A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [303]
The rest of the cabinet had shared Lincoln’s optimism. William Seward had been feeling sufficiently cheerful to allow his work to be interrupted by a visit from Leslie Stephen. The Englishman had arrived in Washington with a letter of recommendation from John Bright. The future editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (and father of Virginia Woolf) was, at the age of thirty-one, entering the final months of his career as an Anglican clergyman. Recently, Stephen had suffered a crisis of faith and was on the verge of leaving the Church and his academic post at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. His wild red hair and unkempt beard made him an alarming figure, but his combination of being a friend of John Bright and the cousin of the pro-Northern journalist Edward Dicey overcame Seward’s resistance. He invited Stephen to accompany him to the White House. A cabinet meeting was slated to begin in half an hour, but in the intervening time Seward introduced Stephen to Lincoln as a friend of the “great John Bright.” “Bright’s name is a tower of strength in these parts,” Stephen wrote in surprise to his mother:
They all talked of him with extraordinary admiration, and I was obliged to conceal the very distant nature of my relations to him by ingenious prevarication. I said that I had not seen him since the end of the Parliamentary session, as I had been absent from England since that time, and I did not let on that I had only seen him once, two years before that epoch, and then from the gallery of the House of Commons when he was on the floor.28
British descriptions of Lincoln had led Stephen to expect a clumsy, elephantine figure of bizarre proportions, not the “benevolent and hearty old gentleman” who laughed and smiled so readily. “I felt quite kindly to him,” Stephen recorded. He thought Lincoln was far more impressive than Seward, whose initial good impression was undermined by his fatal propensity to swagger. “He is a little, rather insignificant-looking man, with a tendency to tell rather long-winded and rather pointless stories,” wrote Stephen dismissively. “He rather amused me by the coolness with which he talked about government affairs to me as a total stranger. Within five minutes after he saw me he said that if England permitted the rebel rams to start, they would declare war.”29
Taking advantage of the military pass Seward had written out for him, Stephen had visited General Meade’s headquarters in Virginia, where no one, either during the journey or in Meade’s camp, believed him when he said that England remained unconvinced that slavery was the real cause of the war. “They perfectly laugh at me,” Stephen wrote to his mother after he had arrived in New York at the end of September. “I might as well tell them that in England we did not think the sun is the cause of daylight.” Nor did Americans believe him when he tried to explain the confusion that had led many Englishmen to support the South. “Assuming that Englishmen had really understood the nature of the quarrel, I should feel ashamed of my country myself. Of course, I know they didn’t,” he added, “but it is no use trying to drive that into Americans, it only produces shrugs of their shoulders and civil grins.”30
Exasperation with English attitudes to the war had also led an acquaintance of Stephen’s, Henry Yates Thompson, to visit America in order to gain firsthand knowledge about the situation. His own family had fallen victim to the fashionable moralizing that dismissed the North as an empire-seeking nation of hypocrites and elevated the South as the last bastion of a preindustrial paradise. “I am quite staggered by your letter,” he had written crossly to his mother from Philadelphia on September 19 in response to her comment that Northern racism was as bad as, if not worse than, Southern slavery. “If you really think slavery pleasanter,