Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

So when news of the Trent boarding reached Britain on November 28, 1861, the prime minister, Lord Henry John Temple Palmerston, immediately drafted an ultimatum and ordered a squadron of steamers and 7,000 troops readied to send to Canada. On December 19 the British minister in Washington, Lord Richard Lyons, handed Seward a note from Earl Russell (who had by this point inherited the family earldom) demanding immediate redress—“namely, the liberation of the four gentlemen and their delivery to your lordship, in order that they may again be placed under British protection, and a suitable apology for the aggression which has been committed”—or else Lyons was instructed to break off diplomatic relations and return to London. “If Commodore Wilkes designed making a sensation he succeeded to his heart’s content,” wrote Edwin de Leon, the Confederacy’s chief propagandist in Britain. “The usually apathetic Englishmen were roused to a sudden frenzy by this insult to their flag, such as I had never witnessed in them before.”16

Seward was always happy to talk about war with Britain, but with the reality of the situation staring him in the face, he reluctantly proceeded to eat his words. Seward consulted with McClellan, who advised him that the United States was in no position to fight the Confederates along the Ohio and the Potomac and simultaneously fight a British army along the St. Lawrence. There was no doubt that the British could muster more than sufficient forces in Canada to cause serious trouble. Up until the 1840s, the British government had left the defense of Canada largely in the hands of local militia, and much of that militia was as disorganized and ragtag as its counterparts across the border. The Crimean War taught the British the valuable lesson of relying on well-organized colonial auxiliary forces to sustain its far-flung empire, and in 1855 the Canadian Militia Act allowed the governor-general of Canada to reorganize the Canadian militia around a core of 5,000 volunteers who were to be armed and uniformed on a par with British regulars.17

When the Trent affair exploded, the Canadian Volunteer Militia was immediately called out, and Palmerston’s troops were shipped to New Brunswick; another 35,000 Canadian volunteers were called up, and an additional 11,000 British regulars were soon on their way across the Atlantic. These were not forces that either Lincoln or Seward wanted to tangle with, and on December 25, Lincoln met with his cabinet and decided to swallow their humiliation. Mason and Slidell were released and placed on board a ship bound for Southampton, England, Wilkes was made to bear the blame for the seizure of the Trent for having acted “upon his own suggestions of duty,” and the crisis relaxed. Mason and Slidell, who had been incarcerated at Fort Warren in Boston harbor, were retrieved by a British steamer on January 8 and made their way to London without any further interruptions. Still, it had been a near thing.18

The international ill temper created by the Federal blockade and its problems seemed to set every diplomatic wind blowing in the Confederacy’s favor. The landed English aristocracy sympathized with what they saw as a corresponding plantation aristocracy in the South, and they were not sad at the prospect of the American republic demonstrating what they had all along insisted was the inevitable fate of all popular democracies—instability, faction, division, civil war, and dismemberment. The aristocratic regimes of Europe were determined to put down anything which looked like liberal revolutions—in Spain, in Poland, in Russia, and all across Europe in 1848. In Britain, the traditional powers of an elected Parliament exerted the strongest check on monarchical authority, and liberalism there had great champions in the philosopher John Stuart Mill and the free-market capitalists of the Manchester School, Richard Cobden and John Bright. But Britain remained a far cry from liberal democracy. Despite a widening of voting rights in the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the repeal of the Tory aristocracy’s chief economic bulwark, the Corn Laws, in 1848, it remained true that “the great institutions of society, the church… primogeniture, the house of peers, though threatened, are not overthrown.”19

Not only not overthrown, but the American Civil War seemed likely to remove the principal bad example in the path of Tory privilege. In the House of Commons, Sir John Ramsden happily greeted the American Civil War as the bursting of “the great republican bubble,” and the Times of London, the great mouthpiece of Tory reaction, offered its considered opinion that the self-destruction of “the American Colossus” would be the “riddance of a nightmare” for all monarchies. Henry Adams found that “British society had begun with violent social prejudice against Lincoln, Seward, and all the Republican leaders except Sumner. … Every one waited to see Lincoln and his hirelings disappear in one vast debacle.” On Commemoration Day at Oxford, the custom “of cheering and hissing the different names of popular or odious public men as they are proposed” earned Jefferson Davis “tumultuous and unanimous applause” while the name of Lincoln “was greeted with hisses and groans.”20

“The American Eagle,” remembered the Confederate propagandist Edwin de Leon, “was a bird, they thought, whose wings would bear clipping,” and to the aristocrats, “the supposed failure of the American experiment was a source of joy.” British soldiers, among them Lieutenant Colonel Garnet Wolseley (who would eventually rise to become the most famous British general of the Victorian age) and Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Fremantle, slipped through the Union blockade to attach themselves to the Confederate army as military observers. There they came to admire the lofty and chivalric principles of war they thought they saw practiced by the Southern generals. Fremantle found Robert E. Lee the very embodiment of a proper British officer, even down to his religion. “General Lee is, almost without exception, the handsomest man of his age I ever saw. … He is a perfect gentlemen in every respect.” Fremantle added with evident gratification that Lee “is a member