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

Ambivalent Nation: How Britain Imagined the American Civil War has a clever title that operates on two analytical levels throughout the book. Hugh Dubrulle’s close yet wide-ranging examination of British attitudes toward the American Civil War, as expressed in newspapers, magazines, published memoirs, travel accounts, and personal correspondence, reveals deep British ambivalence about the United States as an ambivalent nation in the throes of an identity crisis. But focusing only on British attitudes toward the United States during the Civil War does not explain how these perspectives came into being or why they were expressed in particular common tropes. Employing theoretical insights from postcolonial studies, Dubrulle argues that Britons’ understanding of America was still firmly rooted in imperial frameworks of economic and cultural entanglements of ex-colonizer and colonized. He contends that Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, first published and translated in 1835, was the touchstone for British attitudes toward America and set the stage for subsequent debates for generations. The book draws on authors as diverse as Fanny Kemble and Charles Dickens, as well as a number of prominent political figures and newspaper journalists. The diversity of the sources underscores the power of Dubrulle’s argument regarding persistent themes in the British imagination toward the United States in general and the Civil War in particular.

Dubrulle demonstrates that Britons persisted in their self-perception as America’s mother country, using the metaphor of kinship. Paternal criticisms about America’s immaturity in the antebellum period were reinforced and amplified during the Civil War. The aftermath of the war finally brought a slow recognition of kindred adulthood and maturity. Consistent throughout the period was Britain’s ambivalent recognition of its American offspring’s potential to make its mark on the future of the world. Passionate parental criticism about the unique characters of Britons’ diverse colonial children or stepchildren was expressed in the stereotypes of Yankee, Westerner, and Southerner. Dubrulle is subtle in his handling of the varieties of characteristics ascribed to these regional stereotypes, which were employed by a wide range of authors publishing in a variety of media. Britons’ disagreements over moral judgments of Americans reflected divisions within their own rapidly changing society. The vast expansion of print media—from penny dailies to establishment newspapers and magazines—allowed for the proliferation of a multitude of public opinions all vying for a share of the increasingly literate mass market of readers.

British commentators were not united by class in their opinions. Elite commentators demonstrated their ambivalence toward America and social change in Britain through these American regional cultural stereotypes. Yankeedom was defined as democratic bourgeois mediocrity, mendacity, and vulgarity that simultaneously produced a vitality for conquest and expansion. White southerners’ chivalry was approvingly perceived by some elite Britons as aristocratic refinement and totally rejected by others as a grotesque mask covering the brutality of slavery. Both these opinions reflected a critique of class at home. Westerners, described as barely civilized frontiersmen, were admired as noble savages or admonished as dangerous criminals living beyond the control of the state. Not surprisingly, Britons perceived the Civil War as a battle between the northern Yankee bourgeois democracy and southern slaveholding aristocratic oligarchy. But Dubrulle’s sources demonstrate that this representation of a civilizational struggle also provided the backdrop for reflection on changes in Britain and its empire.

The book is arranged both chronologically and thematically from the antebellum period to the conclusion of the Civil War. The chapters cover the formation of British attitudes toward the war and focus on the issues of race, society and politics, military significance, and forms of nationalism. Dubrulle’s fascinating exploration of multiple British discourses regarding the American Civil War skews toward elite opinion and the articulation of official polities, despite the broad array of sources consulted. Ambivalent Nation also provides a fascinating...