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lamented to his wife that his efforts for peace resembled “the struggles of a drowning man.”40 John Bright was at first too nervous to speak about the Trent affair, explaining apologetically to Adams that since his opposition to the Crimean War he had lost his appetite for being a national hate figure. Given Bright’s violent rhetoric, Adams rather hoped that this was true. Unfortunately, Bright overcame his fears and made a speech in Rochdale on December 4 that blasted the country for not being sufficiently pro-Union. This was too much even for the Spectator, which accused Bright of being prepared to sacrifice any principle if it did not sit well with America.41 Harriet Martineau was one of the few English writers who could write with authority, since she was personally acquainted with Captain Wilkes, and even she was careful in her choice of words. Wilkes was not, she stressed in her articles for the Daily News, an Anglophobe or a warmonger, “but he lacks judgement and knowledge.”42

Benjamin Moran realized the extent of the feeling against the North when he chanced to look out the window of his taxi and see that the American owners of the Adelphi Theatre had added the Confederate flag next to the usual Stars and Stripes. “The sight of this base emblem of slavery, treason and piracy made me ill with rage,” he wrote in his diary.43 The Confederates and their supporters were also putting up posters in railway stations and distributing rebel banners to street hawkers. Hackney cabs were given miniature Union Jacks crossed with the Confederate flag.44 Moran heard that such overt displays of Confederate sympathy were even more prevalent in Liverpool. The new consul, Thomas Haines Dudley, reported that Southern exiles living in the city were gleefully capitalizing on the Trent incident.

Although Moran longed to have an American representative in the country who would not be afraid to engage with the press, he regarded Thurlow Weed’s arrival on December 2 as a mixed blessing. “This morning’s Times contains a letter from Thurlow Weed defending Mr. Seward,” wrote Moran in mid-December. “The letter is strong in some things, but weak in others and The Times assails its vulnerable points with its usual malignity.”45 Until the Trent affair, Weed had been in France working with Henry Sanford on schemes to influence European opinion.

Seward’s idea to send the three emissaries—Archbishop John Hughes, Bishop Charles McIlvaine, and Thurlow Tweed—“seems to me of no value,” Charles Francis Adams had written frankly to Edward Everett. But Weed disagreed; when he arrived at the U.S. legation on December 6, his first thought was that he should have come earlier. There was a general air of disarray about the place. The misfits in the basement made him wonder how business was done, while upstairs, Charles Francis Adams was in an alarming state: bewildered and angered by Seward’s silence, paranoid about England’s intentions, and mentally more than halfway home.46

Weed immediately sent out letters and left his cards in all the great houses of London. The relative ease with which he connected with “intelligent and influential English friends of the North” led him to suspect that Adams had not tried very hard to penetrate society. Weed was able to arrange an interview with Lord Russell and had a perfectly sensible, albeit noncommittal, conversation with him. Although he did not say it in so many words, Weed was appalled that Adams had allowed Seward to become so thoroughly feared and hated.47 “You have been infernally abused, and are wholly misunderstood here,” Weed told Seward. Everyone he met believed that the secretary of state was determined to have a war. This was true even of Seward’s friends. Lady Napier unhappily related to Weed a remark Seward had made just before their departure from Washington. “On some occasion,” wrote Weed, “you talked about the incoming Administration going to war with England; that subsequently when alone with you, she asked, ‘Why do you talk about war with England?’ and that you replied seriously, ‘that it was the