A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (13 page)

Nothing had quite gone Russell’s way since he achieved iconic status as the young man who ushered through the Great Reform Bill of 1832. That achievement had been all the more remarkable considering his lifelong poor health and nervous disposition, which had turned him into something of a self-absorbed eccentric.
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Many of his ailments could be traced back to the fact that he had been born more than two months premature, and his survival was almost without precedent in the nineteenth century. Throughout his life, Russell would be blessed and cursed in equal measure. He enjoyed close relations with his family, particularly his older brother, the Duke of Bedford, and yet he was never comfortable in society. Both of his marriages were reasonably happy; on the other hand, the second Lady John never pretended that her love was of the romantic kind. Nor was she capable of providing the support and help that Palmerston received from his wife. Unlike Lady John, who never entertained if she could help it, Lady Palmerston used all the means in her power to assist her husband. They had been lovers for many years until the death of her husband, Lord Cowper, enabled them to marry. During their long political partnership, she had developed her own skills and insights into human nature. According to one diplomat, a morning call on her “was more instructive than studying the newspapers.”
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Lady Palmerston was adept at converting enemies and newspaper editors into political allies, her most important conquest being John Delane, editor of
The Times.

Russell was one of the most cultured politicians of his generation, but “Little Jonny,” as he was called on account of his diminutive stature, was desperately shy and stiff to the point of rudeness while also being overly sensitive and demanding of others. Consequently, he was a dreadful manager of men, incapable of fulfilling the most basic requirements of leadership.
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Although not exactly devious, he could be slippery with his colleagues, who accused him of withholding information and of acting without consultation or contrary to agreed plans. Sydney Smith once said of him, “It is impossible to sleep soundly while Lord John has command of the watch.”

With all these talents and handicaps, Russell was driven by a lofty idealism for genuine political and social reform; but the failures of his career had been catastrophic, not least his inability to come to grips with the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s. Russell ought to have retired from politics after the fall of his administration in 1852, as one of his biographers noted, “with his two and a half dozen bottles of Australian wine and his Colt’s revolving firearm from the Great Exhibition.”
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Then he would have been remembered as a great but flawed leader.
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The new Liberal cabinet had fifteen members, a substantial number by the standards of the day, and included a broad cross section of views and personalities, from the flamboyant and combative Duke of Argyll (Lord Privy Seal) to the intellectual and moderately inclined Sir George Cornewall Lewis (home secretary).
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The most surprising inclusion was William Gladstone as chancellor of the exchequer. Once hailed as the “rising hope of those stern unbending Tories,” Gladstone had initially refused to show any interest in joining the Liberal Party, staying away from Willis’s and voting with the Conservative government on June 10. What brought him into the fold was a case of mutual need. Gladstone could not bear the thought of four more years in the wilderness after his celebrated turn as chancellor from 1852 to 1855, and despite a personal antipathy toward him, Palmerston needed Gladstone’s reputation and proven abilities as chancellor to give weight to his administration. Gladstone was by far the best orator in the House of Commons, which made him a hazard outside government. Moreover, there was one topic on which they both agreed: neither wanted Russell to succeed in enacting further political reform. It was not the most promising of partnerships. Gladstone always joked that he never attended a cabinet meeting without a letter of resignation in his pocket, while Palmerston liked to claim that he kept the fires stoked for just such an event.
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In the matters of faith and the Church of England, Gladstone had few competitors. His rather ostentatious moral rectitude once led the Radical MP Henry Labouchere to complain that he did not object to Gladstone’s always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, only to his pretense that God had put it there. If Seward was an enigma, Gladstone was a man of complex contradictions. In contrast to Palmerston and Russell, whose political principles remained consistent, Gladstone’s could and did change. He had begun his career as hostile to the abolition of slavery and cool on political reform. But the man who once said “I am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle—the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out inegalitarian” would develop a zeal for both causes during the 1860s, later becoming known as “the People’s William.”

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Seward was conscious that there was no place in British society for a man like him, a professional politician with neither land nor personal wealth to sustain him. “I would not be an aristocrat here,” he mused. “I could not be a plebeian.”
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He had received more kindness and respect from the English than he had ever expected, and never again would he feel abashed by Charles Sumner’s casual references to his aristocratic friends. But his success in London had been rather more mixed than Sumner’s.

Seward had failed to impress the assistant secretary at the American legation. Benjamin Moran had worked at the legation since 1853, starting as a temporary clerk and gradually moving up the ranks to assistant secretary in 1857. His wife died a few months after his promotion, leaving him to grieve in the basement of the legation, where, surrounded by mildewed records, broken lamps, and rusting trunks, he diligently copied out dispatches and reviewed documents. When the occasion arose, he also issued passports and performed minor services for American citizens. Moran was sympathetic to those who came begging for help, but his manner was a repellent combination of the insinuating and the supercilious. Although he could never understand why, every minister he served took pains to keep him in the basement and away from social functions. His diary became his best friend, a silent confidant with whom he could share his prejudices and disappointments. Moran yearned to be a popular man-about-town—a desire so entirely out of keeping with his manner and humble Pennsylvanian origins that if known, it would have provoked hoots of laughter. Yet he persisted in believing it an attainable goal, despite the cruel neglect of his superiors.

Moran was prepared to give Seward the benefit of the doubt at their first meeting on May 21, 1859. “He is a much smaller man than I thought him,” noted Moran with a thrill of pleasure. His head, he noticed, was only a “little larger than mine” and he had “a pleasing manner.”
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His opinion altered, however, when Seward ignored him at the next occasion. “I met Seward at Fenton’s [hotel] last night,” recorded Moran on June 23, adding bitterly, “and found his head turned with the attention he has received from England’s aristocracy.”
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Moran was consoled that his political heroes in Parliament, the Radical MPs Richard Cobden and John Bright, had shown little interest in cultivating Seward.
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Known somewhat derisively as the “Members for the United States” (Bright’s portrait hung in the American legation), their friendship with Charles Sumner was well known, and Moran had expected the same with Seward. The two British reformers were generally spoken of in the same breath, even though they did not always agree with each other. Cobden was the quieter, the more intellectual, and the better liked of the two. Bright, his onetime protégé, was a brilliant orator whose passion for denouncing the sins of the aristocracy made him a hero among the working class. Both MPs were exponents of the so-called Manchester School of politics: they believed in democracy, low taxation, universal education, no government regulation, no military expenditure unless in self-defense, and free trade. America had already achieved many of these goals, which in their view rendered its other faults far more excusable than any of the “great crimes” committed by Britain. Lord Palmerston angrily attacked the pair for being traitors and haters of all things English, for whom “everything that was hostile to England was right.”
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Seward was unaware that Richard Cobden thought him a “light weight” who “wrote too much, and thought too little.”
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Seward had also disappointed Harriet Martineau, whose reputation as a woman of letters, social reformer, and commentator was almost as great in America as it was in England. Her study of the United States in 1837,
Society in America
—written after a ten-thousand-mile trek across the country that took two years—was considered by Americans to be one of the least obnoxious ever produced by an English writer. Seward had traveled to her home in the Lake District to pay court. “Miss Martineau … applied her ear trumpet; and we talked right on, an hour and a half, chiefly, of course, about the great American question.” Seward was honest about the difficulty of forcing abolition on the country, perhaps too honest: “I gave her my own more practical views, and spoke, of course, hopefully. She betrayed, or rather confessed, an opinion, that I was a politician, rather than an abolitionist of her school.” But Harriet Martineau’s actual objection was not over his abolition principles per se but his lack of principles in general. She thought he was cynical and self-aggrandizing, especially after he revealed that he had supported the complaints against the Royal Navy’s pursuit of suspected slave traders because “the more noise there is about war, the less probable war becomes; he always makes the utmost possible noise at the earliest moment,” wrote Miss Martineau. “In truth I was aghast. ‘You see,’ said he, ‘I am very candid.’ ”
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Lord Palmerston himself went even further in his condemnation of Seward. The American was a “vapouring, blustering, ignorant Man,” whose overbearing egotism made him a danger to Anglo-American relations.
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Palmerston had accepted his first ministerial post when Seward was seven years old, and by 1859 he had served as secretary for war, foreign secretary (three times), home secretary, and prime minister. He had been in politics long enough to recognize a fellow bluffer and opportunist. But having observed Seward’s evident pleasure at his reception in England, Palmerston hoped that the good experience would translate into better diplomacy in the future.
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Seward was still abroad when the radical abolitionist John Brown led a raiding party of sixteen whites and five blacks in an attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859. The raid was meant to be the catalyst for a slave uprising. But rather than sparking a Santo Domingo–style revolution, the attempt ended in a bloody standoff against a company of U.S. Marines directed by Colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown was hanged for treason on December 2. The public’s hysterical reaction to the raid, particularly in the South, frightened many abolitionists. Fearing arrest because of his known friendship with John Brown, the former slave and abolition campaigner Frederick Douglass gathered his family and fled to England.

Soon after his arrival, Douglass was invited to give a lecture in Paris. The visit required a passport, but Benjamin Moran refused to give him one, in accordance with the Dred Scott decision. Douglass felt it was beneath his dignity to protest and called upon the French embassy instead, which issued a passport without demur. In a separate incident on November 21, Moran also shooed away Sarah Parker Remond, a black abolitionist from Boston who had become a popular public speaker since her arrival in England the previous February.
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In his diary he claimed he would have issued a passport if she had sent the request by post, but Moran could not bear to be challenged, especially by a social inferior. Remond “was so impudent,” he recorded, “that I had to order her out of the house.”
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The following week, on November 28, 1859, Moran foiled Remond’s attempt to gain a passport using a third party. This, he thought, was the end of the matter until he read about her “unjust” treatment in the newspapers. The
Morning Star,
which represented the views of Richard Cobden and John Bright, took the lead and attacked the legation for three days running. “This has fallen like a bomb-shell among the family,” recorded Moran, referring to the American minister, George Dallas. Notwithstanding his Quakerism, Dallas was incensed at having his character impugned over a spat with a “negress” and talked wildly of teaching the English a lesson by closing down the legation.
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He wrote an angry letter to Remond, who replied by reminding him that it was her taxes that paid his salary.
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To the British, the passport episode exposed the United States as a racist and morally backward country whose treatment of nonwhites was reprehensible. “You may read the facts,” wrote Remond in the Quaker journal the
British Friend,
“but no words can express the mental suffering we are obliged to bear because we happen to have a dark complexion. No language can give one an idea of the spirit of prejudice which exists in the States.”
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