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relations between the British legation and the U.S. State Department still in a honeymoon period after the Trent affair, Lyons suggested to Lord Russell that they revive the slave trade question while Seward was still “in the mood.”10.2 47 As it turned out, Seward had also been toying with the idea of resurrecting negotiations, but neither Lyons nor Seward had given the issue as much attention as Lord Russell had. On February 28, 1862, he surprised Lyons with a printed draft of a slave trade treaty, with all the provisions and exclusions that the Americans might demand already included. Russell also gave Lyons discretionary power on any changes, so that momentum would not be lost. Seward’s reaction to the document would show him in his best light, as a gifted politician whose creative manipulation of people and issues could bring about results that were otherwise unobtainable.

Seward liked the proposed treaty and was determined to have it ratified. His abhorrence of the Atlantic slave trade became evident to the journalist Edward Dicey, who went to dinner at his house on March 22, when the secret negotiations were under way. It was another of Seward’s foreign military dinners: Colonel De Courcy, General Blenker and his aide de camp, Prince Felix Salm-Salm of Prussia, were also present. Poor Fanny Seward had taken a violent dislike to De Courcy: “He appeared very well as long as he kept still and did not say much at the dinner table,” she wrote. “But after dinner his brilliant capability of making himself disagreeable showed forth with undimmed luster. Added to being ill bred, awkward, and a terrible stare-er, he has the distinction of one of the most ugly and repulsive of faces.” Dicey was also falling in Fanny’s estimation until she scrambled her knitting and he sat on the floor to help her untangle the mess.48 After dinner, Dicey stayed behind after the others had left and discussed the slave trade with Seward. The journalist did not pick up that the secretary of state was speaking in the past tense: “The Republican Administration would have merited the condemnation of every honest man if whatever else it had left undone, it had not put a stop to the Slave Trade.”49

The “whatever else” referred to Lincoln’s failed attempt to win support from the border states for a gradual emancipation bill.50 In January, Carl Schurz, the U.S. minister in Spain, had visited the White House to discuss the reasons for the North’s unpopularity in Europe. After being told by Schurz that it was a mistake to hide the antislavery aims of the war, Lincoln replied to him:

“You may be right. Probably you are. I have been thinking so myself. I cannot imagine that any European power would dare to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy if it becomes clear that the Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom.” Then he explained to me that, while a distinct anti-slavery policy would remove the foreign danger … he was in doubt as to whether public opinion at home was yet sufficiently prepared for it. He was anxious to unite, and keep united, all the forces of Northern society and of the Union element in the South, especially the Border States, in the war for the Union. Would not the cry of “abolition war” such as might be occasioned by a distinct anti-slavery policy, tend to disunite those forces and thus weaken the Union cause? This was the doubt that troubled him, and it troubled him very much.51

The objections of the border states to any form of emancipation within their own state lines forced Lincoln to go far more slowly than he wished. To avoid the same difficulties as Lincoln, Seward asked Lyons to play an elaborate game of subterfuge with him. In a brilliant political maneuver, he used the border states’ traditional antipathy toward England to trick them into supporting the slave trade proposal. He altered the wording of the draft so that the proposal came from the United States to Great Britain, rather than the reverse. Then he added a ten-year limit to the treaty and asked Lyons to make objections to it at first, only