A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [35]
The hysteria created by John Brown’s raid led Louisiana and South Carolina to call for the imprisonment of free Negro sailors in December, while their ships were docked at port. “There are plans for the re-enslavement of all the emancipated Negroes, and for purging the South of all Whites suspected of abolition tendencies, and what not,” Lord Lyons informed the Foreign Office.28 But the minister was ready to fight “the Lynch Law Assassins,” as he called them, and ordered the British consuls in the South to insist on “decent treatment for Coloured British Subjects” even if it meant defying local opinion.
Mason’s Select Committee found no evidence of Republican connivance in Brown’s raid.29 This did not lessen Southern suspicions, however. “Our social lines were now strictly drawn between North and South,” recalled Mrs. Roger Pryor, the Southern memoirist. “Names were dropped from visiting lists, occasions avoided on which we might expect to meet members of the party antagonistic to our own.”30 The few attempts to revive the old Washington life ended in failure. Shortly after Seward testified to the committee, he went to a large dinner party given by the Southern society hostess and wealthy widow Mrs. Rose Greenhow. His protégé, the newly elected congressional representative for Massachusetts, Charles Francis Adams, was also present, with his wife, Abigail. “An unfortunate allusion was made to some circumstances connected with the affair at Harpers Ferry, when Mrs. Adams launched out into a panegyric on John Brown,” wrote Mrs. Greenhow, “calling him that ‘holy saint and martyr,’ turning her glance full upon me at the time—to which I replied, in a clear and audible voice—for it may be supposed that this conversation silenced all other—‘I have no sympathy for John Brown: he was a traitor, and met a traitor’s doom.’ ”31 The rest of the company remained mute, including Charles Francis Adams, who was too mortified to put together a coherent sentence. He had expressly refrained from speaking about the raid in order to begin his congressional career “perfectly unencumbered.”32 Seward was the first to recover. He “aided me with great skill in directing [the conversation] into a new channel,” Mrs. Greenhow continued. “A few days after I encountered Mr. Seward, and he approached me, saying, ‘I have just been writing to our friend Lady Napier, and have told her that in all Washington you were the only person who had the independence to give a mixed dinner party.’ ” Mrs. Greenhow had not given the dinner party for the reasons Seward supposed. “Perhaps,” she wrote, “had he fathomed my real object, he would not have been so grateful to me for the social countenance. At this early day I saw foreshadowed what was to follow, and I desired to obtain a thorough insight into the plans and schemes of those who were destined to become the prominent actors in the fearful drama, in order that I might turn it to the advantage of my country when the hour for action arrived.”33
Abigail Adams’s career as a Washington hostess was stillborn as a result of her faux pas at the dinner. She had never wholeheartedly embraced the idea anyway; it was Seward and Henry Adams, her third son, who had pushed her into the role. Henry had written to her from Germany, where he was studying, “Be ambitious, Mrs. A. You’re young yet! I wish you could make your ‘salons’ the first in Washington … not on my own account, but as a family joint-stock affair.” Papa needed her, Henry argued: “His weak point is just where you can fill it; he doesn’t like the bother and fuss of entertaining and managing people who can’t be reasoned with, and he won’t take the trouble to acquire strength and influence