A history of England

by Charles Oman

Palmerston returns to power.

Long ere the Italian war was over, Lord Derby's Conservative government had been defeated, and had retired from office. Palmerston's doings of 1858 had quickly been forgiven and forgotten by the nation, and he returned to office, which he held till his death six years later.

The American civil war.

It was well that his strong and practised hand should be at the helm, for the years 1860-65 were full of delicate problems of foreign policy, which more than once brought England within measurable distance of war. A most formidable difficulty cropped up when the great civil war across the Atlantic broke out in 1861. The Southern States seceded from the Union, and proclaimed themselves independent under the name of the Confederate States of America. Their avowed reason for separating themselves from the North was that the Federal government, under Northern control, was infringing the rights of the individual States to self-government. But old sectional jealousies, and especially the fear of the Southern planters that the Northerners would interfere with their "great domestic institution," negro slavery, were really at the bottom of the quarrel.

Attitude of England.—Seizure of the "Trent."

English opinion was much divided on the subject of the American civil war. It was urged, on the one hand, that the North were fighting for the cause of liberty against slavery; and this idea affected many earnest-minded men to the exclusion of any other consideration. On the other side, it was urged that the Southern States were exercising an undoubted constitutional right in severing themselves from the Union, and this was true enough in itself. It was certain that the Southerners, who wished for Free Trade, were likely to be better friends of England than the protectionist North, which had always shown a bitter jealousy of English commerce. Many men were moved by the rather unworthy consideration that America was growing so strong and populous that she might one day become "the bully of the world," and welcomed a convulsion that threatened to split the Union into two hostile halves. Others illogically sympathized with the South merely because it was the weaker side, or because they thought the Southern planters better men than the hard and astute traders of the North. The Palmerston cabinet, with great wisdom, tried to steer a middle course and to avoid all interference. But when eleven powerful States joined in seceding, they thought themselves bound to recognize them as a belligerent power, and to treat them as a nation. This gave bitter offence to the North, and war nearly followed, for a United States cruiser in 1862 stopped the British steamer Trent, and took from her by force two envoys whom the Confederates were sending to Europe. This flagrant violation of the law of nations roused Lord Palmerston to vigorous action: he began sending troops to Canada, and demanded the restoration of the envoys Mason and Slidell under pain of war. President Lincoln and his advisers hesitated for a moment, but gave up their prisoners with a bad grace just as war seemed inevitable. Naturally this incident did not make the English people love the North any better.

The Alabama.

Another cause of friction was destined to give trouble long after the civil war had ended. The United States ambassador in London summoned the English government to prevent the sailing from Liverpool of a vessel called the Alabama, which, as he declared, had been bought by the Confederates, and was destined to be used by them as a war-ship. The cabinet were somewhat slow in ordering the detention of the Alabama, which hurriedly put to sea, and justified the fears of the American minister by seizing and burning many scores of Northern vessels. This damage to commerce was charged to the account of England by the government of President Lincoln, and probably they had some ground for accusing the English officials of slackness. The grudge was carefully nursed in America, and put to good use when the war was over.

The cotton famine.

But the most painful form in which the American quarrel affected England was the dreadful cotton famine in Lancashire, which set in as the year 1862 wore on. The English mills had always subsisted on the cotton of the Southern States, and when the strict blockade instituted by the Northerners sealed up New Orleans, Charleston, and the other cotton ports, England suffered terribly for the want of raw material to keep her mills going. The mill-hands bore the stoppage of their work and wages with great courage and resignation, but they lived for months on the verge of starvation. A disaster as great as the Irish potato famine of 1846 was only prevented by lavish private charity, which sent £2,000,000 to the distressed districts of Lancashire, supplemented by the wise measures of the Government, who worked so well that hardly a life was lost in spite of the pinching poverty of the times. Cotton was at last brought from Egypt and India in quantities sufficient to set the mills going again, and by 1863 the worst of the trouble was over. In 1865 the Southern States were conquered, and the American cotton once more came in.