A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War Read Online Free PDF

architect of the program to build Confederate commerce raiders in Britain and France. “He is the most dangerous man the South have here and fully up to his business,” claimed the head of the U.S. secret service in Europe.
     

 
    35. Henry Hotze (1833–97). Hotze was sent to England to be the chief Confederate propagandist in Europe and founded the pro-Southern journal Index. He was an expert at influencing public opinion: an editor “should see with the eyes of the public, and hear with the ears of the public, and yet have eyes and ears of his own.”
     

 
    36. James Murray Mason (1798–1871), Confederate commissioner in England. Mason and his fellow commissioner John Slidell were sailing to Europe to take up their posts when their ship, the British mail packet Trent, was stopped by Captain Wilkes of the U.S. Navy. Britain demanded an apology for the “attack” on her mail ship and the release of the two men. The Trent affair very nearly took the United States and Britain to war.
     

 
    37. John Slidell (1793–1871), Confederate commissioner in France. “He is an excellent judge of mankind, adroit, persevering, and subtle, full of device and fond of intrigue,” wrote William Howard Russell. If Slidell were shut up in a dungeon, he “would conspire with the mice against the cat rather than not conspire at all.”
     

 
    38. The shipyard of the Laird brothers, Liverpool, builders of the CSS Alabama. The cotton trade had helped to make Liverpool rich and had given it deep ties with the South. The majority of blockade runners sailed from Liverpool, and Fraser, Trenholm, the Confederacy’s bankers, had their offices at 10 Rumford Place. Lord Russell complained that the city was “addicted to Southern proclivities, foreign slave trade, and domestic bribery.”
     

 
    39. Federal troops marching through New Orleans. Before the war, New Orleans was the fourth largest city in the country and the South’s premiere port. It also had the largest immigrant population of the South.
     

 
    40. Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (1835–1915) (second from the right), the only son of Charles Francis Adams to volunteer during the war, who rose from 1st lieutenant of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry in 1861 to colonel of the 5th Massachusetts (Colored) Cavalry in 1865 and led one of the first colored regiments through Richmond after its fall on April 3, 1865.
     

 
    41. Henry Adams (1838–1918). Henry accompanied his father, Charles Francis Adams, to London as his private secretary and later recorded his isolation and loneliness in The Education of Henry Adams. “Every young diplomat,” he wrote, “and most of the old ones, felt awkward in an English house from a certainty that they were not precisely wanted there, and a possibility that they might be told so.”
     

 
    42. Charles Francis Adams (1807–86), U.S. minister to Great Britain. Adams was the son and grandson of U.S. ministers and presidents. Though he was dutiful, honest, and hardworking, his family legacy cast a shadow over his entire life. “Charles Francis Adams naturally looked on all British [statesmen] as enemies,” wrote Henry Adams.
     

 
    43. Henry Feilden (1838–1921), British volunteer in the Confederate army. He was surprised to discover that he was not the only Englishman to offer his services to the South: “A good number have, prior to this, come out to this country,” he wrote in 1863, “and I believe have been obliged to serve as volunteers in the Army or on some General’s staff until they have proved themselves fit for something.”
     

 
    44. Francis Dawson (1840–89), British volunteer in the Confederate navy and subsequently the Confederate army. “My idea simply was to go to the South, do my duty there as well as I might, and return home to England.” In fact, Dawson stayed in the South after the war and became editor of the Charleston News and Courier.
     

 
    45. A colored regiment poses for the camera. By the end of