There was strong support for the insurgency among the English aristocracy, who identified with the highly class-structured Southern society. British diplomatic recognition of the rebels, with subsequent financial and military aid, would have gone far to win the Confederacy’s independence, just as the American Revolution would have failed without French aid. But Britons of all classes were solidly opposed to human slavery, which England had abolished throughout her vast empire in 1834. Working people in particular supported the Union war effort, despite the cost to themselves. Literally millions of mill workers faced destitution, as British mills cut back production during early wartime cotton shortages.

     British newspapers are generally strongly pro-Confederate and hostile to the United States' leaders and war effort. They contain splendid perspectives on the conflict that are not to be found in any other contemporary accounts. Their correspondents traveled and marched with rebel forces and sent home vivid pictures and words of what life was like in "rebeldom." The English pictorial newspapers, chiefly the great Illustrated London News, the world's first pictorial newsweekly, contain the highest quality wood engravings of American news. They are very similar in style to the American Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's, and offer glimpses into life in the South and the North, the like of which are not to be found elsewhere. For this reason I am proud to include these often overlooked treasures among my Civil War catalog offerings.

    For more on Britain's involvement in our war, and how its government's actions (and inaction) profoundly affected its outcome, we recommend Amanda Foreman's fine new book "A World on Fire, Britain’s Crucial Role in America's Civil War" (2011).

The outcome of our civil war was determined by overseas events to a surprising extent. The European powers, though nominally sympathetic to the insurgency, immediately began scheming to recolonize the western hemisphere. Spain reconquered Santo Domingo a month after Sumter. Britain sent ten thousand troops to Canada later that summer. Soon after, French forces began the invasion of Mexico. With the Pope's blessing, France's self-styled "emperor" Napoleon III developed an elaborate plan with Spain and Britain to set up an Imperial Catholic regime that would eventually expand to include Central and South America. The scheme hinged on Mexico's occupation by French forces, stationed there to checkmate the southward expansion plans of the nominally allied Confederacy. But in Mexico a ragtag peasant army inflicted a severe defeat on crack French Zouaves on Cinco de Mayo, 1862. Although they would be later overwhelmed, this startling reversal caused British leaders to reconsider and pull out of the alliance. Later that year a diplomatic crisis triggered by Garibaldi�fs march on Rome forced the resignation of the aggressive French Minister of War, and la reconquesta was abandoned. By 1863, international recognition of the Confederacy became an impossibility. Secretary of State Seward had long intimated that such interference would mean a U.S. declaration of war, and now Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was having its intended effect, triggering an astonishing outpouring of heartfelt public support for the Union, a pro-republican explosion that, coming after the bloody revolutions of 1848, shook the aristocracy of the Old World to its core and convinced them their interests, if not their very survival, lay in distancing themselves from the American conflict.

       

Navigate my Website:

--Select A Catalog-- Introductory Catalog The Earliest Americana 19th Century Americana Early Leaf Catalog Vellum Indentures Pictorial Newspapers Miscellany and Modern British Journalism Reference Books

--Select a Web page-- Collectors Intro Website Index My Sale terms History of Newspapers My Home Page Preserving Old Paper About Indentures Glossary of Terms

Contents ©:2024 Phil Barber.