I

On 13 May 1861 a royal proclamation of neutrality was issued in London in respect of the war which had a month earlier finally broken out between the seceding Confederate States of America and the United States. The proclamation drew the attention of her majesty’s subjects to the need to ‘observe a strict Neutrality’ in the war, and in particular to:

Notwithstanding this announcement of ‘strict Neutrality’, and the 1819 Foreign Enlistment Act’s provisions in respect of fitting out or equipping warships for belligerents, in the course of the war the Confederate States procured eight cruisers in British ports with which to harry US merchant ships; they also commissioned but were prevented from using two rams, designed to break the US Navy’s blockade of their ports.Footnote ³ The cruisers burnt or captured as prizes more than 150 US merchant ships.Footnote ⁴ US carriers hurried to reregister under a new flag, often the British, with the result that ‘the United States’ commerce is rapidly vanishing from the face of the ocean’.Footnote ⁵ The US government was outraged; historians have often concluded that it was right to be so: more than this, that the Confederate ship procurement programme reinforces the widely held view that British policy was sympathetic to the Confederate States.

This article argues that the British government’s failure to prevent the sailing of Confederate warships was a result primarily of administrative shortcomings. The apparatus of government in the first half of the 1860s was by no means fully formed, and what there was often displayed considerable incompetence. Conversely, the great efforts that were in fact made – irrespective of their eventual success (there was some) and in the face of the structural shortcomings of the bureaucracy – to stop the Confederates’ activities undermine the argument that the British government deliberately looked the other way. Scholarship to date on the British response to the American Civil War has tended to focus on macro issues such as trade policy, geopolitical factors, class predispositions, or the personal views of leading politicians and concluded that there were good reasons for Britain to favour the Confederacy. Each of these views has its adherents and sceptics; this article examines, at a micro level, the mechanics of government and argues that these alone suffice to account for the British government’s handling of the Confederate ship procurement programme and, by extension, its diplomatic posture towards the Civil War belligerents.

II

There has been no shortage of studies of the international dimensions of the American Civil War, and particularly of Britain’s role as a declared neutral. As early as 1925, Adams, born in the year the war ended, published Great Britain and the American Civil War, and throughout the ensuing decades there have been other large-scale works on its international aspects.Footnote ⁶

More recently, the historiography of the Civil War has participated in scholarship’s wider ‘global turn’: Coleman, reviewing in 2014 a collection of essays on the war’s transnational meaning, observed that: ‘Research into the global and transnational dimensions of the American Civil War is indisputably in vogue’.Footnote ⁷ Nor is this surprising: the significance of the stance which Britain, in particular, would take was clear at the time to both warring parties, and especially to the Confederacy, which believed it held a trump card in its exports of raw cotton.Footnote ⁸ The first, and fullest, exposition of the significance of ‘cotton diplomacy’ was Owsley’s, who neatly demonstrated the Confederacy’s delicate balancing act in attempting to withhold supplies from European markets, especially Britain, while earning some income and tantalizing customers with the promise of further supplies if only they would recognize the Confederacy (which none did).Footnote ⁹

Historians have also sought explanations of the British government’s attitude towards the belligerents in financial, economic, social, cultural, political, and wider diplomatic factors. Sexton’s Debtor Diplomacy examined the impact of each belligerent’s need to finance the war on their relations with Britain, where, predominantly, they sought the necessary funding.Footnote ¹⁰ Naturally, the importance to north-west England’s and the wider British economy of the Lancashire cotton-spinning industry has received a great deal of attention.Footnote ¹¹ If, as Boaz suggests, the need for cotton led to ‘apparent partiality’ towards the Confederacy on the part of the British government, then abhorrence of slavery worked in the other direction.Footnote ¹² Although it is often asserted that the aristocracy was less antagonistic towards slavery as an institution and generally more pro-Confederacy than the rest of the population (of those who held any view on it at all), this was by no means universal.Footnote ¹³ Indeed, some of the most prominent ‘establishment’ figures were strongly opposed to slavery, notably Palmerston himself and the duke of Argyll, his Lord Privy Seal.Footnote ¹⁴ Nevertheless, in some quarters there was a degree of fellow feeling with the Confederacy, even if these romantic attachments to the ‘Cavalier’ South (as against the ‘Roundhead’ ochlocracy of the North) did not always survive close encounters with actual specimens of this twisted idyll: Mason, the Confederate commissioner in London, was ‘slovenly in dress and manners’.Footnote ¹⁵

Notwithstanding the weight of scholarship which has been trained on British attitudes towards the Civil War belligerents, covering this wide array of possible motivating factors, Hopkins could nevertheless note in 2018 that the jury was still out: he refers to ‘the apparent ambivalence of British policy, which historians of the period have often found puzzling’.Footnote ¹⁶ However, the default view remains that the British government and the British governing classes were pro-Confederacy. Boaz has been quoted above; McPherson avers that ‘Much truth also adheres to the notion of British upper-class support for the South – or at least hostility to the North, which amounted to almost the same thing’; Schama notes the government’s ‘pronounced partiality for a Confederate victory’.Footnote ¹⁷

Turning to the efforts of the Confederates to obtain ships in Britain, there are three main strands in the historiography. The first comprises general accounts of the conflict on both sides of the Atlantic, including some of those referred to above (see note 6); these, while discussing shipbuilding, do not insist on its special significance to the question of Britain’s neutrality. Instead, they see it as one factor among many, and prefer to focus on other flashpoints in US–British relations (most notably, the Trent incident in late 1861) and/or on more generic factors.Footnote ¹⁸ Jones, for example, in his book subtitled ‘The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War’, only briefly mentions the serious US–British standoff over shipbuilding, though both the Florida and the Alabama sailed, against vigorous US protests, in the period covered.Footnote ¹⁹ In his other full-length treatment of the wider diplomatic battle which supported the war on the ground, Jones devotes some pages to the escape of the Alabama, rightly noting that ‘Dudley [Thomas H. Dudley, US consul in Liverpool] and Adams [Charles F. Adams, US Minister in London] had mishandled the process by failing to understand all the legal steps involved in detaining the vessel’.Footnote ²⁰ (Dudley complained in a dispatch to Seward, the Secretary of State, that ‘The burden of proof ought not to be thrown upon us’; instead, Laird’s shipyard should have to prove their integrity. Adams’s assessment of Dudley was that he was ‘a little impulsive’.)Footnote ²¹ Nevertheless, Dudley’s persistence played an important role in persuading the British government to take the issue seriously. However, in a brief reference to what was in many ways the far more acute diplomatic crisis of summer 1863, which eventually led to the British government's detention of the Laird rams (two ironclad ships under construction at Laird's which were equipped with a ram with which to attack the blockading US fleet), Jones unaccountably fails to discuss the British government’s legal embarrassment over the Alexandra earlier in 1863, without reference to which Russell’s actions in the autumn of that year, already difficult to parse, become quite unintelligible.Footnote ²²

The best discussion of Confederate shipbuilding in a general treatment of US–British diplomatic relations during the war remains that of Jenkins, in his two-volume Britain and the War for the Union (see note 6). His accounts of the seizures of the No. 290/CSS Alabama (section IV, below) and of the Laird rams are particularly thorough and include some original insights, such as the roles played by Dudley on the US side and Layard (Russell’s deputy) on the British in the failure to handle the affair of the No. 290 expeditiously.Footnote ²³ Jenkins is also right to insist on an element of continuity in British policy towards Confederate shipbuilding as opposed to a sudden volte-face in 1863; however, as this article will argue, he is much too generous in his assessment of the efficiency of the government apparatus – his claim that ‘the British had acted with dispatch’ in its attempts to seize the Alexandra and the Japan/CSS Georgia is particularly difficult to sustain – see section II, below).Footnote ²⁴

The second strand in the literature largely takes its cue from the outrage the US government expressed throughout the war and mines the shipbuilding programme for evidence of the British government’s Confederate sympathies, or argues, simply, that the fact that shipbuilding was ‘allowed’ to take place at all is ipso facto evidence of British ‘guilt’.Footnote ²⁵ (There are also some studies of local sentiment.)Footnote ²⁶ This school of thought includes Doyle, who accuses the British government of ‘utter disregard’ of its own policy of neutrality in its failure to detain the CSS Alabama in July 1862 – ‘Another ominous sign of British bias’, in his judgement; Sexton, who refers to ‘the British Government’s decision to adopt a loose interpretation of its neutrality laws and allow British-built cruisers to fall into Confederate hands’ (emphasis added); Cook, who is less temperate (‘The Confederate commerce raiders were the most lurid, but not the only, example of the unneutral British acts and friendliness toward the South’); and Lester, who goes further in implying collusion between the governments: ‘the Anglo-Confederate [sic] cruiser venture must be termed a success’.Footnote ²⁷

The third, much smaller, group – those who have investigated the shipbuilding programme and questioned the claim that Britain sympathized with the Confederacy – is exemplified by two scholars: Myers, who reacts so strongly against it that he argues not only that Britain and the United States were on friendly terms throughout the war but that the two governments even collaborated in some respects; and Merli, who did most to examine the Confederate shipbuilding programme in any detail and who sounded a strong note of caution against the traditional view that the British government should be seen as covert allies of the Confederacy.Footnote ²⁸ Myers, while issuing a refreshing counterblast to orthodoxy, surely goes too far in hypothesizing a level of collusion between the US and British governments. To Merli, all subsequent attempts to shed light on the Confederacy’s attempts to obtain ships in Britain owe a debt. Broadly sympathetic to Britain and notably fair-minded, Merli had a particular object in mind: to undo, for an American audience, what he saw as the overly influential factual and interpretative errors of Adams, in particular, in respect of British neutrality in the war.Footnote ²⁹

This article contends that the diplomatic exchanges between the US and British governments in respect of the Confederate ship procurement programme in Britain should be placed squarely at the centre of any discussion of British attitudes towards the belligerents.Footnote ³⁰ The US protests about the Confederate activity constituted a running diplomatic engagement between the governments throughout almost the whole course of the war, in which – at times – the governments expressed themselves with considerable vehemence (more so, but not exclusively, on the US side), threatening on more than one occasion a rupture of diplomatic relations, even to the point of war.Footnote ³¹ In particular, Confederate activity in Great Britain constituted the prime exhibit for the US government in its fury at what it regarded as Britain’s serial failure to perform its obligations as a neutral.Footnote ³² Although there were other diplomatic flashpoints – including blockade-running, the treatment of captured British seamen, the activities of British consuls in the Confederate States, and the occasional outbursts of violently expressed anglophobia by the US Secretary of State, William H. Seward, as well as the perennial maritime stumbling-block of the ‘stop and search’ of neutral vessels – none had the longevity or levels of hostility that were involved in the diplomatic wrangling over the ships.Footnote ³³ The salience of the controversy for almost the whole of the war (indeed, even after it concluded) distinguishes it from the more notorious crisis over the Trent in November 1861, which was very serious while it lasted but was resolved by the turn of the year with the US government’s effective climbdown.

A close reading of the diplomatic correspondence and the vast departmental paperwork which Adams’s protests produced leads to four conclusions: first, that the British government responded with appropriate seriousness to Washington’s complaints about the Confederates in British ports; second, that it did so from the outset and not, as is sometimes alleged, only after the escape of the Alabama; third, that the condition of the administrative apparatus at its disposal in large part accounts for the British government’s failure to put a stop to the Confederates’ activities; fourth, that the diplomatic row continued long after the Laird rams had been detained, and right until the end of the war, and beyond. The British government did make considerable, if disjointed, efforts to intervene; yet they often failed.

It is also true that the British government laboured under severe legal constraints in seeking to stop the Confederacy from acquiring warships in its territory.Footnote ³⁴ For the British government to have the right, under the terms of the Foreign Enlistment Act 1819 (FEA), to intervene to prevent a ship from sailing, it needed to be satisfied on two points: the identity of the nation or belligerent for which the vessel was being built; and that the owners were in contravention of the act’s injunction in section 7 not to ‘equip, furnish, fit out, or arm’ the vessel. As Crook points out, lawyers at the time argued that the original intention of the act had not been to prevent the supply of contraband to a belligerent (why should a ship be any different from a cargo of rifles and ammunition?) but ‘to prevent armed vessels waging war immediately they had cleared port, thus transforming neutral territory into a base of military operations’.Footnote ³⁵ It was not enough to know that a vessel was intended for some belligerent – the identity of the specific recipient must also be known.Footnote ³⁶

The ambiguity of the law which offered the only legal means for the British government to intervene had a wide significance, especially diplomatically: the US government clearly believed that Russell was hiding behind the uncertainty in order to do what he wanted – to be helpful to the Confederacy.Footnote ³⁷ For present purposes, the legal dilemma had two consequences. First, it underpinned the hesitant and divided response of British ministers to US demands to shut down the Confederate shipbuilding programme, which in turn may well have contributed to the stumbling administrative response.Footnote ³⁸ Second, the state of the law was well-known to James D. Bulloch, the principal Confederate agent in Liverpool, from the outset. He carefully took legal advice before starting his work to build a navy in British shipyards.Footnote ³⁹ As we have seen, Dudley, Bulloch’s antagonist, though himself a lawyer, seemed slow to grasp the implications of the act. However, notwithstanding these legal uncertainties, ministers came very close, as will be seen, to testing the law in July 1862, in relation to the Alabama; when they did finally pluck up courage to go to court, in the case of the Alexandra (detained in April 1863), the government lost the case hands down.Footnote ⁴⁰

The principal sources used are the letters and memoranda which passed between Adams, the US minister in London, and Lord John (from 27 July 1861, Earl) Russell, the British foreign secretary, and British civil service interdepartmental letters and memoranda which fed into the official advice to Russell; correspondence between Adams and Dudley, in Liverpool; internal Confederate communications, particularly between Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory and Bulloch; dispatches to and from US Secretary of State Seward; correspondence between ministers; and Adams’s diary.Footnote ⁴¹

Bulloch arrived in Liverpool in September 1861, with a commission from Mallory to procure ships for the fledgling Confederate navy.Footnote ⁴² Dudley ensured that Bulloch was watched closely from the moment he arrived.Footnote ⁴³ Bulloch’s strategy was not to engage only in a covert battle in which the far superior resources of the US government would be bound to overwhelm him, but instead as far as possible to ensure that he stayed within (an interpretation of) the FEA (viz. by ensuring that his warships left British ports unarmed – by, for example, having gun ports and mounts but no guns, which were shipped separately to a rendezvous outside British waters).Footnote ⁴⁴ Bulloch had an additional reason to act cautiously: when he arrived in Britain, the Confederacy had high hopes of securing recognition as an independent state by the British government; a brazen disregard for English law would have risked drawing diplomatic censure. Bulloch’s caution had an important consequence: it meant that there was no pressure on the British government to take any formal cognizance of his activities. It was not until the US government’s representatives drew its attention to Bulloch’s schemes that the British government had to react. From Adams’s arrival as US minister in May 1861, throughout the rest of the year and into the spring of 1862, US diplomatic protests focused principally on blockade-running, in particular shipments of weapons and munitions, and on the broader diplomatic questions of the precise nature of British neutrality. Then, on 18 February 1862, Adams made his first representation to Russell, enclosing material from Dudley, about the construction of a vessel ‘intended for the Southern Confederacy’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Neither man could have imagined that the process of diplomatic claim and counter-claim would continue for a decade.Footnote ⁴⁶

III

‘When Sir Charles Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote referred in their famous report of 1853 to the British Civil Service, they were undoubtedly indulging in wishful thinking.’Footnote ⁴⁷ It would be similarly fanciful to believe that any significant reforms, following publication of the Northcote–Trevelyan report, had actually taken place by the first half of the 1860s. As Southgate notes, in a discussion of ‘the Whig reputation for administrative ineptitude’, Russell ‘associated himself with the officials who criticised the report and resisted its implementation’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In any case, he continues, ‘no government before that date [1867] accepted either the indiscriminate strictures or the principal proposals of the report’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Hoppen’s judgement is even more stark: ‘almost until the end of the century, the picture is one of a bureaucracy gently ossifying, keeping its head down, and concerning itself primarily with pushing out again the paper that was coming in’.Footnote ⁵⁰ It is accordingly not surprising that Horace Mann, the founding secretary of the civil service commission, should still be found, in 1868, describing the civil service as ‘a chaotic mass of unorganized elements … an aggregation of separate departments governed, in many points, by no principle’.Footnote ⁵¹ The service of the early to mid-1860s therefore still puts one irresistibly in mind of Dickens’s satirical portrait of self-serving, sclerotic bureaucracy, Tite Barnacle’s Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, serialized from 1855 to 1857.Footnote ⁵² The Dickensian flavour of the Foreign Office at this time is further enhanced by the fact that Edmund Hammond, the official chief of the department, was the youngest son of George Hammond, himself a former permanent under-secretary of the same department.Footnote ⁵³ Hammond fils served there for a total of forty-nine years (including, in his youth, some overseas postings), the last nineteen as its official head. He is described by the historians of that post as having a reputation as a martinet who ‘stressed the need for the close adherence to certain established rules of procedure’.Footnote ⁵⁴ His memorandum on the correct manner of dealing with correspondence became known as ‘The Adventures of a Paper in the Foreign Office’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Finally, before examining how the government machinery handled the apparent (but by no means clear) affront to the FEA which Confederate commissioning of ships from British shipyards presented, it is important to keep in mind the prevailing orthodoxy in regard to relations between government and commerce. Although it is possible, as Hoppen points out, to overstate the Whig–Liberal commitment to laissez-faire policies – Russell himself had supported some interventionist measures in the course of his career – nevertheless, government’s default position was not to interfere in commercial decisions without very good reason.Footnote ⁵⁶ Russell made this point to Adams on more than one occasion: for example, he told him that ‘when Her Majesty’s Government are asked … to overstep the existing powers given them by municipal and international law for the purpose of imposing arbitrary restrictions on the trade of Her Majesty’s subjects, it is impossible to listen to such suggestions’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Montague Bernard, the Oxford professor who took on the role of apologist for the British government, put it this way: ‘A State is responsible generally for the unlawful acts of its subjects, but for such acts only as it can prevent – and prevent without vexatious and oppressive interference, without imposing undue trammels on personal liberty and the freedom to trade.’Footnote ⁵⁸ In fact, under intense US diplomatic pressure the government did, arguably, seek to ‘impose trammels’ on business when it impounded the Alexandra in 1863 and – against the advice of its law officers – detained the Laird rams that autumn. A jury in the court of the exchequer took only a few minutes to overturn ministers’ actions in respect of the Alexandra, and a similar fate for the rams was probably avoided only by the government’s purchase of them.Footnote ⁵⁹ The point to be made here is that, while ministers did buckle at times under US pressure, the default option, at both official and political levels, was not to intervene.

It is against this background that an assessment of the performance of British officialdom’s handling of the US protests against Confederate shipbuilding must be made. The reader of the official correspondence which Adams initiated by his continued, vehement protests against the Confederates’ activities is struck first by its sheer volume. Each vessel of which complaint was made generated its own mountain of inter-departmental paperwork, to which must be added the correspondence and despatches between the metropole and its colonies and its diplomatic outposts overseas, not to mention the correspondence between the US and British governments in both Washington (between Seward and Lord Lyons, the British minister, or the chargé d’affaires, Stuart) and London (between Adams and Russell). To give one indication, the diplomatic row over the treatment of the CSS Shenandoah in Melbourne, Australia, in the closing months of the war later produced sixty-six printed pages, embracing 116 enclosures together with the main memoranda.Footnote ⁶⁰

The civil service responded with what appeared to Adams to be infuriating lethargy.Footnote ⁶¹ On each occasion that Russell received a formal complaint from Adams that another Confederate warship was under construction or, later, being procured, he asked Hammond to pass on the correspondence to the Treasury, who had responsibility for customs matters (who in turn oversaw the administration of ports). Hammond in each case initiated the same series of elaborately courteous memoranda from one department to another. So, when Adams raised with Russell the matter of the Oreto (later, CSS Florida – Bulloch was careful to arm and commission his warships beyond British territorial waters), on the following day Hammond wrote to his opposite number at the Treasury with no great sense of urgency or expectation of a reply: ‘I am to request that you will move the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury to cause immediate inquiries to be made respecting this vessel, and to take such steps in the matter as may be right and proper.’Footnote ⁶² The Lords Commissioners then sent on the correspondence to the commissioners of customs, who communicated in turn with the local customs officials in Liverpool, enabling the commissioners to respond to the Treasury on 22 February with the falsely reassuring information that the vessel ‘is intended for the use of Messrs. Thomas, Brothers, of Palermo’ (the cover which Bulloch had fabricated to avoid linking the vessel to the Confederacy).Footnote ⁶³ This was then forwarded to the Foreign Office, completing the return of the correspondence to its starting point. Russell reassured Adams, who was not in the least pacified, of the vessel being intended for the Italian government.Footnote ⁶⁴ Four months later, the same laborious procedure was put into operation to handle Adams’s complaint about No. 290 (later the CSS Alabama), then on the stocks at Laird’s shipyard in Birkenhead. Russell responded to Adams with the no doubt far from satisfactory response that the matter had been referred to the ‘proper Department’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Once again, Hammond invited the Treasury to ‘take such steps in the matter as may be right and proper’.Footnote ⁶⁶ A year later, when Adams opened his campaign to prevent the Laird rams from sailing, and even after the anguish and embarrassment created by the escape of the Alabama, the bureaucracy went through the same laboured process of polite inter-departmental memoranda.

The lack of an effective administrative infrastructure is illustrated by the semi-comic attempts to detain the Alexandra in April 1863, especially in light of the abortive move to prevent the Alabama from sailing nine months earlier (see section IV, below). Hammond at the Foreign Office authorized its seizure on Saturday, 4 April.Footnote ⁶⁷ Sir Thomas Fremantle, chairman of the customs board, was not in London, so the letter was passed to Berkeley, his deputy, at midnight on Saturday. When he went to the Knightsbridge and Regent Street telegraphic offices, he found them, perhaps unsurprisingly in the early hours of Sunday morning, closed. After what one can only imagine was a disturbed night, at ‘shortly after eight o’clock’ he went to the homes of both Hamilton and Peel (from the Treasury) but found them also ‘out of town’. Finally, presumably now at his wits’ end, he summoned the courage ‘to telegraph to the collector [of customs] at Liverpool, directing the seizure of the vessel’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Another feature of this rigidly formulaic approach to handling business was a lack of willingness to think beyond the narrow confines of what was expected. The reader of the inter-departmental correspondence quickly develops a picture of the individual bureaucrat for whom it was essential to fulfil precisely what was expected of him, but no more. At times, it is difficult to know whether to ascribe a failure to act to laziness, incompetence, or a fear that to display initiative would be unwelcome to one’s superiors.Footnote ⁶⁹ A classic example of failure to ask the right questions is provided by the Admiralty’s role in the sale (indirectly) of HMS Victor to the Confederacy in November 1863. When the former Royal Navy warship reappeared shortly after her sale as the CSS Rappahannock, having never left the confines of the Sheerness naval dockyard, an embarrassed Russell had to institute enquiries as to how this could have happened. It did not then take very long for a police inspector to establish that the nominal purchasers, acting as intermediaries for the Confederacy, ‘occupy one room only as an office’ and ‘have been there about nine months, and are supposed to be general shipping agents’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Some basic due diligence would have established that the nominal purchasers were unlikely to be bona fide shipbrokers or financial agents.

The nadir of bureaucratic incompetence was reached in the handling of the US protests against the Alabama, though the failed attempt to apprehend the Georgia ran it a close second. The Georgia (alias Japan, alias Virginia, acquired by the Confederates in Glasgow) is a particularly interesting case study: it both gives the lie to the claim that the British government showed little interest in restricting Confederate activity and demonstrates its quite startling incompetence in doing so. The events took place at almost the same time as the seizure of the Alexandra – there can be no doubting the British government’s resolve not to allow another Alabama to sail. It all started so well: on the same day (8 April 1863) that Russell received a letter from Adams containing allegations against the vessel, with unwonted alacrity (‘within half an hour’, boasted Hammond to Adams) the Foreign Office had passed it to the Home Office, which dispatched a letter to Slade, the lieutenant governor of Guernsey, responsible for Alderney. It was believed that the Japan/Virginia would there receive its armament from the Alar, out of Newhaven.Footnote ⁷¹ Regrettably, as a shamefaced official had to admit on 11 April, forwarding the letter to Slade, the letter had initially been sent in error to the Isle of Man, from where it had been ‘returned to sender’.Footnote ⁷² In an effort to make up for lost time, Berkeley at customs, whose second consecutive weekend was thus ruined, telegraphed his local man in Plymouth, but a follow-up communication was delayed by the fact that the telegraph office in Plymouth remained closed until 5pm on Sundays. All of this was, in any case, moot, since the Alar had already transferred its cargo to the Japan/Virginia (now commissioned as CSS Georgia) on 8 April, though not in fact on Alderney but off the French coast at Morlaix, near Brest.Footnote ⁷³

IV

In the case of the vessel which became the CSS Alabama and the greatest source of friction between the governments, the United States’ initial approaches to the British were relatively muted. There appears to have been some delay in bringing the matter to the attention of the British authorities: Dudley reported the building of the ship to Seward on 16 May 1862, but it is not clear when he told Adams, who only made representations to Russell on 23 June.Footnote ⁷⁴ On this occasion, Russell sought advice from the government’s law officers as well as asking customs (via the Treasury) to investigate. The law officers (Sir William Atherton, attorney general, and Sir Roundell Palmer, solicitor general) advised Russell on 30 June that, if Dudley’s assertions (contained in the enclosures to Adams’s letter to Russell) were accurate, then there would appear to be a breach of the FEA. They advised that customs officers at Liverpool should investigate and that Dudley should send them his evidence.Footnote ⁷⁵ Dudley did so, and the solicitor to the commissioners of customs, Hamel, issued an Opinion on 11 July, in which he said that ‘the statement … [in] greater part, if not all, is hearsay and inadmissible … there is nothing in it amounting to prima facie proof sufficient to … justify the seizure of the vessel’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Dudley did not give up in the face of this discouraging response but presented further evidence, and on 23 July his solicitor, Squarey, sent additional affidavits and an Opinion from counsel (Collier) directly to the commissioners of customs, and Adams sent the same material to Russell.Footnote ⁷⁷ Layard, Russell’s deputy, again sought advice from the law officers.Footnote ⁷⁸ The papers were passed to Sir John Harding, the queen’s advocate, who, suffering from some form of serious mental ill-health, was unfit to look at the papers; it was not until 28 July that they were passed on to the attorney and solicitor general. They concluded on the following day that there were prima facie grounds for detention of the ship.Footnote ⁷⁹ On the next day Layard wrote to the Treasury, and on 31 July they confirmed to him that his letter had been forwarded to the commissioners of customs ‘with directions to take the necessary steps for seizing the vessel’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the meantime, however, Bulloch, according to his memoirs, ‘had received information [on 26 July] from a private but most reliable source, that it would not be safe to leave the ship in Liverpool another forty-eight hours’.Footnote ⁸¹ It took slightly longer than that to have everything ready, but the vessel, known at launch as the Enrica, sailed – ostensibly for a sea-trial but in fact never to return – on 29 July, two days before the order to detain was received by customs officials in Liverpool.Footnote ⁸²

While a great deal of attention has been directed at the source of the warning of the impending detention of the vessel, the significant conclusion to be drawn from the handling of Adams’s complaint from 23 June onward is surely the lack of urgency and considerable ineptness of the administrative response.Footnote ⁸³ This is especially true given the law officers’ initial disposition to treat the complaint seriously; their Opinion suggested that a prosecution might well follow. However, the British government contrived to snatch what turned out to be a very expensive defeat from the jaws of victory, for the following reasons.Footnote ⁸⁴ First, Russell, having taken the significant step of involving the government’s senior legal advisers at an early stage, then appears to have taken a back seat at a most inopportune moment. Precious time passed while matters were left in the hands of the customs department, and it was Layard who acted for the Foreign Office at the climax of the crisis. Second, the suggestion made in the legal advice that an investigation should be undertaken by local customs officials in Liverpool was not acted upon. This meant that when Hamel and O’Dowd, the solicitors at customs, were asked for their views some ten days later, they had to rely on the affidavits obtained by Dudley who, partly in order to protect his informants, was unable to provide testimony of sufficient strength to satisfy them. Third, the failure to seek the advice of the senior law officers at this stage was a blunder. It may of course have been the case that they would not, on 11 July, have reached the conclusions that they did on 29 July, when further evidence and Collier’s Opinion were also available; but given the tenor of their own initial Opinion on 30 June, it is at least possible that the law officers would have sanctioned detention at that point.Footnote ⁸⁵ Fourth, although the illness of Harding was unfortunate, it is extraordinary that five days passed before the papers were retrieved, apparently on the initiative of Lady Harding, and sent to the attorney and solicitor generals for comment. Fifth, even when the law officers had given their Opinion, it took two days of the usual inter-departmental correspondence for the decision to detain to be communicated to Liverpool – though it would almost certainly have been too late in any case, as the Enrica/Alabama sailed on the day that the law officers pronounced. Finally, there was the ‘leak’, which, if not deliberate, was unforgivable incompetence.Footnote ⁸⁶ Taken together, the civil service’s handling of this crucial episode betrays many of the faults previously identified: departments acting in what would now be termed ‘silos’; a firm resolve to follow procedures at a predetermined pace and with no urgency; no sense of the bigger picture; and, linked to that, the lack of a directing central agency to ensure a timely, coordinated government response.

V

The failure to prevent the Enrica/Alabama from sailing also raises the question – not only because of the warning issued to Bulloch – about the reliability of individual officials and whether their personal sympathies impaired the performance of their duties. As already noted, the limited scope of bureaucracy in the 1860s meant that the leading figures in a government department, situated in London, were highly dependent on the efficiency and integrity of local officials. The question of collusion arose directly in the purchase of the CSS Rappahannock, where a number of dockyard personnel were involved in helping to fit out the ship, which had been sold by the Royal Navy without its mast, spars, and sails, and without ‘pivots and other fittings for her guns’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The degree of co-operation offered by dockyard personnel ranged from Rumble, HM Inspector of Machinery Afloat at Sheerness (against whom the law officers approved a prosecution under the FEA), through various labourers and boilermakers who sailed on the Rappahannock when she left the dockyard hurriedly on the night of 24 November 1863 (and were discharged from the service as a result), to Rees, the master rigger, who left on board the ship but then returned on the tug (and who may therefore have been taken along involuntarily) and Capt. Hall of the Cumberland, who was ‘glad of an opportunity of testing the derrick’ and assisted in masting the ship.Footnote ⁸⁸ The report by Inspector Court of the water police went so far as to suggest that work on the vessel took place ‘with the sanction of the dockyard authorities, at other than dockyard hours’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Adams also alleged official involvement: ‘I am forced to the conclusion that the entire movement has been conducted with the connivance and direct aid of Her Majesty’s Officers stationed within the Royal Dockyard of Sheerness.’Footnote ⁹⁰

The problems arising from reliance on local officials were most acute in the case of Liverpool, which was notorious for its widespread Confederate sympathies.Footnote ⁹¹ As Bulloch, who was by far the most effective agent for the Confederacy, was based there, it was from that quarter that many of the problems arose for the British government. The two officials on whom the customs department most relied were the collector, Samuel Price Edwards, and the surveyor, Edward Morgan. Certainly Edwards did not distinguish himself by demonstrating an energetic approach to his duties.Footnote ⁹² When enquiries had to be made about the Oreto (Florida), he appears to have accepted everything that Miller & Sons, the shipyard owners, told him. He assured his superiors that ‘he [had] every reason to believe that the vessel is for the Italian Government’.Footnote ⁹³ Similarly, when attention turned later in spring 1862 to the No. 290 (Alabama) in Laird’s shipyard, Morgan replied complacently to his superiors that ‘as yet, nothing has transpired concerning her which appeared to demand a special report’; in any case, Laird's ‘do not appear disposed to reply to any questions respecting the destination of the vessel after she leaves Liverpool, tho’ she has been built for a foreign government’.Footnote ⁹⁴ With remarkable confidence, Edwards asserted that the shipbuilders were unlikely to breach the FEA.Footnote ⁹⁵

Edwards was, from his vantage point as the chief representative of the customs department in Liverpool, a perpetual stumbling-block in the path of the US government’s attempts to have ships detained.Footnote ⁹⁶ In the case of the Alexandra, he did in fact initially acknowledge that the ship appeared to be intended for the Confederacy.Footnote ⁹⁷ However, following the decision to detain the ship, he could not resist making his own commentary on it. He pointedly observed to Goulburn (a customs commissioner) that: ‘The vessel will not be fit for sea for a fortnight, at least … there is nothing to denote that she is to carry guns, save her strength in point of construction.’ He then asked: ‘If registered and duly cleared [to leave port], is she detainable, having, as yet, committed no offence against any law, so far as I am competent to judge?’Footnote ⁹⁸ It may be, however, that Edwards’s somewhat petulant response to his orders respecting the Alexandra raised a question mark about his allegiances in London when the next controversy arose, over the Laird rams.Footnote ⁹⁹ On this occasion, Edwards sent off to headquarters his opinion that the ships were ‘“built for a banker at Paris” [Bravay] but that this banker was paying for them, “on behalf of a foreign Government, and not America”’; however, the law officers noted that Edwards had not ‘satisfactorily explained the grounds’ for this statement, and that a subsequent claim of his in respect of the role of M Bravay was at variance with the statement of Wilding, the US vice-consul in Liverpool.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Russell had evidently had enough of relying on Edwards as the government’s ‘eyes and ears’ in Liverpool. Two days after receiving the law officers’ discouraging assessment of the evidence against the rams, Russell asked ‘that the Lords of the Treasury should send their solicitor to Birkenhead to enquire whether evidence cannot be procured against these vessels’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Having recounted a sorry tale of administrative failure, it would be wrong to complete this survey without looking at the considerable lengths to which, on some occasions, some officials, and their political masters, went to act responsibly and to take the US government’s complaints seriously. Although, as we have seen, the local officials at Liverpool did not distinguish themselves in the performance of their duties and may have personally sympathized with the Confederates, nevertheless there are many instances which demonstrate a serious intent on the part of the administration to respond appropriately to the concerns raised by Adams.Footnote ¹⁰² In the case of the Oreto (Florida), for example, the first warship of which the United States complained, the commissioners of customs informed the Treasury that ‘special directions have been given to the officers at Liverpool to watch the movements of the vessel’.Footnote ¹⁰³ More importantly, Russell caused enquiries to be made in order to check the story that the Italian government was involved.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ (Russell played a similarly important role in testing the Confederates’ cover story for the Laird rams, taking the initiative to check with the British ambassador in Paris and the consul in Alexandria whether in fact M. Bravay was acting for the Pasha of Egypt – he wasn’t.)Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As a result, the Foreign Office was able to write to the Treasury debunking the Italian cover story for the Oreto and requesting that the vessel should be ‘vigilantly watched, and [that] if any armament prohibited by the Foreign Enlistment Act is discovered, the vessel may at once be detained’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Twelve days later Russell chased for an update, though by then it was too late and the Oreto had already sailed.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

VI

The response of the British government, when faced with what was an undoubted diplomatic crisis over Confederate shipbuilding, demonstrated that the administrative apparatus of the country was, to coin a phrase adopted in more recent times with respect to bureaucratic failures, ‘not fit for purpose’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Government departments moved with cautious deliberation along clearly demarcated tracks, officials communicating with each other in their own and other departments with elaborate courtesy and employing well-used formulae. True, officials on the whole were prompt to reply to requests for information or to take the action demanded, but, perhaps in the time-honoured manner of some officials throughout the ages, there is a sense when reading the correspondence that the first consideration of junior officialdom was to dispatch a reply which responded to the letter of what was asked but no more, and to seek to avoid further requests. Russell, who, if anyone could be so described, was responsible for handling the crisis, had to deal with his opposite numbers of equal rank (or his subordinates did, with their opposite numbers) in order to obtain information or request action, and then hope that action filtered down through the layers of bureaucracy in other departments, before laboriously working its way back up the chain of command and, ultimately, across the appropriate channel back to himself.

In what was still an embryonic bureaucratic structure, the role of individual efficiency, opinion and sheer caprice was an important factor in the administration’s response. The small number of personnel involved meant that illness or absence caused problems, as the incapacity of Sir John Harding demonstrated during the crucial phase of the dispute over the Alabama, and the difficulty that Berkeley found in executing the order to detain the Alexandra. Government’s reach was limited, and the men on the ground wielded considerable influence, no matter their rank, as the example of Edwards in Liverpool shows. Much closer to home, men who wanted to earn some money by helping out Confederate agents in the Royal Dockyard in Sheerness were able to do so unhindered until it was too late (though some at least later paid the penalty). However, for all the incompetence, the evidence of individuals striving within the confines of the system to ‘do the right thing’ should not be ignored.

Taking all these factors into account, a picture emerges of a British administrative response which was muddled, flat-footed, often complacent, and simply ill-equipped to respond effectively to a crisis of this nature and magnitude – but not one which set out to be helpful to the Confederacy. There is no evidence that there was an official policy of ‘turning a blind eye’, although it is certainly the case that some individual officials appear to have done so. The government was slow to determine a course of action, and unable quickly to implement a decision once taken. Of course, this inadequacy benefited the Confederates – they were the party deliberately stretching the law to its limits.

It is sometimes alleged that the British government became alert to the dangers of allowing Confederate shipbuilding to proceed unchecked only after the embarrassment of the escape of the Alabama, and that its policy became more restrictive as the war dragged on. Indeed, most historians assume that after the seizure of the Laird rams, the issue went away: Sexton, for example, explicitly claims that ‘The purchasing of the Laird rams largely put the shipbuilding controversy to bed for the remainder of the war’; for Jenkins, 1863 was ‘the decisive year’; and even Merli, in Great Britain and the Confederate Navy, deals somewhat summarily with later vessels such as the Rappahannock and the Shenandoah, which, as we have seen, continued to stoke the diplomatic fires and to create administrative headaches for the British government.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It is certainly the case that the government, and Russell personally, became more interventionist in the course of 1863, as the seizure and subsequent trial of the Alexandra in April of that year and the detention and ultimate seizure of the Laird rams in the autumn make clear. It is also true that external domestic pressures to intervene more effectively began to be exerted on Russell after the escape of the Alabama, and more particularly in 1863. Petitions from anti-slavery bodies poured into the Foreign Office, demanding that the government put a stop to Confederate shipbuilding.Footnote ¹¹⁰ However, Russell was under no particular political pressure to change his stance, since the cabinet largely left him a free hand on the issue. It was only when sticking his neck out to detain the Laird rams that Russell sought political cover from ministerial colleagues, which was immediately forthcoming, but it is telling that Russell informed Palmerston of his intention to detain the rams only on the day he decided to do so.Footnote ¹¹¹ There was some disquiet that the government was not pursuing a more proactive policy against the Confederates among radicals, such as Forster and Bright, for example in a Commons debate on the Alabama on 27 March 1863; but the opposition showed little interest in the subject, though they did call a debate on the Laird rams on 23 February 1864, in order to chastise Russell for intervening too readily in the private affairs of business.Footnote ¹¹²

In reality there was no moment at which British policy pivoted to becoming restrictive. The decision to detain the rams was finely balanced and Russell only just came down on the side of intervention. Equally, as seen above, the government took the matter seriously from the outset, when first contacted by the US authorities over the building of the Oreto, and in the end the political will was not lacking to stop the Alabama from sailing – only the means to do so were. Naturally, the British government’s failure to prevent the sailing of the Florida, and still more the Alabama, served to heighten the US government’s anger and frustration, and the diplomatic war of words intensified throughout the Civil War and beyond, until Britain finally agreed in 1872, following an innovative international tribunal held in Geneva, to pay $15.5 million in compensation for US merchant marine losses at the hands of the British-built raiders.

At first sight, the payment of sizeable compensation is suggestive of British ‘guilt’. There is insufficient space here to examine the specific political and diplomatic circumstances in which the award was made, still less the degree to which the arbitration may properly be described as an arbitration at all (in any meaningful judicial sense).Footnote ¹¹³ However, the tribunal’s decision to award compensation rested on a number of factors, including the treatment of Confederate warships, once they had been commissioned outside British territorial waters, in British colonial ports: so, for example, the British government was held liable (by a three-to-two vote) for the depredations of the CSS Shenandoah only following its visit to Melbourne in February 1865. In relation to the CSS Alabama, the tribunal decided (by a vote of four to one, the British arbiter dissenting) that ‘the British government failed to use due diligence in the performance of its neutral obligations’, and that ‘those orders which it did give at last, for the detention of the vessel, were issued so late that their execution was not practicable’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ A similar finding was made in respect of the CSS Florida.

The tribunal’s allocation of some responsibility to Great Britain is not unreasonable, given the story of muddle and incompetence outlined above. However, what the tribunal did not conclude was that Great Britain had set out to aid and abet the Confederacy, or even that it had turned a blind eye to its activities. This survey, on the contrary, has pointed to the continual, strenuous efforts that the British government did make to try to put a stop to the Confederate activity. These were not the actions of a government seeking to supply covert aid to one party in the Civil War; the vehemence of the US protests must not obscure the considerable lengths to which the British government went to obstruct Confederate plans. It follows that the argument that Great Britain sided with the Confederacy cannot stand. Instead, the British government sought, in accordance with the proclamation with which this article began, to discharge its obligations as a neutral to the best of its ability. The seeds of its failure, to the extent that it did fail, lay in the lack of effective governmental apparatus. Perhaps Palmerston’s administration should also be blamed for that; if so, it would have to share the blame with all previous, and perhaps many subsequent, governments.