How the
British Nearly Supported the Confederacy
Book review by GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT
A WORLD ON FIRE
Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War
By Amanda Foreman
Illustrated. 958 pp. Random House. $35.
Was it a civil war twice over? Not only did the “war
between the states” divide the American people, it sundered the larger
English-speaking community stretching across the Atlantic. The conflict was
followed with consuming interest by the British, it affected them directly,
many of them fought in it — and it split them into two camps, just as it did
the Americans.
Now that Americans are taught that the war was a noble
conflict waged by Lincoln and the forces of light against misguided and
contumacious Southerners, it’s especially valuable to be reminded that this was
far from how all the English saw it at the time. To be sure, almost no
Englishman defended slavery, long since abolished in the British Empire. The
British edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had sold an astonishing million copies,
three times its American sales, and the Royal Navy waged a long campaign
against the slave trade: during Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s visit to the
White House in March 2009, President Obama was presented with a pen holder
carved from the wood of one of the ships that conducted that campaign.
But while some English politicians, like the radical
John Bright and the Whig Duke of Argyll, ardently supported the North, plenty
sided with the Confederacy. They even included W. E. Gladstone, on his long
journey from youthful Tory to “the people’s William,” adored by the masses in
his later years. Apart from sympathy with the underdog, many Englishmen
believed that the South had a just claim of national self-determination.
As Obama remembered to say at Buckingham Palace
recently, a large part of the American population claims ancestry from British
immigrants, great numbers of them arriving throughout the 19th century. Plenty
of those took part in the war, and they were joined by more volunteers who came
just for the fight, on one side or the other. The extraordinary cast portrayed
in “A World on Fire,” by Amanda Foreman — who is also the author of “Georgiana:
Duchess of Devonshire” — extends from men who fled England to escape poverty to
aristocratic Union officers like Major John Fitzroy de Courcy, later Lord
Kingsale, a veteran of the Crimea, not to mention Colonel Sir Percy Wyndham, a
soldier of fortune whose knighthood was actually Italian. Some, like the
Welshman Henry Morton Stanley, even managed to fight for both sides.
Then there were the reporters, like Frank Vizetelly of
The Illustrated London News and, most notably, William Howard Russell of The
Times of London, who had become famous covering the Crimean War and reporting
on the activities of Florence Nightingale. (In an odd conjunction, Foreman says
that “Russell was the ideal choice. . . . Overeating and excessive drinking
were his chief vices.” This is sometimes said of journalists, but rarely by way
of commendation.)
Such eyewitnesses provide a wealth of vivid
description — and here is the one drawback of this thoroughly researched and
well-written but exceedingly long book. The presence of so many Englishmen
means that Foreman can too easily slip away from “Britain’s crucial role” to a
general history of the war and its every battle. But there truly is no shortage
of such histories, and we have all often enough vicariously supped full of the
horrors of Antietam and Fredericksburg.
What for American readers will be a more riveting —
because unfamiliar — tale comes whenever Foreman turns from the patriotic gore
to her true subject of the British and the war. While guns blazed, another
battle was being waged, for English hearts and minds, at both the elite and
popular levels. From Fort Sumter on, the London government was in a quandary,
and so was Lord Lyons, who had the bad luck to be sent as minister to
Washington shortly before the war began (the British representative was not yet
an ambassador, of whom there were then very few, although not just three, as
Foreman thinks).
Lyons carried out his difficult task with patience and
courtesy. On the one hand, Southern politicians threatened that if London did
not recognize the sovereignty of the Confederate States, the cotton trade would
be cut off, driving England to economic collapse and revolution. On the other,
the Union administration warned that such recognition could lead to war. In the
event, London toyed with recognizing independence, and angered the North quite
enough by acknowledging the South’s belligerent status.
Both sides had agents hard at work in England. Charles
Francis Adams, scion of a famous Boston dynasty, was sent as American minister
to the Court of St. James’s. He did as well as he could, although it didn’t
help that he hated small talk, drinking and dancing, and that, as his son Henry
said, “he doesn’t like the bother and fuss of entertaining and managing people
who can’t be reasoned with,” which might be considered a definition of any
diplomat’s job.
What nearly did take Washington and London to war was
the principle of freedom of the seas. To make his case in London, Jefferson
Davis dispatched two Confederate commissioners in November 1861 aboard the
Trent, a British mail packet. But the electrifying news came that crewmen from
the U.S.S. San Jacinto had boarded the ship near Cuba and seized the two.
“Have these Yankees then gone completely crazy?”
Friedrich Engels asked his colleague Karl Marx, who himself wrote a good deal
about the Civil War. Taking “political prisoners” in this way, Engels thought,
was “the clearest casus belli there can be. The fellows must be
sheer fools to land themselves in war with England.”
Despite this provocation, war did not follow. Other
Confederate envoys reached London, and many Englishmen remained susceptible to
the Southern claim. An unlikely British best seller was “The American Union,”
written by James Spence, a Liverpool businessman who had traveled widely in
America. Although he was scarcely disinterested — Liverpool had prospered in
the slave trade and then by cotton — he argued plausibly that North and South
were so different that enforced union was futile. And he held, not so
implausibly either, that since slavery was doomed in any case, it was better
that it should be ended without violence. This was taken up by John Delane, the
editor of The Times, who maintained that the war was a contest for Southern
“independence” against Northern “empire.”
Still the Union blockade of the South continued, and
many English ships continued breaking it or trying to; Wilmington, N.C., to
Bermuda was one favorite route. Meanwhile, the Confederate government
clandestinely commissioned warships from English shipyards. Most famous of
these was the Alabama, built by Laird & Sons. The intended purpose of the
ship was obvious, as Adams’s Liverpool consul told him, and as the London
government belatedly admitted. But the Alabama escaped from under official
noses in July 1862 to begin a devastating career raiding Northern ships, to the
fury of Washington.
As if that rage weren’t enough, Lyons had to deal with
the problem of British subjects caught up in the fighting. Both sides treated
prisoners of war harshly. Of the 26,000 Confederate soldiers held over the
course of the war at Camp Douglas near Chicago, more than 6,000 died, and at
one point the prisoners there included 300 who claimed to be British subjects.
They pleaded for Lyons’s intervention, but there was little he could do. One of
the prisoners was the deplorable Stanley, who adroitly solved the problem by
switching gray uniform for blue, unconcerned with politics: as he said, “there
were no blackies in Wales.”
A succession of Southern victories further encouraged
English sympathy for the South. In late 1862 Lord Hartington, subsequently a
cabinet minister, and nearly prime minister, visited both North and South (it
was surprisingly easy to cross from one to the other), at first proclaiming his
neutrality. But in Virginia he met Jefferson Davis, as well as the modest and
agreeable Robert E. Lee, and was persuaded that the South was fighting
virtuously for her rights. Hartington couldn’t pretend that blacks were
flourishing, but then “they are not dirtier or more uncomfortable-looking than
Irish laborers” (an unhappy comparison so soon after the great famine, and from
a man whose family owned huge estates in Ireland).
In its later stages, the war saw Southern terrorist
conspiracies initiated from Canadian soil, which further inflamed the North.
But English sympathy for the South lingered up until Lee surrendered at
Appomattox in April 1865. Then, within days, came the shattering news that
Lincoln had been assassinated. All at once, “newspapers that had routinely
criticized the president during his lifetime,” Foreman writes, “rushed to
praise him.” There were some wonderfully hypocritical about-faces, one from The
Times, but best of all from Punch. Having just included Lincoln with Napoleon
III in a gallery of April Fools, the magazine now hailed him as “a true-born
king of men.”
Not the least absorbing part of Foreman’s story comes
after the war. Stanley was hired by The New York Herald and set off on his
African journey to find Dr. Livingstone, before returning to England, a seat in
Parliament and a knighthood. That fascinating figure Judah Benjamin, the Jewish
lawyer who served as Confederate secretary of state, fled to London, where he
became a barrister and published “Benjamin on Sales,” a commercial law textbook
that made him rich.
No American politician was now more vehemently
Anglophobic than Senator Charles Sumner, who continued to denounce England, and
whose verbal violence delayed a settlement of the Alabama dispute. His great
rival, William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, also turned up the
heat, demanding the Bahamas in recompense for the Alabama’s depredations,
although he had further designs on Canada, as so many Americans did.
In the end, the Alabama question was settled
admirably, by jaw-jaw rather than war-war, as Churchill might have said, when
an arbitration tribunal meeting in Geneva awarded large damages against Great
Britain. The London government paid without complaint, inaugurating a period of
comparative harmony, until Anglo-American war nearly broke out again in 1895
over an obscure Venezuelan boundary dispute.
Altogether Foreman’s remarkable book should be a
caution against one foolish phrase. A relationship, no doubt — but “special”?
Geoffrey
Wheatcroft’s books include “The Strange Death of Tory England” and “Yo, Blair!”
He is writing a book about the reputation and posthumous cult of Winston
Churchill.
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