Of what they had to expect, the Minister knew no more than his
son. What he or Mr. Seward or Mr. Sumner may have thought is the
affair of history and their errors concern historians. The errors
of a private secretary concerned no one but himself, and were a
large part of his education. He thought on May 12 that he was
going to a friendly Government and people, true to the
anti-slavery principles which had been their steadiest
profession. For a hundred years the chief effort of his family
had aimed at bringing the Government of England into intelligent
cooperation with the objects and interests of America. His father
was about to make a new effort, and this time the chance of
success was promising. The slave States had been the chief
apparent obstacle to good understanding. As for the private
secretary himself, he was, like all Bostonians, instinctively
English. He could not conceive the idea of a hostile England. He
supposed himself, as one of the members of a famous anti-slavery
family, to be welcome everywhere in the British Islands.
On May 13, he met the official announcement that England
recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning of
a new education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of
Harvard College and Germany. He had to learn -- the sooner the
better -- that his ideas were the reverse of truth; that in May,
1861, no one in England -- literally no one -- doubted that
Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly all
were glad of it, though not often saying so.
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