King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (review)

436CIVIL WAR HISTORY The delightful bit of Confederate verse quoted by the author probably summarizes the Battle of NashviUe, as weU as Hood's chances for the big campaign , about as weU as any müitary analyst could ever hope to: So now we're going to leaveyou, Our hearts are full of woe; We're going back to Georgia To see our Uncle Joe. You maytalk aboutyour Beauregard And sing of General Lee, But the gallant Hood of Texas Played heU in Tennessee. WmLIAM E. HlGHSMTTH JacksonviUe, Florida. King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America. By Frank Lawrence Owsley. 2nd edition. Revised by Harriet Chappell Owsley. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1959. Pp. xxiii, 614. $10.00.) SCHOLARS IMMEDIATELY ACCEPTED THE FIRST EDITION of this book as a basic study in the history of Civil War diplomacy when it appeared in 1931. It went out of print in 1954, but Mr. Owsley decided to write a diplomatic history of the United States during the Civil War rather than to republish King Cotton Diplomacy. He was laboring on this larger project at the time of his death in 1956. Always closely associated with her husband's work, Harriet ChappeU Owsley continued the research for the larger study, but the pressure of her duties in the Tennessee State Library and Archives forced her to suspend it in favor of revising the 1931 edition. William C. Binkley, a coUeague of Mr. Owsley at Vanderbüt, has contributed a memorial foreword to this revision . In eight pages Mr. Binkley has given us a sober and perceptive picture of one of the major historians of the last generation in his various roles of writer, southern sectionalist, and graduate adviser. As Mr. Binkley suggests, Mr. Owsley 's other books, State Rights in the Confederacy and Phin Folk of the Old South, made "significant contributions toward the restudy and rewriting of some important aspects of southern history." He could without exaggeration also have argued that the research summarized in Phin Folk had important implications for American agricultural history and liistorical method generaUy. Mrs. Owsley has not revised the major outlines of the book. In research in England, France, and Wasliington after her husband's death, she found the ideas of the first edition "completely sustained." Unmodified is the author's contention that Confederate foreign policy was based through the early years of the Civil War on the assumption that southern cotton supplies were essential to both England and France. Unchanged too are his minor theses: that Great Britain, waxing fat on war profits, faüed to intervene because of fear of war with the United States and from the conviction that the South would Book Reviews437 win independence anyway; that the action of the British government in halting the buüding of Confederate ships in British shipyards was unnecessary in light of international precedent and practice; that Confederate diplomacy should have been based from the beginning on emancipation; that the Union's blockpde was not effective and need not have been recognized by European countries; and that the Confederate government should have taken control of the supplies of southern cotton at an early stage of the conflict and used them to purchase the materials of war. In her revision, Mrs. Owsley has reduced the text by some twenty pages and eliminated one chapter heading. She has removed or compressed a number of iUustrative passages, reorganized some sections, sharpened the style somewhat and moderated the occasional inclination to unsopliisticated exuberance and high-flying metaphor which marked the first edition. Judah Benjamin is no longer "the Jew" and Isaac, CampbeU and Company are now "this firm," instead of "these Jews," although the tendency to make racial distinctions is stiU present to some degree. A quotation formerly credited to R. M. T. Hunter is now attributed to William M. Browne. OccasionaUy Mrs. Owsley has inserted new material but no major re-evaluation of men or events have resulted. Most extensively rewritten is the chapter entitled "The Troubled Waters of Mexico." Mrs. Owsley has brought the bibliography up to date, but she has not included the articles by EU Ginzberg and Martin P. Clausen on...