A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (14 page)

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Charles Sumner returned to Washington in time for the opening of Congress on December 5, 1859. By staying in Italy throughout May and June, Sumner had spared himself the spectacle of Seward being welcomed in London as though he were already the next president. Sumner had changed during his time abroad. He had always been prone to bombast and fanaticism and had always abhorred compromise. After his caning on the floor of the House, these qualities were joined by a lack of restraint that made him vain and capricious.

Washington was much the worse, Sumner complained to his friends in Europe.
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He was not only more unpopular than ever in the South, but was also blamed in many quarters for inspiring John Brown’s raid. The atmosphere in Washington was growing poisonous as Southerners sought to implicate leading Republicans in the supposed conspiracy behind the raid. Senator James Murray Mason was elected head of a Select Committee with powers to call witnesses to testify before Congress. One such witness was Seward, who received a summons as soon as he returned to America on December 28. He kept his cool while Mason, whose seat was next to his in the Senate, harangued him for being the moral, though not actual, instigator of the action. Again and again, Seward’s unfortunate phrase “irrepressible conflict” was hurled back in his face. Democratic newspapers denounced him as the “arch agitator who is responsible for this insurrection.” One Virginia newspaper even went so far as to put a price of $50,000 on his head; the governor of Virginia urged the South to demand Seward’s exclusion from the presidency.
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The hysteria created by John Brown’s raid led Louisiana and South Carolina to call for the imprisonment of free Negro sailors in December, while their ships were docked at port. “There are plans for the re-enslavement of all the emancipated Negroes, and for purging the South of all Whites suspected of abolition tendencies, and what not,” Lord Lyons informed the Foreign Office.
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But the minister was ready to fight “the Lynch Law Assassins,” as he called them, and ordered the British consuls in the South to insist on “decent treatment for Coloured British Subjects” even if it meant defying local opinion.

Mason’s Select Committee found no evidence of Republican connivance in Brown’s raid.
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This did not lessen Southern suspicions, however. “Our social lines were now strictly drawn between North and South,” recalled Mrs. Roger Pryor, the Southern memoirist. “Names were dropped from visiting lists, occasions avoided on which we might expect to meet members of the party antagonistic to our own.”
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The few attempts to revive the old Washington life ended in failure. Shortly after Seward testified to the committee, he went to a large dinner party given by the Southern society hostess and wealthy widow Mrs. Rose Greenhow. His protégé, the newly elected congressional representative for Massachusetts, Charles Francis Adams, was also present, with his wife, Abigail. “An unfortunate allusion was made to some circumstances connected with the affair at Harpers Ferry, when Mrs. Adams launched out into a panegyric on John Brown,” wrote Mrs. Greenhow, “calling him that ‘holy saint and martyr,’ turning her glance full upon me at the time—to which I replied, in a clear and audible voice—for it may be supposed that this conversation silenced all other—‘I have no sympathy for John Brown: he was a traitor, and met a traitor’s doom.’ ”
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The rest of the company remained mute, including Charles Francis Adams, who was too mortified to put together a coherent sentence. He had expressly refrained from speaking about the raid in order to begin his congressional career “perfectly unencumbered.”
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Seward was the first to recover. He “aided me with great skill in directing [the conversation] into a new channel,” Mrs. Greenhow continued. “A few days after I encountered Mr. Seward, and he approached me, saying, ‘I have just been writing to our friend Lady Napier, and have told her that in all Washington you were the only person who had the independence to give a mixed dinner party.’ ” Mrs. Greenhow had not given the dinner party for the reasons Seward supposed. “Perhaps,” she wrote, “had he fathomed my real object, he would not have been so grateful to me for the social countenance. At this early day I saw foreshadowed what was to follow, and I desired to obtain a thorough insight into the plans and schemes of those who were destined to become the prominent actors in the fearful drama, in order that I might turn it to the advantage of my country when the hour for action arrived.”
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Abigail Adams’s career as a Washington hostess was stillborn as a result of her faux pas at the dinner. She had never wholeheartedly embraced the idea anyway; it was Seward and Henry Adams, her third son, who had pushed her into the role. Henry had written to her from Germany, where he was studying, “Be ambitious, Mrs. A. You’re young yet! I wish you could make your ‘salons’ the first in Washington … not on my own account, but as a family joint-stock affair.” Papa needed her, Henry argued: “His weak point is just where you can fill it; he doesn’t like the bother and fuss of entertaining and managing people who can’t be reasoned with, and he won’t take the trouble to acquire strength and influence that won’t fall into his mouth.”
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Henry’s assessment of his father’s social limitations was harsh but accurate. At fifty-three, Charles Francis Adams was a curious figure of a man; he managed to convey the impression of being not quite formed, that there were still untapped reserves of potential, while simultaneously appearing old and disillusioned with the world. Being the son and grandson of American presidents
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had paradoxically both defined him and robbed him of ambition. He sought neither power nor attention. Small by American standards, he cultivated a professorial appearance, accentuated by a receding hairline that ended in fluffy wisps just above his ears. His face was kind, but it seemed more like a mask than a canvas for displaying emotion. It was as if at a young age Adams had entered internal exile and found the place congenial.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.