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Seward was still abroad when the radical abolitionist John Brown led a raiding party of sixteen whites and five blacks in an attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859. The raid was meant to be the catalyst for a slave uprising. But rather than sparking a Santo Domingo–style revolution, the attempt ended in a bloody standoff against a company of U.S. Marines directed by Colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown was hanged for treason on December 2. The public’s hysterical reaction to the raid, particularly in the South, frightened many abolitionists. Fearing arrest because of his known friendship with John Brown, the former slave and abolition campaigner Frederick Douglass gathered his family and fled to England.

Soon after his arrival, Douglass was invited to give a lecture in Paris. The visit required a passport, but Benjamin Moran refused to give him one, in accordance with the Dred Scott decision. Douglass felt it was beneath his dignity to protest and called upon the French embassy instead, which issued a passport without demur. In a separate incident on November 21, Moran also shooed away Sarah Parker Remond, a black abolitionist from Boston who had become a popular public speaker since her arrival in England the previous February.21 In his diary he claimed he would have issued a passport if she had sent the request by post, but Moran could not bear to be challenged, especially by a social inferior. Remond “was so impudent,” he recorded, “that I had to order her out of the house.”22

The following week, on November 28, 1859, Moran foiled Remond’s attempt to gain a passport using a third party. This, he thought, was the end of the matter until he read about her “unjust” treatment in the newspapers. The Morning Star, which represented the views of Richard Cobden and John Bright, took the lead and attacked the legation for three days running. “This has fallen like a bomb-shell among the family,” recorded Moran, referring to the American minister, George Dallas. Notwithstanding his Quakerism, Dallas was incensed at having his character impugned over a spat with a “negress” and talked wildly of teaching the English a lesson by closing down the legation.23 He wrote an angry letter to Remond, who replied by reminding him that it was her taxes that paid his salary.24 To the British, the passport episode exposed the United States as a racist and morally backward country whose treatment of nonwhites was reprehensible. “You may read the facts,” wrote Remond in the Quaker journal the British Friend, “but no words can express the mental suffering we are obliged to bear because we happen to have a dark complexion. No language can give one an idea of the spirit of prejudice which exists in the States.”25

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Charles Sumner returned to Washington in time for the opening of Congress on December 5, 1859. By staying in Italy throughout May and June, Sumner had spared himself the spectacle of Seward being welcomed in London as though he were already the next president. Sumner had changed during his time abroad. He had always been prone to bombast and fanaticism and had always abhorred compromise. After his caning on the floor of the House, these qualities were joined by a lack of restraint that made him vain and capricious.

Washington was much the worse, Sumner complained to his friends in Europe.26 He was not only more unpopular than ever in the South, but was also blamed in many quarters for inspiring John Brown’s raid. The atmosphere in Washington was growing poisonous as Southerners sought to implicate leading Republicans in the supposed conspiracy behind the raid. Senator James Murray Mason was elected head of a Select Committee with powers to call witnesses to testify before Congress. One such witness was Seward, who received a summons as soon as he returned to America on December 28. He kept his cool while Mason, whose seat was next to his in the Senate, harangued him for being the moral, though not actual, instigator