Though London’s Evening Mail [GK9]declared that “‘The Civil War in the United States affects our people more generally even than the Indian Mutiny’” (August 22, 1862), prominent British writers avoided the topic. The sole canonical poet to represent the US Civil War in Britain was American Walt Whitman in W. M. Rossetti’s British edition (1868). Though this chapter considers working-class and feminist writers’ depiction of the war, its principal focus is the underlying causes of major writers’ persistent silence. These causes included President Lincoln’s reluctance to name slavery as the war’s fundamental issue in hopes of bringing the South back, which led many Britons to suspect economic self-interest as the North’s principal motivation; declining abolitionist sympathy based on moral complacency; Conservatives’ sympathy for the Confederacy based on shared commitment to social hierarchies; and increased racism fueled by anthropology and stereotypes of Black Americans circulated in popular minstrel shows.

The centrality of slavery in the North and South, Black resistance, and the greatest shift in the domestic use and formation of federal force form the foundation of Chapter 7. Here, the likes of Robert Smalls, an enslaved boat pilot in South Carolina, the hundreds of thousands of Civil War slave fugitives, Union and Confederate military leaders, President Abraham Lincoln, President Jefferson Davis, and others address the consequences of one question: should the United States deploy its forces, its violence, in support of slaveholders or freed slaves?

Describes the life, political career, and impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, with particular emphasis on the post-Civil War context of the case and the constitutional issues in the case.

The short version of the history of nationalism and America’s mid-nineteenth-century civil war (1861–1865) may best be explained as a tale of two cities. Not, as one might suppose, the capitals of the Union and the Confederacy, Washington and Richmond, but two cities each of which was situated some four hundred miles from their warring sides’ respective capitals: Boston and Charleston. Arguably, it was in these cities that the essence of the national sentiments that motivated each side was most concentrated: in the case of the Union, to seek to maintain the federal compact and, in the case of the Confederacy, to destroy it. But this is also a story of alternative nationalist approaches. The Union and the Confederacy, respectively, inhabit what Christopher Wellman juxtaposes as the two camps of political theorizing on the subject of states, nations, and secession: the “statist” and the “nationalist.”

This chapter delves more deeply into some issues already explored to explain how the existence of the Confederacy complicated judicial decision-making. Judges considered how the exigencies of war shaped personal disputes, rendered verdicts on contracts executed during the war, and examined the use of Confederate currency in those agreements. In doing so, they intervened in the longstanding debate over the right of secession, considered the lingering effects of the Confederacy’s existence, and contributed to political discussions about who had the legal authority to enact Reconstruction policy and what shape it could take.

During winter and spring of 1865, Tennessee amendments gain voter approval, abolishing slavery in the state, and loyalist government elected and inaugurated. Legislatures of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee approve Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln and congressional Republicans fail to reach accord on Reconstruction legislation before Congress adjourns in early March, and Congress refuses to seat Louisiana and Arkansas claimants but creates Freedmen’s Bureau. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address promises reconciliation for former Confederates and justice for freedpeople. Following Lee’s surrender, Lincoln’s “last” address defends his Reconstruction policy and the Louisiana government, although Lincoln also for the first time publicly endorses black suffrage and acknowledges black role in Reconstruction. Confederate surrender in western theater takes several more weeks. Andrew Johnson announces Reconstruction policy in late May 1865, recognizing governments of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana but rejecting calls for black role in Reconstruction.

Under Andrew Johnson’s policy, Mississippi begins process of Reconstruction, while governments of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana extend and solidify their authority. Freedpeople mobilize and organize to articulate and instantiate freedom, underscored by black convention in Nashville in August 1865 that calls for political and legal equality. Mississippi Reconstruction convention in August is the first such convention held by unreconstructed state under Johnson’s policy. Convention highlighted by acrimonious debate over abolition of slavery. Some delegates express view – articulated by conservative Unionists – that Emancipation Proclamation had only freed slaves but had not abolished slavery, and that Mississippi is under no obligation to abolish slavery as a condition of restoration to the Union. Mississippi abolishes slavery, but process bodes ill for Johnson’s policy.

The secession crisis of 1860-61 in the lower Mississippi valley represents the crisis in the South as a whole. Secession is more contentious, and southern Unionism more prevalent, in Arkansas and Tennessee than in Louisiana and Mississippi. Support for secession initially corresponds to areas of plantation agriculture and large slaveholdings, but the Confederacy receives overwhelming white support after secession. Events outside the region shape the Union’s initial approach to the rebellion and to the problem of fugitive slaves, though the region also experiences internal disruptions in mobilizing for war. The lower Mississippi valley initially experiences little direct effect from the war, but control of the Mississippi River soon becomes central to Union strategy. By early 1862, preparations were underway for Federal incursions into the region. Although the issue of slavery becomes unavoidable, notions of “Reconstruction” remain limited, and few Northerners envision a reunion predicated on the abolition of slavery.

Chapter six explores adaptive resistance in Britain during the American Civil War. Black activists exploited this resistance strategy amongst a climate of growing scientific racism and pro-Confederate sympathy, two factors that were inseparable. Throughout the conflict, Black abolitionists used their testimony to revoke charges of Black inferiority and demanded Britons follow a policy of non-fellowship with slaveholders. Despite abolitionist networks which had dwindled at the start of the war, activists such as William Craft, Sella Martin and William Andrew Jackson lectured on both an abolitionist and non-abolitionist stage with a greater sense of urgency, convinced that the conflict’s outcome would mean either the consolidation or the removal of slavery. Craft and Martin in particular used dissonant language to target scientific racists such as Dr. James Hunt, who lectured and published work on Black inferiority. Hunt avidly supported the South and his friendship with Confederate propagandist Henry Hotze represented the synonymy of a cause that promoted slavery and racism, and as much as possible, Black activists used dissonant language to challenge such theories.

That legal ideas emerge and expand through networks and connections is ably demonstrated in the life of J. P. Benjamin (1811-1884). Born to parents who migrated throughout the Atlantic world, Benjamin had a varied career as a lawyer, legislator, and plantation owner in Louisiana before becoming a United States senator, Supreme Court attorney, and Confederate States cabinet member. As a self-described ‘political exile’, he then became the acknowledged leader of the English Bar. This extraordinary career was possible because Benjamin’s personality facilitated the creation and development of networks which facilitated the spread of his legal knowledge. As a Louisianan and an American, he brought to the United Kingdom and its Empire a very different form of legal knowledge than then existed at the Bar. The networks of knowledge, people, and institutions he made had a lasting impact upon the development of law in the United Kingdom and the British Empire.