Themes of the American Civil War

why, under the Constitution, Lincoln had to make this distinction, the
London Spectator gibed that the principle asserted is not that a human being cannot own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the
United States.”
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But when the first day of 1863 arrived and Lincoln, contrary to the predictions of European cynics, actually issued the Proclamation, justifying it not only as a military necessity but also as an act of justice and enjoining slaves to refrain from violence, a powerful pro-Union tidal wave swept liberal and radical circles in Britain. Young Henry Adams, secretary to his father
Charles Francis Adams, the American minister to Britain, reported that the Emancipation Proclamation has done more for us here than all our former victories and all our diplomacy. It has created an almost convulsive reaction in our favor Huge mass meetings took place in England and
Scotland where real workingmen, as well as those who professed to speak for them, roared their approval of pro-Union resolutions. One of Britain’s staunchest supporters of the Northern cause, Richard Cobden, wrote that the largest of these meetings, at Exeter Hall in London, has had a powerful effect on our newspapers and politicians. It has closed the mouths of those who have been advocating the side of the South. Recognition of the South,
by England, whilst it bases itself on Negro slavery, is an impossibility.”
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Cobden was not entirely correct. Not all mouths remained closed. Many
Britons could never quite bring themselves to admire the United States or to favour Union victory—which was not necessarily the same thing as supporting the South. Nevertheless, when that Northern victory finally came at Appomattox, a Tory MP remarked sourly to an American acquaintance that he considered Union success a misfortune. I had indulged the hope that your country might breakup into two or perhaps more fragments,”
he said. I regard the United States as a menace to the whole civilised world.”
Another Tory spelled out the menace as the beginning of an Americanising process in England. The new Democratic ideas are gradually to find embodiment.”
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The British public paid more attention to the American Civil War than did the people of any other European country. We know less about conservative attitudes toward the Civil War in other countries. What we do know,
however, is that royalists in the early years of the war expressed satisfaction with the apparent failure of democracy. In 1862, the Spanish journal
Pensamiento Español found it not surprising that Americans were butchering each other, for that nation was populated by the dregs of all the nations of the world . . . Such is the real history of the one and only state in the world which has succeeded in constituting itself according to the flaming theories of democracy. The example is too horrible to stir any desire for emulation In France the policy of Napoleon III leaned toward the
Confederacy. The French republican Edgar Quinet exaggerated only slightly
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when he wrote from exile in Switzerland in 1862 that Napoleon’s purpose was to weaken or destroy Democracy in the United States . . . because in order for Napoleonic ideas to succeed, it is absolutely indispensable that this vast republic disappear from the face of the earth.”
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Whether or not Napoleon thought he could destroy republicanism in the
United States, he did try to do so in Mexico. That country experienced its own civil war in the s between a reactionary alliance of the church with large landowners and followers of the republican Benito Juárez. Under the pretext of collecting debts owed to the French citizens, Napoleon sent an army of 35,000 men to Mexico to overthrow Juárez. Napoleon collaborated with his fellow emperor Franz Joseph of Austria to establish Franz
Joseph’s younger brother Ferdinand Maximilian as emperor of Mexico,
thereby reclaiming at least part of the vast Spanish domain once ruled by the Hapsburgs. King Leopold of Belgium, Maximilian’s father-in-law, had an additional purpose in mind. Describing the Lincoln administration as characterised by the most rank Radicalism Leopold feared that if the
North own the war,“America, in collaboration with Europe’s revolutionaries,
might undermine the very basis of the traditional social order of Europe.”
Therefore he backed the installation of Maximilian on the throne of Mexico into raise a barrier against the United States and provide a support for the monarchical-aristocratic principle in the Southern states.”
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In contrast to these emperors in central and western Europe, Czar
Alexander, the most absolutist of all, proved to be the Union’s steadfast friend. This strange-bedfellow relationship was one of pragmatic self- interest the Russian interest in a strong United States as a counterweight to Britain, and American dependence on Russia as a counterweight to British and French flirtation with recognition of the Confederacy in The following year the Russian fleet visited American ports, staying for months, ostensibly as a goodwill gesture but in reality to escape being bottled up in their home ports by the Royal Navy during a period of tension over
Russian suppression of an uprising in Poland.
Although Russian policy supported the Union, the Czar’s minister to the
United States, Edouard de Stoeckl, privately believed the Northern cause hopeless. Stoeckl considered himself an aristocrat and like to be addressed as Baron though he had no title of nobility. He disliked democracy and regarded the Civil War as proof of its failure. In his dispatches to the
Russian foreign minister, Prince Alexander Gorchakov, Stoeckl wrote with apparent satisfaction that the republican form of government, so much talked about by the Europeans and so much praised by the Americans, is breaking down. What can be expected from a country where men of humble origin are elevated to the highest positions He meant Lincoln, whom
Stoeckl held in low regard. This is democracy in practice, the democracy that European theorists rave about he continued. If they could only see it
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at work they would cease their agitation and thank God for the government which they are enjoying.”
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Those theorists that Stoeckl sneered at—European liberals and radicals—
experienced many moments of doubt and discouragement during the war, moments when it seemed that Union defeat may well bring about the failure of a society they had, in the words of a French republican, held up as defenders of right and humanity When the Union finally triumphed,
they breathed a sigh of relief, even of exultation. The Italian republican
Guiseppe Mazzini blessed the Northern people, who have done more for us in four years than fifty years of teaching, preaching and writing from all your European brothers have been able to do None other than Karl Marx,
who had followed the American war with great attention, declared that as in the eighteenth century the American war of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century, the
American Civil War sounded it for the working class.”
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Even Baron Edouard de Stoeckl experienced a conversion of sorts.
Democracy was still not to his taste, but he ate humble pie and paid a handsome tribute to the nation whose victory he had doubted until the fall of Richmond. By an irresistible strength of the nation at large he wrote to Prince Gorchakov, this exceptional people has given the lie to all predictions and calculations including his own. They have passed through one of the greatest revolutions of a century . . . and they have come out of it with their resources unexhausted, their energy renewed . . . and the prestige of their power greater than ever.”
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This triumph encouraged reformers in Britain who wanted to expand voting rights there. For almost four years, said Edward Beesly, a liberal professor of political economy at University College London, they had endured the taunts of Tories who gloated about the immortal smash of
American democracy. They insisted on our watching what they called its breakdown. They told us that it was forever discredited in England. Well,
we accepted the challenge. We staked our hopes boldly on the result . . Under a strain such as no aristocracy, no monarchy, no empire could have supported, Republican institutions have stood firm. It is we, now, who call upon the privileged classes to mark the result . . . Avast impetus has been given to Republican sentiments in England.”
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Queen Victoria was in no danger of being toppled from her throne because of the outcome of the American Civil War. But a two-year debate in Parliament, in which the American example figured prominently, led to enactment of the Reform Bill of 1867, which nearly doubled the eligible electorate and enfranchised a large part of the British working class for the first time. This expansion of the suffrage would undoubtedly have come sooner or later in any case, but perhaps later rather than sooner if the North had lost the war, thereby confirming Tory opinions of democracy.
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If progress toward democracy in Britain was, perhaps, an indirect consequence of the American Civil War, the triumph of Benito Juárez and republicanism in Mexico was inconsiderable part a direct result. The United
States sent 50,000 veteran soldiers to Texas after Appomattox. None too subtly, Secretary of State Seward pressed the French to pull their troops out of Mexico. Napoleon did so in 1866, whereupon the republican forces under Juárez regained control of the country, captured Maximilian, and executed him in 1867. Three years later Napoleon himself lost the throne,
and event attributed by the historian of his republican opposition in part to the example of triumphant republicanism in the United States five years earlier.
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This is pushing things too far France’s third republic was born of French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, not Union victory in the American Civil
War. But perhaps it was more than coincidence that within five years of that Union victory, the forces of change had expanded the suffrage in
Britain and toppled emperors in Mexico and France. It was also more than coincidence that after the abolition of slavery in the United States, the abolitionist forces in the two remaining slave societies in the Western
Hemisphere, Brazil and Cuba, stepped up their campaigns for emancipation,
which culminated in success two decades later. In 1871, referring to Brazil’s commitment to the first steps toward abolition, an emancipationist in that country rejoiced to see Brazil receive so quickly the moral of the Civil War in the United States.”
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Lincoln would have been pleased if he had lived to witness the impact abroad of Union victory. Although he was not a vindictive man—quite the contrary—he would have enjoyed quiet pleasure in knowing that the outcome, in the words of Peter Parish, came as a considerable surprise to those who had seen in secession final proof of the fatal weakness of
American federalism and democracy Lincoln, noted Parish,“showed a truly remarkable understanding of the cosmic significance of the Civil War.
But even he might not have anticipated Parish’s conclusion that if the war had ended in the achievement of Southern independence, and a permanent division of the once United States, the balance of world power and the shape of world politics in the twentieth century would obviously have been completely different.
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Perhaps we would today all bespeaking German.
Notes
1.
Peter J. Parish, The American Civil War (New York, 1975), pp. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner, eds, Inside Lincoln’s White House The Complete

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