Perceptions of America and British Reform during the 1860s

A notable recent trend in the scholarly study of the American Civil War and Reconstruction has been the furtherance of a "transnational" agenda. The present article seeks to add to the international perspectives that have been brought to bear on this pivotal period by concerning itself with interactions—specifically, how the Civil War and Reconstruction related to and shaped reform politics in Britain. What follows is an examination of Anglo-American contact at the level of political ideas, practices, aspirations, and structures. There were similarities and differences between Britain and America, mutual respect but also tension and suspicion. The relationship was complicated. Some light is shed by Thomas Perronet Thompson (1783-1869), an important figure in British reform and, like most of his associates, a keen observer of American affairs. Thompson's activities make it possible to discern broader currents of thought in Britain during the 1860s, a time of potent and meaningful interconnection between developments on either side of the Atlantic. The Civil War and Reconstruction had wide effects and prompted some telling reevaluations in British reform politics.

British political culture rested on liberalism—interlinking concepts of freedom, rights, and opportunity that were, in general, positive, generous, and uplifting in motivation. In his study of "liberal government" in Victorian Britain, Jonathan Parry identifies three core goals: to harmonize different interests in society, strengthen the people's attachment to the political and legal system, and shape individual character constructively.¹ The vehicle was the Liberal Party, a coalition of groups (reform-minded, but with varying levels of commitment to reform) that came together during the 1850s and 1860s.

Pro-reform groups had to operate in a political environment that was changing quickly, although in some respects it was also resistant to change. Opinions about democracy were divergent and complex, and there was the prospect of class-based politics as industrialization and urbanization proceeded apace, but there was no linear transition to democracy in Victorian Britain, notwithstanding the enlargement of the electorate in 1832, 1867, and 1884. Indeed, there were ways in which politics became less participatory.² Political reform had an uneven impact and it would be wrong to exaggerate the speed and extent of change.³

Historians disagree about the results of reform and about the nature and timing of the formation of organized national parties and rise of class-based politics. The Liberal Party won popular support because it provided workers with a more meaningful collective consciousness than that provided by "class." The party's program of "liberty, retrenchment, and reform" accorded with workers' traditions, political awareness, and social and economic hopes. Most did not think of themselves as a class but as "the people," and it was to an active and participatory public that dignity and opportunity were offered by the charismatic Liberal leader William Gladstone, who had four spells as prime minister, beginning in 1868.⁴ But the relationship between parties and those they claimed to represent was far from straightforward. Jon Lawrence contends that class and party are less helpful categorizations than place. People were most likely to be satisfied with their representation, he thinks, when their Member of Parliament and party activists lived in the local community and understood local needs.⁵ Defining "class" and "place" is no easy task, especially on this side of the "linguistic turn" that began dramatically to affect the historiography of British reform during the 1980s. Lawrence's approach combines an examination of class and place as material realities with the recognition that they could also be discursive creations shaped by political argument and conduct. Devotees of the linguistic turn deny the usefulness (and even possibility) of this combination, preferring to emphasize the constructed nature of identities at the expense of their material contexts.

These considerations have affected analyses of nineteenth-century British radicalism, the commitment to thorough as opposed to merely superficial or cosmetic change in state and society. Plebeian forms of radicalism tended to go further in ideology and tactics than more moderate, "respectable," and self-consciously middle-class types, but whatever their backgrounds and loyalties, most radicals...