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Lyons was about to leave for a short visit to Canada when Seward waylaid him with a proposition to spend the last two weeks of August exploring northern New York State: all the foreign ministers had been invited. Lyons could think of few things less appealing than being dragged through the wilds with the very people he wished to escape. But, he confessed in a private letter to Lord Russell, Seward “has made such a point of my going with him, that it has been impossible to get off without telling him plainly that I’d not choose to travel with him. This of course I could not do; and he deserves some consideration from us.”48

Lyons would not have felt so guilty if he had known the reasons behind Seward’s invitation. The secretary of state had been entertaining for some time the idea of a summer jaunt with the diplomatic corps, which would allow him to demonstrate his charming side and the North’s booming economy all at the same time, but he only went forward with his plan when he needed a cover for visiting Judge Samuel Nelson of the Supreme Court. Opponents of the draft were mounting legal challenges and the administration wanted to be sure that the Court would make the right decision. Judge Nelson happened to live in Cooperstown, in upstate New York.

On August 15 the large party of diplomats and officials boarded a special train for New York; Lyons had brought along two attachés so he would not have to do all the talking. Contrary to his fears, Seward behaved with impeccable manners throughout the journey; ice cream was provided when it was hot, and carriages for those who preferred to explore sitting down. This rarely seen side of Seward touched Lyons. The secretary of state was incurably vain, he told Russell, but the more one knew of him, the more there was “to esteem and even to like.” The trouble lay in Seward’s tendency to overplay his hand, which required Lyons to exercise his “patience and good temper to be always cordial with him.”49

The two-week excursion ended with a visit to Niagara Falls on August 25. Seward had a long conversation with Lyons before the minister departed for Canada. He began by referring to the problem of British antipathy toward the North. Lyons assured him that pro-Southern sentiments in Britain would dissipate as soon as the war ended, since there would be “nothing to keep it alive. I told him that the important point was public opinion in the United States.” But Seward insisted that something had to be done to change British opinion: “The President could not travel, and the United States had no Princes.” Lyons listened, wondering where this was leading. Then it dawned on him that Seward was floating the idea of paying a goodwill visit to England. The prospect seemed baffling, and Lyons suspected Seward was thinking more of his domestic audience, perhaps for a future presidential run. Guessing how the cabinet would react to such a tour, Lyons gently discouraged the plan. When he heard of it, Palmerston was indeed horrified: “I hope Seward will not come here,” he wrote to Lord Russell. The visit would not change British policy—except for the worse if Seward said something silly. “He is … vulgar and ungentlemanlike and the more he is seen here the less he will be liked.” He would drink brandy with “some editors of second rate newspapers,” and be fêted by the manufacturing towns, but “I doubt whether Seward would be very well received in Society.”50 Seward soon dropped the idea—to a silent chorus of relief in England.

After the tour’s conclusion, Lyons traveled to Canada in the hope of finally obtaining some rest from his labors. But there he found that the conflict was being enacted in miniature north of the border. Crimpers and recruiters were doing a brisk business along the border towns, turning Canadian public opinion dangerously pro-Southern. The authorities suspected that the Confederates were planning to use Canada as a base for operations, although so far there was little evidence to support these fears.