More than thirty years had passed since the unexpected death of his own father in England. The letter, which had come from old Mr. Albion, who had gone to some trouble to discover all the details of the affair, explained that he had been set upon by ruffians in the city, probably intent only upon theft. James Master had put up such a fight, though, that one of the fellows had struck him a terrible blow with a cudgel, from which he had not recovered. The news had not only come as a great shock to Weston, it had also set the seal on a prejudice that remained with him for the rest of his life. All through his New York childhood, for reasons he never quite understood, England had seemed to claim the mother who was missing from his home. It was the war with England, also, which kept his father away, and made the other boys at school call his father a traitor. And these wounds had only partly healed when this news came that, like some ancient god who can never be satisfied, England had taken his father’s life as well. Even though he was a rational young man at Harvard when it happened, it was not so surprising that a primitive sense of aversion to England and all things English had settled in his soul.

As time passed, the scope of this aversion grew wider. While he was at Harvard, at the time of the French Revolution, it had seemed to Weston that perhaps in that country, inspired by the example of America, a new European freedom might be dawning. But as the liberal constitution for which Lafayette and his friends had hoped gave way first to the bloodbath of the Terror, and then to Napoleon’s empire, Weston had concluded that the freedoms of the New World might never be possible in the Old. Europe was too mired in ancient hatreds and rivalries between nations. The whole Continent, in Weston’s imagination, was a dangerous place, and he wanted as little to do with it as possible.

He was in excellent company. Hadn’t Washington, in his farewell address, warned the new American nation to avoid foreign entanglements? Jefferson, that standard-bearer of the European Enlightenment, and former resident of Paris, had likewise declared that America should stick to honest friendship with all nations, but entangling alliances with none. Madison agreed. Even John Quincy Adams, the great diplomat, who’d lived in countries from Russia to Portugal, said the same. Europe was trouble.