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By Root 6769 0

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