Sumantra Maitra
The British debate about an intervention in the American Civil War is fascinating because it skewers every political theory one might be attached to. Consider, for example, that the hero of liberalism, William Gladstone, was interested in supporting the Confederacy and thought southern independence was a foregone conclusion. Charles Dickens, seeing the Lancashire Cotton Famine, was convinced that the war was primarily due to Northern protectionism, a sentiment also somewhat shared by the Economist, which argued (bizarrely, one might add) that the Union victory would continue the institution of slavery, something most British citizens opposed. Incidentally, the people who shared both kinship and class with the landed gentry of the South were the British aristocracy and Tory landowners back in England; most of them had sympathies for their cousins. Robert E. Lee was considered the last true Englishman in America.
But they were also opposed to any foreign wars and intervention. The New York Times, explaining Lord Palmerston’s neutrality, wrote, “England having no control over the domestic politics of other nations can acknowledge whatever form of Government they please to set up. To refuse to do so, would involve her in endless wars, and ruinous commercial embarrassments.”
Ultimately, with the start of the war, Great Britain did what classical Tory realpolitik dictated: a “declaration of neutrality” in the American Civil War, which immediately bestowed the status of equal belligerents between the Union and the Confederacy while withholding recognized nationhood on the south. This allowed individual Englishmen to take sides in a private capacity with whichever cause they favored, including those who refused to serve Confederates for their association to slavery, and those who ran blockades smuggling goods in and out of the Southern ports blockaded by Union troops. It was a policy which disappointed both sides in the civil war. It was also a perfect strategy.