Owen Wister – The Complete Collection

Chapter 12

We remembered Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston in the British Government, and their fellow aristocrats in British society; we remembered the aristocratic British press--The Times notably, because the most powerful--these are what we saw, felt, and remembered, because they were not with us, and were able to hurt us in the days when our friends were not yet able to help us. They made welcome the Southerners who came over in the interests of the South, they listened to the Southern propaganda. Why? Because the South was the American version of their aristocratic creed. To those who came over in the interests of the North and of the Union they turned a cold shoulder, because they represented Democracy; moreover, a Dis-United States would prove in commerce a less formidable competitor. To Captain Bullock, the able and energetic Southerner who put through in England the building and launching of those Confederate cruisers which sank our ships and destroyed our merchant marine, and to Mason and Slidell, the doors of dukes opened pleasantly; Beecher and our other emissaries mostly had to dine beneath uncoroneted roofs.

In the pages of Henry Adams, and of Charles Francis Adams his brother, you can read of what they, as young men, encountered in London, and what they saw their father have to put up with there, both from English society and the English Government. Their father was our new minister to England, appointed by Lincoln. He arrived just after our Civil War had begun. I have heard his sons talk about it familiarly, and it is all to be found in their writings.

Nobody knows how to be disagreeable quite so well as the English gentleman, except the English lady. They can do it with the nicety of a medicine dropper. They can administer the precise quantum suff. in every case. In the society of English gentlemen and ladies Mr. Adams by his official position was obliged to move. They left him out as much as they could, but, being the American Minister, he couldn't be left out altogether. At their dinners and functions he had to hear open expressions of joy at the news of Southern victories, he had to receive slights both veiled and unveiled, and all this he had to bear with equanimity. Sometimes he did leave the room; but with dignity and discretion. A false step, a "break," might have led to a request for his recall. He knew that his constant presence, close to the English Government, was vital to our cause. Russell and Palmerston were by turns insolent and shifty, and once on the very brink of recognizing the Southern Confederacy as an independent nation. Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a speech at Newcastle, virtually did recognize it. You will be proud of Mr. Adams if you read how he bore himself and fulfilled his appallingly delicate and difficult mission. He was an American who knew how to behave himself, and he behaved himself all the time; while the English had a way of turning their behavior on and off, like the hot water. Mr. Adams was no admirer of "shirt-sleeves" diplomacy. His diplomacy wore a coat. Our experiments in "shirt-sleeves" diplomacy fail to show that it accomplishes anything which diplomacy decently dressed would not accomplish more satisfactorily. Upon Mr. Adams fell some consequences of previous American crudities, of which I shall speak later.

Lincoln had declared a blockade on Southern ports before Mr. Adams arrived in London. Upon his arrival he found England had proclaimed her neutrality and recognized the belligerency of the South. This dismayed Mr. Adams and excited the whole North, because feeling ran too high to perceive this first act on England's part to be really favorable to us; she could not recognize our blockade, which stopped her getting Southern cotton, unless she recognized that the South was in a state of war with us. Looked at quietly, this act of England's helped us and hurt herself, for it deprived her of cotton.

It was not with this, but with the reception and treatment of Mr. Adams that the true hostility began. Slights to him were slaps at us, sympathy with the South was an active moral injury to our cause, even if it was mostly an undertone, politically. Then all of a sudden, something that we did ourselves changed the undertone to a loud overtone, and we just grazed England's declaring war on us. Had she done so, then indeed it had been all up with us. This incident is the comic going-back on our own doctrine of 1812, to which I have alluded above.

On November 8, 1861, Captain Charles Wilkes of the American steam sloop San Jacinto, fired a shot across the bow of the British vessel Trent, stopped her on the high seas, and took four passengers off her, and brought them prisoners to Fort Warren, in Boston harbor. Mason and Slidell are the two we remember, Confederate envoys to France and Great Britain. Over this the whole North burst into glorious joy. Our Secretary of the Navy wrote to Wilkes his congratulations, Congress voted its thanks to him, governors and judges laureled him with oratory at banquets, he was feasted with meat and drink all over the place, and, though his years were sixty-three, ardent females probably rushed forth from throngs and kissed him with the purest intentions: heroes have no age. But presently the Trent arrived in England, and the British lion was aroused. We had violated international law, and insulted the British flag. Palmerston wrote us a letter--or Russell, I forget which wrote it-- a letter that would have left us no choice but to fight. But Queen Victoria had to sign it before it went. "My lord," she said, "you must know that I will agree to no paper that means war with the United States." So this didn't go, but another in its stead, pretty stiff, naturally, yet still possible for us to swallow. Some didn't want to swallow even this; but Lincoln, humorous and wise, said, "Gentlemen, one war at a time;" and so we made due restitution, and Messrs. Mason and Slidell went their way to France and England, free to bring about action against us there if they could manage it. Captain Wilkes must have been a good fellow. His picture suggests this. England, in her English heart, really liked what he had done, it was in its gallant flagrancy so remarkably like her own doings--though she couldn't, naturally, permit such a performance to pass; and a few years afterwards, for his services in the cause of exploration, her Royal Geographical Society gave him a gold medal! Yes; the whole thing is comic--to-day; for us, to-day, the point of it is, that the English Queen saved us from a war with England.

Within a year, something happened that was not comic. Lord John Russell, though warned and warned, let the Alabama slip away to sea, where she proceeded to send our merchant ships to the bottom, until the Kearsarge sent her herself to the bottom. She had been built at Liverpool in the face of an English law which no quibbling could disguise to anybody except to Lord John Russell and to those who, like him, leaned to the South. Ten years later, this leaning cost England fifteen million dollars in damages.

Let us now listen to what our British friends were saying in those years before Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. His blockade had brought immediate and heavy distress upon many English workmen and their families. That had been April 19, 1861. By September, five sixths of the Lancashire cotton-spinners were out of work, or working half time. Their starvation and that of their wives and children could be stemmed by charity alone. I have talked with people who saw those thousands in their suffering. Yet those thousands bore it. They somehow looked through Lincoln's express disavowal of any intention to interfere with slavery, and saw that at bottom our war was indeed against slavery, that slavery was behind the Southern camouflage about independence, and behind the Northern slogan about preserving the Union. They saw and they stuck. "Rarely," writes Charles Francis Adams, "in the history of mankind, has there been a more creditable exhibition of human sympathy." France was likewise damaged by our blockade; and Napoleon III would have liked to recognize the South. He established, through Maximilian, an empire in Mexico, behind which lay hostility to our Democracy. He wished us defeat; but he was afraid to move without England, to whom he made a succession of indirect approaches. These nearly came to something towards the close of 1862. It was on October 7th that Gladstone spoke at Newcastle about Jefferson Davis having made a nation. Yet, after all, England didn't budge, and thus held Napoleon back. From France in the end the South got neither ships nor recognition, in spite of his deceitful connivance and desire; Napoleon flirted a while with Slidell, but grew cold when he saw no chance of English cooperation.

Besides John Bright and Cobden, we had other English friends of influence and celebrity: John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hughes, Goldwin Smith, Leslie Stephen, Robert Gladstone, Frederic Harrison are some of them. All from the first supported us. All from the first worked and spoke for us. The Union and Emancipation Society was founded. "Your Committee," says its final report when the war was ended, "have issued and circulated upwards of four hundred thousand books, pamphlets, and tracts... and nearly five hundred official and public meetings have been held..." The president of this Society, Mr. Potter, spent thirty thousand dollars in the cause, and at a time when times were hard and fortunes as well as cotton-spinners in distress through our blockade. Another member of the Society, Mr. Thompson, writes of one of the public meetings: "... I addressed a crowded assembly of unemployed operatives in the town of Heywood, near Manchester, and spoke to them for two hours about the Slaveholders' Rebellion. They were united and vociferous in the expression of their willingness to suffer all hardships consequent upon a want of cotton, if thereby the liberty of the victims of Southern despotism might be promoted. All honor to the half million of our working population in Lancashire, Cheshire, and elsewhere, who are bearing with heroic fortitude the privation which your war has entailed upon them!... Their sublime resignation, their self-forgetfulness, their observance of law, their whole-souled love of the cause of human freedom, their quick and clear perception of the merits of the question between the North and the South... are extorting the admiration of all classes of the community ..."

How much of all this do you ever hear from the people who remember the Alabama?

Strictly in accord with Beecher's vivid summary of the true England in our Civil War, are some passages of a letter from Mr. John Bigelow, who was at that time our Consul-General at Paris, and whose impressions, written to our Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, on February 6, 1863, are interesting to compare with what Beecher says in that letter, from which I have already given extracts.

"The anti-slavery meetings in England are having their effect upon the Government already... The Paris correspondent of the London Post also came to my house on Wednesday evening... He says... that there are about a dozen persons who by their position and influence over the organs of public opinion have produced all the bad feeling and treacherous con- duct of England towards America. They are people who, as members of the Government in times past, have been bullied by the U. S.... They are not entirely ignorant that the class who are now trying to overthrow the Government were mainly responsible for the brutality, but they think we as a nation are disposed to bully, and they are disposed to assist in any policy that may dismember and weaken us. These scars of wounded pride, however, have been carefully concealed from the public, who therefore cannot be readily made to see why, when the President has distinctly made the issue between slave labor and free labor, that England should not go with the North. He says these dozen people who rule England hate us cordially... "