Ambivalent Nation: How Britain Imagined the American Civil War by Hugh Dubrulle (review)

The study of British responses to the American Civil War is a well-ploughed, but far from exhausted, field. Hugh Dubrulle seeks to move in a new direction and provides a substantial contribution in Ambivalent Nation. He builds on the work of numerous others in a lengthy historiography that, in spite of its voluminous nature, remains divided on many issues. Dubrulle separates the existing scholarship into two camps. The “traditional” interpretation captures the emotional, passionate British response. Richard J. Blackett is credited with providing the most impressive and nuanced examination of support for each side in Great Britain during the war, although Dubrulle notes that Blackett’s Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (2001) “still expresses the tendency of this tradition to divide Britons into partisans of one belligerent or the other” (2). “Revisionists,” by contrast, do not find sustained support for either the Confederacy or the Union but present a fluid response set within the political goal of remaining neutral. This pragmatic interpretation of realpolitik, epitomized by D. P. Crook’s The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861–1865 (1974), reflects public ambivalence toward the war but “has drained all the passion out of British opinion,” Dubrulle maintains. Instead, “a true estimate of British opinion cannot dwell exclusively on who believed what; rather, it must also expend some effort in studying how Britons believed” (3). It might reasonably be assumed that Ambivalent Nation primarily engages in discourse analysis, then, but importantly a careful eye is kept throughout on the historiographical agenda. Key issues of who supported whom, when, and why are discussed, although they are not the driving questions. Dubrulle’s lively analysis succeeds in putting the traditional and revisionist viewpoints in conversation with one another, as it was “passionate ambivalence that characterized British attitudes” (71).

In trying to find a new framework from which to interpret British responses to the war, Dubrulle advocates a postcolonial perspective. He briefly summarizes the advantages of this approach, which allows for a long view of Anglo-American relations, rather than an episodic focus that privileges moments of conflict. Britons felt a close affinity with the United States in spite of the violent history between the two countries, but they struggled to pin down the evolving nature of the Anglo-American relationship. They were fascinated and appalled, in roughly equal measure, by the United States as it grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, and they followed political and sectional developments with considerable interest. British observers took “a position of superiority and authority when it came to discussing all things American. This position allowed them to judge, instruct, and correct the United States with the intent of guiding American development according to British norms” (5). This stance was taken on most international questions, whether they concerned former colonies or not, as the imperial concept of the civilizing mission was strong. However, Dubrulle contends further that Britons not only acted like a parent toward a child, but they also regarded the United States as their nation’s “Other.” This basic insight is familiar to anyone who works on Anglo-American issues, but it is developed to its fullest extent in Ambivalent Nation. The book is at its best in analyzing the ways in which the United States and its war informed British discussion of diplomatic, political (particularly the thorny question of democratic reform), economic, social, and military issues.

Ambivalent Nation painstakingly re-creates the views of a multitude of prominent figures. Even scholars well versed in Victorian society and politics will learn much that is new about the ways in which the war focused British thoughts toward the United States and its quarreling sections that, in turn, prompted considerable self-reflection. In a book based on substantial research in published and unpublished sources, Dubrulle makes good use of and has much to say about the British cabinet (notably Lord Palmerston, William Gladstone, William Howard Russell...