Themes of the American Civil War

During the Civil War itself, ideologically motivated Union soldiers echoed
Lincoln’s statements that the fate of democratic government depended on
Union victory. I do feel that the liberty of the world is placed in our hands to defend wrote a Massachusetts private to his wife in 1862. If we are overcome then farewell to freedom On the second anniversary of his enlistment, an Ohio private wrote in 1863 that he had not expected the war to last so long, but no matter how much longer it took, it must be carried on for the great principles of liberty and self government at stake, for should we fail, the onward march of Liberty in the Old World will be retarded at least a century, and Monarchs, Kings, and Aristocrats will be more powerful against their subjects than ever.”
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Some former subjects of those kings who had emigrated to America expressed similar convictions. Ina forty year-old Ohio corporal who had immigrated from England as a young man wrote to his wife explaining why he had decided to reenlist fora second three-year hitch in the Union army. If I do get hurt I want you to remember that it will be not only for my Country and my Children but for Liberty allover the World that I risked my life, for if Liberty should be crushed here,
what hope would there be for the cause of Human Progress anywhere else?”
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Five months later he was dead before Atlanta.
Americans had never been reticent about proclaiming their God-given mission to carry the torch of liberty and democracy for all the world. But did peoples of other lands acknowledge that mission Some certainly did.
During the first century of its history as a nation, the United States was a model for European and Latin American liberals and radicals who sought to reform or overthrow the ancien régimes in their own countries. During the debate that produced the British Reform Act of 1832, the London
Working Men’s Association pronounced the Republic of America to be a beacon of freedom for all mankind. In the s, English Chartists praised the bright luminary of the western hemisphere who radiance will. . . light the whole world to freedom In the preface to the twelfth edition of Democracy in America, written during the 1848 uprisings in Europe, Alexis de Tocqueville urged leaders of France’s newly created Second Republic to study American institutions as a guide to the approaching irresistible and universal spread of democracy throughout the world.”
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A British radical newspaper may have overstated the case when it declared in 1856 that the American democratic example was a constant terror,
and an everlasting menace to the oppressors of Europe, especially those of
England . . . who maintain that without kings and aristocrats, civilised communities cannot exist.”
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Nevertheless, a good many members of the
British Establishment expressed delight, at least in private, at the immortal smash of the dis-United States in 1861, which demonstrated the failure of republican institutions in time of pressure When Sir John Ramsden,
a Tory member of the House of Commons, expressed satisfaction that “the
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great republican bubble had burst cheers broke forth from the back benches.
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The Earl of Shrewsbury looked upon this trial of Democracy and its failure and proclaimed that the dissolution of the Union is inevitable,
and . . . men before me will live to see an aristocracy established in America.”
The Times of London, whose unconcealed anti-Americanism led it to sympathise with the Confederacy, considered the downfall of the American colossus a good riddance of a nightmare . . . Excepting a few gentlemen of republican tendencies, we all expect, we nearly all wish, success to the
Confederate cause.”
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Peter Parish has wisely counselled us against overgeneralising the class basis of British attitudes toward the American Civil War. Not all members of the aristocracy and gentry sympathised with the Confederacy not all workers and middle-class liberals supported the Union. For the latter, the slavery issue was a particular sticking point. Because of constitutional restraints, and because of his need to keep the support of Democrats and border-state Unionists for the war effort, Lincoln made abundantly clear in 1861 that the Northern war aim was Union, not emancipation. Since the North does not proclaim abolition and never pretended to fight for antislavery asked an English journalist in September 1861, how can we be fairly called upon to sympathise so warmly with the Federal cause?”
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A good question, and one that Lincoln had wrestled with fora long time.
As far back as 1854, in his famous Peoria speech, he acknowledged that the monstrous injustice of slavery deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites In September 1862 Lincoln agreed with a delegation of antislavery clergymen that emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition.”
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When he said this, the military and political equation had shifted to a point that now favoured emancipation, and a proclamation to that effect rested in a White House drawer, awaiting a military victory to give it force.
The battle of Antietam gave Lincoln his opportunity. But the preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation he issued on 22 September 1862, to go into effect one hundred days later in all states still in rebellion, did not immediately sway British opinion. Many regarded it as a Yankee trick to encourage a slave insurrection, undertaken not from moral conviction but as a desperate measure to destroy the Confederacy from within because Union armies could not defeat it from without. Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell branded the Proclamation a vile encouragement to acts of plunder, of incendiarism, and of revenge Because the Proclamation was grounded on the executive’s power, as commander in chief, to seize enemy property being used to wage war against the United States, it applied only to slaves in

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