Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

earnest sympathy.” On January 29, 1863, a pro-Union meeting at Exeter Hall in London drew overflow crowds that spilled out into the streets and snarled traffic. Great as the suffering of the unemployed mill workers was, they saw in the Emancipation Proclamation an unambiguous blow against oppression and tyranny of every kind. “The distress in Lancashire is & has been very great,” admitted one of Charles Grandison Finney’s correspondents in March 1863, but all the same, “I would be very sorry & so I am persuaded would the bulk of our Lancashire people to see you patch up a peace with the South upon the basis of protection of slavery.”

We are Sure the mass of our people [are] Sympathetic with the Northern interest, especially since the Emancipation Policy has been adopted. I cannot tell you how glad I felt & how I shouted Hurrah for Lincoln when news reached here that he had confirmed that Proclamation on the 1st Jan[uar]y. … The reason why many of our people did not sooner sympathize with the North was a feeling that they were not fighting for the destruction of slavery but merely for the Union with or without slavery.36

So when Gladstone unwisely attempted to raise the subject of Confederate recognition in Cabinet, Palmerston quashed the motion and Russell turned to rap Gladstone sharply on the knuckles for going “beyond the latitude which all speakers must be allowed when you say that Jefferson Davis had made a nation.”37 On October 9, 1863, Russell stepped in and seized two powerful ironclad warships that Bulloch had contracted for at Laird Brothers and appropriated them for the British navy as HMS Wivern and HMS Scorpion.

The Confederacy still had hopes for the French. Napoleon III was less moved by the Emancipation Proclamation than Palmerston was, and he continued to make hopeful noises about European support and recognition for the Confederacy. The negotiation of the Erlanger loan in March 1863, and the emperor’s private approval of a plan by Bulloch to build two ironclads and two wooden steam cruisers in France, gave further encouragement to Confederate agents to hope that Napoleon III might yet act on his own. But Napoleon was unwilling to act for the Confederacy without British support, and that support never had much hope of materializing after September 1862, if it had ever had any. On November 10, 1862, Napoleon proposed to Palmerston that Britain, France, and Russia impose a cease-fire in America, along with a lifting of the blockade. What he had in mind was “an armistice of six months, with the Southern ports open to the commerce of the world,” the emperor explained to John Slidell—and added, with a wink and a nod, that “hostilities would probably never be resumed.” Palmerston’s cabinet rejected the proposal. In June 1863, the emperor met with two pro-Confederate members of Parliament and made more veiled suggestions about cooperative intervention to end the war—but Parliament refused to listen. And with that, the emperor’s interest in American affairs wandered. By 1867 he had even abandoned his luckless puppets in Mexico. In January 1864 the French government withdrew permission for the construction of Bulloch’s ships, and only a phony sale of one of the ironclads to Denmark allowed Bulloch to salvage at least one of his prizes. By the time the ship (named CSS Stonewall) could be repurchased from the Danes, fitted for service, and sailed to the West Indies, the war was over.38

By the end of 1863, the once-bright confidence of the Confederacy that Europe would be forced by economic necessity to step in and guarantee Southern independence lay in the dust. John L. Peyton, North Carolina’s state agent in Paris, warned his home-state governor, Zebulon Baird Vance, that “the people of the South” must “realize that they have no friends among the crown heads of Europe—that they must rely upon themselves for deliverance from the hated thralldom of the Yankee Union.”39 In August 1863 the Confederate government recalled Mason from London, effectively conceding the hopelessness of winning over British opinion; in October Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Cabinet concurred in expelling all British consuls from Southern ports on the grounds that the consuls had been obstructing Southern military draft laws.

Much of the credit in frustrating Confederate foreign policy lies with the American minister to Britain, Charles Francis Adams. The perfect statesman, Adams not only tirelessly represented the Union cause to the British government and the British people but also financed an active network of spies and agents who relentlessly exposed Confederate violations of the British neutrality laws and hobbled Confederate efforts to raise money and buy arms. Even the Confederate propagandist de Leon had to admit that Adams “played well his part, and by his singular moderation of language and action… sustained his own dignity and that of the people he represented… and won reluctant admiration from many who loved not the cause or the Government he sustained.”40 William L. Dayton, the American minister to France (who died in harness in 1864), was equally active in pushing the French to stay within their own neutrality laws, and Dayton’s shrewd exposures of the shakiness of Confederate finance critically depressed the value of the Confederate bond sale by the Erlangers. The two rocks on which Confederate hopes for foreign intervention unavoidably foundered were the fatal timing of its military defeats in 1862, and the moral capital Lincoln earned for the Union with the Emancipation Proclamation. After Antietam, and after Emancipation, the Confederacy was simply no longer believable.

THE WAR AT SEA

Lincoln’s decision to impose a naval blockade of the Confederacy broadened, at one stroke, the scope of the American Civil War to take in the seven seas as well as the Confederate heartland. By the same token, the Confederacy could ill afford to stand by and allow the Federal navy to put its hands around the Confederacy’s neck and wring it. So between the Federal navy’s determination to choke the Confederates inside their own harbors and the Confederacy’s desperation to