Great Britain and the Confederate Navy 1861-1865 (review)

book reviews179 Ohio constitutional convention singled out by both the author and contemporaries for special notice as softs were from, respectively, a "very strong Democratic" county which was the poorest in the state, a "strong Democratic," a "neutral" and a "strong Whig" county. While single instances do not a generalization unmake, they should call into serious question the conclusion that "the soft-money Democrats, in many cases, were Whigs who just happened to be Democrats" (p. 325), and should prompt a more serious study of the role of party leadership and its relation to popular voting patterns, especially among the soft-money Democrats . This otherwise excellent book will provide the basis for those future investigations. David E. Meerse State University of New York at Fredonia Great Britain and the Confederate Navy 1861-1865. By Frank J. Merli. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. Pp. xvi, 342. $7.50.) Of all the "iffy" questions about the Civil War, perhaps the most intriguing is: What would have happened if Great Britain, "acting out of malice or self-interest, or perhaps sheer bureaucratic inefficiency," had allowed the Confederacy to construct naval vessels in British yards and get them to sea in sufficient numbers where they could destroy northern trade, "break President Abraham Lincoln's blockade, and give the Southern army access to almost unlimited war material?" (p. 3) Would such developments have assured southern independence? Although Professor E. D. Adams explored these and other questions in his classic Great Britain and the American Civil War (1925), new manuscript sources and a vast outpouring of scholarly literature have appeared in the last forty years. Stuart Bernath, Philip Van Doren Stern, Martin Duberman, Glyndon Van Deusen, Lynn Case, and Warren Spencer have all published books dealing with the international dimensions of the Civil War within the past decade. A worthy addition to this literature h Frank J. Merli's massively researched and colorfully written study of the South's attempts to build a navy in England. In keeping with his title, Merli focuses on England and the South—on the efforts of Mallory and Bulloch to procure ships, and the reaction of Queen Victoria's government to these efforts. While he does not neglect northern diplomacy (Merli is particularly good on Charles Francis Adams and there is an excellent discussion of the Trent affair), his analysis of Confederate and British policies is more incisive. For example, Merli does an expert job unraveling the legal complexities of the Foreign Enlistment Act in his treatment of the Akbama and Alexandria cases, and he shows conclusively how the precarious equilibrium in Parliament served to dissuade Palmerston and Russell from any attempt to change England's neutrality laws. Equally well done are the blow-byblow accounts of how each Confederate raider or ram was contracted 180CIVIL WAR HISTORY for, designed, financed, constructed, and eventually spirited out to sea. The discussion of Confederate activity in Clydeside shipyards is enriched by use of the records of Alexander Stephen and Company of Glasgow. While praising the individual efforts of Bulloch, Mallory, and Maury, Merli is not uncritical of overall Confederate strategy. He argues that the policy of building rams should have commenced sooner, that faulty financial policy retarded construction for almost a year, and (in an illuminating chapter) that earlier use of government-owned blockade runners might have produced decisive results. Merli's best chapter deals with the Laird Rams, those innocuous-looking but much feared vessels building at Birkenhead. Here, as in other parts of the book, he takes care not to exaggerate the importance of his subject. In discussing the British decision to seize the ironclads, he contends that Adams's famous "superfluous" note of September 5, 1863 ("It would be superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war.") did not actually threaten war. According to Merli, "when read in its entirety, "by its four comers/ as the lawyers say, the note indicates that Adams did not intend his remarks as a threat. Had he substituted 'unneutral act' in place of 'war' the note would have attracted much less attention from historians." (p. 201) In an interesting epilogue, the author also shows—by tracing the post...