His mix of attitudes was characteristic of British opinion in general. The dangerous people in Britain who might well have provoked war with the Union, were the Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, W. E. Gladstone. They wanted to mediate between the warring parties in company with "Europe", in the form of France and Russia, as a preliminary recognition of the Confederacy, all with a humanitarian view to ending Lincoln's bloodthirsty and futile war to overwhelm the South. Russell dreamed of being a counter-Canning, calling an Old World into being to redress the balance of the New. Gladstone worried about the depressed state of his native Lancashire, deprived by Lincoln's blockade of its key to prosperity and employment, Confederate cotton. It was a mercy to everyone concerned that Cornewall Lewis led a successful resistance to them.
On the American side, amid the din of fighting, there was nothing that could be expected in the way of caution or moderation from among the Confederates. Theirs was a case of passing from a phase of gross over-confidence to a condition of desperation. Their energies were entirely devoted to purchasing the means of an army to stave off the Union, a navy to break the Union blockade, and pleading for recognition from any power that would listen. Napoleon III in France, already deep in Mexican schemes, was willing, but found himself stymied by British reluctance. In Washington, Lincoln did not need to resist any serious equivalents to Russell and Gladstone. He was free to reciprocate, in effect, Britain's studiously moderate demeanour. Charles Francis Adams at the US Legation in London played much the same enabling part as Lyons in Washington.
The big test here was the Trent affair near the end of 1861. A British mail packet was detained by a Union warship and two passengers, who happened to be Confederate Commissioners on their ways respectively to London and Paris, were abducted and imprisoned. The irony of the affair was that the Union was behaving exactly in the manner of British blockaders in 1812, provoking the US to war.
Britain had a cast-iron case for war had the Union stayed obdurate. Regiments were despatched to reinforce garrisons in British North America (the core of the later Canada). British demands for satisfaction were couched in carefully unprovocative terms. Lincoln responded accordingly. He accepted in the face of vociferously patriotic popular opinion that he had no option other than to apologise and set his captives free.
The Trent affair defined the essence of the care taken by both of the cousins' sides that there was not going to be, in Secretary of State William Seward's braggart words, "a world on fire". That care survived even the exasperation of Washington arising out of British negligence in letting loose from Laing's yard at Liverpool in 1863, the Alabama and her sister Confederate privateers, who were to cause havoc to Union shipping. The ultimate expression of that note of care was the decision of Charles Francis Adams, leading the US delegation at the International Arbitration Tribunal at Geneva in 1872, not to press for the enormous "indirect" damages caused by Alabama and her sisters. This rescued Britain (in the person, by now, of Gladstone) from having to choose between humiliation or war.
