Читать книгу Great Britain and the American Civil War - Ephraim Douglass Adams - Страница 10

Did books dilating upon the expanding power of America reflect British public opinion, or did they create it? It is difficult to estimate such matters. Certainly it is not uninteresting that these books coincided in point of time with a British governmental attitude of opposition, though on peaceful lines, to the development of American power, and to the adoption to the point of faith, by British commercial classes, of free trade as opposed to the American protective system. But governing classes were not the British public, and to the great unenfranchised mass, finding voice through the writings of a few leaders, the prosperity of America made a powerful appeal. Radical democracy was again beginning to make its plea in Britain. In 1849 there was published a study of the United States, more careful and exact than any previous to Bryce's great work, and lauding American political institutions. This was Mackay's "Western World," and that there was a public eager for such estimate is evidenced by the fact that the book went through four British editions in 1850[24]. At the end of the decade, then, there appeared once more a vigorous champion of the cause of British democracy, comparing the results of "government by the wise" with alleged mob rule. Mackay wrote:

"Society in America started from the point to which society in Europe is only yet finding. The equality of men is, to this moment, its corner-stone … that which develops itself as the sympathy of class, becomes in America the general sentiment of society. … We present an imposing front to the world; but let us tear the picture and look at the canvas. One out of every seven of us is a pauper. Every six Englishmen have, in addition to their other enormous burdens, to support a seventh between them, whose life is spent in consuming, but in adding nothing to the source of their common subsistence."

British governing classes then, forgoing after 1850 opposition to the advance of American power, found themselves involved again, as before 1832, in the problem of the possible influence of a prosperous American democracy upon an unenfranchised public opinion at home. Also, for all Englishmen, of whatever class, in spite of rivalry in power, of opposing theories of trade, of divergent political institutions, there existed a vague, though influential, pride in the advance of a people of similar race, sprung from British loins[25]. And there remained for all Englishmen also one puzzling and discreditable American institution, slavery--held up to scorn by the critics of the United States, difficult of excuse among her friends.

Agitation conducted by the great philanthropist, Wilberforce, had early committed British Government and people to a crusade against the African slave trade. This British policy was clearly announced to the world in the negotiations at Vienna in 1814–15. But Britain herself still supported the institution of slavery in her West Indian colonies and it was not until British humanitarian sentiment had forced emancipation upon the unwilling sugar planters, in 1833, that the nation was morally free to criticize American domestic slavery. Meanwhile great emancipation societies, with many branches, all virile and active, had grown up in England and in Scotland. These now turned to an attack on slavery the world over, and especially on American slavery. The great American abolitionist, Garrison, found more support in England than in his own country; his weekly paper, The Liberator, is full of messages of cheer from British friends and societies, and of quotations from a sympathetic, though generally provincial, British press.

From 1830 to 1850 British anti-slavery sentiment was at its height. It watched with anxiety the evidence of a developing struggle over slavery in the United States, hopeful, as each crisis arose, that the free Northern States would impose their will upon the Southern Slave States. But as each crisis turned to compromise, seemingly enhancing the power of the South, and committing America to a retention of slavery, the hopes of British abolitionists waned. The North did indeed, to British opinion, become identified with opposition to the expansion of slavery, but after the "great compromise of 1850," where the elder American statesmen of both North and South proclaimed the "finality" of that measure, British sympathy for the North rapidly lessened. Moreover, after 1850, there was in Britain itself a decay of general humanitarian sentiment as regards slavery. The crusade had begun to seem hopeless and the earlier vigorous agitators were dead. The British Government still maintained its naval squadron for the suppression of the African slave trade, but the British official mind no longer keenly interested itself either in this effort or in the general question of slavery.

Nevertheless American slavery and slave conditions were still, after 1850, favourite matters for discussion, almost universally critical, by English writers. Each renewal of the conflict in America, even though local, not national in character, drew out a flood of comment. In the public press this blot upon American civilization was a steady subject for attack, and that attack was naturally directed against the South. The London Times, in particular, lost no opportunity of presenting the matter to its readers. In 1856, a Mr. Thomas Gladstone visited Kansas during the height of the border struggles there, and reported his observations in letters to the Times. The writer was wholly on the side of the Northern settlers in Kansas, though not hopeful that the Kansas struggle would expand to a national conflict. He constantly depicted the superior civilization, industry, and social excellence of the North as compared with the South[26].

Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin excited greater interest in England than in America itself. The first London edition appeared in May, 1852, and by the end of the year over one million copies had been sold, as opposed to one hundred and fifty thousand in the United States. But if one distinguished writer is to be believed, this great British interest in the book was due more to English antipathy to America than to antipathy to slavery[27]. This writer was Nassau W. Senior, who, in 1857, published a reprint of his article on "American Slavery" in the 206th number of the Edinburgh Review, reintroducing in his book extreme language denunciatory of slavery that had been cut out by the editor of the Review[28]. Senior had been stirred to write by the brutal attack upon Charles Sumner in the United States Senate after his speech of May 19–20, 1856, evidence, again, that each incident of the slavery quarrel in America excited British attention.

Senior, like Thomas Gladstone, painted the North as all anti-slavery, the South as all pro-slavery. Similar impressions of British understanding (or misunderstanding) are received from the citations of the British provincial press, so favoured by Garrison in his Liberator[29]. Yet for intellectual Britain, at least--that Britain which was vocal and whose opinion can be ascertained in spite of this constant interest in American slavery, there was generally a fixed belief that slavery in the United States was so firmly established that it could not be overthrown. Of what use, then, the further expenditure of British sympathy or effort in a lost cause? Senior himself, at the conclusion of his fierce attack on the Southern States, expressed the pessimism of British abolitionists. He wrote, "We do not venture to hope that we, or our sons, or our grandsons, will see American slavery extirpated, or even materially mitigated[30]."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] State Department, Eng., Vol. LXXIX, No. 135, March 27, 1862.

[2] Walpole, Russell, Vol. II, p. 367.

[3] Life of Lady John Russell, p. 197.

[4] There was a revival of this fear at the end of the American Civil War. This will be commented on later.

[5] This was the position of President and Congress: yet the United States had not acknowledged the right of an American citizen to expatriate himself.

[6] Between 1797 and 1801, of the sailors taken from American ships, 102 were retained, 1,042 were discharged, and 805 were held for further proof. (Updyke, The Diplomacy of the War of 1812, p. 21.)

[7] The people of the British North American Provinces regarded the war as an attempt made by America, taking advantage of the European wars, at forcible annexation. In result the fervour of the United Empire Loyalists was renewed, especially in Upper Canada. Thus the same two wars which fostered militant patriotism in America against England had the same result in Canadian sentiment against America.

[8] Temperley, "Later American Policy of George Canning" in Am. Hist. Rev., XI, 783. Also Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, Vol. II, ch. 2.

[9] Much has recently been published on British policy in Texas. See my book, British Interests and Activities in Texas, 1838–1846, Johns Hopkins Press, Balt., 1910. Also Adams, Editor, British Diplomatic Correspondence concerning the Republic of Texas, The Texas State Historical Association, Austin, Texas, 1918.

[10] In my studies on British-American relations, I have read the leading British reviews and newspapers, and some four hundred volumes by British travellers. For a summary of the British travellers before 1860 see my article "The Point of View of the British Traveller in America," in the Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, June, 1914.

[11] John Melish, Travels, Vol. I, p. 148.

[12] Morris Birkbeck, Letters from Illinois, London, 1818, p. 29.

[13] Letter in Edinburgh Scotsman, March, 1823. Cited by Niles Register, Vol. XXV, p. 39.

[14] Travels in North America, 1827–28, London, 1829.

[15] Captain Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, Edinburgh and London, 1833. 2 vols.

[16] Society in America, London, 1837. 3 vols. Retrospect of Western Travel, London, 1838. 2 vols.

[17] Captain Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America, with Remarks on Its Institutions, Vol. VI, p. 293.

[18] James Silk Buckingham, America, Historical, Statistic and Descriptive, London, 1841–43. 9 vols.

[19] Notes on the United States of North America during a phrenological visit, 1838–9-40, Edinburgh, 1841. 3 vols.

[20] A Visit to the United States in 1841, London, 1842.

[21] George William Featherstonaugh, Excursion through the Slave States, London, 1844. 2 vols.

[22] William Kennedy, Texas: The Rise, Progress and Prospects of the Republic of Texas, London, 1841. 2 vols. George Warburton, Hochelaga: or, England in the New World, London, 1845. 2 vols.

[23] Warburton, Hochelaga, 5th Edition, Vol. II, pp. 363–4.

[24] Alexander Mackay, The Western World: or, Travels through the United States in 1846–47, London, 1849.

[25] This is clearly indicated in Parliament itself, in the debate on the dismissal by the United States in 1856 of Crampton, the British Minister at Washington, for enlistment activities during the Crimean War.--Hansard, 3rd. Ser., CXLIII, 14–109 and 120–203.

[26] Gladstone's letters were later published in book form, under the title The Englishman in Kansas, London, 1857.

[27] "The evil passions which 'Uncle Tom' gratified in England were not hatred or vengeance [of slavery], but national jealousy and national vanity. We have long been smarting under the conceit of America--we are tired of hearing her boast that she is the freest and the most enlightened country that the world has ever seen. Our clergy hate her voluntary system--our Tories hate her democrats--our Whigs hate her parvenus--our Radicals hate her litigiousness, her insolence, and her ambition. All parties hailed Mrs. Stowe as a revolter from the enemy." Senior, American Slavery, p. 38.

[28] The reprint is without date, but the context shows the year to be 1857.

[29] For example the many British expressions quoted in reference to John Brown's raid, in The Liberator for February 10, 1860, and in succeeding issues.

[30] Senior, American Slavery, p. 68.