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By Root 6718 0

the legation received a telegram from the vacationing secretary of the legation, Charles Wilson, announcing his imminent arrival in London. Benjamin Moran was in despair. Adams was horrified. Both had assumed that Wilson would never return from his government-funded vacation in Chicago. Neither could stand working with the uncouth and obnoxious secretary, whose only reason for being at the legation arose from a serpentine bargain between Seward and Lincoln over patronage. Without consulting or explaining his thoughts to Moran, Adams decided that the best way to keep Wilson at a distance—without its looking like a direct snub—was to exclude both legation secretaries from all social functions. Moran was crushed when he discovered that the Adamses were entertaining behind his back. “This is a deliberate slight,” he raged in his diary. “All other Ministers invite their secretaries to their state dinners; but it seems to be a pleasure to ours to degrade his by acts of omission.”16 Charles Francis Adams was far too preoccupied to notice Moran’s wounded dignity. A thick yellow fog had descended on London, quite different from the usual kind at that time of year. It made the day seem like endless night, and the world outside even more claustrophobic than the world within. The sense of being trapped exacerbated Adams’s fears; he was dreading the opening of Parliament on February 5 and could think of little else.

As it happened, although several speakers referred at length to the American war, there were no clarion calls for immediate recognition of the South, no hints from the government about a change in policy. The issue was certainly alive: in the Lords, the Earl of Carnarvon asked Lord Russell to explain Britain’s position on the fate of Her Majesty’s subjects currently held without trial in Northern prisons.17 But America did not seem to resonate in Parliament as it had before Christmas. Adams mentally thanked the Poles for their revolution on January 22, 1863, which was keeping the House distracted.

Adams was also nervous about his meeting with Lord Russell on February 7, the first since the publication of his uncomplimentary dispatches, and he expected some sort of rebuke or coldness. “I was a little prepared to find him rather more reserved than heretofore,” Adams wrote in his diary. “In his place I think I should have been so. But so far as I could see there was no difference.” (Adams might have felt differently toward Russell had he known of the foreign secretary’s strenuous efforts to unite the cabinet behind his mediation plan.) The fog dissipated, “yet I felt rather sad,” Adams confessed in his diary. “The unsettled condition of our public affairs and the doubt that overhangs the future both financially and morally cast a shadow upon everything.”18 When he did venture out, Adams was not particularly sociable. Even dinner at the Argylls’ was a chore for him, though he liked them as a rule. “The Duchess is an interesting woman, but she is not very easy in conversation. She labors at starting subjects without knowing how to keep them going. He is much in the same way,” he complained on February 11, forgetting that a conversation requires two willing partners.19

Nearly three weeks later, Adams came face to face with Lord Palmerston at a royal levee. The two had not spoken to each other since the “Butler letters” the previous June. “Of course I was called to decide something, so I made a formal bow and put out my hand.” To Adams’s relief, “He bowed in return and took my hand so that no perceptible difficulty took place. Most of the other Cabinet members treated me with great cordiality.”20 Adams was still trying to make sense of the encounter when he received an invitation from Lady Palmerston, the first in over a year. “This was certainly a change,” he wrote in puzzlement, unaware that Benjamin Moran had left his card at Cambridge House. The dictates of diplomatic protocol obliged Lady Palmerston to respond to the gesture by inviting the assistant secretary to her next party, which she could not do without also including