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caused Russell to greet him with more reserve than he had intended. Both men were struck for a moment by the physical similarities between them. Their small stature, coupled with their bald crowns, meant that from the back they could be taken for twins. Since neither had the least facility for small talk, the meeting quickly escalated into an acrimonious debate about the neutrality proclamation. Each thought the other rude and arrogant, and each set out to prove his superior knowledge of diplomatic history. They continued arguing after the bell rang for lunch. However, by the end of the meal their animosity had given way to a grudging respect. Russell showed his goodwill by inviting Adams for a stroll around the grounds. “I like Adams very much,” he wrote a few weeks later, “though we did not understand one another at first.”36

When he reflected on the interview, Adams thought he had acquitted himself reasonably well, but he was less positive about the state of relations between the two countries.37 He never imagined the sense of emergency he had created in Lord John Russell. During the closing days of May, the British cabinet spent many hours trying to divine Seward’s real purpose. The Duke of Newcastle’s conversation with him the previous October was again analyzed. It was recalled how Napoleon had always reacted to failure with aggression; was Seward of the same mold, they wondered? If the South became independent, would he try to deflect public anger by attacking Canada? The question became not whether but how many regiments they should send to reinforce the Canadian border. The Duke of Argyll agreed to warn Charles Sumner about the effect of Seward’s threatening behavior. “Mr. Seward knows Europe less well than you do,” Argyll explained in his letter of June 4; “he may be disposed to do high-handed and offensive things which would necessarily lead to bad blood, and perhaps finally to rupture.”38

“The great question of all is the American,” Lord John Russell wrote to Lord Cowley, the British ambassador in Paris, “and that grows darker and darker every day. I do not expect that Lyons will be sent away, but it is possible. Seward and Co. may attempt to revive their waning popularity by a quarrel with Great Britain, but if we avoid all offence, I do not see how they can do it.”39 Since Russell was blind to his remarkable ability to make speeches that offended all parties, his confidence was perhaps misplaced. The cabinet had made a decision on privateering that it hoped would soothe Northern irritation with the belligerency issue: they had stretched the meaning of neutrality as far as it could go by closing British ports in every part of the globe to privateers and their captures. Since the North had no need of privateers, the new prohibition affected only the South and its ability to wage war at sea.

However, the South was picking up backhanded support from politicians who were keen to rub John Bright’s nose in the apparent failure of democracy. “We are now witnessing the bursting of the great republican bubble which had so often been held up to us as a model on which to recast our own English Constitution,” Sir John Ramsden, MP, proclaimed in the Commons on May 27 to a scattering of sarcastic cheers. Gladstone and Russell hurriedly disowned Ramsden’s speech. “I do not think it just or seemly that there should be among us anything like exultation of their discord,” Russell chided. Unfortunately, he diminished the good effects of his speech with some unnecessary observations on the failings of American democracy.40

Reports of the Commons debate reached an American audience already infuriated by excerpts of William Howard Russell’s candid travelogues that had found their way back across the Atlantic. Northerners objected to his description of racism, and especially his honest appraisal of pro-Southern feeling in New York. Southerners were offended by his depiction of them as heartless and arrogant. (“Charleston people are thin skinned,” commented the Southern diarist Mary Chesnut; “I expected so much worse.”)41 Seward