ONE
The Uneasy Cousins

Britain and America—Divisions over slavery—Lord Palmerston—Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Stafford House Address—Charles Dickens’s disappointment—The caning of Charles Sumner

For seventy-five years after the War of Independence, the British approach to dealing with the Americans had boiled down to one simple tactic: to be “very civil, very firm, and to go our own way.”¹ During the late 1850s, the prevailing view in London was that Washington could not be trusted. “These Yankees are most disagreeable Fellows to have to do anything about any American Question,” the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, had complained in 1857 to Lord Clarendon, his foreign secretary, fourteen months before Lord Lyons’s arrival in America. “They are on the Spot, strong … totally unscrupulous and dishonest and determined somehow or other to carry their Point.”² It went without saying that the Foreign Office expected Lyons to be on guard against any American chicanery.

One of the legacies of the War of 1812 was a British fear that the United States might try to annex British North America (as Canada was then known), accompanied by a conviction among Americans that they should never stop trying. It was neither forgiven nor forgotten in England that precious ships and men had had to be diverted from the desperate war against Napoleon Bonaparte in order to defend Canada from three invasion attempts by the United States between 1812 and 1814. London regarded the burning of Washington and the White House by British soldiers in August 1814 as a well-deserved retribution for the sacking of York (later called Toronto) by American troops.

Lyons soon discovered, as had each of his predecessors, that the War of 1812 had not only an entirely different meaning in the United States, but also a different outcome. In American histories, Britain had provoked the war by her arrogant and unreasonable behavior, first, by blockading all ports under Napoleonic rule, thereby stifling American trade, and second, by boarding American ships in search of deserters from the Royal Navy. The practice of “impressing” American sailors^1.1 into the navy was considered beyond the pale, especially when it took place off the coast of Virginia.³ Despite furious protests from Washington, the number of American citizens wrongly impressed had steadily increased over the years, and by 1812 the tally had reached over six thousand. But when the U.S. Congress declared war on June 8, 1812, it was to stop a practice that had already been disavowed by the English; just two days earlier, in London, the British government had agreed to stop impressment—too late to affect the outcome of the debates in Washington.

The peace treaty signed by Britain and America in 1814, the Treaty of Ghent, was based on the assumption that the war had been a draw since no territory was lost or gained by either side. However, news of the treaty had not yet reached the British and American armies facing each other in New Orleans, and a battle still took place on January 26. Though a small engagement compared to the great battles unfolding in Europe, it was a decisive American victory. General Andrew Jackson’s force of four thousand men managed to defeat a British expedition almost three times its size. The fact that this stunning victory occurred after peace had been declared was later brushed aside in the telling. Two great American myths were born: that Andrew Jackson won the war, and that he had not only put the British in their place, but also crushed the army that had defeated Napoleon.

The failure of the United States to conquer Canada during the war had come as a great surprise to many Americans. Former president Thomas Jefferson wrote to a colleague in August 1812, “The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, and the final expulsion of England from the American continent.”⁴ Over the next few decades, politicians often expressed their desire to expel England from the “American continent.” When small local rebellions broke out in Quebec and Toronto in 1837, it came as no surprise to the British to learn that President Martin Van Buren had ostentatiously invoked international law and declared U.S. neutrality, or that American sympathizers were providing arms and volunteers to the rebels. By announcing “neutrality,” Van Buren elevated the uprising of a few hundred Canadians to the standard applied to an international war, giving hope to Americans who believed that a Canada free from British “shackles” would want to join the Union.⁵

—

That the original thirteen states would increase in number over the years had never been in doubt, but whether these new states would allow slavery was a question that had troubled Americans from the beginning. When the first Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, five of the thirteen^1.2—Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut—had abolished slavery, and eight—New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—had not. There had been slaves in America since 1619—one year before the arrival of the Mayflower. And at the time of independence, one in five of the 4 million ex-colonists were black. The Convention agreed on a compromise, the first of many that would be tried until the Civil War. Slavery was left alone, but the slave trade was given a twenty-one-year time limit. After 1808, the importation of slaves was to be banned.

The invention in 1793 of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (which separated the tough cotton fibers from their seeds, saving many hours of manual labor), however, meant that slavery not only continued but also even flourished in the Southern states. The demand for cotton by England’s textile mills was apparently inexhaustible and within two years after Whitney’s gin arrived in the South, shipments of cotton across the Atlantic had increased from roughly 130,000 pounds a year to more than 1.5 million. The rise of cotton over rice, tobacco, or corn as the primary Southern crop coincided with the government’s acquisition of the Louisiana territories from the French in 1803. The United States doubled in size as a result of the Louisiana Purchase, opening up to development and potential statehood more than 820,000 square miles from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border. Instead of dying out, as some of the original framers of the Constitution had hoped, slavery was spreading north and west.

By 1819 the thirteen states had become twenty-two, evenly split between free and slave states. But in 1819 the territory of Missouri applied to join the Union, and the balance was suddenly upset. Missouri straddled the implied boundary established by the Mason-Dixon Line; both the Northern and Southern states claimed her as one of their own. Both feared what would happen to the balance of power in the Senate, where each state sent two senators regardless of size or population. By now, the two regions were developing separate though intertwined economies. The Northern states were hurtling toward industrialization, building factories, constructing cities, and developing financial institutions; the Southern states kept to their agricultural base, received fewer immigrants, and developed an alternative financial system based on the buying and selling of slaves and cotton.^1.3 The majority of Northerners could read and write; in the South, the literacy rate was less than half. The growing political, economic, and cultural differences between the North and South could not be easily reconciled. Finally, in 1820, Congress agreed to the “Missouri Compromise,” which admitted Missouri as a new state to the Union, with slavery allowed. As a balance, however, Maine was admitted as a free state, and the future growth of slavery was confined to new states south of the Missouri border. The Southern states suddenly became deeply interested in the expansion of the United States into Mexico and Central America.

Britain could not help becoming entangled in these territorial disputes. In 1823, President James Monroe announced the “Monroe Doctrine,” which essentially called for the Old World to stay on its side of the Atlantic and allow the New World to develop without interference. Since Britain had possessions and interests on both continents, this was neither desirable nor possible for her.^1.4 After a decade as foreign secretary, from 1830 to 1841, Lord Palmerston had become thoroughly exasperated by the continuous bickering between the two countries over Canada’s borders. “It never answers to give way [to the Americans],” he wrote in January 1841, “because they always keep pushing on their own encroachments as far as they are permitted to do so; and what we dignify by the names of moderation and conciliation, they naturally enough call fear.”⁶ Palmerston followed his own advice in the case of a British subject named Alexander McLeod, who was being held in a New York prison on the charge of murder. McLeod had been arrested in November 1840 after he drunkenly boasted in a New York bar of killing an American sympathizer who had been on his way to take part in the Canadian revolts of 1837. Palmerston informed Washington that McLeod’s execution “would produce war; war immediate and frightful in its character.”⁷ Hints from William H. Seward, the governor of New York, that he would pardon McLeod once the public outcry had petered out had no effect on Palmerston’s determination to go to war unless the prisoner was released. Fortunately, a jury acquitted McLeod since there was no evidence against him except his own bibulous lies.⁸

Palmerston’s approach to American issues was a reflection of his general attitude toward foreign policy: that Britain’s interests should never be sacrificed to satisfy her friends or appease her enemies. His unapologetic nationalism made him widely disliked in Europe. According to legend, a Frenchman once complimented him by saying, “If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman.” To that Palmerston replied, “If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman.” The Germans complained, “Hat der Teufel einen Sohn, / So ist er sicher Palmerston” (“If the Devil has a son, surely he must be Palmerston”). Palmerston’s willingness to use the Royal Navy, which was the largest in the world, at the slightest provocation earned him the sobriquet “Lord Pumicestone” among his detractors. It was also noticed that Palmerston employed his gunboat diplomacy only against smaller nations such as Greece, while his manner toward the other Great Powers of Europe (France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia) was far more conciliatory.

Palmerston’s attitudes had been formed in the age when wigs and rouge were worn by men as well as women. He had personally witnessed the first wave of violent revolutions in Europe as a child when his parents joined the retinue of friends and relations escorting Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, through France. The family’s brief but terrifying experience at the hands of a citizens’ committee in Paris left Palmerston with only tepid faith in the ability of the lower classes to make rational decisions. During the first half of his political career, Palmerston was better known for his womanizing (which won him his initial nickname of “Lord Cupid”) than for his work at the War Office, where he toiled diligently for twenty years at the midlevel post of secretary for war. But apart from his enjoyment of female company—the more the better—Palmerston was in every other way a serious politician whose capacity for long hours and hard work almost incited a rebellion among the clerks when he became foreign secretary in 1830. It was a shame, Florence Nightingale remarked after she came to know the real Palmerston, that people accepted his jocular, almost flippant manner at face value, since “he was so much more in earnest than he appeared.” Once his slumbering humanitarian instincts were aroused by a particular cause, he could act with unbounded zeal. The abolition of the slave trade became a lifelong obsession as Palmerston painstakingly attempted to create an impregnable web of international treaties that would allow the navy the right to search suspected slave ships in any part of the world.

One of the driving forces behind Palmerston’s enmity toward the United States was its refusal to agree to a slave trade treaty. To his mind, the acts abolishing the slave trade in 1807 and then slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833 had joined such other events as the Glorious Revolution and Waterloo in the pantheon of great moments in the nation’s history. For many Britons, the eradication of slavery around the globe was not simply an ideal but an inescapable moral duty, since no other country had the navy or the wealth to see it through. At the beginning of 1841, Palmerston had almost concluded the Quintuple Treaty, which would allow the Royal Navy to search the merchant ships of the Great Powers. “If we succeed,” Palmerston told the House of Commons on April 15, 1841, “we shall have enlisted in this league … every state in Christendom which has a flag that sails on the ocean, with the single exception of the United States of North America.”⁹ The Quintuple Treaty was signed, but without the signature of the United States. As a consequence, the slave trade continued exclusively under the American flag. The one concession Britain did obtain—and this was not accomplished by Palmerston, who was out of government between 1841 and 1846—was the formation of joint patrols with the U.S. Navy off the West African coast.

Whether Palmerston was foreign secretary, however, made no difference to the constant wrangling or the relentless expansion of the Union over the lands of Native Americans as well as British-held territories. Three years later, in 1844, the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, James Polk, ran on a platform that all of Britain’s Oregon territories right up to Russian America should be annexed by the United States. “The only way to treat John Bull is to look him in the eye,” Polk wrote in his diary. “If Congress falters or hesitates in their course, John Bull will immediately become arrogant and more grasping in his demands.”¹⁰ Polk’s claim for all the land as far as what is now southern Alaska resulted in the popular slogan “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!” (meaning that the new boundary line should be drawn along the 54°40’ parallel). But the expected fight never occurred; Texas joined the Union as a slave state in 1845, and a year later President Polk declared war on Mexico, a far less dangerous opponent. The British foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, who shied away from gunboat diplomacy, was willing to negotiate, and the Oregon Treaty was signed in June 1846, giving all of present-day Washington, Oregon, and Idaho to the United States.¹¹ Victory in the Mexican-American War in 1848 resulted in the United States acquiring a further 600 million acres, most of them below the Mason-Dixon Line. There were now thirty states in the Union, once again in an even split between slave and free.

In 1848, the discovery of gold in California led to a rush of settlers—more than eighty thousand of them in a matter of months—and the urgent need to accept the newly acquired territory as the thirty-first state so that law and order could be imposed. But the Southern states would not agree to the addition (since the Californians were demanding to be admitted as a free state) until they had secured a series of concessions. The most bitterly contested of these was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed “owners” to pursue and recapture their escaped “property” in whatever state he or she happened to be hiding. Graphic newspaper reports—of families torn apart, of law-abiding blacks dragged in chains back to their erstwhile masters—raised an outcry in the North. Several Northern states passed personal liberty laws to try to circumvent the act; in some towns, there was violent resistance to the federal agents who arrived in search of fugitive slaves; and the “underground railroad,” with its vast network of safe houses from Louisiana to the Canadian border, received many more volunteers.

—

The domestic and political turbulence during 1850 was one of the reasons why the United States’ pavilion at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 displayed so few objects compared to those of other nations. The suspicion among Americans that Britain had put on the exhibition simply to show off its status as the richest country in the world had also diminished enthusiasm for taking part. Yet even with a fraction of the exhibits presented by the Great Powers, the American pavilion still won 5 of the 170 Council medals (admittedly, France won 56). The American photography contingent, led by Mathew Brady, won first, second, and third prize.^1.5 The great number of American tourists and businessmen who visited the exhibition brought more contact between the citizens of the two countries than at any other time during the century. Britons now realized the extent to which the United States had developed separately from the mother country. Americans not only had different accents and wore different fashions; their choice of words and phrases sounded quite foreign. They said “I guess” instead of “I suppose,” and “Let’s skedaddle” instead of “Shall we go,” and they called con men “shysters,” an epithet entirely new to English ears.¹² It was their strange and different mannerisms that inspired Tom Taylor to compose Our American Cousin.

Taylor also wrote the popular 1852 stage version of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The English took to heart the story of the saintly slave whose goodness and humanity upstage a succession of masters until his murder by the evil Simon Legree. In 1852, its first year of publication, the book sold a million copies in Britain—compared to 300,000 in the United States.¹³ Every respectable British household owned a copy. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was allegedly the first novel Lord Palmerston had read in thirty years, and whether it was the effects of the long abstinence or the allure of the book, he read it from cover to cover three times.¹⁴ The depressing and grisly portrayal of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin articulated what the British had long suspected was the truth—despite the South’s self-depiction as an agrarian paradise of courtly manners, charming plantations, and contented slaves. Few Britons had ever seen how slaves really lived, unlike the celebrated British actress Fanny Kemble, whose marriage to Pierce Butler, a Southern slave owner, fell apart after they moved to his Georgia plantation in 1838. They divorced acrimoniously in 1849, with Butler holding Fanny’s daughters hostage until they turned twenty-one.

The publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin led to a renaissance of antislavery clubs in Britain, after they had tottered along in a state of earnest torpor since 1833. The public agitated for Britain “to do something.” In November 1852, Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, and the Earl of Shaftesbury drafted a petition to “the Women of the United States of America,” urging them to “raise your voices” against slavery. More than half a million British women signed their names to the public letter, which was known as the Stafford House Address. Predictably, the American response was one of outrage.¹⁵ Julia Tyler, the wife of former president John Tyler, led the barrage of scathing replies to “The Duchess of Sutherland and the Ladies of England.” British labor conditions, rigid class structure, and lack of opportunity for self-betterment all came under attack. But it could not be denied that Britain possessed the moral high ground on the issue of slavery. American abolitionists who visited England were amazed to discover that British blacks enjoyed the same rights as their white peers. “We found none of that prejudice against color in England which is so inveterate among the American people,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton had written about her honeymoon in Britain during the summer of 1840. “At my first dinner in England I found myself beside a gentleman from Jamaica, as black as the ace of spades.”¹⁶ Similarly, a former slave, the author Harriet Jacobs, recalled how her self-esteem had changed after visiting England. “For the first time in my life,” she wrote, “I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion. I felt as if a great millstone had been lifted from my breast.”¹⁷

The Stafford House Address had been doomed to fail no matter how good and sincere its intentions. The Anglophobia that was so often articulated in the U.S. Congress was no more than a reflection of public opinion. Alexis de Tocqueville commented in Democracy in America in 1835 that he had never encountered hatred more poisonous than that which Americans felt for England.¹⁸ There were notable exceptions, of course. In the early 1840s the American minister in London told a wildly receptive audience that “the roots of our history run into the soil of England.… For every purpose but that of political jurisdiction we are one people.”¹⁹ But there had existed a deep-rooted prejudice since the War of Independence. The influx of a million Irish refugees during the potato famine merely added more venom to the mix. “Why,” wrote a nineteenth-century American journalist, “does America hate England?” He answered: “Americans believe that England dreads their growing power, and is envious of their prosperity. They detest and hate England accordingly. They have ‘licked’ her twice and can ‘lick’ her again.”²⁰

Tocqueville attributed the hostility to fifty years of self-congratulatory propaganda. He thought Americans were convinced that their country was a beacon of light to the world; “that they are the only religious, enlightened, and free people … hence they conceive a high opinion of their superiority and are not very remote from believing themselves to be a distinct species of mankind.” The more the English scoffed at this view, the more furious and resentful Americans became toward Britain. The most memorable attack on American exceptionalism was Sydney Smith’s scornful comparison of the two cultures in 1820. “Who reads an American book?” he wrote in the Edinburgh Review:

Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? Who drinks out of American glasses? Or eats from American plates? Or wears American coats or gowns? Or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?²¹

A decade later, Fanny Trollope, the novelist and mother of Anthony Trollope, rekindled the impression that all Britons looked down their noses at the former colonists with her book Domestic Manners of the Americans. Mrs. Trollope had spent a brief and unhappy period in Ohio in the late 1820s, trying to build a commercial business, which had ended with the family becoming bankrupt and homeless. Her book was not meant to be a serious study of America, but a piece of entertainment to help solve her family’s financial difficulties. While not condemning all Americans in all areas of life, she portrayed the majority as too vulgar, violent, and vainglorious to be really likable. Her view of America inspired hundreds of English imitators, further souring cultural relations between the two countries.

Ill.3 Punch’s view of American manners, 1856.

Other British writers sneered that the self-styled “superior” United States was militarily weak, politically corrupt, and financially unsound.²² America’s markets were prone to panics; its people preached equality but practiced “mobocracy.” English travelers who saw American democracy in action either condemned it outright or praised it halfheartedly as an evolving system. The greatest blow to American pride came from Charles Dickens. Until his visit to the country in 1842, Americans had considered the world’s bestselling novelist to be almost an adopted son. His humble beginnings and liberal politics had fostered their assumption that the United States would be far more congenial to him than class-ridden England. Dickens had indeed wanted to admire America during his triumphant lecture tour. “Still it is of no use,” he wrote dolefully to a friend during the tour. “I am disappointed. This is not the republic I came to see; this is not the republic of my imagination.” He warmed to the friendliness and generosity of its people, and he admired the emphasis on education and public philanthropy. But he found American society as a whole utterly intolerant of dissenting views. “Freedom of opinion! Where is it?” he asked rhetorically after being warned not to discuss the slave mutiny on board the Creole outside abolitionist circles, even though the subject was dominating British-American relations.^1.6 If American democracy was simply a vehicle for majority rule, then, asserted Dickens, “I infinitely prefer a liberal monarchy.”²³ He gave vent to his disenchantment in American Notes, published in 1842, and Martin Chuzzlewit, which followed the year after.

—

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.

^1.6 In November 1841, the journey of the Creole from Virginia to Louisiana was interrupted when the slaves on board mutinied and took the ship to Nassau in the Bahamas. The British authorities refused to hand over the mutineers or return the slaves.

^1.7 Despite fronting four presidents, the Whig Party survived for less than twenty-five years and was more a collection of factions than a cohesive national party. By the time of its demise in the early 1850s, several new parties were forming, including the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party, so called because when questioned about their affiliation, its members were instructed to say “I know nothing.”

^1.8 The East Coast–based Free-Soilers, whose slogan was “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men,” initially competed with the Republican Party, which was born in the Midwest in 1854 and also opposed slavery, and then became absorbed by their newer rival.