A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (11 page)

—

The great influx of immigrants into the United States after 1846 accelerated the rise of the harsh, strident politics that Dickens so deplored. In 1840 there had been 17 million people living in America; by 1850 there were 23 million, an increase of 35 percent. The altered political landscape—where ethnic identity and class affiliation translated into thousands of votes—demanded a new breed of politician, the kind exemplified by William Henry Seward, who was elected to one of the two New York Senate seats in 1849. While governor he had behaved with shameless opportunism, courting the state’s large Irish vote with his vitriolic diatribes against England. The annexation of Canada was a constant theme in his speeches.
²⁴
Though not a bigot himself, Seward was an expert at appealing to popular prejudice to shore up his power base. Once he realized that the Democratic and Whig parties were fragmenting into Northern and Southern, proslavery and antislavery factions, he abandoned the Whigs and became a Republican.
^1.7
He subtly repositioned himself, raising his antislavery rhetoric and emphasizing his protectionist credentials. This infuriated the free-trade South, but it endeared him to states that feared competition from European goods.

There were two different Sewards, according to his friend Henry Adams: the “political and the personal.” But over time they had become so entwined “that no one could tell which was the mask and which the features.” “I am an enigma, even to myself,” Seward once quipped.
²⁵
With his soft, husky voice and confiding manner, he exuded the air of a man who knew the foibles of humanity but did not sit over them in judgment. “You are at your ease with him at once,” recorded an English admirer. “There is a frankness and bonhomie. In our English phrase, Mr. Seward is good company. A good cigar, a good glass of wine, and a good story, even if it is a little risqué, are the pleasures which he obviously enjoys keenly.” His opposition to slavery was never in doubt, but his preference for pragmatism over principle meant that sometimes his ends became lost in the means. Shortly after his election to the Senate, Seward explained that one consideration governed all his political actions: “My duty is to promote the welfare, interest, and happiness of the people of the United States.” But whether this view was a goal or a cover remained the subject of debate. His wife, Frances, became increasingly disillusioned by her husband’s ability to temporize. She had once been a woman of strong political views, but her confidence had been crushed by prolonged exposure to Seward’s ego. She preferred to live in seclusion in New York, pleading ill health, while Seward lived in Washington. It was almost as if Frances represented some part of his conscience: safely left at home but still accessible by post.

Seward had become the leader of the nascent Republican Party in the Senate when Senator Stephen Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, proposed a bill in 1854 to admit two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska, into the Union. However, the provisions included a bombshell: the two territories would decide for themselves whether to be free or slave states. Douglas had proposed breaking the 1820 Missouri Compromise because it was the only way he could achieve his real aim of obtaining Southern support for a transcontinental railroad. But the result was catastrophic for the residents of Kansas. In theory, majority rule was going to decide the issue. In practice, pro- and antislavery settlers began to slaughter each other in cold blood. “Border Ruffians” based in Missouri charged over the border to join forces with Kansas slave owners, while New England abolitionists shipped caseloads of rifles to their western brethren. Each of the rival factions proclaimed its own legislature. Throughout 1855, American newspapers referred to “Bleeding Kansas.”

Seward tried to find common ground with the Southern senators as a means to ending the violence in Kansas without endangering the Union. But the North and South each regarded the fate of Kansas as the key to slavery’s future. There could be no compromise. In the spring of 1856, President Franklin Pierce gave his full support to a bill proposed by Senator Douglas to repeal the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in territories north of the 36˚30’ parallel, which included Kansas. Seward responded on behalf of the Republican Party with a bill to admit Kansas as a free state. The Senate leader of the Free-Soil Party,
^1.8
Charles Sumner, showed Seward the speech he was preparing to deliver on May 19. Entitled “The Crime Against Kansas,” the speech was a devastating indictment of the South, her institutions, and the character of her most prominent politicians. Although Seward personally disliked Sumner—considering him far too priggish for a politician—he shuddered at his folly. Seward tried to persuade him to at least remove the personal attacks within his speech, but Sumner refused. After initially hailing Seward as a fellow soldier in the battle against slavery, the aristocratic Bostonian had come to regard him with disdain. According to a mutual friend, “The two men would have disliked each other by instinct had they lived in different planets.”
²⁶
Seward had brawled and clawed his way from New York to national prominence; by contrast, Sumner was a seventh-generation American, a Harvard man who spoke four languages and was an acknowledged authority in jurisprudence.

The forty-year-old Sumner had never held office before he took his Senate seat in 1851. Unlike Seward, who knew the inside of every back room between Buffalo and Brooklyn, Sumner had deliberately eschewed politics. Seward had been abroad only once, in 1833, and the New Yorker had returned with his prejudices against Britain confirmed. By contrast, Sumner had become something of a sensation when he visited England in 1838, prompting the essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle, who opposed abolition, to dub him sarcastically “Popularity Sumner.” Although he lacked a sense of humor—a fatal disability for most foreigners in Britain—Sumner exuded a charismatic earnestness combined with obvious brilliance. He knew more dukes and earls than most Englishmen, let alone any other American. But the most important friend he made during this time was Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, whose views on abolition and social reform coincided with his own. After he returned to America, they maintained their friendship. She saw Sumner as he wished to see himself: as a proud and tireless advocate of society’s victims.

Sumner’s lack of experience or even understanding of basic political realities proved his undoing. In contrast to Seward, he was incapable of trimming his actions or modulating his speeches to suit political expediencies. Sumner abhorred compromise: “From the beginning of our history,” he explained, “the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned.” Sumner was prepared to make a last, defiant stand against the forces of accommodation, and did so at every opportunity. On May 19, 1856, he began a two-day marathon of invective in the Senate. Congress had just learned that the border town of Lawrence, Kansas—which had held out against slavery—was surrounded by a thousand Border Ruffians. The tension in the chamber added force to his words, which needed no extra help. Sumner was already a mesmerizing orator; his speeches were emotional to the point of being histrionic. Between damning the South to hell, he accused Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina of being so attached to the idea of slavery that he was like an adulterer obsessed with his mistress. Then he scored some gratuitous blows by making fun of Butler’s infirmities. He also insulted Senator Stephen Douglas, who responded, “That damn fool will get himself killed by some other damned fool.”

Two days later, while Sumner was sitting at his desk in the nearly empty Senate chamber, one of the insulted Butler’s nephews, Congressman Preston Brooks, silently approached him from behind. After speaking a few words, Brooks raised his arm and smashed his heavy cane on Sumner’s head. Blinded by blood and in shock, Sumner struggled to get his long legs out from under his desk. He finally managed to stand up while Brooks continued beating him with increasing ferocity. According to horrified observers, Sumner tried to stagger away only to be grabbed by Brooks, who held his lapel with one hand while raining down blows with the other. By his own count, he struck Sumner about thirty times before his cane splintered. His mission completed, Brooks calmly walked away unmolested. Within a few minutes he was strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue as if nothing had happened.
²⁷

The House of Representatives failed to muster enough votes to expel Brooks, and, although he immediately resigned his seat, South Carolinians expressed their views by promptly reelecting him. To Southerners, infuriated by the constant moral and political tirades poured down on them by Northern abolitionists, Brooks was a hero. They had long felt beleaguered by the persistence of Northern attempts to curtail slavery. For many, Brooks had acted out their greatest fantasy against the abolitionists. Thousands of canes arrived at his house, some with gold or silver tips and one that bore the words “Hit Him Again.”

Abolitionists, on the other hand, regarded Sumner’s savage beating as a call to action. The terrible scene on the chamber floor, described in lurid detail by every newspaper, also served to unite the North. Rather than worrying about the activities of immigrants, or black preachers, or Freemasons, Northerners could finally agree on a common enemy. The Republican Party was overwhelmed with new members. But for Sumner, his martyrdom came at a terrible price. Even after his wounds healed, the psychological scars proved far more intractable. On March 7, 1857, the frail patient was gently conveyed onto a steamer bound for England. It was the beginning of three years of self-imposed exile. By his own estimation, his political career and possibly his life were concluded. Still, Sumner was not just popular abroad; he was now a bona fide hero. His English friends welcomed him as though he were a wounded general returning from war. Later, some would claim that his assault marked the beginning of the Civil War.
²⁸

The Duchess of Sutherland insisted that the wounded warrior recuperate at Stafford House. After his caning she had redoubled her efforts to arouse English sympathy against Southern slavery. One of her most successful events was a public reading of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by the black American performer Mary Webb. The scene at Stafford House “would have caused considerable astonishment to any gentleman of the Southern States of America,” reported the
Illustrated London News.
“A large audience was gathered together in that hall … to listen to a lady of color giving dramatic readings.… Our Southerner would have been confounded and disgusted at the sight of what he would call a ‘tarnation nigger’ being listened to with the most respectful attention by no inconsiderable number of the aristocracy of England.”
²⁹

Among the new friends Sumner made during his stay at Stafford House were the Duchess of Sutherland’s daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, the Duke of Argyll. For the Argylls, it was the perfect meeting of minds. “He was a tall, good-looking man,” recalled the duke in his memoirs, “very erect in attitude, with a genial smile and a very intellectual expression. I always found his conversation full of charm, not only from his devotion to one great cause, but from his wide and cultivated interest in literature and in art.”
³⁰
Like Sumner, the thirty-three-year-old duke was a striking figure, whose flaming red hair—which he wore shoulder length—and theatrical dress were considered emblematic of his idiosyncratic politics. His views were always logical and well thought out, and yet strangely angular, so that on any given subject it defied prediction whether they coincided with those of his own party or with those of the opposition. This trait, combined with his caustic and often dogmatic style of debating, meant that Argyll carried weight in politics but would never inspire a following. Both he and Sumner would always be forces in their own right, and yet also their own greatest impediments to power. For the future of British-American relations, however, the relationship between Argyll and Sumner would prove to be one of the most important friendships of the Civil War.

^1.1
The term “impressment” meant the legal conscription of a civilian, usually a sailor, into the Royal Navy. The practice had been going on since the 1600s. It was rare for “landlubbers” to be impressed, but in time of war all kinds of injustices took place, which for the most part the authorities pretended not to notice.

^1.2
Although slavery was abolished in Vermont in 1777, the former colony attempted to go it alone for the first fourteen years after independence, joining the Union only in 1791.

^1.3
Southerners referred to slavery (and by extension the cotton economy) as the “peculiar institution” not because it was strange, but because the mode of life was particular to the South and nowhere else.

^1.4
For the first half of the nineteenth century, the “Monroe Doctrine,” when it was observed at all, was enforced by the Royal Navy, since it was in Britain’s interest to prevent the Great Powers from interfering with the balance of power in South America.

^1.5
Several objects, including the Singer sewing machine and the Colt .45-caliber single-action army revolver, were subsequently sent on a triumphant tour around Britain.