Europe and the Civil War
Although by the end of 1863 the
Confederacy was obviously tottering, the outcome of the war would not
necessarily be decided on the battlefields. If the South could secure European
recognition and persuade Great Britain and France to intervene. Confederate
independence would be certain. At the outset the South confidently expected
that Great Britain in particular would be forced by her dependence on Southern
cotton to intervene to break the blockade, or at least to press mediation on
the North. Southerners even tried to precipitate British intervention by
placing an embargo on the export of cotton in 1861 and burning a large part of
the year’s crop.
But Southern faith in King Cotton
was misplaced. Thanks to heavy imports in the previous two years British
manufacturers held large stocks of cotton when the war broke out; shortages of
raw material did not become acute until 1863, by which time alternative
supplies were beginning to arrive from India and Egypt. The so-called
‘Lancashire cotton famine’, which inflicted widespread hardship on mill-workers
during the war, could not have been alleviated by breaking the blockade since
it was caused primarily by overproduction. In any case Great Britain was
reluctant, as a great sea power which had traditionally relied upon the
blockade weapon, to question Lincoln’s authority to use it. Then, too, British
industry as a whole did well out of the Civil War. Northern wartime purchases
produced a boom in steel, munitions, and shipbuilding, and in the manufacture
of woolen textiles and boots and shoes.
Economic factors do not, however,
explain why in the end neither Great Britain nor France was prepared to
intervene. Nor does the Emancipation Proclamation. In the last analysis, it was
the military situation in America that was crucial. The European powers were
prepared to contemplate intervention only when the Confederacy seemed about to
win. Had Lee’s invasion of Maryland in the autumn of 1862 succeeded, Great
Britain would have recognized the Confederacy. But when he was repulsed such
thoughts were put aside and, after Gettysburg, virtually abandoned. France
would have followed Great Britain’s lead in recognizing the Confederacy but was
unwilling to act alone.
The long-standing belief that the
British government gave up its plans for intervention because of fears of a
working-class outcry is a myth. There is no evidence that the government took
working-class sentiment into account. In any case British opinion on the Civil
War was not wholly divided along class lines. True, most of the ruling classes
were strongly sympathetic to the Confederacy. Despising Northerners as a breed
of acquisitive vulgarians, and cherishing a sense of kinship with aristocratic
Southerners, they further welcomed the break-up of the Union because it
weakened a dangerous rival and would tend to discredit popular government.
Ranged against the established classes were middle-class anti¬ slavery liberals
like Bright and Cobden, who had long admired American democracy. But
working-class support for the North was far from solid. The numerous
pro-Northern mass meetings in Lancashire in the spring of 1863 to celebrate the
Emancipation Proclamation were not wholly spontaneous and there was a
substantial amount of pro-Southern—or at least anti-Northern—sentiment in
trade-union and working-class circles. Since the North was avowedly fighting to
preserve the Union rather than to abolish slavery, the South, it was felt, was
simply fighting for independence.
There were nonetheless two
occasions when Great Britain might have been drawn in. The first was in
November 1861, when Captain Charles Wilkes, commanding the American frigate, San
Jacinto, stopped the British mail steamer, Trent, on the high seas
and removed two Confederate diplomats, Mason and Slidell, who were on their way
to represent the Confederacy in Europe. The British government denounced
Wilkes's action as a violation of international law and of neutral rights and
demanded the release of the prisoners and an apology. Feelings ran high on both
sides of the Atlantic and for several weeks war seemed unavoidable. But after
the British had adopted a less threatening attitude Lincoln and Seward gave way
and released the captives.
The second crisis resulted from
the building of vessels for the Confederacy in British shipyards. The British
Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819 for¬ bade the construction of warships for
belligerents, but Confederate agents found that the regulations could be evaded
by not actually arming the vessels until they had left British waters. This
loophole enabled the Confederacy to build or purchase in England a number of
fast commerce-raiders like the famous Alabama, which slipped out of the
Mersey in July 1862 and, together with her consorts, harried Northern commerce
to such effect that, because of prohibitive insurance costs, the Stars and
Stripes all but disappeared from the high seas. The efforts of Charles Francis
Adams, the American Minister in London, to prevent the departure of the Alabama
came to naught, but his angry protests at the building of the ‘Laird Rams' were
more effective. These were not mere commerce-raiders but powerful ironclad
steam warships, whose underwater rams could have crippled the wooden ships of
the Union blockading squadron. In September 1863 Adams solemnly warned Lord
John Russell, the British Foreign Secretary, that if the rams were permitted to
sail ‘it would be superfluous in me to point out to Your Lordship that this is
war’. The ultimatum was unnecessary for the government had already ordered
their seizure. It realized that to do otherwise would create a precedent which
might be cited against Great Britain in future wars. (Maldwyn A. Jones, The
Limits of Liberty: American History 1607-1980 [The Short Oxford History of
the Modern World; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983], 231-33)
