A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [51]
Seward was conspicuously absent when William Howard Russell visited the White House again, on March 31, for a near-deserted reception given by Mrs. Lincoln. Nor did he attend Lord Lyons’s dinner that evening, which gave Charles Sumner the field to himself. The other missing person was Charles Francis Adams, who ought to have paid his respects at the British legation after accepting his post but had hurried home to Massachusetts instead. “My visit has changed my feelings much,” he wrote. “For my part I see nothing but incompetency in the head. The man is not equal to the hour.” Like William Howard Russell, he dismissed the rest of the cabinet as “a motley mixture, consisting of one statesman, one politician, two jobbers, one intriguer, and two respectable old gentlemen.”36 Adams was determined to avoid inconveniencing himself or his family any more than was necessary. Although the last of the Southern diplomatic envoys had already left for London, Adams could not see why he should chase after them. He was going to arrange his affairs, pack in an orderly fashion, and, most important of all, attend his oldest son’s wedding in Massachusetts. Decades later, his son Charles Francis Jr. severely criticized his father for being so petulant:
Every stage of our action was thus marked by extreme deliberation; and the Confederate Commissioners took full advantage of the fact. There can, I think, be no question that my brother John’s marriage on the 29th of April 1861, led to grave international complications. It is creditable to neither Seward nor my father that the latter was allowed to dawdle away weeks of precious time because of such a trifle. It was much as if a general had permitted some social engagement to keep him away from his headquarters on the eve of a great battle.37
Adams’s casual neglect of Lord Lyons was another serious mistake. Lyons would have been able to give him valuable insights and directions in his dealings with the British government, among them that the British genuinely desired to keep aloof. He might even have discovered, as Russell did, that Lyons was “strong for the Union.” The information might have been helpful to Seward as well, whose paranoia was increasing by the day. A few days in Seward’s company had allowed Russell to see through the bonhomie to the ambiguities of his character. Initially he had found him to be slightly absurd, but the more Seward insisted that there was no imminent civil war, and that neither England nor France was allowed to refer to it as such, the more Russell inclined to Lyons’s opinion that Seward was either a deluded narcissist or a desperate bully, and possibly both.
Seward was tormented by his declining political influence, telling his wife that he felt like “a chief reduced to a subordinate position, and surrounded with a guard to see that I do not do too much for my country, lest some advantage may revert to my own fame.”38 He made one last effort to reassert his authority and composed a memorandum entitled “Thoughts for the President’s Consideration,” which was delivered to Lincoln’s office on April 1. It is often called the “April Fool’s Day Memorandum,” and in it Seward argued that a foreign war was the only salvation for the Union. What possessed him to make such a bizarre proposal has puzzled historians ever since.39 Seward criticized the administration, meaning Lincoln, for being “without a policy, either domestic or foreign.” As a remedy, Seward proposed to reunite the country by creating a foreign threat—in his words, to “change the question before the Public from one upon Slavery … to one of Patriotism or Union.