Seward indignantly remonstrated with Lord Lyons not only about the proclamation but also the willingness of Foreign Secretary John Russell to meet informally with Confederate commissioners. Privately, the secretary of state cursed the British ministry: “God damn them, I’ll give them hell. I’m no more afraid of them, than I am of Robert Toombs.” (This reaction seemed excessive, coming from a man who had met informally with Confederate commissioners two months earlier.) With equal truculence, Seward on May 21 penned such a bellicose a dispatch to Charles Francis Adams that Lincoln felt compelled to moderate it, lest it provoke a war. (Years earlier the impulsive Seward confessed: “I love to write what I think and feel as it comes up.”) According to the Russian minister to the United States, Seward continued to believe that “the Unionist party in the South is quite strong and awaits only the presence of federal troops to declare itself” and that a foreign war would induce the seceded states to return to the fold.
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃