A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [446]
5. The U.S. Senate. Here, on May 22, 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina ambushed Senator Charles Sumner, who was sitting at his desk reading, and beat him with his cane. By Brooks’s own account, he struck Sumner thirty times before the cane splintered.
6. President Abraham Lincoln (1809–65). Lincoln’s physical appearance astonished people. The British journalist William Howard Russell was introduced to him at around the time this photograph was taken in 1861: “There entered, with a shambling, loose, irregular, almost unsteady gait, a tall, lank, lean man, considerably over six feet in height, with stooping shoulders, long pendulous arms, terminating in hands of extraordinary dimensions which, however, were far exceeded in proportion by his feet. He was dressed in an ill-fitting wrinkled suit of black, which put one in mind of an undertaker’s uniform at a funeral.” By the end of the war, the world saw past Lincoln’s appearance to his humanity and magnanimity toward his foes.
7. William Seward (1801–72), U.S. secretary of state, Lincoln’s rival for power before the war but who became his greatest ally during it. Seward’s frequent statements that Canada would one day belong to the United States, coupled with his unscrupulous playing to American Anglophobia, made him the most detested U.S. politician in Britain.
8. London, view of the Royal Exchange. In 1861, Britain was the richest nation on earth. A trading country par excellence, its exports in the 1860s counted for a quarter of the world’s manufactured goods.
9. Cambridge House, Piccadilly, where Prime Minister Lord Palmerston lived from 1855 to 1865. Sir George Trevelyan wrote of it: “Past the wall which screens the mansion / Hallowed by a mighty shade / Where the cards were cut and shuffled / When the game of state was played.”
10. The chamber of the House of Commons. The pro-Northern faction of MPs led by William Forster and John Bright successfully prevented all attempts by pro-Southern MPs to persuade the house to vote in favor of recognizing Southern independence.
11. Lord John Russell, 1st Earl Russell (1792–1878), foreign secretary. A cultured and intellectual man, but an abrasive politician, Russell held thirteen political offices during his long career in politics and was twice prime minister. He and Palmerston were referred to by Queen Victoria as “those two dreadful old men.”
12. Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865), prime minister, popularly known as “Lord Cupid” when young and “Pam” when an elder statesman. His dislike of the United States went back to the War of 1812, when he was secretary at war, and was exacerbated by America’s protection of the slave trade. Palmerston’s brinkmanship was successful during the Trent crisis of 1861, but his bluff was called three years later by the Germans.
13. Charles Sumner (1811–74), senator for Massachusetts. Until the Civil War, he was the most revered U.S. politician in Britain on account of his unflinching campaigns to abolish slavery and win equal rights for blacks.
14. Frederick Douglass (1818–95), writer, orator, and leading abolitionist in America. Douglass campaigned in Britain several times, and in 1859 briefly fled to London to avoid persecution after the radical abolitionist John Brown tried to start a slave uprising by raiding the armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
15. Gideon Welles (1802–78), U.S. secretary of the Navy. Nicknamed “Father Neptune” by Lincoln because of his flowing beard, Welles was a lawyer and journalist with no maritime experience before his appointment. His loathing for William Seward, the secretary of state, interfered with their ability to work together.
16. Salmon P. Chase (1803–73), U.S. secretary of the treasury. An effective treasurer who established a national