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By Root 6839 0

Adams to the White House for his interview with Lincoln. Adams was shocked by the “ravenous crowd” of office seekers who milled around the building, blocking stairs and corridors.27 Inside Lincoln’s office they found the president in deep conversation with a congressman over other potential candidates to fill the much-discussed Chicago Post Office job. When Adams began to express his gratitude for the appointment to London, Lincoln hurriedly cut him short, saying it was all Seward’s doing. He then turned his back on Adams in order to engage Seward and the congressman in further discussion on “the Chicago case.” Adams waited, uncertain whether the conversation was over, until a gesture from Seward indicated he had been dismissed.28

Adams was insulted. “Such was his fashion of receiving and dismissing the incumbent of one of the two highest posts in the foreign service of the country!” he complained in his diary. Nor had he been invited to attend the first state dinner of the White House, taking place that night, a gross slight considering that Seward was bringing as his guest William Howard Russell of The Times, who had arrived in Washington shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration.

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The forty-year-old war correspondent William Howard Russell, known to his friends as Billy, was the most famous journalist in the world. His honest and searing reports during the Crimean War had made a heroine of Florence Nightingale as they had rocked the Aberdeen administration.

Russell was the ideal choice to represent The Times in the United States. Overeating and excessive drinking were his chief vices—especially drinking, which had grown worse as his wife, Mary, became increasingly frail and dependent on him. Their four older children were in boarding school, but Russell had left her nursing their four-month-old son, Colin, who seemed as weak and poorly as his mother. After saying goodbye, “I went to the station in a storm of pain,” Russell wrote in his diary, feeling guilty that the night before he had been enjoying himself at the Garrick Club, where the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray proposed a toast in his honor.29

The qualities that made Russell an unsatisfactory husband to Mary were precisely those that John Thadeus Delane, the editor of The Times, hoped would endear him to the Americans. Russell was at his happiest in company; over dinner his round face and bright blue eyes would come alive as he amused his listeners with witty observations and stories. He could converse easily with anyone, which Delane knew was a vital prerequisite for success in democratic America.

Although the circulation of The Times was small by U.S. standards, hardly more than 65,000, the paper’s influence was felt around the globe. Unlike its newer rivals, such as the Daily Telegraph and the Daily News, The Times, which was founded in 1785, had the financial resources to provide the latest news from distant countries. There were many who resented its power: “What an absurd position we are in, so completely dictated to and domineered by one newspaper,” complained the MP Richard Cobden, who was nevertheless grateful when, in April 1859, a fellow passenger on a Mississippi steamboat, Senator Jefferson Davis, had offered to share his copy with him.

William Howard Russell soon discovered that celebrity in America had its drawbacks. A drunken night at the Astor Hotel with the Friendly Society of St. Patrick made the front pages. Apparently—since he could not remember the evening’s events—Russell had made a rousing speech in favor of the Union. He confessed in his diary: “O Lord, why did I do it?” When Delane learned of the episode, he asked him the same question. English writers had a poor reputation in the South for coming “with their three p’s: pen—paper—prejudices.”30 Russell had jeopardized the paper’s credibility and his own, which was not as high in America as he had assumed.31 “I should imagine that you must be very perplexed in England,” a British immigrant in New York remarked to his relatives. “The idea is somewhat amusing to us here that Mr.