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

demand.” Later in June and again in July, debate erupted in Parliament over Southern recognition, with one pro-Southern member of Parliament, William Lindsay, loudly proclaiming that he wanted Britain to grant diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy and then present an ultimatum for mediation because he “desired the disruption of the American Union, as every honest Englishman did, because it was too great a Power and England sh’d not let such a power exist on the American continent.”

In August, Earl Russell began sounding out the French about the possibility of a joint Anglo-French intervention to stop the war. Finally, on September 14, 1862, Palmerston drafted a short note to Russell that asked whether it might not “be time for us to consider whether… England and France might not… recommend an arrangement upon the basis of separation?” If mediation was rejected by the Lincoln administration, would it not be time for Britain “to recognize the Southern States as an independent State” and force some kind of arbitration on the North? Three days later Russell responded favorably to Palmerston’s suggestion, observing that “the time is come for offering mediation to the United States Government, with a view to the recognition of the Independence of the Confederates.” Palmerston should call for a cabinet meeting on October to discuss the offer, Russell said, and he added hopefully that “if the Federals sustain a great defeat, they may be at once ready for mediation.”32

The Federals did not sustain a great defeat, however. On the same day that Russell yielded to Palmerston’s suggestion about recognizing Southern independence, Lee and McClellan fought each other to a bloody standstill at Antietam. When Lee retreated afterwards, Palmerston decided to shelve his proposal. And there the matter rested, for whatever abstract or emotional sympathies the British might feel for the Confederacy, none of them was so burning that Palmerston would commit his government to backing a loser. Nor is there any substantial evidence that the British government had gotten to the point of calculating what force it would take to get the North to the peace table. Russell and Palmerston talked of mediation only if it could be jointly arranged with the French and the Russians. Despite the effect of the cotton blockade in 1862, British textile merchants soon found new sources of cotton in Egypt, Brazil, and India, and the British economy gradually recovered, thus removing a major agitation for intervention.33

Also, as Palmerston acknowledged, any form of intervention could very likely mean a war at sea. While the British navy was undoubtedly the most powerful in the world at that time, the American navy had grown by leaps and bounds since 1861, and since the United States was not a signatory of the Declaration of Paris, it could unleash a cloud of privateers, which, as the example of the Florida and the Alabama demonstrated, could easily create serious trouble for British commerce, sending insurance rates as well as losses in ships and cargoes beyond acceptable limits. In the event of armed intervention, the British army would be compelled to operate from the Canadian border, and to do so under the disadvantage of having to supply it across three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean.

Even if the military situation had not been enough to give the British pause, there was the business of President Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, issued a week after Antietam in September 1862. At first emancipation actually looked as though it might drive the British even more quickly toward mediation, since Palmerston and Russell read the Proclamation as an incitement to John Brown–style slave rebellion. Such incitement, they were sure, would result in a race war that would not only disrupt the transatlantic cotton flow beyond repair but also set an uncomfortable example for Britain’s colonial subjects about the possibilities of non-Europeans rising in revolt against white European rulers. (The British had only just endured such a conflict in the Sepoy Rebellion in India in 1857–58, and prospect of an American slave rebellion reviving the specter of the racial antagonisms that generated violence in India was not reassuring to British minds.)34

However, Lincoln’s decision to make even partial abolition of slavery a stated aim of the war operated in exactly the other direction on the British public’s view of intervention. No matter what opinion an English aristocrat had of Southern planters, or what opinion English merchants or workingmen had of cotton, few Englishmen wanted to set themselves up as the enemies of a war against slavery, which had been abolished in the British empire in 1833. From the moment Lincoln announced the Proclamation, wrote Richard Cobden to Charles Sumner, “our old anti-slavery feeling began to arouse itself, and it has been gathering strength ever since.” Cobden, who originally lacked confidence in Lincoln, now came decisively down from the fence himself and embraced the Union for “the lofty motive of humanity that has induced them to risk the longer continuance of the war rather than allow the degrading institution of slavery to continue.” Once the Proclamation was in place, John Bright (Cobden’s great partner in the promotion of the Manchester School) jubilantly demanded to know “who they are who speak eagerly in favour of England becoming the ally and friend of this great conspiracy against human nature.” Who, he asked, are the men in England “eager to admit into the family of nations a State … more odious and more blasphemous than was theretofore dreamed of in Christian or in Pagan, in civilized or in savage times”?35

One week after the preliminary Proclamation was issued, a meeting staged by pro-Confederate British sympathizers at Staleybridge, outside Manchester, was broken up by a pro-Union workers’ group; in Manchester, a New Year’s Day workers’ meeting forwarded to Abraham Lincoln a series of resolutions that affirmed that “since we have discerned… that the victory of the free north, in the war which has so sorely distressed us as well as afflicted you, will strike off the fetters of the slave, you have attracted our warm and