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Portents of War: English Opinion on Secession

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

D. P. Crook
D. P. Crook
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
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Extract

One would expect from the relatively sophisticated industrial society into which Britain had developed by the 1860s a complex reaction to the immense crisis which struck the United States in that decade, euphemistically described in the British press as ‘the American Difficulty’. The enormous heterogeneity of economic, ideological, political and group interests involved in the English response – together with the spectrum of issues raised by the break-down of the Union – should enforce caution upon the historian who wishes to paint his Civil War scene in bold and simple strokes. During the war itself it was natural that Americans of both sections should make the simple demand of European opinion ‘is it pro-North or pro-South ?’ But the continuation of this tradition by later historians lasted too long, and has ended by befuddling rather than clarifying the situation. The search for partisan alignments too often provides a kind of distorting mirror through which events are viewed, or becomes a Procrustean device by which the data is chopped or stretched into the required form.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , February 1971 , pp. 163 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

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page 174 note 1 The ambiguities of the inaugural led to the widespread impression in England that Lincoln intended to retake the forts; in fact he had deleted the promise to ‘retake’ the forts from his first draft of the speech.

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page 174 note 3 Ibid. 18 May 1861, 489. See also 26 January 1861, 83; and cf. Sixpenny Mag. July 1861 (The American Discussion), 13–14. The ardently pro-Northern magazine declared that ‘if…, as historians assure us, money be the sinews of war, a very brief campaign must settle the question in favour of the North’.

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page 176 note 1 George Cornewall Lewis raised the problem without solving it when he pointed out the possibility of a Western Confederation also being formed if the process of separation were allowed to continue. Since the process had begun ‘there is a difficulty in assigning a limit to it, or in determining the new centres round which the wandering stars of the Union may cluster’. (ER, 113 (04 1861), 581.)Google Scholar

page 176 note 2 On the other hand, as Van Auken points out, the secession of Virginia after Sumter tended to dispel the Northern allegation that the seceding states were in the grip of a few lawless conspirators. As Lord Lothian emphasized, the ‘accession of her splendid and powerful name to the role of the Confederate States’ was an enormous blow to the Union, while the ‘unanimous resolve’ of the other states to transfer the capital from Montgomery to Richmond made unlikely the prospect of a Unionist revival in the South. (Van Auken, , op. cit. p. 31.)Google Scholar

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page 178 note 3 Dub. Univ. Mag. 06 1861, 751.Google Scholar Centralized despotism, it claimed, would result from the bloated hope ‘that the American eagle should touch the Atlantic or Pacific oceans with her outstretched wing, and brood over the continent with her beak in Cuba and her claws in Canada’.

page 178 note 4 Nat. Rev. 13 (07 1861), 157, and generally 150–69.Google Scholar

page 178 note 5 Ibid. 158.

page 178 note 6 Ibid. 158. Like Bagehot, this writer doubts the wisdom of ‘forcible reincorporation’: ‘It would be uncomfortable, turbulent, precarious and transient’.

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