A North American Tour Journal 1824–1825

The Making of a Prime Minister

Author: Edward Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Lisa A. Francavilla, Caroline Derby, Andrew O’Shaughnessy and Jeanie Grant Moore

Edward Stanley, MP and future 14th earl of Derby, wrote this diary as a young man in 1824–25 during a tour of North America. It reveals insights and experiences that went on to shape his political destiny and legacy as prime minister.

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In July 1824, Edward Geoffrey Smith Stanley arrived in New York City at the end of a month-long voyage from Liverpool. The young MP and future 14th earl of Derby had left England under a cloud. His political career was off to a rough start, and he was in love with a woman he was forbidden to marry. The lengthy tour of America that he was about to embark on—a ‘banishment’ as he called it—had been imposed upon him.

From July 1824 into March 1825, Stanley travelled extensively throughout the eastern half of North America. He crossed mountains and lakes, journeyed up and down rivers, and trekked through pine barrens, swamps, and marshes. He travelled by stagecoach, steamboat, canoe, horseback, and sometimes on foot, studying every aspect of the towns and countryside he passed through. He was sometimes surprised, and sometimes shocked, by what he saw: the complex interactions between the Catholic French and their Protestant British neighbours in Canada; the horrifying lives of black slaves in the Southern states; the poverty of Irish immigrants in the North; the degradation of Native Americans everywhere. It left a deep impression on Stanley, shaping his future career as a political reformer and distinguished statesman.

About the Author

Edward Geoffrey Smith Stanley (1799-1869), laterLord Stanley and the 14th earl of Derby, was thefirst British statesman to become prime ministerthree times and remains the longest serving partyleader in modern British politics. A complex,astute and influential figure, he dominated thepolitical scene during the mid-nineteenth century.

Lisa A. Francavilla is a historian of family, gender, and society, and senior managing editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, International Center for Jefferson Studies.

Caroline Derby is a historian, curator, and storyteller. Born a Neville, she married a Stanley and grew up on the Audley End estate before studying history and history of art at London University and then working for nearly a decade in all the royal palaces as exhibitions assistant to the surveyor of The Queen’s paintings of the Royal Collection. She married the 19th earl of Derby in 1995 and they have three children. She is convinced that education and knowledge of history have the power to change lives.

Professor Andrew O’Shaughnessy is professor of history at the University of Virginia and a noted scholar on the American Revolution. He is a former Saunders director of the Robert H. Smith Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, vice president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, and visiting international fellow at the Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull. He is currently visiting fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Professor Jeanie Grant Moore received her undergraduate degree from UCLA and her doctorate from the University of California, Riverside. She is professor emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin and is recently retired from the University of San Diego. She has published articles based on British and European literature from the medieval period through the nineteenth century. Her teaching and publications reflect her interest in the way that history and literature are inextricably intertwined, and her current research focuses on the connections between Charles Dickens and the 14th earl of Derby. She lives in San Diego with her husband and family.