by A. N. Wilson
As in the late medieval canvas celebrated by Auden, ‘everything looks away quite leisurely from the disaster’ in Rossetti’s picture. Few, if any, who looked at The Beloved today in a gallery would be able to find a glimmering of political significance in the child’s presence. He has, surely, been added for purely aesthetic reasons to this crowded and not entirely successful composition for which Mr Rae paid £300 – about a third as much money as he would have had to pay for the boy himself.
It is this, the concept of actual ownership by one person of another, which makes slavery not merely an abhorrent concept but to almost all modern sensibilities an unimaginable one. W.H. Russell, following his success as a war correspondent in the Crimea and in India, attended a slave auction in Montgomery, Alabama, and filed this dispatch in The Times, 30 May 1861:
I am neither a sentimentalist nor Black Republican, nor negro worshipper, but I confess the sight caused a strange thrill through my heart. I tried in vain to make myself familiar with the fact that I could, for the sum of £975, become as absolutely the owner of that mass of blood, bones, sinew, flesh and brains as of the horse which stood by my side. There was no sophistry which could persuade me the man was not a man – he was, indeed, by no means my brother, but assuredly he was a fellow creature.
Such feelings were hardly new in England. ‘No man is by nature the property of another,’ Samuel Johnson had averred. And visiting Oxford in his sixty-ninth year he gave as a toast, ‘Here’s to the next insurrection of negro slaves in the West Indies.’ (Of the Americans in 1777, he had asked, ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’)
The same paradox which Tory Johnson had observed in the 1770s was on glaring display in the 1860s. Those states which insisted on their liberty to secede from the Union (though Jefferson Davis would never have done anything so undignified as to yelp) were those which also insisted on their right to perpetuate slavery, at a period in history when even the Russians were liberating their serfs.1 (The emancipation of the serfs happened on 19 February 1861, two months before the bombardment of Fort Sumter; nearly two years before Lincoln proclaimed the emancipation of slaves in those states in arms against the Union, on 1 January 1863.)
Yet even from the remote perspective of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s studio, the question of American slavery was not one which could be seen in morally simple terms. The Englishman, particularly the English liberal, might deplore the notion of purchasing ‘blood, bones, sinew, flesh and brains’, but what else was the nineteenth-century factory-owner doing to his workforce? What – come to that – was the status of English women, of whatever class, in relation to their father or husband? (Not until 1882 did the Married Women’s Property Act grant to married women the full right of separate ownership of property.)
Then again, there was the intimate economic connection between the English capacity to mass-produce cotton goods, and hence increase their national wealth immeasurably, and the American capacity to grow and harvest cotton in ever greater, ever cheaper quantities. If James Hargreaves, the poor weaver of Blackburn, had never pioneered the spinning-jenny in 1764, and if Richard Arkwright had never invented the water-frame spinning machine a little later, or Cartwright invented the power-loom, the quiet home-weavers of Lancashire, rustic characters who belonged in the pages of Wordsworth, might still have been pursuing their calm, untroubled lives deep into the third decade of Queen Victoria’s reign. But they weren’t.2 The population-explosion had occurred; the Malthusian struggle was conjoined; the masses had thronged into the mills and factories of Northern England – Lancashire by now contained 12 per cent of the population. Between 1821 and 1831 17,000 persons per annum had flocked to Lancashire. By 1860 there were some 2,650 cotton factories, worked by a population of 440,000, their wages amounting to £11,500,000 per annum. In order to employ this population at this rate it was necessary to import 1,051,623,380 lb of cotton: nearly all of this raw material came from America.3
If the population-explosion in England fed upon and needed the industrial genius set in motion by Arkwright, Cartwright, Hargreaves and others, cotton itself could not have supplied their need had it not been for comparable advance in American agriculture. In 1793 Eli Whitney had invented the cotton gin, which enabled the cotton seed to be easily separated from the lint. The declining agrarian economy of the South was immediately revitalized. Cotton was an easy crop to grow in the rich virgin lands of the Mississippi basin, and a cheap labour force was to hand – in the slaves. Article 1, Section 9 of the American Constitution had envisaged the ending of the trade in slaves, though not the institution of slavery, by 1808. A number of enlightened planters had followed Jefferson’s example and liberated their slaves in their wills. Had the agrarian economy of the South continued to decline, had Eli Whitney never made his ingenious cotton gin, had there been no industrial revolution in Lancashire, then the quiet old Southern ways might have gradually evolved into a poor, but slave-free culture, a sort of eighteenth-century England, underpopulated but genteel.4 As it was, to meet the demands of nineteenth-century trade, slavery in America actually increased, from 1 million slaves in 1800 to approximately 4½ million in 1860.
There are few more tragic examples in history of the truth of Ezra Pound’s observation, ‘Nature overproduces. Overproduction does no harm until you over-market.’5
Those who profited from the overproduction of Southern cotton were not just planters. They were the Northern middlemen, the New York merchants who bled the Southerners dry by selling them manufactured goods at ever-increasing prices; and they were the English merchant class, liberals almost to a man, loud in their advocacy of the abolitionist cause, but only after they had made millions out of a system which had depended, for its initial profitability, on American slave labour to harvest, English child labour to manufacture, cheap cotton goods for the export market.
These uncomfortable truths were not lost on observant Englishmen and women in the 1860s, which is precisely why we find many English people turning a blind eye to America at this time, or almost wilfully missing the point of what was going on there; and also perhaps why we find some of the keenest abolitionists in the ranks of those who had defended capitalist industrialism. (Harriet Martineau was typical.)
We should expect that most paradoxical of political figures, Gladstone, to typify the many-stranded complexity of this matter. Prince of humbug, yet deeply the man of principle; guilt-ridden profiteer from his father’s Demerara slave-plantations, yet defender of the old man’s good intentions; stern, in youth an unbending Tory, yet in old age visionary radical; populist with an eye to the main chance, yet prepared throughout his long political life – from resignation over the Maynooth Grant to his destruction of the Liberal Party over Irish Home Rule – to stand on firmly rooted moral conviction; visionary prophet, but crashing bore: at the time of the outbreak of the American Civil War, Gladstone was, aged fifty-two, the chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Palmerston’s ‘Liberal’ government. Lord John Russell was foreign secretary. England was still being governed by the ‘two dreadful old men’ who had been around at the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, the Irish Famine and the Indian Mutiny. Victorian England was a gerontocracy, which made the life of the politically ambitious keenly frustrating. While his opposite number in the Commons, Disraeli, made a comparably agonizing ascent of ‘the greasy pole’, patiently awaiting the retirement or demise of Lord Derby, the Conservative leader, Gladstone was the Liberal leader in waiting, ever anxious to establish himself as the only possible successor to Palmerston.
At this date, the North-Eastern region of England was as prosperous – from exports to Europe, from shipbuilding, from coal – as the North-Western cotton-producing towns of Lancashire were distressed. As Liberal chancellor of the Exchequer Gladstone was widely credited with this prosperity, and he was invited to address a dinner at the town hall in Newcastle on 7 October 1862. He was given ‘the reception of a king’, in the words of his biographer and
admirer Morley. A great procession of steamers followed him to the mouth of the Tyne, and workers from the forges, furnaces, coal staiths, chemical works, glass factories and shipyards lined the river bank to cheer: ‘and all this not because he had tripled the exports to France, but because a sure instinct had revealed an accent in his eloquence that spoke of feeling for the common people’.6 This is not, of course, a reference to the Liverpudlian timbre which is (just) detectable in the recorded voice of Etonian and Oxford-educated Gladstone but to his streak of populism, his feeling, amounting to genius, for public mood. At the grand dinner, no doubt carried away by the warmth of his reception in Newcastle, Gladstone moved into one of those oratorical flights for which he was long remembered. On this occasion, his words occasioned a diplomatic incident between Britain – in the person of the foreign secretary – and the American minister in London, Charles Francis Adams. Was it a gaffe as is generally supposed? Or did Gladstone, who was a most unusual combination of passionate impulsiveness and deviousness, intend his words to cause the discomfiture which they unquestionably did?
‘We know quite well,’ he said, ‘that the people of the Northern States have not yet drunk of the cup – they are still trying to hold it far from their lips – which all the rest of the world see nevertheless they must drink of. We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South 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.’ The words were greeted with loud cheers.
Adams – of the great dynasty – did not have an easy task. From the beginning of the Civil War, over the question of British neutrality, he had been forced to emphasize that Britain could not recognize the Confederacy without putting itself on terms of hostility with the Union. Russell smoothed things down, and forced Gladstone to withdraw his implication that the British government believed in the inevitability of a Confederate victory. Much later in life, Gladstone expressed dismay at his words. He had never, he said, desired a division of the American Union and indeed feared that such a thing would put a ‘dangerous pressure on Canada’. The ‘tokens of goodwill’ which, over the last twenty-five years of his career, he received from the American people made him all the more anxious to dissociate himself from his earlier position. This was because it suited Gladstone the octogenarian democrat to believe that he had always been a fervent believer in government of the people, for the people and by the people. The new orthodoxy of a shared political vision, linking Britain and America, enabled early twentieth-century historians to see the 1860s as the great turning point for both countries, the era when both put the old world, and with it old hostilities, behind them. ‘The Reform Bill of 1867 brought a new British nation into existence, the nation decrying American institutions was dead, and a “sister democracy” holding out hands to the United States had replaced it’ was one genial American view, published six years after Woodrow Wilson had imposed his disastrous conclusions on the Versailles Peace Agreement.7 This is still very much the way some people, on both sides of the Atlantic, see the 1860s.
At the time, things looked very different. Many would have shared Disraeli’s view that the ‘immense revolution’ taking place in the United States would ‘tell immensely in favour of aristocracy’.8 The greatest Tory intellectual of the age, Lord Robert Cecil, perhaps influenced this view. (Although Cecil at the time abominated Disraeli, the feeling of antipathy was not reciprocated. And Cecil, as Lord Salisbury, was destined to be Disraeli’s foreign secretary, and his successor as Conservative prime minister – vide infra.) Writing in the Quarterly Review Cecil insisted – in October 1862 – that the democratic idea
is not merely a folly. It is a chimera. It is idle to discuss whether it ought to exist; for, as a matter of fact, it never does. Whatever may be the written text of a Constitution, the multitude always will have leaders among them, and those leaders not selected by themselves. They may set up the pretence of political equality, if they will, and delude themselves with a belief in its existence. But the only consequence will be that they will have bad leaders instead of good. Every community has natural leaders, to whom, if they are not misled by the insane passion for equality, they will instinctively defer. Always wealth, in some countries birth, in all intellectual power and culture, mark out the men to whom, in a healthy state of feeling, a community looks to undertake its government.9
These are sentiments with which the bulk of the political class, Conservative and Liberal, agreed in England until the First World War, which is why the idea of England becoming more democratic, or more like America, in the 1860s or 1870s must be taken with a pinch of salt. Naturally there were pockets of such opinion.10 Cobden and Bright’s use of American flags at election rallies to represent freedom excited rancour and ridicule. Most British opinion – The Times, Bagehot, Disraeli and the Conservatives, as well as Gladstone – assumed the likelihood of a Confederate victory; and many, perhaps a majority, hoped for it. Matthew Arnold was one of the first commentators to express the view that secession was final. This prophet of liberalism thought it was a good thing for the North, allowing the Yankees to develop a modern enlightened society, and free from blacks, who he imagined would be sent back to Africa. As a schools inspector, Arnold noted in early January 1865 that of students in training colleges who had been set a composition which touched upon the American crisis, almost every one had taken ‘the strongest possible side’ with the Confederacy.11
The neutrality of the British government was certainly not based on any form of natural common feeling with Lincoln or the Federal government. Adams noted that when it became clear that the North would fight on to victory the attitude of Palmerston and Russell became favourable to the Union, but this was ‘no special sympathy, but merely a cool calculation of benefits to Great Britain in maintaining that policy of friendship determined upon in the fifties’.12 (In the early stage of the war, they had taken no chances, though, and dispatched 11,000 troops to Canada to protect the border.)13 Lincoln’s secretary of state, Seward, the man who had himself hoped for the Republican nomination for the presidency, described Britain, perhaps understandably, as ‘the greatest, most grasping, and most rapacious power in the world’.
That power depended on trade, on manufacturing, on exports; and a crucial part of that trade was concentrated upon the cotton-mills and factories of Lancashire. Jefferson Davis’s decision to impose a cotton embargo, rather than attempting to defy Federal blockades of the ports, was a major political blunder. In the first year of the war it was ineffectual. Canny British merchants had seen the danger of raw materials running out and had bulk-bought cotton in a year when its price was in any event low. By the following year, however, in May 1862, the situation in formerly prosperous Lancashire was desperate. In a cotton town such as Blackburn ‘of 84 mills, 23 were silent and smokeless’;14 9,414 persons had applied for poor relief; the pawnshops were crammed with furniture and clothing; starvation beckoned.
The British press, on the whole, took the view that the commercial and human calamity which had now befallen Lancashire mattered far more than the issue of slavery. The Times reminded its readers that abolitionists had been persecuted in the North, as well as in the South, before the war; and that even at the outset of the conflict, Lincoln and his allies had not come out unambiguously against slavery. The more populist Reynolds’ News urged, if necessary, force to break the blockades.15 ‘England must break the Blockade or her millions will starve.’ ‘Better to fight the Yankees than starve our operatives.’16 The American consul in Manchester reported that public opinion among the working classes was ‘almost unanimously adverse to the Northern cause’. This was hardly surprising. ‘A few soldiers may indeed be pierced by shot and bayonet or shattered by cannon, but what are their sufferings compared with the miseries of thousands of capitalists who view with alarming eyes the gradual disappearance of their stock? What are bullet
s flying about you compared with the heavy fall of securities which have utterly lost their buoyancy?’17 At a meeting in the Temperance Hall, Little Bolton, on 14 February 1863 to consider such questions as ‘Is not the recent policy of President Lincoln worthy of sympathy and support of all lovers of freedom and constitutional government?’ there were raucous interruptions, laughter, booing and catcalls when the worthy Liberal speaker, Mr John Edward Kirkman, tried to defend Lincoln.18
Urged on by the English abolitionists and the economic radicals, Lincoln himself wrote to the people of Lancashire recognizing their plight, and trying to imply that the English working classes would prefer to starve rather than tolerate the existence of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic. ‘I cannot,’ he wrote, ‘but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or any country.’19 The truth is that in years of prosperity the working classes, as well as the factory-owners themselves, had been content to make profits out of cheap imported cotton which, without slaves to harvest it, would have been twice the price. Equally true was that most workers would have preferred an early end to the war in exchange for regular paid work in the mills and factories. The factory operatives of Lancashire did not have any influence, one way or another, either on the conduct of the war in America, or on the decisions by Palmerston and Russell about their policy of neutrality.
But while this is undoubtedly the case, and while from month to month of the crisis the import of the American Civil War, its monumental significance as a turning point in the tide of world history, was very largely lost on English politicians and the English public, on another level the issue of slavery was perfectly clear.fn1 Gladstone’s biographer, Lord Morley, explains the superficial English myopia over the matter by saying, ‘we applied ordinary political maxims to what was not merely a political contest, but a social revolution. Without scrutiny of the cardinal realities beneath, we discussed it like some superficial conflict in our old world about boundaries, successions, territorial partitions, dynastic preponderance. The significance of the American war was its relation to slavery.’20