American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863 by Peter O'Connor (review)

American Sectionalism in the British Mind strives to bridge a newer historiography that has been globalizing the American Civil War and an older historiography concerned with Anglo–American relations in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Peter O'Connor insists that we cannot understand British responses to the American Civil War without properly considering a longer history of Anglo–American relations. Why, for instance, did certain antislavery British liberals come to favor the Confederacy over the Union? How does one explain such counterintuitive political alignments? For that matter, how does one explain general British ambivalence about the outbreak of the American Civil War, on its surface a starkly delineated conflict? Arguing that it is not enough to start historical analysis with the onset of the American Civil War itself, O'Connor instead begins his investigation in the 1830s utilizing British cultural commentary about American life in the form of firsthand travel narratives.

Such travel narratives blossomed in the 1830s and continued to flourish in the ensuing decades, even during the American Civil War itself. O'Connor devotes three chapters to analyzing travel narratives from several angles. Chapter 1 covers race and slavery, while Chapter 2 focuses on ethnicity, and Chapter 3 examines American sectionalism with respect to economic and political differences. This is how the sources have spoken to O'Connor, who discerns a broad and sustained historical pattern in this cultural commentary. At bottom, British cultural commentators tended to be somewhat sympathetic with certain elements they supposed characterized the South: its paternalism toward enslaved blacks, its ethnic homogeneity and Britishness, its free-trade preferences, and its aversion to democracy. At the same time, they tended to be unsympathetic with certain supposed elements perceived in the North, especially the Mid-Atlantic region between New York City and Philadelphia: its racism toward free blacks, its ethnic heterogeneity harboring the Catholic Irish, its protectionist preferences, and its allowance of anarchic mobs and scurrilous press.

O'Connor is keen to emphasize that British cultural commentators did not closely associate the North with abolitionism and did not solely associate the South with slavery. British interpretation of American sectionalism proved more complex, concerned not only with race and slavery but also with ethnicity, economics, and politics. The baseline lesson drawn by British cultural commentators seemed that American culture was disunited not just by slavery, but in multiple ways. Furthermore, when British travelers extended their gaze beyond slavery, they often registered more affinities with southern culture praised for its Anglophilia than with northern culture condemned for its Anglophobia.

These patterns were generally true of British travelers in the 1830s, the 1840s, and the 1850s, and they would remain true of British cultural commentators in 1861 and 1862—the subjects of Chapters 4 and 5. O'Connor devotes an individual chapter to each year to stress continuity between the antebellum decades and the initial years of the American Civil War itself, when British cultural commentators sustained their habitual ambivalence about the South as well as their habitual distaste for the North.

In the end this would change. The key historical pivot, according to O'Connor, was the Emancipation Proclamation in late 1862. This established the North's antislavery bona fides, and prompted a prevailing British public preference for the North, even if it did not alter official British neutrality. Lacking recognized nation–state status, the rebellious South paid a higher geopolitical price for British neutrality than did the North.

Altogether, O'Connor's book is something of a long tracking shot of British ambivalence about American sectionalism before and into the Civil War. O'Connor provides ample evidence for his main historical argument with close textual analysis tracing British ambivalence toward American sectionalism. Of course, O'Connor is not the first historian to note that unexpected ambivalence, but he pulls the historical question out of high-level Anglo...