CHAPTER SIX
THE SOUTH IN THE BRITISH
POLITICAL MIND: DIPLOMACY AND
THE SECTIONAL CRISIS
DAVID BROWN & DAVID WALLERi
When Britons thought about the United States in the midnineteenth century their concerns were very different from
those common in the twentieth. American geopolitical power
and cultural hegemony were not as yet significant beyond
their own continent and, although the country was of great
economic importance to Great Britain by the 1850s and the
principal destination for her emigrants, the political
connections were few.ii Diplomatic relations with the United
States were not as important to the British government as
those with her European rivals and personal contacts between
the governing élites of the two countries were insubstantial. iii
Nevertheless, that there were deep historical connections
between the two nations, albeit not always of the happiest
kind, was understood on both sides of the Atlantic: to Britons,
America was in many ways not a ‘foreign’ country at all, so
obvious were the ties of kith and kin, and reference to ‘the
mother country’ in the USA was not uncommon. iv The
diplomatic settlement of longstanding issues such as the U.S.-Canadian border (in 1846) seemed, by mid-century, to
presage a more pacific era of Anglo-American relations.v
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That the history of those relations in the subsequent
decade and a half was in fact anything but tranquil has been
one of the more intractable, and controversial, conundrums of
diplomatic scholarship. The American Civil War of 1861-65
was to see a serious breakdown that threatened war between
Great Britain and the United States on more than one
occasion, despite this possibility being regarded as disastrous
by the political leaderships on both sides. The origins of
Anglo-American antagonism during the 1860s are manifold,
but many writers have sought to ascribe it to a combination of
American suspicion of British imperial politics, seeking to
frustrate the Republic’s ‘manifest destiny’ to control the
North American continent, and ingrained British antipathy
towards American social and political norms. What may be
called the ‘traditional interpretation’, first set out by Ephraim
Adams and Donaldson Jordan and Edwin Pratt in the early
20th century, paints the crisis in the Anglo-American
relationship as an accident waiting to happen.vi
This conceptualisation of British views sees the country’s
ruling class, although anxious to preserve peaceful relations
with the United States for economic reasons and to protect the
largely indefensible Canada, as still not well disposed to its
former colonies in the 1850s: American democracy was
politically suspect, and potentially posed a revolutionary
threat to the British Empire, and socially and culturally most
Americans were seen as rude, uneducated, provincial,
capricious, grasping, excitable, and even child-like.vii
Thereafter during the War, the traditional interpretation runs,
some in the Liberal government in London (most notoriously
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Gladstone) even
desired Southern independence, the better to achieve Britain’s
THE SOUTH IN THE BRITISH POLITICAL MIND
3
strategic and political interests. By contrast the working class
has been seen as much more pro-Northern in its sympathies;
and the victory of the Union in 1865 was the precursor to
parliamentary reform in Britain two years later. In sum,
Britain’s formal neutrality during the War and (an often
inferred) latent sympathy for the cause of the Confederacy
has been taken as evidence of a fundamental hostility towards
an expansionist republican power that might in time threaten
the British Empire--a power whose diminution, if not actual
destruction, it was implied, might better serve British
interests.viii
Of course it has not been possible to accept this highly
romanticised picture for at least the past thirty years, not since
Mary Ellison published her pathbreaking work on the proConfederate sympathies of the Lancashire textile workers; ix
and there is plenty of other evidence to suggest that élite
figures feared the revolutionary precedents which Southern
independence might establish and were relieved to see the
victory of the legitimate government. Although only the most
advanced Liberals (such as John Bright) saw the United
States as the pattern for Britain’s own political development,
British opinion was highly nuanced and difficult to
characterise as either pro- or anti-Confederate, as has been
recently shown in great detail by, in particular, Richard
Blackett.x Contemporary scholarship therefore reveals a more
complicated picture of a Britain that was deeply divided over
the war at all levels of society. The traditional picture of a
conservative aristocracy that was pro-Southern in sympathy
and pro-Confederate in policy is now seen to be as inadequate
as its counterpart which depicts the British working class as
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united in support of a democratic Union government waging a
war of liberation against slavery and the ‘slave power’.
Nor were British observers necessarily consistent in their
attitudes: discomfiture at American actions that might harm
British interests (and there were many) could be combined
with regret that civil war threatened the future of a country
whose progress was a further example of the superiority of
British institutions and the British racial stock. The idea that
racial ideology was fundamental to both British and American
imperialism in the latter decades of the 19th century is now
well established; however the possibility that an “AngloAmerican political and cultural identity” was reinforced by an
ethnic dimension even at this earlier date has profound
implications for how Britons viewed the conflict between
North and South.xi The collapse of the Union in 1861 might
no longer be a cause for satisfaction at the humbling of an
imperial rival but rather one of regret. Moreover there is
evidence that the two contending parties were not viewed
alike in the conflict nor held equally responsible for the
outbreak of war: the South, it can be shown, was thought the
more culpable by at least one group of Britons (or
representatives of the British Crown) who knew America
intimately--Her Britannic Majesty’s consuls.
From an analysis of the correspondence of British consuls
in the Southern states in years leading to secession, we find
that Britons who had the closest connection to America in this
era were sceptical of the claims of Southern independence
and strongly opposed to the continuation of slavery. Slavery
emerges as a major stumbling block in relations between
Great Britain and the Southern states, even prior to secession
in 1861: racist legislation controlling the movement of free
THE SOUTH IN THE BRITISH POLITICAL MIND
5
blacks in port cities was opposed by the British government;
and British consuls (and ministers) rejected Southern hopes of
an alliance with British commercial interests because of their
insistence upon preserving slavery. In time, of course, the
abolition of slavery in the United States was to be seen as a
great victory for an international movement that had drawn
heavily upon British funds and organisation; and supporters
of parliamentary reform in Great Britain took inspiration from
the triumph of American democracy over separatism and
rebellion.xii
In the historiography of Anglo-American relations, a
major element of the argument about British reservations
towards America in the 1850s and 1860s has been the degree
to which Her Majesty’s Government was aware of political
developments in the United States. Or unaware, one might
better say, because it is usually argued that Britons
misunderstood American federalism and were suspicious of
democratic republicanism. In fact there is plenty of evidence
to suggest otherwise. Despite their significantly different
social and cultural backgrounds (different from Americans
that is), the diplomatic correspondence of British Foreign
Secretaries and Ministers in Washington in the mid-19th
century reveals an acute awareness not only of the contours of
American foreign relations but also of internal partisan
movements, the significance of electioneering, and the
general political development of the American state. xiii Her
Majesty’s Government was able to rely not only upon its
diplomats in Washington, but also upon the highly
experienced consular service throughout the United States.
Consuls were stationed in all major American cities and, in
addition to their routine duties related to commercial
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operations and the needs of British subjects resident in
America, they provided social, political, and economic reports
directly to the Foreign Office in London. xiv For example,
when first appointed to the office at Mobile, which dealt with
‘Alabama and the Floridas’, Charles Tulin was invited to
furnish reports on “commerce, navigation, agriculture or any
other branch …. which may be interesting,” for an annual
salary of £450 and £100 expenses, although he was restricted
from engaging in commercial activity. xv A minority of Her
Majesty’s consuls were naturalised foreigners (including
some Americans), but those in the major commercial cities,
which included New York and Charleston, South Carolina,
were experienced public officials of social standing.
The intelligence provided by consuls in the 1850s affords
a crucial perspective on British opinion of the United States
and, indeed, directly challenges the preconception that the
British élite remained rooted in a colonialist mentality
towards America. It also demonstrates that a significant body
of British opinion came to regard the differences between
North and South as directly relevant to how the United States
as a whole was to be understood; that is to say, that by the end
of the Civil War the South was firmly established in the
British political mind as a region that was exceptional
because it was deviant.
Of the seven consuls whom Great Britain had in the
American South in 1860, Robert Bunch in Charleston and
Edmund Molyneux in Savannah were particularly well placed
to observe and report on the growing sectional crisis. xvi
Britain’s valuable commercial connection with the cotton
economy had meant extensive dealings with political and
mercantile interests in these districts; and a history of
THE SOUTH IN THE BRITISH POLITICAL MIND
7
assisting black British subjects who were adversely affected
by racial legislation had given the consuls a detailed insight
into Southern politics. Moreover, Savannah (to an extent) but
particularly Charleston were hotbeds of secession where
movement leaders led southern states out of the Union.
Consul reports to the Foreign Office in London (and
occasionally to the British Legation in Washington, D.C.) are
uniquely rich in their observations of, and comments upon,
the movement towards secession.
In general British consuls throughout the United States
were impressed by the dynamism and economic potential of
the young republic, if not by its social customs, but they did
not regard it as all alike. The North and the West were seen as
the lands of progress in comparison with a South that was
dependent upon slave labour.xvii The differences between the
sections extended to their politics as well. Lawlessness --- or
at least bias in the administration of justice (especially against
British claimants) --- and political corruption were seen as
established articles of U.S. public life throughout the country,
in part because the educated social élite were “deprived of
their natural influence” by the elective form of
government;xviii but Southerners were reckoned especially
prone to poor government. When commenting upon the
growing sectional crisis from the late 1850s onwards, Bunch
and Molyneux argued that the South was thoroughly mistaken
in its assumptions that separation would be achieved easily.
Writing in October 1860, on the eve of secession, Bunch
suggested that “South Carolina has always been impulsive
and hasty; always disposed to rebel against Federal dictation
and restraint; but this very sensitiveness, whilst depriving it’s
[sic] threats of the weight which would attach to the
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CHAPTER SIX
utterances of a calmer people, may precipitate it into a course
of action from which there will be no withdrawal.” xix A
month later he acknowledged that an independent
Confederacy was unlikely “without the antecedent horrors of
a bloody civil war.” Although Southerners might have a
legitimate grievance that the Republican Party was bent on
destroying their “domestic institutions,” as a people they (and
especially those in South Carolina) were hasty, obsessed with
their honour, and liable to act without restraint or much
forethought.xx As such they were, or could become, the
antithesis of the gentlemanly conduct that élite Britons saw as
fundamental to a rational political order.xxi
What is notable about the emerging British view of
Southern society--one for which the traditional interpretation
of Anglo-American relations suggests they felt a close
affinity--is that it is very largely in accord with the opinion of
the South held by Northern Americans as the sectional crisis
deepened in the 1850s. As Susan-Mary Grant has shown, by
the end of the decade Northern politicians and writers had
constructed in their public discourse an image of the South as
a section that was not only substantially different from their
own but also one that deviated from an idealised American
norm.xxii It is not surprising that an ideology of ‘Northern
nationalism’ should have been fundamental to the new
Republican Party, but that the South was seen as different or
even un-American by foreign observers too underlines how
little sympathy the seceding states evoked abroad.
Throughout the early stages of the secession crisis the
British consuls comforted themselves that the “conservative
party” would prevail, but after Lincoln’s electoral victory in
November 1860 it was acknowledged that unionism was a
THE SOUTH IN THE BRITISH POLITICAL MIND
9
dead letter in the South, as much due to the influence of
“demagogues” as any actual threats from the presidentelect.xxiii This was exasperating for some, who felt there were
far more similarities than differences between the two
sections. As many did in Great Britain, Bunch wondered
whether it had actually been worth America breaking from its
mother country, as “The alleged misdeeds of Great Britain,
which led to the American Revolution, read but tamely when
compared with those of which the North is now accused by
the South.” He found it difficult to accept the South’s position
on secession, believing that such “a Catalogue of grievances
[was] not usually brought by a publick functionary of one
portion against the Authorities and people of another section
of the same Country.”xxiv
British interpretations of United States domestic politics
therefore do not consist of a blanket condemnation of
American republicanism; it was rather the excesses which
could result from the democratic element or the machinations
of individuals that were potentially dangerous.xxv Moreover
there was a recognition that Southern opinion was
hypocritical in its rejection of Lincoln’s election: as Bunch
suggested to Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell in October
1860, “To one who might be disposed to think that the
practice of the people of the United States would be in
accordance with the theory of their Constitution and
Government, it must appear strange that a President who, if
elected at all, will undoubtedly be chosen by a majority of the
States, or, in other words, by the will of the People, expressed
through it’s [sic] legitimate channels, should fail to command
support and obedience of the minority, who may have been
disappointed in the success of their candidate. But in the
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United States, as elsewhere, profession and practice do not
always agree; a truth of which, I much fear, the world is about
to receive a startling demonstration in the present case.” xxvi
Consular evidence suggests a strong repugnance towards
slavery and consequent preference for the North. Southern
consuls like Molyneux and Bunch tended to view the South in
a slightly patronising fashion, in places making judgements
like a parent to a child, which of course was a charge made of
the British attitude toward the United States in general.
Contemporary Americans thought “British observers of the
United States were ignorant, superficial, and suffused with a
basic hatred of American democracy”, xxvii although those
observers were often quite capable of distinguishing between
the political cultures and socio-economic conditions of the
North and the South.xxviii For his part Bunch regarded the
South much like an errant waif who refused to see the error of
his ways by insisting upon perpetuating slavery. The British
consuls were also much exercised by racist legislation
buttressing slavery and regulating the behaviour of free blacks
and its consequences for black British subjects. Of particular
importance in this respect were the Colored Seamen’s Laws,
which authorised the incarceration of black seamen who
arrived in southern ports on board visiting vessels. This
particularly affected British sailors from the Caribbean.
British opposition to such legislation was sometimes
motivated more by pragmatic than moral concerns. xxix
Nevertheless all British consuls seemingly rejected Southern
concerns about the threat posed by free blacks and did their
utmost to protect the rights of black British sailors. The
government in London was at pains to point out that all
Britons enjoyed the Crown’s protection (which in the case of
THE SOUTH IN THE BRITISH POLITICAL MIND
11
these sailors meant the assistance of the consular authorities
in the American South) whatever their race or colour and that
is fully reflected in consular reports.
Given Richard Blackett’s recent emphasis upon the
importance of an antislavery “residue” within Britain in the
1850s, this is a particularly important point. Great Britain
presented itself as the world’s leading anti-slavery power in
the immediate aftermath of emancipation in the British
Empire in 1833, but historians have tended to see that
commitment on the wane in the middle decades of the
nineteenth century. Frederick Douglass, of course, famously
noted a rising tide of racism in Great Britain in between two
visits in 1845 and 1859, finding “American prejudice [on the]
streets of Liverpool and in nearly all...commercial towns.” xxx
Other historians have suggested that Britons had grown weary
of the slavery issue, disillusioned with the effects of
emancipation in the West Indies, and/or persuaded by the
racist arguments of former Caribbean planters.xxxi Whilst to
an extent there was a retreat from antislavery commitment,
consul papers tend to support Blackett’s contention that “there
is ample evidence that a strong undercurrent of abolitionist
sentiment continued to exist.”xxxii Instructions issued to
Consul William Mure at New Orleans concerning the Colored
Seamen’s Laws were unequivocal: “Her Majesty’s
Government have been much disappointed by the
determination of the Legislature of Louisiana to wrought a
system which is no less discreditable to itself, than it is
injurious to the persons whom it immediately affects, and
they are at a loss to understand the grounds on which this
harsh procedure has been adopted”. The Foreign Office urged
the consul to ensure that “better counsels will presently
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prevail” and ordered him to take whatever steps necessary to
address the situation, including pressing any case through the
federal courts. Louisiana, it was suggested, was not only
“disregarding the rights of foreign nations” and violating the
provisions of the United States Constitution but also ignoring
“the common dictates of humanity.” xxxiii In South Carolina
Bunch even wrote to a member of the state’s House of
Representatives, Colonel J. Harleston Read, urging better
treatment of “my unfortunate Countrymen [who] were
imprisoned for the offence of being what God made them” on
the grounds that it would be in the South’s own interests: “I
cannot keep thinking that if any of the plans should be
realized which have for years occupied the minds of Southern
Statesmen, if the ‘irrepressible conflict,’ so loudly
proclaimed, should ever lead to complications which it is
easier to imagine than to describe, it would be wiser on the
part of South Carolina to make a friend, rather than an enemy,
of an old ally”.xxxiv Perhaps the consuls’ close proximity to the
“peculiar institution” heightened their antislavery instincts,
but communications with the Foreign Office were equally
antislavery in content.
For those British consuls below the Mason-Dixon line the
question of slavery became acute as the secession crisis
deepened. In December 1860 Bunch in Charleston was
approached by a representative of the state government,
former U.S. Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett, editor of the
Charleston Mercury and notorious ‘fire-eater’, who sounded
out the consul on whether South Carolina could expect British
support for her independence. Bunch was at pains to point out
that, whatever arguments Rhett might make about the
commercial or strategic advantages an independent Southern
confederacy could offer Great Britain, his country would have
THE SOUTH IN THE BRITISH POLITICAL MIND
13
no sympathy for a regime which practised slavery and
certainly could not entertain an alliance with any that
considered reviving the slave trade “which Great Britain
viewed with horror”. Moreover any Southern hopes that other
European states might step in where Britain feared to tread
were undoubtedly ill-founded; because of “the universal
detestation of the African Slave Trade felt by all civilized
people, [Rhett should] not forget that nearly all the Powers of
Europe were bound by Treaty to repress it, and that it was
hardly likely that they would tolerate in one Nation, for the
sake of commercial gain, that which they had systematically
and continually reprobated in others.” xxxv In taking this
stance, Bunch was doing no more than repeating the view
held in the British Legation in Washington, D.C. and indeed
in the highest circles in London. xxxvi The British Minister
Lord Lyons, writing to Lord John Russell in the same month,
repeated Bunch’s sentiment almost verbatim: “[I]t must ever
be repugnant to our feelings to be in intimate relations with a
Confederation formed on the avowed principle of
perpetuating, if not extending, Slavery.” xxxvii
As the war progressed, British views of the North were to
become more favourable as its opinion of the South declined.
This was a quite remarkable development given the serious
disputes Great Britain had with the United States during the
course of the conflict, disputes such as the Trent affair of
1861 and the crisis over the Laird rams two years later that
nearly led to hostilities between the two powers despite Great
Britain’s formal neutrality.xxxviii Part of the explanation lies in
the treatment that individual British subjects received in the
Confederacy as its military and economic situation worsened.
Even before the outbreak of hostilities, the consul in
Charleston was approached by British subjects who were
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being forced to join the state militias. The contemporary law
of nations permitted enforced service by foreign subjects if its
object was the preservation of domestic order, but Bunch
denied that this was the primary purpose of these patrols: “. . .
the ‘Patrol’ alluded to, is in reality a Police force, which is
charged more specifically with the supervision of Slaves,
upon whom it may inflict summary chastisement for absence
from their Owner’s [sic] plantation and similar offences,
without legal trial. It can hardly be contended that a British
Subject, who is not a Citizen of the United States, should be
compelled to participate in such acts of inhumanity.”xxxix
Britishness, in the consul’s eyes, was quite incompatible with
inhuman conduct, so the South’s violation of accepted
standards of decency threatened to place it beyond the pale.
The situation for Britons worsened considerably, as it did
for all foreign residents of the South, following the outbreak
of war in April 1861. Military necessity required firstly the
drafting of the state militias into the regular Confederate army
and in due course the introduction of conscription in April
1862. In the chaos of war British subjects, some long resident
in the country, struggled to prove their nationality, and
southern opinion turned heavily against Great Britain when it
became clear that the European powers would not recognise
the independency of the Confederacy. The British Minister in
Washington, Lord Lyons, issued instructions to the Southern
consuls in November 1861 on the subject emphasising the
injustice of any attempt to impress foreigners in a civil war in
particular.xl However the expulsion of the Crown’s
representatives from Confederate-controlled territories in
mid-1863 removed the only means of official protection
against ill-treatment that British subjects then enjoyed.
Formally speaking, the President of the Confederate States
THE SOUTH IN THE BRITISH POLITICAL MIND
15
Jefferson Davis revoked each consul’s exequatur or legal
authority from the host government recognising his status; the
Confederacy had in fact long disputed the consuls’ position
because their exequaturs were originally issued by the U.S.
Government. xli
Official disputes in wartime are not unexpected and are
therefore unremarkable in themselves, but Britain’s alienation
from the Confederacy was reinforced by the latter’s status as
a slave power. Of course the United States had, formally
speaking, been such before the secession of the slave states in
1861, but slavery was purely a sectional phenomenon and
thus it was the South which came to be seen as the locus of
inhumanity and even irrationality. In British eyes slavery was
an evil because (amongst other things) it debased the liberal
political order that was the foundation of freedom. Lord
Lyons observed as early as November 1860 that the popular
election of Lincoln, which threatened abolition, had “carried
men of all classes beyond the bounds of reason and common
sense”xlii and attacks on abolitionists during the secession
crisis provided “still further proof of the natural result of
Slave Institutions in debasing and brutalizing the minds of
Slave owners”.xliii Nothing that happened thereafter was to
change this view in the official British mind.
Slavery, then, played a critical role in shaping the consuls’
image of the South, as it did in a wider sense in influencing
public opinion in Great Britain. As Duncan Andrew Campbell
has shown, even those opinion formers (for example, travel
writers) who were sympathetic to the South recognised that
the slavery was an indelible stain on its reputation: the best
they might hope for was that Southern independence would
cause slavery to wither away more rapidly than if the section
continued to be held in bondage to the North. xliv There is no
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evidence to suggest that Britons made any distinction between
a political Confederacy that deserved independence as a
matter of natural right--which they could support--and a
Southern section of the United States that was culturally and
economically backward compared with the North and with
Great Britain -- which they might look down upon. To the
nineteenth-century mind there was a near symbiotic relation
between a country’s society and culture on the one hand and
its institutions on the other and so the immorality of Southern
society fatally undermined its political cause. In any event,
the existence of a significant pro-Confederate lobby in
Parliament and among the British elite -- one which
supposedly influenced British government policy in favour of
the South -- is very largely a myth: most leading politicians,
including many Conservatives, were either neutral in their
sympathies or can be described as pro-Northern.xlv Moreover
beyond the metropole those who advocated Southern
independence often struggled to gain a hearing or were
outnumbered by the supporters of the Union.xlvi
Slavery was the anachronism that made the South
different. James Spence, the Liverpool tin-plate merchant
who was the driving force behind propaganda for the
Southern cause in Great Britain during the war, believed that
the Confederacy would have to initiate a policy of
emancipation before it could possibly expect to gain general
acceptance as a legitimate and independent nation. Henry
Hoetze, the most important Confederate agent in England,
naturally disagreed with Spence. He promoted the idea of a
hereditary and historical bond between the Great Britain and
the South: “Southern America, in manners, forms of speech,
and habits of thought and business, resembled more old
England, while young England resembled more northern
THE SOUTH IN THE BRITISH POLITICAL MIND
17
America.” The South was “proud of its closer affinity of
blood to the British parent Stock, than the North, with its
mongrel compound of the surplus population of all the
world”.xlvii Unfortunately for Hoetze’s cause, the evidence
suggests that British consuls within the United States did not
share his view. Like the majority of Britons at home they
believed that slavery was an insurmountable stumbling block
that forever condemned the South to be exceptional and,
worse, unacceptable.
Between 1859 and 1863 course of Southern secession
fundamentally damaged, and finally terminated, Great
Britain’s official relations with the Southern states. The
failure of the Confederacy to achieve diplomatic recognition
by the European powers was not, of course, determined
exclusively by its own conduct, since in the case of Great
Britain at least, the necessity to maintain peace with the
considerably more powerful United States obliged the British
not to abandon their declared neutrality. Nevertheless the
sectional crisis itself was not perceived neutrally by Britons in
America. The Crown’s official representatives, both
diplomatic and consular, were from the outset wary of
Southern claims to independence, often antagonised by its
people’s high-handed behaviour, and united in their
condemnation of its slave system. Moreover, despite the very
real crises in which Great Britain and the United States were
embroiled during the War, these criticisms of society and
politics were only rarely applied to the Northern states. In
contradistinction to the traditional interpretation of AngloAmerican relations, ruling circles in Great Britain were
anything but pro-Confederate and indeed can be seen to have
regarded the North as embodying more nearly the culturally
and even ethnically-based attributes of liberal civilisation that
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the British saw in their own system, however much tarnished
in practice these were by the realities of war. The victory of
the Union in the American Civil War, far from representing a
disaster for the British Empire, was seen as the only
legitimate outcome, even by many political conservatives,
and even for some as a vindication of ‘Anglo-Saxon’
civilisation. For as Consul James had informed the Foreign
Office, writing from Boston in 1851, “This is a very
wonderful country, and no Englishman that I know has done
justice to it …. amidst this chaos of democracy, principles of
great value and importance are slowly evolving themselves,
and there are virtues beneath the surface of society.” xlviii
i
David Brown gratefully acknowledges the support of a British
Academy Overseas Conference Grant (OCG-36523) that enabled
him to present an earlier version of this paper at the 51st
International Congress of Americanists in Santiago, Chile, in July
2003; and at a workshop on Southern Exceptionalism at the
European Association for American Studies conference in Prague in
April 2004 (published as “British Perceptions of American
Exceptionalism on the Eve of the American Civil War” in MarieJeanne Rossignol and Lucia Bergamasco (eds)., L’Amérique: Des
Colonies aux Républiques, Les Cahiers Charles V No. 39; Paris:
Institut d’Études Anglophones Universitié Paris 7 --Denis Diderot,
2005).
ii Martin Crawford, The Anglo-American Crisis of the MidNineteenth Century: The Times and America, 1850-1862 (London:
The University of Georgia Press, 1987), 8. Bernard Porter, AbsentMinded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 26-27.
iii The British legation in Washington D.C. was headed by a Minister
and not yet an Ambassador (as it would be from 1893).
iv The years 1852-62 actually constitute the only period between
THE SOUTH IN THE BRITISH POLITICAL MIND
19
1850 and 1890 when the United States was not the principal
destination for emigrants from England and Wales (in part because
of the War): Charlotte Erickson, Leaving England: Essays on British
Emigration in the Nineteenth Century (London: Cornell University
Press, 1994), 60.
v Crawford, The Anglo-American Crisis, 6-7.
vi Ephraim Douglass Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil
War (London: Longmans, 1925) and Donaldson Jordan and Edwin
Pratt, Europe and the American Civil War (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1931).
vii Martin Crawford, “British Travellers and the Anglo-American
Relationship in the 1850s”, Journal of American Studies XII, ii
(August 1978), 203-219.
viii The persistence of this interpretation is traced in Duncan Andrew
Campbell, English Public Opinion and the American Civil War
(Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2003), 2-9.
ix
Mary Ellison, Support for Secession: Lancashire and the
American Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
x Richard Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil
War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001).
xi Paul Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and
Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880-1910”,
Journal of American History, 88 (March 2002), 1315-53. Crawford,
The Anglo-American Crisis, 9.
xii Campbell, English Public Opinion, 1-15.
xiii
James J. Barnes and Patience J. Barnes, Private and
Confidential: Letters from British Ministers in Washington to The
Foreign Secretaries in London, 1844-67 (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna
University Press, 1993) and The American Civil War through British
Eyes, three vols. (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2003
and 2005).
xiv
Eugene H. Berwanger, The British Foreign Service and the
American Civil War (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky,
1994), 4-5.
20
xv
CHAPTER SIX
Foreign Office to Tulin: U.K. Public Record Office (PRO)
Foreign Office Series 5 [hereafter FO 5] 699, p 55; 12 May 1858.
xvi At Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, New Orleans,
Galveston and (the only one not a port city) Richmond.
xvii Laura A. White, “The United States in the 1850’s as Seen by
British Consuls”, Mississippi Valley Historical Review XIX, iv
(1933) 509-536, and “The South in the 1850’s as Seen by British
Consuls”, The Journal of Southern History I, i (1935), 29-48.
xviii White, “The United States in the 1850’s”, 524-526. According
to Consul James in Norfolk, Virginia, no less a figure than U.S.
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney was also critical of political
democracy for the same reasons.
xix Bunch to Foreign Office: PRO FO 5/745 p 165; 20 October 1860.
xx Bunch to Foreign Office: PRO FO 5/745 p 220; 29 November
1860.
xxi On the connection between liberal political principles and ideas
of racial Anglo-Saxonism in the 19th century see Porter, AbsentMinded Imperialists, 70-71.
xxii Susan-Mary Grant, North Over South: Northern Nationalism and
American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 2000).
xxiii Vice-Consul MacRae at Wilmington, North Carolina to Bunch:
PRO FO 5/745 p 265; 24 December 1860.
xxiv Bunch to Foreign Office: PRO FO 5/745 p 200; 24 November
1860.
xxv
During the initial crisis (especially over the blockading of
Southern ports and its effect upon Anglo-French commerce, in mid1861) the British Minister in Washington, Lord Lyons, informed the
Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell that threats of war against Great
Britain were more the product of the personal opinions of Secretary
of State William Seward than the considered policy of President
Lincoln’s administration: Barnes and Barnes, Private and
Confidential, 251-252.
xxvi Bunch to Foreign Office: FO 5/744 p 165; 20 October 1860.
THE SOUTH IN THE BRITISH POLITICAL MIND
21
Martin Crawford, “British Travellers and the Anglo-American
Relationship in the 1850s”, Journal of American Studies XII, ii
(August 1978), 203-204.
xxviii Campbell, English Public Opinion, 117.
xxix Consul Mure in New Orleans, for example, thought it potentially
an “injury to the commerce of the City”. Mure to Foreign Office:
PRO FO 5/744 p 15; 16 February 1860.
xxx
Frederick Douglass, cited in Blackett, Divided Hearts, 37.
Blackett lists similar reactions by African Americans on p. 40.
xxxi Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English
Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Leicester:
Leicester University Press, 1978), esp. 123-130. British Home
Secretary Sir George Cornewall Lewis, writing in the Edinburgh
Review in April 1861, “did not think the South could be expected to
commit economic suicide, when British experience in the West
Indies had shown that a free negro workforce was an unsatisfactory
substitute for slavery”; but the argument of Lewis’s article was that
slavery was nevertheless a great evil (quoted in E.D. Steele,
Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 301-302).
xxxii Blackett, Divided Hearts, 54.
xxxiii Foreign Office to Mure: FO 5/721 p 1; 24 August 1859.
xxvii
xxxiv
Bunch to Foreign Office: FO 5/720 p 242-243; 28 November
1859.
xxxv Bunch to Foreign Office; PRO FO 5/745 p 229; 5 December
1860.
xxxvi Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 296.
xxxvii Lyons to Russell, Dispatch 317, 18 December 1860; Barnes
and Barnes, The American Civil War through British Eyes, Volume
1, 12.
xxxviii
Howard Jones, Union in Peril: The Crisis over British
Intervention in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1992), 80-99; Dean B. Mahin, One War at a Time:
22
CHAPTER SIX
The International Dimensions of the American Civil War
(Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1999), 174-184.
xxxix Bunch to Foreign Office: FO 5/745 pp 137-141; 22 June 1860.
xl Lyons to Russell, Dispatch 660, 18 November 1861; Barnes and
Barnes, The American Civil War through British Eyes, Volume 1,
212.
xli Berwanger, The British Foreign Service, 92-96 and 108-112.
Consul Moore at Richmond was the first to be expelled in June
1863; Consul Bunch had already left Charleston (in February) on the
Foreign Office’s instructions because of Confederate antipathy
towards him. Not all were actually deported: a few retired to private
life in situ and thus were able, when their states of residence were
occupied by Union forces towards the end of the War, to resume
their functions as British consuls.
xlii Lyons to Russell, Dispatch 283, 12 November 1860 (emphasis
supplied); Barnes and Barnes, The American Civil War through
British Eyes, Volume 1, 2.
xliii Bunch to Foreign Office: PRO FO 5/745 p 203; 27 November
1860.
xliv Campbell, English Public Opinion, 117-124.
xlv Campbell, English Public Opinion, 134-192.
xlvi To cite one provincial example, the town of Northampton, which
during the War had a direct economic connection with the South
through its supply of boots for the Confederate army, was
nevertheless not particularly fertile territory for the agents of the
Southern Independence Association: by 1863 their meetings were
attracting a negligible audience compared with the numbers who
attended pro-Northern speeches. See David Waller, “Northampton
and the American Civil War”, Northamptonshire Past and Present,
VIII, ii (1990-91), 137-153.
xlvii Richard Blackett, “British Views of the Confederacy,” in Joseph
P. Ward (ed.), Britain and the American South (Jackson: University
of Mississippi Press, 2003), 143.
xlviii White, “The United States in the 1850’s”, 535. Campbell makes
THE SOUTH IN THE BRITISH POLITICAL MIND
23
the important point that perhaps the majority of Britons nevertheless
did not think highly of either side in the conflict, not least because it
had resulted in over half a million dead in the course of four years
(English Public Opinion, 246).