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

Join us for a Lunch at the Library presentation from The Countess of Derby and Professor Andrew O'Shaughnessy on A North American Tour Journal 1824-1925: The Making of a Prime Minister.

In July 1824, Edward Geoffrey Stanley arrived in New York City at the end of a nearly five-week voyage from Liverpool. The young MP and future 14th earl of Derby was under a cloud before his departure. His political career was off to a rough start and he was in love with a young lady that he was forbidden to marry. A lengthy tour, or as Stanley termed it, a “banishment,” 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 stage, steamboat, canoe, horseback and sometimes on foot, studying every aspect of the towns and countryside he passed through.  Stanley was sometimes surprised, and sometimes shocked, by what he saw. Complicated interactions between the Catholic French and their Protestant British neighbours in Canada, the horrifying lives of those enslaved in the U.S. South, the poverty of Irish immigrants in the north, the degradation of Native Americans everywhere: all of these left deep impressions on Stanley. Everything he learned during this journey shaped his future career as a political reformer and distinguished statesman.

In their presentation, The Countess of Derby and Professor O'Shaughnessy will uncover the Earl's remarkable insights and the lasting impact of his exciting voyage across the United States and Canada.

This event will take place on Wednesday, April 16, 2025 at 12:00 p.m. ET in Benjamin Franklin Hall and will also be livestreamed. This event is free to attend but registration is required.

The Countess of Derby is passionate about enhancing people’s lives through the power of studying history and sharing stories. Cazzy, as she is affectionately known by her friends has spent the past 30 years working with her husband the 19th Earl of Derby on the restoration of Knowsley Hall, the ancestral seat of the Derby Family. Now that project is complete the Countess is on a mission to enhance people’s lives through the power of storytelling. Born a Neville and married to a Stanley, the Countess is an exponent of living history, in 2023 she started to share her stories through podcasts, books and documentaries, working with leading academics both in the UK and the US to shed new light on 600 years of her family’s contribution to British History. The importance of the Stanley women has been brought to the fore with the tales of Lady Margaret Beaufort who put her sone Henry Tudor on the throne of England as King Henry VII and Charlotte de la Tremoille, 7th Countess, who defended the family seat Lathom House against a ferocious siege by Oliver Cromwell for over 30 days.

In 2025 the Countess will publish volume II of the recently discovered travel journals of the 14th Earl of Derby who as a young man journeyed across Canada and the United States in 2024-25. She published his European Grand Tour journal in 2022. What he saw and experienced on these travels had a huge impact on his later ministries as Chief Secretary to Ireland, Colonial Secretary and Prime Minister three times to Queen Victoria. His inner most thoughts in these diaries will show him to be one of the leading visionaries of the Victorian age and will expose his true legacy shedding new light on how he drew on examples from all aspects of American life to influence British reform.

2026 is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence for America. The Countess is a direct descendant of General Charles Cornwallis who lost the Battle of Yorktown and General John Burgoyne (who lost the battle of Saratoga) lived at Knowsley Hall for some time as he was married to Lady Charlotte Stanley, sister to the 12th Earl of Derby so the Derby family are uniquely placed to offer an insider’s view to this historic moment in the founding history of the United States of America along with leading academics who will explain why this unexpected defeat stunned the British Empire.

Andrew O’Shaughnessy is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Between 2003 and 2022, he served as Vice President of The Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello), and the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. He is a dual citizen of Britain and the United States. After completing his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Oxford University, he taught at Eton College before becoming a visiting professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas and a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, where he was chair of the History department between 1998 and 2003. 

His book The Men Who Lost America. British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) received eight national awards including the New York Historical Society American History Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution Excellence in American History Book Award and The Society of Military History Book Prize. He is also the author of An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University (University of Virginia Press, 2021), and a co-authored book with the late Trevor Burnard, Republic and Empire: The American Revolution and The Crisis of British Imperialism (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2025).

As part of his study of the 1824-25 American tour of Edward Geoffrey Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, he was awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford.  He has previously been a Visiting International Fellow at the Wilberforce Institute at Hull University; a Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow at The University of Melbourne, Australia; a Sons of the American Revolution Visiting Professor at King’s College, London University, in association with the Georgian Papers Programme at Royal Archives in Windsor Castle; a  Barra Senior Research Fellow at The McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; a Copeland Colloquium Fellow at Amherst College, Massachusetts; and a University of Wisconsin System Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.