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thirty thousand U.S. troops under General Philip Sheridan to the Rio Grande, where they provided arms and training to the Juárez rebels. Prussia’s victory over Austria in 1866 convinced Emperor Napoleon that Mexico was a distraction compared to the threat on his doorstep posed by German militarization. He informed Maximilian that the French army would remain in Mexico only until March 1867, when he would have to choose between maintaining his throne unaided and abdicating. Napoleon urged him not to be proud and to abdicate, but Maximilian would not hear of leaving and paid for his misplaced idealism with his life. His rule collapsed within weeks of the French leaving Mexico, and despite a heroic rescue attempt by Prince Felix Salm-Salm, a former Prussian volunteer in the Federal army and colonel of the 68th New York Infantry, Maximilian was captured and executed by the victorious Benito Juárez on June 19, 1867.epl.3

Canada was not Mexico, and the Fenians in the United States were never thought to be as dangerous as the Juaristas. The British desire to resolve the Alabama claims controversy came more from a growing sense that bygones should be bygones. “Surely it is time to forget ancient differences,” declared the Duke of Argyll at a public breakfast in honor of the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison on June 29, 1867, just ten days after Maximilian’s death. “This country desires to maintain with the American people not merely relations of amity and peace; it desires to have their friendship and affection.… I think we ought to feel, every one of us, that in going to America we are going only to a second home.”27 The breakfast was a final gathering of the old guard of pro-Northern supporters and included not just MPs and journalists but also many veteran black abolition campaigners such as Sarah Parker Remond and the Reverend John Sella Martin. Lord Russell was initially not invited, an omission that hurt him deeply. Too embarrassed to explain that Garrison subscribed to the American view that Russell had supported the South during the war, the organizers “found” his invitation. Russell then took advantage of the occasion to offer a public apology for his failure to understand why Lincoln did not simply abolish slavery in 1861:

Distance and want of knowledge of the circumstances of America made me fall into error in that respect. I was afterwards convinced by … Mr. Adams … that I had not rendered due justice to President Lincoln, who was the friend of freedom, and not only the friend, but ultimately the martyr of freedom. (Cheers.) I now, therefore, acknowledge that … I did not do justice to the efforts made by the United States, but I am now persuaded that President Lincoln did all that it was possible to do, and that we are bound to give our tribute of admiration to the excellent policy which the President and his Government pursued.28

Lord Russell’s attempts to make amends impressed Charles Francis Adams and John Bright but not Seward, whose continued intransigence puzzled British friends of the North.29 Shortly before Christmas, however, Seward fatally undermined Adams’s confidence in his judgment by proposing that instead of Canada, Britain could relinquish the Bahamas in exchange for settling the Alabama claims. Now convinced that personal ambition rather than principle was the main force driving Seward’s foreign policy, Adams informed him that he was resigning effective April 1, 1868.

Once it became known that Charles Francis Adams was retiring after seven years in London, the American minister’s stiffness and unsociability was no longer deplored but admired as proof of his integrity and demonstrable fairness toward England.30 By April 1868 there had been four prime ministers in three years: Palmerston, Russell, Derby, and Benjamin Disraeli; Adams’s longevity at the legation during a period of such rapid political transition changed his public persona from that of a Yankee crank to a pillar of the diplomatic community. Ever nervous about making speeches, he turned down the numerous offers to hold a