Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

of the Church of England.” Wolseley, too, was struck with admiration for Lee, and one of Wolseley’s aides described Lee in terms that bordered on beatification:

Every one who approaches him does so with marked respect, although there is none of that bowing and flourishing of forage caps which occurs in the presence of European generals; and, while all honor him and place implicit faith in his courage and ability, those with whom he is most intimate feel for him the affection of sons to a father. … When speaking of the Yankees he neither evinced any bitterness of feeling nor gave utterance to a single violent expression, but alluded to many of his former friends and companions among them in the kindest terms. He spoke as a man proud of the victories won by his country and confident of ultimate success under the blessing of the Almighty, whom he glorified for past successes, and whose aid he invoked for all future operations.21

Fremantle, after leaving the Confederacy in 1863, happily declared that “a people which in all ranks and in both sexes display a unanimity and a heroism which can never have been surpassed in the history of the world is destined sooner or later, to become a great and independent nation.”22

Nor were the British rejoicing alone. Eugénie, the French empress, laughed at the impossibility of taking the Union cause seriously: “Why is [the French-American scientist] Du Chaillu searching Africa for the missing link when a specimen was brought from the American backwoods to Washington?” Leopold of Belgium, the power broker among European monarchs, ardently hoped that the war would make it possible “to raise a barrier against the United States and provide a support for the monarchical-aristocratic principle in the Southern states.” In Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, who was only beginning the ascent to power which would make him and Germany the colossus of central Europe, admitted that “there was something in me that made me instinctively sympathize with the slaveholders as the aristocratic party.” He could not understand “how society could be kept in tolerable order where the powers of the government were so narrowly restricted and where there was so little reverence for the constituted or ‘ordained’ authorities.” Paul von Hindenburg, who would serve in 1870 as a Prussian army subaltern and in World War I as one of the principal German overlords, could recite even in the 1930s “every detail” and “every place” involved in the campaigns of the Army of Northern Virginia; in the post–Civil War years “Lee, Jackson and Stuart” were “the favorite heroes” of Prussian officers.23

It was not just the aristocrats and generals who sympathized with the Confederacy. After all, the Confederacy could claim that its war was being waged on the basis of national independence and free trade. As a result, many English liberals admired the South’s fight as a struggle against money-grubbing Yankee overlordship and high protective tariffs, while others feared the political instability that massive unemployment and the disruption of trade would cause in England. The liberal stalwart and chancellor of the exchequer William Ewart Gladstone told a political dinner in Lancashire in October 1862 that they might as well recognize the inevitable success of the Confederacy now, rather than wait for the blockade to inflict more of its “frightful misery on British workers.” “We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation.” (In Paris, John Slidell bolted upright on hearing about Gladstone’s speech: “If this means anything, it means immediate recognition!”)24

Nor was Gladstone seeing ghosts for bedsheets in that “frightful misery.” Only 497 of the 1,678 cotton-spinning mills in Manchester had enough cotton to operate at full capacity; 298 were shuttered entirely, and 80,000 mill workers were out of work. “I need hardly say that now there is great distress from want of employment—the result of your horrid war,” a Methodist preacher wrote to the American evangelist Charles Grandison Finney. Another English friend advised Finney, “We have been working short time at the mill… & we seem to get worse & worse weekly & from all human appearances we can see no end to it after all.” By December 1862, almost 15 percent of English textile workers were out of work entirely, and another 70 percent were working reduced shifts. “Better fight Yankees,” read one workers’ newspaper, “than starve operatives.”25

The blockade also inflicted damage on the French economy, and with some of the same results in French public opinion. And the French emperor, Napoleon III, had reasons based on colonial ambition for preferring an independent Southern Confederacy. In December 1861 England, France, and Spain sent troops into Mexico to enforce the collection of debts owed by the bankrupt Mexican Republic. This was not the first time the European monarchies had schemed to reestablish themselves in the New World: the British had established a protectorate in Nicaragua, the Belgians set up a quasi-colony in Guatemala, both the French and the Spanish had repeatedly put their oars into Mexican affairs, and even the north German states had their eyes on Central America for “emigration and colonization” in the 1850s. But intervention in Mexico in 1861 was the most serious effort yet, since Napoleon intended to use the debt crisis as a pretext for deposing the Mexican president, Benito Juárez, and installing a puppet ruler who would rule Mexico, for all intents and purposes, as a French colony. The English and the Spanish withdrew once it became clear that this was Napoleon’s game, and in 1863, Napoleon recruited an Austrian archduke, Ferdinand Maximilian (the brother of the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef), as the new “emperor” of Mexico.26

The chief threat to this scheme was the United States, which publicly warned Napoleon not to intervene in Mexican affairs. By