North American Tour Journal 1824-1825 : The Making of a Prime Minister

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.

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.