• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Shortly after the seizure of the Alexandra, Adams had written in his diary, “The course of the government has raised the whole hive of sympathizers, as it was never stirred before. What with the case of the Alexandra, and that of the Peterhoff … the effect is to stimulate ill temper. The greater the necessity of keeping as quiet and calm as possible.”6 But instead of heeding his own advice, Adams became entangled in a blockade-running scandal involving two American gunrunners who were shipping arms to Mexico. Admiral Wilkes’s capture of the Peterhoff had made insurance for sailing in Mexican waters prohibitive for small firms. The gunrunners, General Juan Napoleon Zerman and Colonel Bertram B. Howell, asked Adams to provide them with an affidavit stating they were aiding the Mexicans and not the South. This, they hoped, would lower their insurance premium, since their ship would no longer be at risk of capture by the U.S. Navy. In spite of Moran’s warnings, Adams not only provided Howell and Zerman with a letter of indemnity, but also embellished it with pointed jabs at Lloyds for underwriting “dishonest enterprises” such as blockade running.7 As is so often the case with compromising letters, one copy became several. The letter went from Lloyds to the owners of the Peterhoff, thence to the Foreign Office, and finally to The Times.

The press called Adams a hypocrite for protesting against British arms sales to the South while secretly helping Americans to supply Mexico. One newspaper wondered if he was selling protection; another accused him of plotting to drive British shipping from the Americas. The Times returned to its favorite theme of Northern hypocrisy. The paper often reminded its readers of the example set during the Crimean War, when President Franklin Pierce had rebuffed Britain’s protests over the shipments of American-made weapons to the Russians with the retort: “Americans sold munitions of war to all buyers without troubling themselves about the ports to which the goods would be consigned, or the purposes to which they would be put.”

The French also issued a strong protest to the U.S. minister in Paris. The Foreign Office was incensed with Adams and thought “his explanation of it … very lame.” The embarrassed ministry desperately tried to stave off a debate on the subject but finally yielded on April 23. Aided by the Tories, pro-Southern MPs excoriated the government for allowing the North’s envoy to become “the Minister for Commerce in England.” One sarcastically remarked that Adams’s notion “of honesty and neutrality is remarkable. Every thing is honest to suit his own purposes.” Some of the speeches that followed were so insulting toward the North that the speaker of the House later apologized to Adams. Calm was restored only after Palmerston and Russell assured their respective listeners in the Commons and the Lords that Seward would disavow Adams’s “extraordinary” and “unwarrantable” act.

The government had to work hard to stifle the controversy, muzzling its party members and planting stories in the press that the Foreign Office was satisfied with Adams’s protestations of innocence. Palmerston twisted Delane’s arm into having The Times imply that Howell and Zerman had tricked Adams. But none of these efforts to protect Adams diminished his sense of grievance. He remained convinced that his behavior had been above reproof, and for weeks afterward he badgered Lord Russell to retract his speech in the Lords. Henry Adams loyally supported his father, telling his brother Charles Francis Jr., “When the whole Peterhoff story is told, we shall reverse everything and overwhelm these liars.”8 Nevertheless, he could see that his father was floundering and was relieved when the prominent New York lawyer William M. Evarts arrived on May 1. Evarts, one of Seward’s closest political confidants, had been sent by him to liaise with the Crown prosecution lawyers in the Alexandra trial. But instead of bolstering Charles Francis Adams’s confidence, Evarts’s arrival had sent him into further decline.