A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War

by Amanda Foreman

  Adams’s unsettled early life had no doubt impressed upon him a sense of being different from others. In 1814, after six years in Russia, his father became the American minister to the Court of St. James’s, having helped negotiate peace with England. But for eight-year-old Charles it meant being transplanted from cosmopolitan St. Petersburg to a small country house in the village of Ealing, several miles west of London, which his father preferred to living in the city. It also meant leaving a friendly nation to go to one that had been, until a few months earlier, America’s enemy.

  It was the Adams legacy, however, rather than any particular childhood event, that cast the longest shadow over Charles’s life. His father constantly invoked the family name as both praise and chastisement. If one of his children performed well, he was simply doing what was expected of an Adams; if he failed, the shame would follow him into the afterlife.35 The treatment crushed Charles’s elder brother, but in Charles it created a morbid sense of duty. When the family returned to Boston, Charles followed a well-trodden path, entering law, then politics, the occupations of an Adams, and taking up the family crusade to see slavery abolished.

  Charles Francis Adams loathed the noisy, public side of politics. He admired Sumner and Seward precisely because they possessed the drive and bravado he lacked. He could never emulate Seward’s theatrical embrace of working-class voters, and public speaking made him miserable. He also lacked Sumner’s charisma and conversational ease. Adams was no more likely to frequent Willard’s than was Lord Lyons. His greatest pleasures were the quiet concentration of historical research and the inner satisfaction of rock collecting. John Quincy Adams, who had become president at the age of fifty-eight—beating his own father by four years—would not have been impressed to learn that at fifty-one his son had only just managed to reach the House of Representatives.36

  The price Adams paid for this determination to remain above, or at least away from, the fray was his failure to be considered for a place on any of the prestigious committees in Congress. Indeed, he was so reticent that the winter of 1860 passed without his having made his maiden speech. He did not even attempt to cultivate Lord Lyons, despite a family history that gave him a far greater claim to the minister’s notice than Sumner, who stopped by the legation at every opportunity.

  Lyons appreciated Sumner’s visits. The senator happily shared with him the sort of insider political gossip that diplomats are required to know but find it hardest to obtain. Although Lyons was one of the only Washington figures whose standing had not been affected by the widening social chasm between the North and South, he was still as friendless as the day he arrived in the city. Ironically, his inability to make social inroads made it easier for President Buchanan to confide in him. On April 5, 1860, Lyons bumped into Buchanan while taking his constitutional around Lafayette Square. The president looked harassed and careworn. He felt helpless, he told Lyons, against the forces that were driving the country apart. The only area in which he still hoped to make a positive contribution was that of Anglo-American relations; here he still considered himself master of his own house. “He began by repeating an observation he often makes to me,” reported Lyons after their meeting, “that it has been his great ambition to be able to say at the end of his administration that he had left no question with Great Britain unsettled; that for the first time since the Revolution ‘the docket was clear.’ ” Yet even in this, Buchanan feared that events were conspiring against him.

  Ten months earlier, in June 1859, a domestic pig on San Juan Island in the Straits of Juan de Fuca had wandered from its enclosure into the potato patch of a neighboring farm. The patch belonged to Lyman Cutlar, one of twenty-five Americans living on the rugged, tree-lined island. Cutlar was tired of having his potatoes raided by the pig, and he settled the matter for good with a bullet. The pig’s owners happened to be British. They demanded compensation, and when Cutlar refused, they took their case to the governor of British Columbia. Unfortunately, it was unclear where the exact boundary lay between Washington State and the province of British Columbia. The arrival in July of a company from the 9th U.S. Infantry under Captain George Pickett appeared to settle the question, but then the British governor countered by dispatching a magistrate, Major John Fitzroy De Courcy, to the island. The major was a decorated veteran of the Crimean War, and fighting—rather than diplomacy—was his forte. He did not bother to hold a parley with Pickett, instead ordering him to leave the island or face arrest. Pickett refused and requested several hundred reinforcements. The governor sent several warships to reinforce De Courcy’s authority. Pickett’s men dug in, and the gunboats maneuvered into position.

  Alarmed that the two nations could stumble into war over a dead pig, Lord Lyons and Secretary of State Lewis Cass immediately ordered the withdrawal of their respective troops. But the actual details surrounding the dispute were more difficult to resolve. Neither nation was willing to concede its right to the island. The best that Lyons and Cass could achieve was a compromise whereby each country would maintain a small company of soldiers on the island until the question was resolved.37 President Buchanan confessed to Lyons that he could not see any way to end the matter. “The People of the West Coast were becoming very excited,” he told Lyons, “and he really did not know what to do. He concluded by begging me to set my wits to work to devise some plan of coming to an amicable settlement.” Lyons promised to try, though he privately doubted that anything he suggested would be acceptable to the inhabitants of the West Coast.38

  Lyons was still considering the problem when the Democratic Party convened in Charleston on April 23, 1859. A total of 630 delegates from around the country descended on the city to select the party’s presidential candidate for the election in November. The Southerners who openly advocated secession from the United States, known as the “Fire-eaters,” were determined to force the slavery debate into the open. William Yancey of Alabama had sufficiently recovered from the illness that had kept him from Lord Napier’s farewell ball to lead the way with his brilliant oratory. The Fire-eaters wanted the party to endorse a platform guaranteeing federal protection of slavery in all states and territories, including any new acquisitions such as Cuba or Honduras, but most Northern members of the party wanted to maintain the status quo. Yancey ostentatiously led a walkout of fifty delegates from the cotton states after the Northern majority voted down the proslavery platform. The convention ended in disarray, without a presidential nominee being selected.

  It was obvious to all that the Fire-eaters were blackmailing the Democratic Party with the threat of a split unless their platform was adopted. The Southern Democrats in the Senate pleaded with Yancey and the others not to turn the election into a three-horse race. The Democrats’ turmoil had naturally boosted the morale of the Republican Party by the time its delegates gathered in Chicago in mid-May to choose their presidential candidate. Seward was so certain of victory that he departed for his hometown of Auburn in upstate New York with his farewell speech to the Senate already prepared. But once the balloting began, his supporters realized they had made a tactical mistake in allowing the convention to take place in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln’s home state, instead of in New York. Seward’s campaign was outmaneuvered at every turn. Lincoln’s supporters successfully portrayed their candidate as an American success story. Lincoln was “honest Abe,” the humble rail splitter turned prominent lawyer, whose moderate views on slavery would do more to unite the country than Seward’s radical rhetoric. Seward’s campaign manager, Thurlow Weed, spent too much time doing deals and not enough assuaging the fears of the doubters. After a blazing start, Seward’s camp began to lose supporters, and by the third ballot, Lincoln emerged as the clear winner.

  Seward was crushed. He had refrained from running for the presidency in 1856 on Thurlow Weed’s advice. Now he looked back and saw it as his squandered opportunity. His loss to Lincoln seemed inexplicable to anyone who had not attended the convention. “Seward went away from Washington a few days a
go feeling perfectly certain of being named as the Candidate of the Republicans,” Lyons reported on May 22, 1860. “I never heard Lincoln even mentioned by the heads of the Party here.” Lyons could provide only scant details: “He is, I understand, a rough farmer who began life as a farm labourer and got on by a talent for stump speaking. Little more is known of him.”39 Charles Sumner sent a letter of commiseration to Seward expressing his shock at the surprise result, although he wrote to the Duchess of Argyll “that, while in England, I always expressed a doubt whether Seward could be nominated.”40

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  The British government was pondering the meaning of Seward’s defeat for Anglo-American relations when President Buchanan issued an invitation for the Prince of Wales to tour the United States.2.9 The president had heard that Queen Victoria was sending the eighteen-year-old Prince Edward to Canada, in fulfillment of a long-standing request from the Canadians for a royal visit. Buchanan suggested that the prince’s trip could be extended by a further six weeks to include a stay at the White House.

  Although the Queen was initially doubtful whether her son was up to the job, Prince Albert and the cabinet realized that Britain had been presented with a rare opportunity to improve the transatlantic relationship. Lyons, who was awarded the daunting task of deciding the prince’s itinerary, was delighted to have something other than the island of San Juan to discuss with Buchanan. Together with the Queen and the Foreign Office, Lyons devised an arrangement whereby the prince would travel to the United States in an unofficial capacity, as if on holiday, though accompanied by himself and the Duke of Newcastle at all times. There were to be no official deputations, delegations, or ceremonies. This, Lyons hoped, would dampen any attempts by Irish agitators to whip up local Anglophobia. Furthermore, in a nod to republican sentiment, the prince would use the least of all his titles, Baron Renfrew, allowing him to be treated as an ordinary British subject while “incognito.” Except for a passing visit to Virginia, Lyons simply left the South off the prince’s itinerary.

  Naturally, in all the cities on the prince’s route, the request for “Baron Renfrew” to be treated as a private citizen was ignored. Almost every inhabitant of Detroit was at the docks when the royal party clambered off the ferry Windsor on September 20, 1860. The same was true at the train station in Chicago. “Bertie,” as his family called him, was taken aback by the enthusiasm that greeted his arrival. The Americans seemed to like him even more than the Canadians did. At his every stop there were parades, fireworks, banquets, triumphant tours, and thousands upon thousands of cheering spectators. For a young man who was used to being treated as a great disappointment by his parents, this was an experience beyond fantasy.

  By the time the royal entourage arrived at Washington in early October, Bertie had become an enthusiastic admirer of America; he even thought the unfinished capital was a fine place to visit. He spent a night at the White House, where President Buchanan and his niece, Miss Harriet Lane, made an exception for the young prince by allowing card games after dinner (although no dancing).41 After being shown Congress, the Washington Monument, the Treasury, and a score of other public buildings, he informed his parents, “We might easily take some hints for our own buildings, which are so very bad.”42

  From Washington, Lyons accompanied Prince Edward to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate on the banks of the Potomac River, sixteen miles from Washington, where the prince planted a tree at Washington’s tomb. The British minister was just beginning to congratulate himself upon a splendid piece of organization when the visit threatened to unravel during the trip to Richmond, Virginia. The locals were furious because the prince’s hosts had canceled a large slave auction, and a hostile crowd gathered outside his hotel. Lyons managed to avoid a public confrontation, but that afternoon, he and Newcastle encountered a second embarrassment when they discovered en route that the royal party was being taken to visit a slave plantation. Only with great difficulty did they convince their hosts that a tour of the mayor’s office would be much more pleasurable.43

  When “Baron Renfrew” arrived in New York on October 11, his guardians were beginning to fear that the good-natured prince’s appetite for orphanages and parades had run its course. But Bertie absolutely loved New York. Some 300,000 people (out of a population of 800,000) lined the streets, climbing on rooftops, trees, and carriages, even hanging from streetlamps, to watch his carriage proceed up Broadway to his hotel. They cheered, threw flowers, and waved placards that said “Welcome, Victoria’s Royal Son.” “I never dreamed we would be received as we were,” he wrote.44

  The prince had never imagined such comforts, either. The Fifth Avenue Hotel was the newest and grandest addition to New York’s already magnificent accommodations. Completed in 1859 on the “edge” of town at Twenty-fourth Street and Madison Square, the marble-clad six-story building had the latest conveniences including en suite bathrooms, communication tubes that allowed a guest to speak his request to room service, central heating, and, most exciting of all, a “perpendicular railway intersecting each floor.” The American ideal of luxury was different from the European. The ornaments and objets d’art often taken for granted in English or French houses were missing, but “the rooms are so light and lofty; the passages are so well warmed; the doors slide backward in their grooves so easily and yet so tightly; the chairs are so luxurious; the beds are so elastic, and the linen so clean, and, let me add, the living so excellent,” he wrote, “that I would never wish for better quarters.… All the domestic arrangements (to use a fine word for gas, hot water, and other comforts) are wonderfully perfect.”45

  For one night the prince was allowed to sample life as it was lived by New York’s gilded “Four Hundred.” On October 12, 1860, the entire entourage, including Lyons, traveled in a parade of open carriages to a grand ball at the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street organized by New York’s most distinguished citizen, Peter Cooper. Four thousand guests bribed, blackmailed, or otherwise insinuated their way into the most coveted social event of the decade. The danger that the prince would inadvertently start a stampede was so great that the entrances to the supper rooms were guarded by prominent citizens, who admitted fifty guests at a time.46 Even so, the ballroom floor partially collapsed beneath the dancers’ weight and carpenters had to be called in during dinner. Bertie danced until five in the morning. Four hours later, he was dressed and dutifully touring P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, where he saw the “Feejee Mermaid” and shook hands with Tom Thumb.

  Ill.4 Grand torchlight parade of the New York firemen in honor of the Prince of Wales, passing the Fifth Avenue Hotel, October 13, 1860.

  That night, five thousand men from the City Fire Brigade marched in a torchlight procession past his hotel. Each company let off fireworks as it went under the prince’s balcony. “This is all for me! All for me!” he exclaimed.47 He was exhausted, like the rest of his entourage, but also elated. The warmth of the American reception made it difficult to imagine that there had ever been open hostility between the two countries. Even the much-anticipated protests from Irish immigrants had been confined to a single incident, when the Irish-dominated 69th Regiment of the New York State Militia refused to march in the parade up Broadway.48 Leaving New York with great regret, the prince traveled to Albany on October 15, 1860, for a grand dinner given by the governor of the state, Edwin Morgan.

  Seward also attended Morgan’s dinner. The past few months had been turbulent for him. His return to Washington following the Republican convention was one of the most humiliating episodes of his life. He told his wife that the house felt “sad and mournful” and that he missed the Napiers, whose engravings on the wall seemed “like pictures of the dead.”49 Seward could not decide which was worse, the complacent sympathy of Sumner or the exaggerated politeness of Mason and the other Senate Democrats.50 The demeanor of both demonstrated that they considered his political career effectively at an end. Only the Adamses, wrote Seward, were as “generous, kind, faithful as ever.�
�� Adams took him to task with uncharacteristic force after he learned that Seward was contemplating his retirement from politics. Neither Adams nor Weed thought Lincoln capable of winning the election without Seward, let alone running the country. Thurlow Weed had met with Lincoln after the convention and offered his services for the upcoming campaign. His conversation had convinced him that if Lincoln were elected, which was beginning to look quite possible, the newcomer would never be a match for Seward. Lincoln might be president in name, but the real power would reside with Seward.

  Weed’s optimism about Seward’s role stemmed from the Democrats’ recent split into two camps. The Northern and Southern factions had decided to field their own candidates, Stephen Douglas for the North and John Breckinridge for the South, almost guaranteeing the defeat of both in favor of the Republicans. By early August, Weed had managed to drag Seward out of his despondency and into a sufficiently robust frame of mind to contemplate a tour through Northern and western states on Lincoln’s behalf. Seward had to put up a brave front and conduct himself as a loyal party man; any other action would have given Lincoln an excuse to leave him out of his cabinet. Seward knew that Weed was right, but his wisdom did not make the effort any less painful.51 The Republican message that Seward carried to the Northern states contained something for everyone: no expansion of slavery, a protective tariff for American industries, a homestead law giving away undeveloped federal land, and government aid to construct a transcontinental railroad.