A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [68]
Adams would have welcomed any excuse to stay at home. “We are invited everywhere, and dine out almost every day, but this brings us no nearer [to belonging],” he admitted to Charles Francis Jr.63 Henry Adams yearned to cut a dash among the fashionable young men, like any twenty-three-year-old, but, as an “American who neither hunted nor raced, neither shot nor fished nor gambled, and was not marriageable,” there was no obvious circle for him to join. Nor did he have school or university ties to ease his entry. Tagging along to events with his father made him feel like a burden. “Every young diplomat,” he wrote, “and most of the old ones, felt awkward in an English house from a certainty that they were not precisely wanted there, and a possibility that they might be told so.”64 Henry’s introduction to the season began with a dance given by the Duchess of Somerset, where he was forced into a Scottish reel with the daughter of the new Turkish ambassador. He could not remember a more excruciating twenty minutes.
Adams was too busy to notice his son’s unhappiness. Seward showed more restraint in his subsequent dispatches, but he continued to insist on a retraction of the neutrality proclamation.65 The Queen’s Advocate, Sir John Harding, claimed that his sympathies lay with the North, but, recorded Adams, when “I tried to explain to him the nature of my objection, which is much misunderstood here, he defended it with the usual argument.”66 The British attitude in general dismayed him. “People do not quite understand Americans or their politics,” he wrote to Charles Francis Jr. He had heard that Richard Cobden thought separating from the South would be good for the North,67 and John Bright had come out strongly for “strict neutrality.”68 “They think this a hasty quarrel,” complained Adams. “They do not comprehend the connection which slavery has with it, because we do not at once preach emancipation. Hence they go to the other extreme and argue that it is not an element of the struggle.”69
Adams was himself guilty of mischaracterization. The English reaction was far more complicated than he allowed. The celebrated novelist Mrs. Gaskell, an ardent admirer of the United States, confessed to being “thoroughly puzzled by what is now going on in America.” “I don’t mind your thinking me dense or ignorant,” she wrote candidly to the future president of Harvard, Charles Eliot Norton. “But I should have thought (I feel as if I were dancing among eggs) that separating yourselves from the South was like getting rid of a diseased member.” She added: “You know I live in S. Lancashire where all personal and commercial intimacies are with the South. Everyone looks and feels sad (—oh so sad) about this war. It would do Americans good to see how warm the English heart is towards them.”70
Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species had been published in 1859, highlighted another aspect that troubled the English. “Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God,” he wrote to the botanist Asa Gray, “that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery.”71 A leading abolitionist, Richard Webb, voiced a similar complaint from Ireland: “Neither Lincoln nor Seward has yet spoken an antislavery syllable since they took office.”72 Seward had specifically instructed all U.S. ministers and consuls to avoid mentioning the word in connection with the Union. The deliberate omission was a grievous miscalculation. Seward had sacrificed the North’s trump card in Britain in the hope that it would appease the South. Instead, he had provided ammunition to his critics who accused the North of hypocrisy. The Economist had already stated, “The great majority of the people in the Northern States detest the coloured population even more than do the Southern