Mission Accomplished: Sort of. British Block Sale of Birkenhead Rams

(Library of Congress photo) Gideon Welles wanted the rams being built at the Laird shipyard in Birkenhead in Union hands -- at almost any cost.

(Third of Three Parts)

As the correspondence flowed from London to Washington and back, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles and his assistant Gustavus Fox became increasingly interested in what progress was being made in buying the  “swift privateers” for the Union.  This was an astounding turn of events for a clandestine mission ordered by the secretaries of the Navy and the Treasury to disrupt Confederate shipbuilding  plans to deliver ocean-crossing rams that could sail as commerce raiders like CSS Alabama [built in the Laird shipyard] and be strong enough to wreak havoc on Northern ports and break the blockade of Southern ports.

For the public, including the United States Senate, the mission was still secret.  When Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts abolitionist  who had been viciously attacked on the Senate floor by a cane-wielding South Carolina congressman, wanted to know if the United States was trading in the British arms markets, as John Laird alleged in Parliament. When he took office, Laird resigned his position as head of one of the most innovative shipyards in Europe.

Welles called the statements “destitute of the truth,”  coming from “a mercenary hypocrite without principle or honesty.” For their part, the Confederates “were protesting before high Heaven that they had no concern or interest in the Birkenhead iron-clads.” They waved the legal papers saying the vessels belong to “Mr. Bravay and Co., of Paris, agents for the Pasha of Egypt.”

True, Adrien Bravay’s brother manned an Alexandria office and had bought war materiel and ships for the Egyptian in the past; but the Bravays and James Bulloch, the most innovative Confederate ship-buyer overseas; the Laird yard in Birkenhead; and the Confederate banking house Fraser, Trenholm in Liverpool understood who had the real claim on the rams, despite their new names – El Tousson and El Monassir.

They even had a plan in place if the British seized the rams, a concern of Bulloch’s for months with all the Union spies snooping in the Mersey River’s yards and Paradise Street bars in Liverpool.  Francois Bravay, as a French parliamentarian, would appeal to the emperor whose diplomats would sing a sad chorus in London and Liverpool at how wronged this French company had been.  Didn’t the British understand that a contract was a contract, a sacred trust?

Welles’ letter to Sumner and the Confederate-Laird documents had little bearing on the truth. (1)

Businessman John Murray Forbes during a breakfast meeting with Charles Francis Adams, the American minister of the Court of St. James on April 23 laid out a “general review of the ship-yards of the island, and a description of every suspicious vessel. …I do not know that any anxiety I have is heavier than this.” The British and Scots’ shipyards appeared to be the winners in all these machinations.  As demand went up and supplies were limited, prices rose like Congreve rockets, as Adams predicted and Forbes and William Aspinwall, the businessmen entrusted with $10 million by the Lincoln administration to disrupt Confederate shipbuilding plan acknowledged to Welles in putting the ship-buying program on hold. (2)

Forbes now headed to Germany, ostensibly to recruit volunteers for the Union Army, and Aspinwall crossed the channel to work with Union officials there on Confederate activities with French yards and arms manufacturers and the intentions of Napoleon III’s government in Mexico. They were gone from May into June.

Work at the Laird yard was nearly complete on the first ram by the time they returned to Great Britain. The only hope in keeping the rams out of rebel hands lay in Adams’ protestations having an effect on Lord Palmerston’s government or the government itself acknowledging that Bravay’s claimed ownership was too murky to be allowed to proceed. (3)

In the end, the British government acknowledged that the ownership was too clouded to let the rams leave Liverpool.  Foreign Minister Lord John Russell confessed to the prime minister that it was time for a public investigation  into the ownership of the “Birkenhead rams.” Before that got under way,  the ships were detained at gunpoint. By February 1864, the House of Commons approved their seizures.  Adams diplomatic protestations fueled by Consuls Thomas Haines Dudley’s and Freeman H. Morse’s reports, paid for in large measure, by drawing on the Union deposit at Barclays made by Aspinwall, had paid off.

The two businessmen began closing out their affairs in July 1863. They left $4 million in bonds with Barings to cover the bank’s loan at the start of the mission and also to finance Haines and Dudley’s growing network of spies that continued gathering evidence that was the backbone of the Union’s “Alabama Claims” case against Great Britain.  It also went to other agents working the arms market until the war ended.

The other $6 million was packed into three trunks and steamed back across the Atlantic with them aboard the Great Eastern, the world’s largest passenger vessel.  They arrived in New York in the early evening July 12, as news of Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg was arriving. 

After leaving the ship, clearing customs, and gathering his baggage, Aspinwall barely had time to catch a train to his home on the North River.  After sundown, Forbes, his son, and a servant landed on a wharf crowded with a “as bad-looking a lot of roughs as I ever saw.” With the Forbes party were the trunks of bonds.  “We did not know that the great [draft] riot was about breaking out, nor luckily did the gentry around know what a prize lay within their grasp.” An Irish cab driver recognized Forbes from a visit he had paid his regiment and offered the party his services.  “Over the rough, dark streets,” the party made their escape to the safety of the  fashionable Brevoort House.

As for the $6 million in bonds, they eventually were “returned to the Treasury in the original packages, with the seals of the Treasury unbroken.” (4) 

Although Forbes and Aspinwall returned without ships to show for their time, other agents using the money in Barings continued shopping in the European arms and ship markets, still using guises of private investors buying neutral goods or private investors buying war goods for neutral foreign governments.  They talked, bought, and acted like their Confederate counterparts. In the late summer of 1864, an exasperated Judah P. Benjamin, Confederate secretary of State, ordered Henry Hotze in London to print every new case of Northern arms buying that he could find in his pro-Confederate paper’s next edition.

Enlightening as this news was to Southern supporters in Great Britain,  the facts were the United States’ credit was better than the Confederacy’s after Gettysburg and Vicksburg,  its ports were open, and its manufacturing sector having turned to the war effort was running in high gear. Three weeks after the Battle of Hampton Roads, Seward wrote, “We can build our iron clad steamers (like the Merrimack or CSS Virginia) and build them quicker” than the Confederacy could in its few yards or in buying them abroad. As the year was ending, Fox was even more confident than the secretary.  He was ready to take on the Great Powers of Europe.  “In two years we can take the offensive with vessels that will be superior to any England is now building.” They were right but with an asterisk. (5) 

End Notes

(1) Charles Adams, Studies Military and Diplomatic, 1775 – 1865, MacMillan Company, New York, 1911,  Official Records of the War of the Rebellion – Navy, Bulloch to Mallory, March 30, 1863, Ser. 2 , Vol. 2, p. 397.

(2) Charles Francis Adams, Laird Rams (hereafter Adams, Laird), Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. 33, Google e-Book,  pp. 191-192.

(3) James D. Bulloch,The Confederate Secret Service in Europe, Vol. 1, Google e-Book, pp. 404-405.

(4) Adams, Laird, p. 195.  John Murray Forbes, Drawing on Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes edited by his daughter Sarah Forbes Hughes , Google e-Book,, Vol. 2, pp. 44-49. Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and Johnson with an introduction by John L. Morse Jr., Vol. 1. 1861-March 1864, Boston entries for May 2 and May 19, 1863.

(5) John Bigelow, Retrospections of an Active Life, Vol. 1, Google e-Book, pp. 410-411. Bigelow, Retrospections, Vol. 2, p. 207. “Mr. Laird and Secretary Welles,” New York Times, Aug. 10, 1863.

With Millions in Hand, 2 Businessmen Set out to Wreck Rebel Ship-buying Plans

 

 

(Library of Congress photos)

 

Former Treasury Secretary Robert Walker, left, was also sent to Europe by his successor, Salmon Chase.  While Forbes and Aspinwall were to wreck Confederate  ship-buying plans, Walker was to undercut their bonds sale.

 

Second of Three Parts

With the basic points settled on what two private businessmen would be doing to disrupt Confederate shipbuilding efforts in Europe, especially the rams being built near Liverpool, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, John Murray Forbes and William H. Aspinwall agreed that Forbes should leave first. He would take his young son John Forbes II. Aspinwall, on the other hand, was to wait until  the 12, 500, five- and twenty-year bonds were countersigned, pack them into “five or six trunks,” and then head overseas from New York. He would take a Captain Pearson from his steamship company to scout yards in England and Scotland. 

What was so extraordinary about this mission hatched in a New York hotel room in spring 1963 -- during some of the darkest days facing the Union cause -- was the Lincoln administration’s handing over after the briefest of meetings to two private citizens millions of taxpayers’ dollars “to dispose of pretty much as they liked” in Europe. (1)

After seeing Consul Thomas Haines Dudley in Liverpool to assess the situation at Laird, Forbes hunted down his old friend Joshua Bates, a Massachusetts-born senior official at  Baring Brothers bank in London. The bank was the grand sounding “financial agent” for the Union government in Great Britain. In reality, the “financial agent” disbursed piddling sums to cover immediate bills and pay consuls’ salaries. In the plan hatched in the Fifth Avenue hotel, Barings became vital to securing the credit needed to buy ships or to the raise prices so high that the South couldn’t afford them.

On the more personal level, Bates and Baring Brothers had a long relationship with Forbes and his western railroad investments. In fact, before receiving Chase’s telegram, Forbes took the extraordinary step of sharing with Bates, who for decades ran the commercial side of the bank’s global operations, confidential letters between him and Gustavus Fox, assistant secretary of the Navy,  outlining the Confederate ironclad threat. To this meeting at the bank with Bates and Thomas Baring, Forbes also brought a letter of introduction from Chase. (2)

“From policy I gave them (as they wished) a very limited sketch of my plans,” Forbes wrote. He then left to meet briefly with Charles Francis Adams, the United States minister to Great Britain, who did not press Forbes on exactly what he was doing for the United States. He pledged his aides’ assistance if needed. Forbes left the impression with Adams that he was in Europe to recruit soldiers in Germany for the Union army. By the time Forbes returned to Barings, the United States was awarded a 500,000 pound line of credit “subject to cash draft.”  All that was needed now was for Aspinwall to deposit the securities at the bank. (3) 

The businessmen’s cover was blown almost from the day Aspinwall arrived in the compact financial city that was abuzz with news of the British seizure of Alexanda, a soon-to-be commerce raider, in Liverpool and the capture of Peterhoff on its run from the British Virgin Islands to Matamoros.  As Aspinwall and Forbes dined with Adams, the Times reported on April 7, “Two well known merchants, one from Boston and one from New York have been commissioned by the Washington government … to employ part of the 2 million pounds” they brought with them to buying up “the gunboats now building in England for the rebels.”  (4)

Like Confederate Secret Agent James Bulloch whose presence became news upon his arrival in Liverpool, the two pressed on with their work – buy ironclads, disrupt Confederate shipbuilding activities, and where possible, preach the gospel of the Union emphasizing the Emancipation Proclamation. (5)

The businessmen and the consuls understood that they needed real intelligence to stymie the Confederate agents and that meant paying for depositions and necessary legal fees, retaining detectives and spies of their own, and spreading cash among disaffected shipyard workers and seamen, and when necessary, bribing clerks in shipyards along the Thames, Mersey, and Clyde, for plans;   clerks in banking houses on curious transactions, and chandleries on suspicious purchases. The line of credit at Barings gave the Union a leg up in all these areas. 

While neither the businessmen nor consuls saw any problem with spending the Navy’s money on spying, the funds should have been coming from the State Department, a point that concerned Welles, and he let officials at State know that.

What Forbes and Aspinwall also picked up was the depth of British resentment over the letters of marque resurrecting the anger over Captain Charles Wilkes’ forcibly removing James Mason and John Slidell from the British mail packet Trent in 1861.  “Every Englishman thinks that his appointment [as flotilla commander in the West Indies] was a taint to the international mails.” On these two points, the men finally got their way. The letters of marque were never issued, and Wilkes was reassigned. 

As April moved along, Forbes was receiving advice from Adams, who by then knew what their real mission was, to be very wary of the shipyards toying with them.  “This is merely playing the game of the Englishmen” in driving war materiel prices skyward.  The Confederates’ successful sale of bonds based on the delivery of cotton had changed the financial game, the minister noted. On the rams, they were not going to be out-bid. Adams stepped up his diplomatic pressure on the British.  Dudley’s reports from Liverpool, paid for out of the Barings account, were particularly useful in building the Union’s case on who really was buying these warships. (6)

The defeat at Chancellorsville added to financial pressures on the Union overseas. The Union bonds were bringing between 60 and 75 percent of par value, further reducing the businessmen’s ability to knock the South out of the European arms and shipbuilding markets.

Adams then reminded Forbes it was better to work as a private businessman with a limited amount of hard currency in these matters than appear to be an agent of the United States with its deep pockets.

Complicating matters for the Union in London was the arrival of Robert Walker, a former secretary of the Treasury and a one-time senator from Mississippi, on a special mission from Chase.  Walker’s mission was to undermine Confederate bond sales and to bolster the Union’s standing in European financial markets. It was just another addition to the posse of roving diplomats, like Thurlow Weed; poaching diplomats, like William Evarts to handle American claims against the British government;  volunteer diplomats, like Moncure Conway who began corresponding with Mason, the Confederate commissioner in London, that soon appeared in the Times, and special mission diplomats, like Forbes, Aspinwall, and Walker.  Adams noted in his diary that like Forbes’ and Aspinwall’s mission, “I had nothing to do” with Walker’s. 

As for the two businessmen, they were pleasant enough with Walker but remained tight-lipped about what they were about. This was in contrast to their letter to Chase about conferring freely with him. The letter was proof that Forbes, especially, had an  uncanny ability at “working through indirections.” The historian Adams marveled, “That, under such an ingeniously bad system, a catastrophe did not result, speaks volumes for the discretion of those concerned.”  By contrast, Confederate agents even representing the same department bickered among themselves over who was entitled to what share of the Erlanger Loan. The Confederate agents “are soon found out and drawn into confessions and statements by gossiping acquaintances.”  (7)

End notes:

1.Charles Francis Adams, Laird Rams (hereafter Adams, Laird), Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. 33, Google e-Book, p. 196, John Murray Forbes, Drawing on Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes edited by his daughter Sarah Forbes Hughes (hereafter Hughes, Recollections), Vol. 1, Cambridge, Google e-Book, Vol. 1, p. 340. John Launtz Larson, Bonds of Enterprise: John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America’s Railway Age (hereafter Larson, Bonds of Enterprise), Google e-Book, p. 211.

2.Hughes, Recollection, Vol. 1, p. 340.  Larson, Bonds of Enterprise, p. 211.  Stanley Chapman, The Rise of Merchant Banking, Taylor and Francis, Oxon, U.K., 2006, p. 28.

3.Hughes, Recollections, Vol. 2, pp. 8-9. Adams, Studies, p. 358.

4.Adams, Studies, p. 359. Maynard, Forbes, pp. 67-89.

5.Hughes, recollections, Vol. 2, p. 9.  Maynard, Forbes, pp. 67-89.

6.Maynard, Forbes, pp. 67-89.

7.Adams, Studies, pp. 360-364. Adams, Laird, pp. 165-207.  John Niven (ed.), Salmon P. Chase Papers, Correspondence, 1863-1864, Vol. 4, Kent State University Press, Kent, pp. 16-18.

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