A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War

by Amanda Foreman

  In 1848, the discovery of gold in California led to a rush of settlers—more than eighty thousand of them in a matter of months—and the urgent need to accept the newly acquired territory as the thirty-first state so that law and order could be imposed. But the Southern states would not agree to the addition (since the Californians were demanding to be admitted as a free state) until they had secured a series of concessions. The most bitterly contested of these was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed “owners” to pursue and recapture their escaped “property” in whatever state he or she happened to be hiding. Graphic newspaper reports—of families torn apart, of law-abiding blacks dragged in chains back to their erstwhile masters—raised an outcry in the North. Several Northern states passed personal liberty laws to try to circumvent the act; in some towns, there was violent resistance to the federal agents who arrived in search of fugitive slaves; and the “underground railroad,” with its vast network of safe houses from Louisiana to the Canadian border, received many more volunteers.

  —

  The domestic and political turbulence during 1850 was one of the reasons why the United States’ pavilion at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 displayed so few objects compared to those of other nations. The suspicion among Americans that Britain had put on the exhibition simply to show off its status as the richest country in the world had also diminished enthusiasm for taking part. Yet even with a fraction of the exhibits presented by the Great Powers, the American pavilion still won 5 of the 170 Council medals (admittedly, France won 56). The American photography contingent, led by Mathew Brady, won first, second, and third prize.1.5 The great number of American tourists and businessmen who visited the exhibition brought more contact between the citizens of the two countries than at any other time during the century. Britons now realized the extent to which the United States had developed separately from the mother country. Americans not only had different accents and wore different fashions; their choice of words and phrases sounded quite foreign. They said “I guess” instead of “I suppose,” and “Let’s skedaddle” instead of “Shall we go,” and they called con men “shysters,” an epithet entirely new to English ears.12 It was their strange and different mannerisms that inspired Tom Taylor to compose Our American Cousin.

  Taylor also wrote the popular 1852 stage version of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The English took to heart the story of the saintly slave whose goodness and humanity upstage a succession of masters until his murder by the evil Simon Legree. In 1852, its first year of publication, the book sold a million copies in Britain—compared to 300,000 in the United States.13 Every respectable British household owned a copy. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was allegedly the first novel Lord Palmerston had read in thirty years, and whether it was the effects of the long abstinence or the allure of the book, he read it from cover to cover three times.14 The depressing and grisly portrayal of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin articulated what the British had long suspected was the truth—despite the South’s self-depiction as an agrarian paradise of courtly manners, charming plantations, and contented slaves. Few Britons had ever seen how slaves really lived, unlike the celebrated British actress Fanny Kemble, whose marriage to Pierce Butler, a Southern slave owner, fell apart after they moved to his Georgia plantation in 1838. They divorced acrimoniously in 1849, with Butler holding Fanny’s daughters hostage until they turned twenty-one.

  The publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin led to a renaissance of antislavery clubs in Britain, after they had tottered along in a state of earnest torpor since 1833. The public agitated for Britain “to do something.” In November 1852, Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, and the Earl of Shaftesbury drafted a petition to “the Women of the United States of America,” urging them to “raise your voices” against slavery. More than half a million British women signed their names to the public letter, which was known as the Stafford House Address. Predictably, the American response was one of outrage.15 Julia Tyler, the wife of former president John Tyler, led the barrage of scathing replies to “The Duchess of Sutherland and the Ladies of England.” British labor conditions, rigid class structure, and lack of opportunity for self-betterment all came under attack. But it could not be denied that Britain possessed the moral high ground on the issue of slavery. American abolitionists who visited England were amazed to discover that British blacks enjoyed the same rights as their white peers. “We found none of that prejudice against color in England which is so inveterate among the American people,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton had written about her honeymoon in Britain during the summer of 1840. “At my first dinner in England I found myself beside a gentleman from Jamaica, as black as the ace of spades.”16 Similarly, a former slave, the author Harriet Jacobs, recalled how her self-esteem had changed after visiting England. “For the first time in my life,” she wrote, “I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion. I felt as if a great millstone had been lifted from my breast.”17

  The Stafford House Address had been doomed to fail no matter how good and sincere its intentions. The Anglophobia that was so often articulated in the U.S. Congress was no more than a reflection of public opinion. Alexis de Tocqueville commented in Democracy in America in 1835 that he had never encountered hatred more poisonous than that which Americans felt for England.18 There were notable exceptions, of course. In the early 1840s the American minister in London told a wildly receptive audience that “the roots of our history run into the soil of England.… For every purpose but that of political jurisdiction we are one people.”19 But there had existed a deep-rooted prejudice since the War of Independence. The influx of a million Irish refugees during the potato famine merely added more venom to the mix. “Why,” wrote a nineteenth-century American journalist, “does America hate England?” He answered: “Americans believe that England dreads their growing power, and is envious of their prosperity. They detest and hate England accordingly. They have ‘licked’ her twice and can ‘lick’ her again.”20

  Tocqueville attributed the hostility to fifty years of self-congratulatory propaganda. He thought Americans were convinced that their country was a beacon of light to the world; “that they are the only religious, enlightened, and free people … hence they conceive a high opinion of their superiority and are not very remote from believing themselves to be a distinct species of mankind.” The more the English scoffed at this view, the more furious and resentful Americans became toward Britain. The most memorable attack on American exceptionalism was Sydney Smith’s scornful comparison of the two cultures in 1820. “Who reads an American book?” he wrote in the Edinburgh Review:

  Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? Who drinks out of American glasses? Or eats from American plates? Or wears American coats or gowns? Or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?21

  A decade later, Fanny Trollope, the novelist and mother of Anthony Trollope, rekindled the impression that all Britons looked down their noses at the former colonists with her book Domestic Manners of the Americans. Mrs. Trollope had spent a brief and unhappy period in Ohio in the late 1820s, trying to build a commercial business, which had ended with the family becoming bankrupt and homeless. Her book was not meant to be a serious study of America, but a piece of entertainment to help solve her family’s financial difficulties. While not condemning all Americans in all areas of life, she portrayed the majority as too vulgar, violent, and vainglorious to be really likable. Her view of America inspired hundreds of English imitators, further souring cultural relations between the two countries.

  Ill.3 Punch’s view of American manners, 1856.

  Other British writers sneered that the self-styled “superior” United States was militarily weak, politically corrupt, and financially unsound.22 America’s m
arkets were prone to panics; its people preached equality but practiced “mobocracy.” English travelers who saw American democracy in action either condemned it outright or praised it halfheartedly as an evolving system. The greatest blow to American pride came from Charles Dickens. Until his visit to the country in 1842, Americans had considered the world’s bestselling novelist to be almost an adopted son. His humble beginnings and liberal politics had fostered their assumption that the United States would be far more congenial to him than class-ridden England. Dickens had indeed wanted to admire America during his triumphant lecture tour. “Still it is of no use,” he wrote dolefully to a friend during the tour. “I am disappointed. This is not the republic I came to see; this is not the republic of my imagination.” He warmed to the friendliness and generosity of its people, and he admired the emphasis on education and public philanthropy. But he found American society as a whole utterly intolerant of dissenting views. “Freedom of opinion! Where is it?” he asked rhetorically after being warned not to discuss the slave mutiny on board the Creole outside abolitionist circles, even though the subject was dominating British-American relations.1.6 If American democracy was simply a vehicle for majority rule, then, asserted Dickens, “I infinitely prefer a liberal monarchy.”23 He gave vent to his disenchantment in American Notes, published in 1842, and Martin Chuzzlewit, which followed the year after.

  —

  The great influx of immigrants into the United States after 1846 accelerated the rise of the harsh, strident politics that Dickens so deplored. In 1840 there had been 17 million people living in America; by 1850 there were 23 million, an increase of 35 percent. The altered political landscape—where ethnic identity and class affiliation translated into thousands of votes—demanded a new breed of politician, the kind exemplified by William Henry Seward, who was elected to one of the two New York Senate seats in 1849. While governor he had behaved with shameless opportunism, courting the state’s large Irish vote with his vitriolic diatribes against England. The annexation of Canada was a constant theme in his speeches.24 Though not a bigot himself, Seward was an expert at appealing to popular prejudice to shore up his power base. Once he realized that the Democratic and Whig parties were fragmenting into Northern and Southern, proslavery and antislavery factions, he abandoned the Whigs and became a Republican.1.7 He subtly repositioned himself, raising his antislavery rhetoric and emphasizing his protectionist credentials. This infuriated the free-trade South, but it endeared him to states that feared competition from European goods.

  There were two different Sewards, according to his friend Henry Adams: the “political and the personal.” But over time they had become so entwined “that no one could tell which was the mask and which the features.” “I am an enigma, even to myself,” Seward once quipped.25 With his soft, husky voice and confiding manner, he exuded the air of a man who knew the foibles of humanity but did not sit over them in judgment. “You are at your ease with him at once,” recorded an English admirer. “There is a frankness and bonhomie. In our English phrase, Mr. Seward is good company. A good cigar, a good glass of wine, and a good story, even if it is a little risqué, are the pleasures which he obviously enjoys keenly.” His opposition to slavery was never in doubt, but his preference for pragmatism over principle meant that sometimes his ends became lost in the means. Shortly after his election to the Senate, Seward explained that one consideration governed all his political actions: “My duty is to promote the welfare, interest, and happiness of the people of the United States.” But whether this view was a goal or a cover remained the subject of debate. His wife, Frances, became increasingly disillusioned by her husband’s ability to temporize. She had once been a woman of strong political views, but her confidence had been crushed by prolonged exposure to Seward’s ego. She preferred to live in seclusion in New York, pleading ill health, while Seward lived in Washington. It was almost as if Frances represented some part of his conscience: safely left at home but still accessible by post.

  Seward had become the leader of the nascent Republican Party in the Senate when Senator Stephen Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, proposed a bill in 1854 to admit two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska, into the Union. However, the provisions included a bombshell: the two territories would decide for themselves whether to be free or slave states. Douglas had proposed breaking the 1820 Missouri Compromise because it was the only way he could achieve his real aim of obtaining Southern support for a transcontinental railroad. But the result was catastrophic for the residents of Kansas. In theory, majority rule was going to decide the issue. In practice, pro- and antislavery settlers began to slaughter each other in cold blood. “Border Ruffians” based in Missouri charged over the border to join forces with Kansas slave owners, while New England abolitionists shipped caseloads of rifles to their western brethren. Each of the rival factions proclaimed its own legislature. Throughout 1855, American newspapers referred to “Bleeding Kansas.”

  Seward tried to find common ground with the Southern senators as a means to ending the violence in Kansas without endangering the Union. But the North and South each regarded the fate of Kansas as the key to slavery’s future. There could be no compromise. In the spring of 1856, President Franklin Pierce gave his full support to a bill proposed by Senator Douglas to repeal the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in territories north of the 36˚30’ parallel, which included Kansas. Seward responded on behalf of the Republican Party with a bill to admit Kansas as a free state. The Senate leader of the Free-Soil Party,1.8 Charles Sumner, showed Seward the speech he was preparing to deliver on May 19. Entitled “The Crime Against Kansas,” the speech was a devastating indictment of the South, her institutions, and the character of her most prominent politicians. Although Seward personally disliked Sumner—considering him far too priggish for a politician—he shuddered at his folly. Seward tried to persuade him to at least remove the personal attacks within his speech, but Sumner refused. After initially hailing Seward as a fellow soldier in the battle against slavery, the aristocratic Bostonian had come to regard him with disdain. According to a mutual friend, “The two men would have disliked each other by instinct had they lived in different planets.”26 Seward had brawled and clawed his way from New York to national prominence; by contrast, Sumner was a seventh-generation American, a Harvard man who spoke four languages and was an acknowledged authority in jurisprudence.

  The forty-year-old Sumner had never held office before he took his Senate seat in 1851. Unlike Seward, who knew the inside of every back room between Buffalo and Brooklyn, Sumner had deliberately eschewed politics. Seward had been abroad only once, in 1833, and the New Yorker had returned with his prejudices against Britain confirmed. By contrast, Sumner had become something of a sensation when he visited England in 1838, prompting the essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle, who opposed abolition, to dub him sarcastically “Popularity Sumner.” Although he lacked a sense of humor—a fatal disability for most foreigners in Britain—Sumner exuded a charismatic earnestness combined with obvious brilliance. He knew more dukes and earls than most Englishmen, let alone any other American. But the most important friend he made during this time was Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, whose views on abolition and social reform coincided with his own. After he returned to America, they maintained their friendship. She saw Sumner as he wished to see himself: as a proud and tireless advocate of society’s victims.

  Sumner’s lack of experience or even understanding of basic political realities proved his undoing. In contrast to Seward, he was incapable of trimming his actions or modulating his speeches to suit political expediencies. Sumner abhorred compromise: “From the beginning of our history,” he explained, “the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned.” Sumner was prepared to make a last, defiant stand against the forces of accommodation, and did so at every opportunity. On May 19, 1856, he began a two-day marathon of invective in the Senate. Congress had just learned that the border
town of Lawrence, Kansas—which had held out against slavery—was surrounded by a thousand Border Ruffians. The tension in the chamber added force to his words, which needed no extra help. Sumner was already a mesmerizing orator; his speeches were emotional to the point of being histrionic. Between damning the South to hell, he accused Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina of being so attached to the idea of slavery that he was like an adulterer obsessed with his mistress. Then he scored some gratuitous blows by making fun of Butler’s infirmities. He also insulted Senator Stephen Douglas, who responded, “That damn fool will get himself killed by some other damned fool.”

  Two days later, while Sumner was sitting at his desk in the nearly empty Senate chamber, one of the insulted Butler’s nephews, Congressman Preston Brooks, silently approached him from behind. After speaking a few words, Brooks raised his arm and smashed his heavy cane on Sumner’s head. Blinded by blood and in shock, Sumner struggled to get his long legs out from under his desk. He finally managed to stand up while Brooks continued beating him with increasing ferocity. According to horrified observers, Sumner tried to stagger away only to be grabbed by Brooks, who held his lapel with one hand while raining down blows with the other. By his own count, he struck Sumner about thirty times before his cane splintered. His mission completed, Brooks calmly walked away unmolested. Within a few minutes he was strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue as if nothing had happened.27