The History of the Civil War (Complete Edition). James Ford Rhodes
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England-loving part of the country."42 In other sections of the North where England was less liked, the feeling of resentment was still more acute; and the sum of this dissatisfaction may have served a useful purpose in helping to prevent Great Britain from acknowledging the Southern Confederacy in the following year. Nevertheless, a calm survey of the facts can hardly lead to any conclusion but that Great Britain was abundantly justified for her recognition of the belligerent rights of the Confederate States. The cogent argument for it was put in a nutshell by the foreign secretary who issued the Proclamation. "Upwards of five million free men," wrote Lord Russell in a private letter to Edward Everett, "have been for some time in open revolt against the President and Congress of the United States. It is not our practice to treat five millions of free men as pirates and to hang their sailors if they attempt to stop our merchantmen. But unless we meant to treat them as pirates and to hang them we could not deny them belligerent rights."43
The concession of belligerent rights to the Confederate States was made with no unfriendly purpose; and as repeated assurances to that effect were received from both public and private sources in England, and as a proper comprehension was gained of the wide difference between the recognition of the belligerency and acknowledgment of the independence of the Confederate States, the irritation of the North began to subside. The President showed his understanding of the attitude of England and other European powers and believed that his government had their sympathy. "The feeling toward the United States," wrote Adams from London on May 31, "is improving in the higher circles here. It was never otherwise than favorable among the people at large."44
The division of English sentiment was well expressed by Palmerston, the Prime Minister, in his words, "We do not like slavery, but we want cotton and we dislike very much your Morrill tariff."45 Punch declared sympathy with the North but confessed,
"That with the South we've stronger ties,
Which are composed of cotton.
And where would be our calico
Without the toil of niggers?"
Then "the North keeps Commerce bound"; thus we perceive "a divided duty." We must choose between "free-trade or sable brothers free."46 But, so Adams wrote, "Our brethren in this country, after all, are much disposed to fall in with the opinion of Voltaire that, 'Dieu est toujours sur le côté des gros canons.'"47
For our standing in England it was unfortunate that we did not win the battle of Bull Run, as our defeat caused a marked revulsion of feeling. The aristocracy and upper middle class made no secret of their belief that "the bubble of democracy had burst in America." By the autumn of 1861 the commercial and manufacturing people began to realize the disaster with which they were menaced by our cutting off the supply of cotton. Ordinarily the new crop came forward during the early autumn; now practically none was being received. Stocks of cotton were rapidly sinking. "A manufacture," said the London Times, "which supports a fifth part of our whole population, is coming gradually to a stand."48 Mills were working short time; manufacturers were reducing wages; mill owners and laborers were dismayed at the prospect of a cotton famine. The blockade stood between them and a supply of cotton, threatening the owners with business derangement, and the workmen with starvation. The self-interest of the manufacturers and the sentimental predilections of the aristocracy were forces which, sometimes merging, sometimes reacting on one another, gave rise to a desire amongst these classes that the North should fail. It seemed more favorable to England's power and trade that the United States should be divided into two nations, especially as the Southern Confederacy would offer England practically free trade, hence a large market for her manufactured goods that would be paid for in raw cotton. The wish was father to the thought and the inference to be drawn from Bull Run settled the matter. The nobility and upper middle class came to the conclusion that the North could not conquer the South and that separation would be the result. This opinion was advocated by the Times and Saturday Review with a power of sarcastic statement that stung their Northern readers to the quick. "Help us to a breath of generous strengthening sympathy from old England" was Sumner's appeal to William H. Russell. "Do not forget, I pray you," was Russell's reply, "that in reality it is Brightism and republicanism at home" which the conservative papers mean to smite. "America is the shield under which the blow is dealt."49
The exponents of the ten-pounders, who, in their smug complacency, believed their Constitution and government to be not only now the best on earth but the best that had ever existed,50 criticised the North freely in "a tone of flippant and contemptuous serenity,"51 highly irritating to a people engaged in a life-and-death struggle. The sneers at the panic and cowardice of Northern troops at Bull Run, as the common measure of a people fighting their countrymen to suppress their desire for independence, were hard to bear. Edward Dicey when in America argued with James Russell Lowell about what seemed to him an "unreasonable animosity toward England." It is possible, Lowell replied, that my feelings may be morbidly exaggerated, but, pointing to a portrait of a handsome young man, a near and dear relative, a Captain of the twentieth Massachusetts, who was shot dead at Ball's Bluff, he asked, "How would you like yourself to read constantly that that lad died in a miserable cause, and, as an American officer, should be called a coward?" Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to Dicey: "I have a stake in this contest, which makes me nervous and tremulous and impatient of contradiction. I have a noble boy, a captain in one of our regiments, which has been fearfully decimated by battle and disease and himself twice wounded within a hair's breadth of his life."52
Still another drift of sentiment must not be ignored. The sympathy of the British government and public with Italy during the war of 1859, and the progress made in that war towards Italian liberty, impressed upon the English mind the doctrine that a body of people who should seek to throw off an obnoxious dominion and form an orderly government of their own, deserved the best wishes of the civilized world. Why, it was asked in England, if we were right to sympathize with Italy against Austria, should we not likewise sympathize with the Southern Confederacy whose people were resisting the subjugation of the North? This argument swayed the judgment of the liberal-minded Grote, and colored other opinion which was really determined by considerations of rank or of commerce and manufactures.53
But there were English statesmen and writers of ability who understood that the fight of the North was against slavery; they urged her cause without ceasing, although many times their hearts failed them as they feared she had undertaken an impossible task. They had as their followers the workingmen whom hunger stared in the face but who realized, as did the upper class, that the cause of the Union was the cause of democracy in England.
Up to the latter part of November, Great Britain preserved a strict neutrality. Louis Napoleon, the Emperor of the French, though in his American policy he did not represent the intelligent and liberal sentiment of his country, asked England officially to coöperate with him in recognizing the Confederacy and breaking the blockade. Earl Russell54 in a letter to Palmerston took the ground that it would "not do for England and France to break a blockade for the sake of getting cotton," but they might offer their mediation between the North and the South with the implied understanding that the section which refused it [the United States, of course, as the South would grasp eagerly at the offer] would be their enemy. Palmerston replied that "our best and true policy seems to be to go on as we have begun and to keep quite clear of the conflict