A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [456]
18. Allen, Great Britain and the United States, p. 198.
19. William Brock, “The Image of England and American Nationalism,” Journal of American Studies, 5 (Dec. 1971). Edward Everett, speech at Bristol, 1842, p. 227.
20. Nichols, Forty Years of American Life, vol. 1, p. 398.
21. Allen, Great Britain and the United States, p.147, quoting the Edinburgh Review, 1820.
22. It was often pointed out that Louisiana would still belong to the French if Barings Bank in London had not financed the purchase, selling more than $9 million worth of the $11 million total of bonds sold.
23. Charles Dickens to Macready, March 22, 1842, quoted in Walter Allen, Transatlantic Crossing: American Visitors to Britain and British Visitors to America in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1971), p. 236.
24. What Seward actually believed in has been the subject of intense historical debate. In a speech in 1853 he declared it was his aim that the republic “shall greet the sun when he touches the tropics, and when he sends his gleaming rays towards the polar circle, and shall include even distant islands in either ocean.” But Ernest Paolino argues that by 1857 Seward had abandoned the idea of annexing Canada by force. For one thing, a trip to Labrador convinced him that the Canadians would never accept it. Nevertheless, he liked to talk as though he believed it was just a matter of time, if only to annoy the British. In 1860 he made a speech congratulating the Canadians for “building states to be hereafter admitted into the American union.” Ernest N. Paolino, The Foundations of the American Empire (New York, 1973), p. 8.
25. G. H. Warren, Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas (Boston, 1981), p. 56.
26. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (repr., Boston, 1973), p. 102.
27. David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1961), pp. 295–96.
28. Letters of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, ed. Sir G. F. Lewis (London, 1870), pp. 390–92, Lewis to the Hon. Edward Twisleton, January 21, 1861.
29. Illustrated London News, August 29, no. 814 (Aug. 1856), pp. 121–22. The Duchess of Sutherland made it a point of duty to support black performers who came to England. In 1853, for example, she invited Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, known as “the Black Swan,” to perform a concert at Stafford House in the presence of Queen Victoria. The event was so celebrated that it was turned into a song: “The Other Side of Jordan” (1853).
30. George Douglas, Eighth Duke of Argyll (1823–1900): Autobiography and Memoirs, ed. the Dowager Duchess of Argyll, 2 vols. (London, 1906), vol. 1, p. 412.
Chapter 2: On the Best of Terms
1. Kathleen Burk, Morgan Grenfell, 1838–1988 (Oxford, 2002), p. 20.
2. John M. Taylor, William Henry Seward: Lincoln’s Right Hand (New York, 1991), p. 107.
3. Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy (Oxford, 2005), p. 138.
4. Playing to the gallery, Seward had urged President Buchanan to give Britain one year to withdraw entirely from Central America. If she refused, he argued, the United States would have the right to annex Canada. Cuba had become the largest importer of slaves after Brazil, prompting Lord Palmerston to order the Royal Navy to surround the island, if necessary, and board any suspicious-looking ship, whatever the color of its flag. By May 1858, the navy had boarded 116 suspected slave ships, of which 61 were American-owned. The New York press, in particular, raised an outcry, and Secretary of State Lewis Cass demanded that Britain stop such activities immediately. Senator James Murray Mason had steered a bill through the Senate to send a U.S. naval squadron to the Caribbean. The British government backed away from a confrontation and ordered the Royal Navy to desist from the practice. Palmerston was outraged by Derby’s pusillanimity,