On 20 September, on the understanding that he was to stay in hotels rather than in houses and to travel in the character of a private student intent upon the private observation of American life, the Prince was permitted to enter the United States. Not being a party to his parents’ conditions, the Americans could hardly be expected to treat him as a private person. Special trains were placed at his disposal, and crowds gathered wherever he stopped on his way across the country — at Detroit and Chicago, at Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Baltimore. He was required to shake hundreds of hands and to smile at thousands of people.
There were a few insulting remarks from Americans of Irish descent; there were one or two newspaper editorials which advised their readers not to behave like flunkeys in welcoming royalty; there were occasional disparaging remarks about his diminutive size: one writer in the New York Daily Tribune rudely comparing him to ‘a dwarf at a country fair’, another writing of his having shaken ‘some of the gigantic hand’ of Chicago’s Mayor ‘Long John’ Wentworth and of his having addressed a few complimentary remarks to the Mayor’s ‘lower waistcoat button’. There was a nasty episode at Richmond, Virginia, which was included in the itinerary when Newcastle gave way to demands that the Prince should visit at least one of the Southern states to see for himself how humanely Negro slaves were treated. During this visit he was jeered and jostled for his supposed preference for the ways of the Yankee North. But, in general — despite the bustle of an electoral campaign which was to result in the return of Abraham Lincoln as President — the ‘whole land’, as the actress Fanny Kemble said, ‘was alive with excitement and interest’ in the progress of the Prince. In Washington he was met by the Secretary of State, General Cass, and taken to the White House to see President James Buchanan, to whom he gave portraits of his parents painted by Winterhalter. The President accepted them enthusiastically, but his niece, Harriet Lane, who acted as his hostess, took the portraits to be their personal property and was most reluctant when later she had to hand them over to President Lincoln. The Prince was introduced to members of the Cabinet and was the guest of honour at a luncheon at the Capitol; he was taken up the Potomac to see George Washington’s house and grave at Mount Vernon, where he planted a chestnut sapling. At Philadelphia, which he thought the ‘prettiest town’ he had seen in America, he went to the opera — where the audience stood up to sing ‘God Save the Queen’ — and he visited the big, modern penitentiary, where he met a former judge, Vandersmith, who was serving a sentence for forgery. He asked him if he would like to talk. ‘Talk away, Prince,’ Vandersmith replied breezily. ‘There’s time enough. I’m here for twenty years!’ At St Louis, closely followed by a wagon advertising a local clothing store, he had visited the Great Fair, where he was given a meal in a wooden shed and, although he could not overcome his disgust at the sight of his hosts ejecting streams of tobacco-coloured saliva into repulsive-looking spittoons, he was apparently less shocked than the Duke of Newcastle by the table manners of the St Louis citizens who, like ‘ravenous animals’, set upon the sides of beef and buffalo tongue with pocket knives.
In New York, where he stayed in a suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel — which, he said, was far more comfortable than any of his rooms at home — he was welcomed by a cheering, flag-waving crowd which, he was told, numbered 300,000. He also attended a ball in the old Academy of Music, where the floor gave way beneath the weight of 5,000 guests; and went to a breakfast given by the Mayor, who invited also the heads of twenty families, one of whom described his reception as ‘truly enthusiastic and genuine’. He was introduced to the Commander-in-Chief, General Winfield Scott, hero of the Mexican campaign of 1847, who took him to West Point to inspect a parade of cadets, and in Boston he met Longfellow, Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. From Boston he went to Bunker Hill to survey the site of the first important engagement of the War of Independence; and to Harvard to see the university. Finally, the next week, on 20 October, he stepped once more aboard the Nero at Portland, Maine.
Apart from a quiet expression of regret that he was expected to dance all the time with middle-aged ladies instead of young girls, a muttered protest about being hurried about from one place to the next was his only complaint during the whole of this American tour. He had found some of the long railroad journeys exceedingly tedious, and at both New York and Chicago, exhausted by the rush and commotion, he had had to go to bed with a fearful headache. Still, he afterwards agreed that he had enjoyed himself enormously; and the Americans had clearly enjoyed him. General Winfield Scott described him as ‘enchanting’; and the roar of cheering voices that greeted him as he drove down Broadway in a barouche with the Mayor, Fernando Wood, persuaded his suite that most Americans were prepared to agree.
General Bruce told Sir Charles Phipps, Keeper of the Queen’s Privy Purse, that it was quite impossible to exaggerate the enthusiasm of the Prince’s reception in New York; he despaired of its ‘ever being understood in England’. He went on:
This is the culminating point of our expedition and … with the exception of the Orange difficulty, the affair has been one continual triumph. No doubt the primary cause has been the veneration in which the Queen is held … but it is also true that, finding that sentiment in operation, the Prince of Wales has so comported himself as to turn it to the fullest account and to gain for himself no small share of interest and attraction. He has undergone no slight trial, and his patience, temper and good breeding have been severely taxed. There is no doubt that he has created everywhere a most favourable impression.
His mother was delighted with these reports and, for once, gave him credit unreservedly. ‘He was immensely popular everywhere,’ she told Princess Frederick William as the Prince was on his way home through stormy seas, ‘and he really deserves the highest praise, which should be given him all the more as he was never spared any reproof.’ The Prince Consort, too, was prepared to recognize that much of the credit for the resounding success of what King Leopold called this ‘tremendous tour’ must rest with his son, though he had been more than usually pained by the letters addressed to him from North America which — containing such passages as ‘St John’s is a very picturesque seaport town, and its cod fisheries are its staple produce’ — might well have been copied out of some peculiarly boring guidebook. The Prince Consort was also sorry to note that Bruce’s praise was tempered by criticism of the Prince’s poor showing in conversation, his ‘growing sense of his own importance’ which was ‘stimulating a longing for independence of control’. But these reservations were exceptional. President Buchanan reported:
In our domestic circle he won all hearts. His free and ingenuous intercourse with myself evinced both a kind heart and a good understanding … He has passed through a trying ordeal for a person of his years, and his conduct throughout has been such as becomes his age and station. Dignified, frank and affable, he has conciliated, wherever he has been, the kindness and respect of a sensitive and discriminating people.
Lord Lyons, the British Minister in Washington, praised his ‘patience and good humour … his judgement … and tact’. Sir John Rose, the Canadian Minister, spoke warmly of his ‘kind and gentle demeanour’. All in all, the Prince Consort was driven, albeit ironically, to conclude, his son had been ‘generally pronounced “the most perfect production of nature”’.