A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [39]
By the time the royal entourage arrived at Washington in early October, Bertie had become an enthusiastic admirer of America; he even thought the unfinished capital was a fine place to visit. He spent a night at the White House, where President Buchanan and his niece, Miss Harriet Lane, made an exception for the young prince by allowing card games after dinner (although no dancing).41 After being shown Congress, the Washington Monument, the Treasury, and a score of other public buildings, he informed his parents, “We might easily take some hints for our own buildings, which are so very bad.”42
From Washington, Lyons accompanied Prince Edward to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate on the banks of the Potomac River, sixteen miles from Washington, where the prince planted a tree at Washington’s tomb. The British minister was just beginning to congratulate himself upon a splendid piece of organization when the visit threatened to unravel during the trip to Richmond, Virginia. The locals were furious because the prince’s hosts had canceled a large slave auction, and a hostile crowd gathered outside his hotel. Lyons managed to avoid a public confrontation, but that afternoon, he and Newcastle encountered a second embarrassment when they discovered en route that the royal party was being taken to visit a slave plantation. Only with great difficulty did they convince their hosts that a tour of the mayor’s office would be much more pleasurable.43
When “Baron Renfrew” arrived in New York on October 11, his guardians were beginning to fear that the good-natured prince’s appetite for orphanages and parades had run its course. But Bertie absolutely loved New York. Some 300,000 people (out of a population of 800,000) lined the streets, climbing on rooftops, trees, and carriages, even hanging from streetlamps, to watch his carriage proceed up Broadway to his hotel. They cheered, threw flowers, and waved placards that said “Welcome, Victoria’s Royal Son.” “I never dreamed we would be received as we were,” he wrote.44
The prince had never imagined such comforts, either. The Fifth Avenue Hotel was the newest and grandest addition to New York’s already magnificent accommodations. Completed in 1859 on the “edge” of town at Twenty-fourth Street and Madison Square, the marble-clad six-story building had the latest conveniences including en suite bathrooms, communication tubes that allowed a guest to speak his request to room service, central heating, and, most exciting of all, a “perpendicular railway intersecting each floor.” The American ideal of luxury was different from the European. The ornaments and objets d’art often taken for granted in English or French houses were missing, but “the rooms are so light and lofty; the passages are so well warmed; the doors slide backward in their grooves so easily and yet so tightly; the chairs are so luxurious; the beds are so elastic, and the linen so clean, and, let me add, the living so excellent,” he wrote, “that I would never wish for better quarters.… All the domestic arrangements (to use a fine word for gas, hot water, and other comforts) are wonderfully perfect.”45
For one night the prince was allowed to sample life as it was lived by New York’s gilded “Four Hundred.” On October 12, 1860, the entire entourage, including Lyons, traveled in a parade of open carriages to a grand ball at the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street organized by New York’s most distinguished citizen, Peter Cooper. Four thousand guests bribed, blackmailed, or otherwise insinuated their way into the most coveted social event of the decade. The danger that the prince would inadvertently start a stampede was so great that the entrances to the supper rooms were guarded by prominent citizens, who admitted fifty guests at a time.46 Even so, the ballroom floor partially collapsed beneath the dancers’