited that constitution even before it was written.
In South Carolina, Robert Bunch had no chance to celebrate his victory. Lincoln’s announcement of emancipation had heightened the hysteria about a slave uprising. In the weeks that followed, people waited for the decree to take effect on January 1, 1863, as if Doomsday had been marked on the calendar. Were the ghosts of Saint-Domingue and of Denmark Vesey about to rage through the plantations of the South? Bunch did not think so. He wrote that he saw little possibility of an insurrection “in this neighborhood, at least,” and he was soon proved right again. But Southerners were more riled than ever by Britain’s refusal to recognize their cause, and Bunch had to work harder than ever to convince the good people of South Carolina that he remained a friend. British warships now paid frequent, seemingly friendly visits to the harbor to pick up dispatches. Bunch introduced the officers to Gen. Beauregard, Col. Ripley, and other stalwart defenders of the city. Occasionally Bunch traveled aboard the ships outside the harbor to look at the blockade, which he often found wanting. He shared that information with the people in Charleston who thought they knew him so well. And he knew, as everyone knew, that the Union would soon lay siege to the city. On the last day of 1862, in a letter to the commander of one of the British warships in the area, Bunch warned that the Royal Navy might soon be called upon to help evacuate British citizens before the Yankee attack began.