Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  This last prospect had a powerful appeal, for the cotton famine was beginning to pinch. In July 1862 the supply of raw cotton in Britain stood at one-third the normal level. Three-quarters of the cotton-mill workers were unemployed or on short time. Charity and the dole could not ward off hardship and restiveness in Lancashire working-class districts. Young Henry Adams, son and secretary of the American minister in London, conceded as early as May 1862 that "the suffering among the people in Lancashire and in France is already very great and is increasing enormously." Chancellor of the Exchequer William E. Gladstone feared an outbreak of rioting unless something was done to relieve the distress. Gladstone favored British intervention to stop the war and start the flow of cotton across the Atlantic. A British diplomat predicted that "so great a pressure may be put upon the government [that] they will find it difficult to resist."2

  2. Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., May 8, 1862, in Worthington C. Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), I, 139; Frank L. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 2nd ed. rev. by Harriet C. Owsley (Chicago, 1959), 137, 337, 340. Similar pressures were building in France, whose foreign minister told the American minister to Belgium that "we are nearly out of cotton, and cotton we must have." Lynn M. Case and Warren F. Spencer, The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy (Philadelphia, 1970), 290.

  The attitude of textile workers toward the American war has been something of a puzzle to historians as well as to contemporaries. Henry Hotze confessed frustration at his failure to win support from this class whose economic self-interest would seem to have favored the South. "The Lancashire operatives," wrote Hotze, are the only "class which as a class continues actively inimical to us. . . . With them the unreasoning . . . aversion to our institutions is as firmly rooted as in any part of New England. . . . They look upon us, and . . . upon slavery as the author and source of their present miseries." The American Minister Charles Francis Adams echoed this appraisal. "The great body of the aristocracy and the commercial classes are anxious to see the United States go to pieces," wrote Adams in December 1862, while "the middle and lower class sympathise with us" because they "see in the convulsion in America an era in the history of the world, out of which must come in the end a general recognition of the right of mankind to the produce of their labor and the pursuit of happiness."3

  In this view, the issues of the American Civil War mirrored the issues of class conflict in Britain. The Union stood for popular government, equal rights, and the dignity of labor; the Confederacy stood for aristocracy, privilege, and slavery. Lincoln expressed this theme in his speeches portraying the war as "essentially a People's contest . . . a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men . . . to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life."4 British radicals expounded numerous variations on the theme. For a generation they had fought for democratization of British politics and improved conditions for the working class. For them, America was a "beacon of freedom" lighting the path to reform. The leading British radical, John Bright, passionately embraced the Union cause. "There is no country in which men have been so free and prosperous" as the Union states, declared Bright. "The existence of that free country and that free government has a prodigious influence upon freedom in Europe." Confederates were "the worst foes of freedom that the world has ever seen,"

  3. Frank J. Merli, Great Britain and the Confederate Navy 1861–1865 (Boomington, 1965), 23; Charles Francis Adams to C. F. Adams, Jr., Dec. 25, 1862, Ford, Cycle of Adams Letters, I, 220–21.

  4. CWL, IV, 438.

  Bright told workingmen. That was why "Privilege thinks it has a great interest in this contest, and every morning, with blatant voice, it comes into your streets and curses the American Republic." Liberal intellectuals shared this belief that a southern victory, in the words of John Stuart Mill, "would be a victory of the powers of evil which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the spirits of its friends all over the civilized world."5 A German revolutionary living in exile in England also viewed the American war against the "slave oligarchy" as a "world-transforming . . . revolutionary movement." "The working-men of Europe," continued Karl Marx, felt a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, "the single-minded son of the working class. . . . As the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American anti-slavery war will do for the working classes."6

  But a number of historians have discovered cracks in the apparent pro-Union unity of working men. Indeed, some have gone so far as to maintain that most Lancashire textile workers favored British intervention on behalf of the South to obtain cotton. The rhetoric favoring the cause of the Union, according to these historians, was the work of radical intellectuals like Bright or Marx and did not represent the real sentiments of the unemployed operatives. The mass meetings of workers that passed pro-Union resolutions are said to have been engineered by these middle-class outsiders. One historian has found twice as many meetings in Lancashire supporting the Confederacy as favoring the Union.7

  This revisionist interpretation overcorrects the traditional view. Cotton manufacturing was not the only industry in Britain or even in Lancashire. Workers in wool, flax, armaments, shipping, and other industries prospered from increased wartime trade. And in any case, a good deal of truth still clings to the old notion of democratic principle transcending

  5. Bright quoted in G. D. Lillibridge, Beacon of Freedom: The Impact of American Democracy upon Great Britain 1830–1870 (Philadelphia, 1955), 121, and in Ephraim D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, 2 vols. (New York, 1925), II, 132; Mill quoted in Belle B. Sideman and Lillian Friedman, eds., Europe Looksat the Civil War (New York, 1960), 117–18.

  6. Saul K. Padover, ed. and trans., Karl Marx on America and the Civil War (New York, 1972), 237, 263, 264.

  7. Mary Ellison, Support for Seccession: Lancashire and the American Civil War (Chicago, 1972), 226–27 and passim. For a review of the historiography on this question see Peter d'A. Jones's "Epilogue" to this book, pp. 199–219.

  economic self-interest in Lancashire. As a veteran Chartist leader put it in February 1863: "The people had said there was something higher than work, more precious than cotton . . . it was right, and liberty, and doing justice, and bidding defiance to all wrong."8

  Much truth also adheres to the notion of British upper-class support for the South—or at least hostility to the North, which amounted to almost the same thing. Well-born Englishmen professed to dislike Yankees as much for their manners as for their dangerous democratic example to the lower orders. Many of the gentry expressed delight at the "immortal smash" of 1861 which demonstrated "the failure of republican institutions in time of pressure." The Earl of Shrewsbury looked upon "the trial of Democracy and its failure" with pleasure. "The dissolution of the Union [means] that men now before me will live to see an aristocracy established in America."9 Similar statements found their way into prominent newspapers, including the London Morning Post and the magisterial Times, both with close ties to the Palmerston government. The Times considered the destruction of "the American Colossus" a good "riddance of a nightmare. . . . Excepting a few gentlemen of republican tendencies, we all expect, we nearly all wish, success to the Confederate cause." If by some remote and hateful chance the North did manage to win, said the Morning Post, "who can doubt that Democracy will be more arrogant, more aggressive, more levelling and vulgarizing, if that be possible, than ever before."10 This war of words against the Yankees contributed to an embitterment of Anglo-American relations for a generation after the Alabama had sunk below the waves and the Enfield rifles shipped through the blockade had fallen silent.

  In 1862 an incident in New Orleans intensified British upper-class alienation from the North. Benjamin Butler's heavy hand as commander of occupation troops caused many complaints, but no act occasioned more uproar than his order of May 15 that a
ny woman who persisted in the practice of insulting northern soldiers "shall be regarded

  8. Quoted in Philip S. Foner, British Labor and the American Civil War (New York, 1981), 52. This study vigorously reasserts and documents strong working-class support for the Union.

  9. William H. Russell to John Bigelow, April 14, 1861, quoted in Norman Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward's Foreign Policy, 1861 (Knoxville, 1976), 21on.; Shrewsbury quoted in Adams, Britain and the Civil War, II, 282.

  10. Morning Post, Feb. 22, 1861, quoted in Adams, Britain and the Civil War, II, 284; Times, Aug. 15, 1862, March 27, 1863, quoted in Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 186.

  and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation." Butler had issued this maladroit order after considerable provocation, climaxed by a woman who dumped the contents of a chamber pot from a French-Quarter balcony on Fleet Captain David Farragut's head. Butler conceived of his order as a means of humiliating southern civilians into decent behavior; southerners and Europeans chose to interpret it as a barbarous license for northern soldiers to treat refined ladies as prostitutes. In an extraordinary statement to the House of Commons, Palmerston branded Butler's conduct "infamous. Sir, an Englishman must blush to think that such an act has been committed by one belonging to the Anglo-Saxon race." This was more than Charles Francis Adams could stand. For months he had silently endured the gibes of Englishmen. But this self-righteous condemnation of Butler, with its implied approval of a people who held two million women in slavery, evoked an official protest by Adams. Palmerston's huffy reply caused an estrangement between the two men at a time when Anglo-American relations were entering a critical stage.11

  The correlation between class and British attitudes toward the American conflict should not be exaggerated. The Union had few warmer friends than the Duke of Argyll, and the same could be said of others whose blood matched the color of northern uniforms. At the same time, several liberals and even radicals were attracted to the South's fight for self-determination. Many Englishmen had cheered the Greek fight for independence or the struggle of Hungary and Italian states to throw off Hapsburg rule. Some viewed the South's revolution against Yankee overlordship in a similar light. Such convictions motivated Russell and Gladstone, the most important members of the Palmerston ministry next to Old Pam himself. "Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South," said Gladstone in a celebrated speech at Newcastle in October 1862, "have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either; they have made a nation."12

  The canker in this image of southerners as freedom-loving nationalists, of course, was slavery. One thing upon which Englishmen prided themselves was their role in suppressing the transatlantic slave trade and abolishing slavery in the West Indies. To support a rebellion in behalf of slavery would be un-British. To accept the notion that the South fought

  11. Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union (Montreal, 1980), II, 50–59.

  12. D. P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers 1861–1865 (New York, 1974), 227–29.

  for independence rather than slavery required considerable mental legerdemain. But so long as the North did not fight for freedom, many Britons could see no moral superiority in the Union cause. If the North wanted to succeed in "their struggle [for] the sympathies of Englishmen," warned a radical newspaper, "they must abolish slavery."13

  But these issues of ideology and sentiment played a secondary role in determining Britain's foreign policy. A veteran of a half-century in British politics, Palmerston was an exponent of Realpolitik. When pro-southern members of Parliament launched a drive in the summer of 1862 for British recognition of the Confederacy, Palmerston professed not to see the point. The South, he wrote, would not be "a bit more independent for our saying so unless we followed up our Declaration by taking Part with them in the war." Few in Britain were ready for that. Palmerston would like more cotton, but it remained unclear just how diplomatic recognition would get it. Southerners believed that recognition would help the Confederacy by boosting its credibility abroad and strengthening the peace party in the North. They may have been right. But so far as Palmerston was concerned, the South could earn recognition only by winning the war: Britain must "know that their separate independence is a truth and a fact" before declaring it to be so.14

  Across the Channel, Louis Napoleon felt fewer inhibitions against expressing his partisanship for the South. To the extent that the French people thought about it, they disliked slavery. But the French press paid less attention to the American war than did British newspapers, and except for distress caused by shortages of cotton, most Frenchmen cared little about what happened in America. Napoleon cared, however, and he thought he saw a way to get cotton and to enhance his imperial designs at the same time. By the summer of 1862 thousands of French soldiers were fighting in Mexico to overthrow the liberal regime of Ben-ito Juarez and turn the country into a French colony. Napoleon had sent these troops on the pretext of enforcing the collection of Mexican debts. But his real purpose was the creation of an empire in the new world to replace the one that his uncle had sold to Thomas Jefferson. The Union government supported Juarez, but was in no position to help him in 1862; the Confederacy decided to support Napoleon, and believed they could help him—for a price. In July 1862, John Slidell offered Napoleon several hundred thousand bales of cotton and an alliance

  13. Reynolds Weekly, quoted in Lillibridge, Beacon of Freedom, 115.

  14. Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, II, 66, 95–100.

  against Juarez in return for French diplomatic recognition and possible naval assistance in breaking the blockade.

  Napoleon was intrigued by the offer but reluctant to court hostilities with the United States. He told Slidell he would think about it. In truth, Napoleon dared not act unilaterally. Although he hoped to surpass Britain as the world's leading power, he recognized that a confrontation with the Union navy without Britain at his side might scuttle his plans. From his summer palace, Napoleon therefore instructed his foreign secretary: "Demandez au government anglais s'il ne croit pas le moment venu de reconnaitre le Sud."15 But les anglais were not ready to cooperate. The ancient hostility between Britain and France had not vanished. Palmerston was suspicious of Napoleon's global designs. The British prime minister warded off a parliamentary motion for Confederate recognition in mid-July even though a majority in Commons clearly favored such a step.

  But as the summer wore on, Confederate victories seemed likely to fulfill Palmerston's criterion for recognition: establishment of southern nationhood as truth and fact. During 1861 most British observers had assumed as a matter of course that the North could never conquer so large an area and so militant a people. After all, if the Redcoats could not prevail over a much weaker nation in 1776, how could the Yankees expect to win? Union victories in the first half of 1862 had threatened this smug assumption, but Jackson and Lee—who became instant legends in Britain—revived and made it stronger than ever. Even some of the Union's staunchest friends came to share the Times's conviction that "North and South must now choose between separation and ruin." The "useless butchery and carnage" had proved only that "nine millions of people, inhabiting a territory of 900,000 square miles, and animated by one spirit of resistance, can never be subdued." By September, according to the French foreign secretary, "not a reasonable statesman in Europe" believed that the North could win.16

  In both Whitehall and on the Quai d'Orsay a sentiment favoring an offer of mediation grew stronger as reports of new Confederate victories filtered across the Atlantic. By bringing the war to an end, mediation might prove the quickest and safest way to get cotton. A joint offer by

  15. Adams, Britain and the Civil War, II, 19.

  16. The Times quoted in Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 297, in Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 245, and in Nevins, War, II, 246; Eduard Thouvenel quoted in Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 247.

&n
bsp; several powers—Britain, France, Russia, and perhaps Austria and Prussia—would be most effective, for the North could not ignore the united opinion of Europe and even the bellicose Seward could scarcely declare war on all of them. A mediation proposal would be tantamount to recognition of Confederate independence. Rumors that such a move was afoot caused euphoria among southern diplomats and plunged the American legation into gloom. "I am more hopeful," wrote Slidell from Paris, "than I have been at any moment since my arrival." In London, James Mason "look[ed] now for intervention speedily in some form."17 Henry Adams reported "the current . . . rising every hour and running harder against us than at any time since the Trent affair." Consul Thomas Dudley in Liverpool, depressed by his failure to apprehend the Alabama, reported that "we are more in danger of intervention than we have been at any previous period. . . . They are all against us and would rejoice at our downfall."18

  The European belief that defeat might induce Lincoln to accept mediation misjudged his determination to fight through to victory. "I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die," Lincoln had said, and he meant it. Even after the setback at Second Bull Run, Seward told the French minister that "we will not admit the division of the Union . . . at any price. . . . There is no possible compromise." Such obstinacy compelled the proponents of mediation to pin their hopes on a Democratic triumph in the northern elections. Betraying a typical British misunderstanding of the American constitutional system, Foreign Minister Russell expected that Democratic control of the House would force Lincoln to change his foreign policy. "The Democratic party may by that time [November] have got the ascendancy," wrote Russell in October. "I heartily wish them success."19

  So did Robert E. Lee, as he invaded Maryland to conquer a peace. The fate of diplomacy rode with Lee in this campaign. The Federals "got a very complete smashing" at Bull Run, wrote Palmerston to Russell on September 14, "and it seems not altogether unlikely that still greater disasters await them, and that even Washington or Baltimore