In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • American Sectionalism in the British Mind: 1832–1863 by Peter O'Connor
  • Angela F. Murphy
American Sectionalism in the British Mind: 1832–1863. Peter O'Connor.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8071-6815, 280 pp., cloth, $47.95.

Peter O'Connor contributes to the literature on how the British viewed the American Civil War by expanding the examination chronologically, situating British wartime views in earlier discussions of American sectionalism that date back to the 1830s. Other scholarly treatments of British opinion on the war primarily limit themselves to discussion of reactions of the 1860s, but O'Connor's analysis of British intellectual commentary on American sectionalism, political policy, and regional culture demonstrates the way antebellum views of the United States helped set the stage for the early ambivalent British reactions to the Civil War. O'Connor points out that only after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did many British [End Page 300] intellectuals express support for the Union cause. In fact, during the first years of war many liberal thinkers in Great Britain, most of whom held antislavery views, often criticized the North while expressing sympathy with the South. The driving question here is why this was so. The answer, O'Connor says, is that these liberal thinkers did not initially see the Civil War as a contest over slavery.

O'Connor's first three chapters are dedicated to proving this point. In them, he examines British intellectual discussions of American slavery, culture, and politics. In discussions of slavery, he emphasizes that many British thinkers condemned American slavery but did not necessarily condemn it as a Southern institution. They saw slavery as a national problem, and in discussions of sectional differences British writers often accepted Southern arguments that a paternalistic approach to slaveholding mitigated some of the institution's evils. Neither did they let the Northern states off the hook, pointing out the problem of Northern racism against African Americans. Thus, their antebellum discussions of slavery did not necessarily pit an immoral slaveholding South against a moral free North, and when the Civil War broke out this moral sectional division was not assumed.

Instead of presenting a sectionalism based on the presence or absence of slavery, O'Connor argues that British views of American differences focused on ethnocultural factors in three regions: the Northeast, the South, and the mid-Atlantic states. British writers judged these areas were judged on their comparative "Britishness" and sympathy toward Great Britain. By this standard, the Mid-Atlantic states fell short, as they were seen as under greater influence of immigrants, especially the Irish, who promoted Anglophobia among their neighbors. The free states of this region, therefore, were more problematic to many British thinkers than the Southern states which the British saw as more connected to their own values and culture.

Because many British thinkers adopted these understandings of American society, when they discussed the sectional political issues that emerged between the North and South during the decades before the Civil War they focused less on slavery than on other issues, like the tariff. The South, which adopted a stance that promoted free trade, seemed more in line with British liberalism. Many British thinkers were therefore inclined to accept the Southern states' rights arguments that emerged in reaction to the tariff issue as the central cause of the region's political disaffection from the North. O'Connor argues that this focus on the tariff also affected British views of the outbreak of the Civil War. Northern leaders did nothing to dissuade them from this view, as they hesitated to declare the war as one of emancipation. Some British writers thus accepted the idea that the Southern states had banded together in order to resist a tyrannical Federal government that ignored regional economic interests. It was only after Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 that these liberal thinkers viewed the war [End Page 301] as a moral crusade against slavery and came out more forcefully in praise of the Union cause and criticism of the Confederate.

O'Connor's book offers us a nuanced view of British opinion on the Civil War. It recognizes that a change took place...

pdf

Share