A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [33]
Moran was prepared to give Seward the benefit of the doubt at their first meeting on May 21, 1859. “He is a much smaller man than I thought him,” noted Moran with a thrill of pleasure. His head, he noticed, was only a “little larger than mine” and he had “a pleasing manner.”14 His opinion altered, however, when Seward ignored him at the next occasion. “I met Seward at Fenton’s [hotel] last night,” recorded Moran on June 23, adding bitterly, “and found his head turned with the attention he has received from England’s aristocracy.”15 Moran was consoled that his political heroes in Parliament, the Radical MPs Richard Cobden and John Bright, had shown little interest in cultivating Seward.16 Known somewhat derisively as the “Members for the United States” (Bright’s portrait hung in the American legation), their friendship with Charles Sumner was well known, and Moran had expected the same with Seward. The two British reformers were generally spoken of in the same breath, even though they did not always agree with each other. Cobden was the quieter, the more intellectual, and the better liked of the two. Bright, his onetime protégé, was a brilliant orator whose passion for denouncing the sins of the aristocracy made him a hero among the working class. Both MPs were exponents of the so-called Manchester School of politics: they believed in democracy, low taxation, universal education, no government regulation, no military expenditure unless in self-defense, and free trade. America had already achieved many of these goals, which in their view rendered its other faults far more excusable than any of the “great crimes” committed by Britain. Lord Palmerston angrily attacked the pair for being traitors and haters of all things English, for whom “everything that was hostile to England was right.”17
Seward was unaware that Richard Cobden thought him a “light weight” who “wrote too much, and thought too little.”18 Seward had also disappointed Harriet Martineau, whose reputation as a woman of letters, social reformer, and commentator was almost as great in America as it was in England. Her study of the United States in 1837, Society in America—written after a ten-thousand-mile trek across the country that took two years—was considered by Americans to be one of the least obnoxious ever produced by an English writer. Seward had traveled to her home in the Lake District to pay court. “Miss Martineau … applied her ear trumpet; and we talked right on, an hour and a half, chiefly, of course, about the great American question.” Seward was honest about the difficulty of forcing abolition on the country, perhaps too honest: “I gave her my own more practical views, and spoke, of course, hopefully. She betrayed, or rather confessed, an opinion, that I was a politician, rather than an abolitionist of her school.” But Harriet Martineau’s actual objection was not over his abolition principles per se but his lack of principles in general. She thought he was cynical and self-aggrandizing, especially after he revealed that he had supported the complaints against the Royal Navy’s pursuit of suspected slave traders because “the more noise there is about war, the less probable war becomes; he always makes the utmost possible noise at the earliest moment,” wrote Miss Martineau. “In truth I was aghast. ‘You see,’ said he, ‘I am very candid.’ ”19
Lord Palmerston himself went even further in his condemnation of Seward. The American was a “vapouring, blustering, ignorant Man,” whose overbearing egotism made him a danger to Anglo-American relations.20 Palmerston had accepted his first ministerial post when Seward was seven years old, and by 1859 he had served as secretary for war, foreign secretary (three times), home secretary, and prime minister. He had been in politics long enough to recognize a fellow bluffer and opportunist. But having observed Seward’s evident pleasure at his reception in England, Palmerston