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of earnest torpor since 1833. The public agitated for Britain “to do something.” In November 1852, Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, and the Earl of Shaftesbury drafted a petition to “the Women of the United States of America,” urging them to “raise your voices” against slavery. More than half a million British women signed their names to the public letter, which was known as the Stafford House Address. Predictably, the American response was one of outrage.15 Julia Tyler, the wife of former president John Tyler, led the barrage of scathing replies to “The Duchess of Sutherland and the Ladies of England.” British labor conditions, rigid class structure, and lack of opportunity for self-betterment all came under attack. But it could not be denied that Britain possessed the moral high ground on the issue of slavery. American abolitionists who visited England were amazed to discover that British blacks enjoyed the same rights as their white peers. “We found none of that prejudice against color in England which is so inveterate among the American people,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton had written about her honeymoon in Britain during the summer of 1840. “At my first dinner in England I found myself beside a gentleman from Jamaica, as black as the ace of spades.”16 Similarly, a former slave, the author Harriet Jacobs, recalled how her self-esteem had changed after visiting England. “For the first time in my life,” she wrote, “I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion. I felt as if a great millstone had been lifted from my breast.”17

The Stafford House Address had been doomed to fail no matter how good and sincere its intentions. The Anglophobia that was so often articulated in the U.S. Congress was no more than a reflection of public opinion. Alexis de Tocqueville commented in Democracy in America in 1835 that he had never encountered hatred more poisonous than that which Americans felt for England.18 There were notable exceptions, of course. In the early 1840s the American minister in London told a wildly receptive audience that “the roots of our history run into the soil of England.… For every purpose but that of political jurisdiction we are one people.”19 But there had existed a deep-rooted prejudice since the War of Independence. The influx of a million Irish refugees during the potato famine merely added more venom to the mix. “Why,” wrote a nineteenth-century American journalist, “does America hate England?” He answered: “Americans believe that England dreads their growing power, and is envious of their prosperity. They detest and hate England accordingly. They have ‘licked’ her twice and can ‘lick’ her again.”20

Tocqueville attributed the hostility to fifty years of self-congratulatory propaganda. He thought Americans were convinced that their country was a beacon of light to the world; “that they are the only religious, enlightened, and free people … hence they conceive a high opinion of their superiority and are not very remote from believing themselves to be a distinct species of mankind.” The more the English scoffed at this view, the more furious and resentful Americans became toward Britain. The most memorable attack on American exceptionalism was Sydney Smith’s scornful comparison of the two cultures in 1820. “Who reads an American book?” he wrote in the Edinburgh Review:

Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? Who drinks out of American glasses? Or eats from American plates? Or wears American coats or gowns? Or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?21

A decade later, Fanny Trollope, the novelist and mother of Anthony Trollope, rekindled the impression that all Britons looked down their noses at the former colonists with her book Domestic Manners of the Americans. Mrs. Trollope had spent a brief and unhappy period in Ohio in the