A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [63]
“I found them all very tolerably informed and strongly inclined to the anti-Slavery side,” Adams wrote in his diary. However, Milnes declared he had come “mainly for the abominable selfishness of the South in breaking up a great country”; Adams could not decide whether that was English irony or a genuine statement.30 John Motley informed the meeting that he had received a letter from the Duke of Argyll, who insisted that the British government had no alternative but to declare neutrality. “When the American colonies revolted from England we attempted to treat their privateers as pirates, but we very soon found this would be out of the question,” he wrote. “The rules affecting and defining the rights and duties of belligerents are the only rules which prevent war from becoming massacre and murder.”31
Cassius Clay refused to be persuaded of England’s good intentions. He was already tired of the country, with its rude servants and hotels that claimed not to have his reservation. Adams was also dubious, though he might have felt less wretched about the small number of MPs around the table had he known that the Southern envoys were in no better position. Gregory had managed to introduce Yancey to only two MPs, John Laird, owner of one of the largest shipbuilding firms in the country, and William Schaw Lindsay, a self-made shipping magnate. Both professed interest in helping the South achieve independence, but only on the understanding that slavery would eventually be abolished.
Adams went home after the meeting to change for his presentation at court. This was not the time, he told Moran, “for indulging oddities of any kind,” nor for wearing clothes that made them look like servants caught on the wrong side of the green baize door.32 The plain black uniform mandated by the State Department was to be put away; under his tenure, the legation would attend royal functions in the usual brocade and breeches of the diplomatic corps. Dallas and Adams arrived at Buckingham Palace twenty-five minutes early, giving Adams the chance to study the paintings in the Great Saloon while he steadied his nerves. “I reasoned with myself with severity,” he wrote in his diary.33 Queen Victoria received him with a few gracious words and then asked with polite disinterest whether he had ever been to England before. Keeping his composure, Adams replied that he had, when young.
George Dallas and his son left for Southampton immediately after Charles Francis Adams’s presentation. Adams wrote in his diary, “From this time I take the burden on my shoulders.”34 He was justifiably uneasy about his staff; the legation secretary, Charles Wilson, displayed a lingering disappointment at being denied the Chicago Post Office. Benjamin Moran’s open hostility toward Dallas was also an ill omen. “I part with the whole lot with joy,” Moran crowed when the two Dallases set sail. He felt they had taken him for granted, never asking about his late wife during her illness, nor bothering to include him at legation dinners. His job was all he had, and he clung to it with ferocious desperation. Moran did not know that retaining him at the legation had been Henry Adams’s idea or that he was the one who arranged it with the State Department.35 From the moment Moran set eyes on Henry he regarded him as a rival, even though the young Adams was only his father’s private secretary with no official standing at the legation.
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Minister Adams received his first dispatch from Seward on May 17. Its tone and the peremptory demands of the British government worried him, but he obeyed Seward’s orders and requested an interview with Lord John Russell, who had returned to London following the death of the Duke of Bedford. Russell replied with an offer of lunch that day if Adams was prepared to come to his house, Pembroke Lodge, in Richmond Park. In his haste, Adams arrived at the house before his message of acceptance, which