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by treating them in matters of form as [a] great people … as if they were really a considerable military power.”29 But Lyons had made an error in assuming that he needed only to practice a little flattery to assuage America’s suspicions about Britain. Relations between the two countries had been bent and twisted by eighty-three years of wars, disputes, and reconciliations. “I hate England,” the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne had recently written from his consular post in Liverpool, “though I love some Englishmen, and like them generally.”30

Map.5 Washington

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pr.1 Equivalent to $1,700 in today’s money.

pr.2 Charles Francis Adams’s grandfather, John Adams (the second president of the United States), and father, John Quincy Adams (the sixth president), had both served as ministers plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James’s.

pr.3 The line was originally drawn in 1767 by two British astronomers, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who had been commissioned to settle a border dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania. But by the mid-nineteenth century, “Mason-Dixon Line” had come to mean the separation between the “northern” state of Pennsylvania and the “southern” state of Maryland, and all the states above and below the 39th parallel.

PART I

COTTON IS

KING

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 sailors1.1 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