GDG- Re: Defeat of AoP, Recognition by Britain

[Richard M Kadas]

Michael Davidson <mldavidson at verizon.net> wrote:    Esteemed GDG Member Contributes:
Margaretl and Michael,
  I only enter this thread to support your assessment of the British, both government and public's ability to suffer abominations done in the name of Empire. As evidence I offer Britains involvement in two opium wars (circa 1830-60) in which they forced China to allow the importation of opium by British merchants, and also managed to steal Hong Kong. 
  Dick
I think we're in substantial agreement.

Your points are very well taken. I knew the extent of damage prohibition of the slave trade
caused to the sourthern economy, but I never considered the similar effect to the economy
of GB. And I can just see the MPs rising to express their moral outrage at the Trent Affair. 

I also realize, as Lincoln must have, that GB was not in position to enter a global war at that time.
But taking GB as an empire, I remain skeptical that moral outrage is the final explanation.
Empires have no emotions (though I do believe empires can advance an inherent morality. I'm not a cultural relativist and I do tend to like British values.). So the
outrage could have been both genuine and feigned.

In 1812, America had its own dreams of empire, which underlay the decision to go to war with GB a second time. The impressment of sailors was a convenient excuse,
although the outrage was genuine then, too.

In the 1860s there was little risk that the Lincoln administration would go to war with GB while engaged in its own civil war. Thus British sabre rattling at the Trent episode
carried low risk and the possibility of high returns.

And the South's confidence that Cotton was King was not realistic. That did not prevent it from being expected.

The bottom line is, GB let it be understood it might support the CSA, for whatever its own
advantage. The CSA, or at least Davis, Lee, and others in position to set policy, held to this hope, and acted as if it were a real possibility.

Is that a fair assessment?

Regards,

Michael Davidson

esteemed member wrote:
>>
I doubt even the most fervent fire-eaters expected the UK to support them for ideological
reasons. What they believed, as an article of faith, was that English cotton mills were so
dependent upon slave state cotton that Her Majesty's government. James Henry
Hammond said in his infamous "King Cotton" speech in 1858 in the US Senate:

>>Why the South has never yet had a just cause of war except with the North. Every
time she has drawn her sword it has been on the point of honor, and that point of honor
has been mainly loyalty to her sister colonies and sister States, who have ever since
plundered and calumniated her.

But if there were no other reason why we should never have war, would any sane
nation make war on cotton? Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they
make war on us we could bring the whole world to our feet. The South is perfectly
competent to go on, one, two, or three years without planting a seed of cotton. I believe
that if she was to plant but half her cotton, for three years to come, it would be an
immense advantage to her. I am not so sure but that after three years' entire abstinence
she would come out stronger than ever she was before, and better prepared to enter
afresh upon her great career of enterprise. What would happen if no cotton was
furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what every one can imagine, but this
is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her,
save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make
war upon it. Cotton is king. Until lately the Bank of England was king; but she tried to
put her screws as usual, the fall before last, upon the cotton crop, and was utterly
vanquished. The last power has been conquered. Who can doubt, that has looked at
recent events, that cotton is supreme? When the abuse of credit had destroyed credit
and annihilated confidence; when thousands of the strongest commercial houses in the
world were coming down, and hundreds of millions of dollars of supposed property
evaporating in thin air; when you came to a dead lock, and revolutions were threatened,
what brought you up? Fortunately for you it was the commencement of the cotton
season, and we have poured in upon you one million six hundred thousand bales of
cotton just at the crisis to save you from destruction. That cotton, but for the bursting of
your speculative bubbles in the North, which produced the whole of this convulsion,
would have brought us $100,000,000. We have sold it for $65,000,000 and saved you.
Thirty-five million dollars we, the slave holders of the South, have put into the charity
box for your magnificent financiers, your "cotton lords," your "merchant princes."

As it turns out, they seriously overestimated English dependency on southern cotton.
Furthermore, if they had studied, with any degree of objectivity, the Parliamentary
history of, first, the abolition of the slave trade and later abolition of slavery itself in
British possessions, they should have realized that the UK did this at a significant
financial disadvantage to itself. Not only had the UK come to dominate the slave trade
(there were Royal investors in the Royal Africa Company) but a substantial portion of the
British economy derived its income from servicing the slave trade, even when conducted
under other flags, through, among these services, building and outfitting ships and
supply trade textiles and other items to be traded for slaves in Africa. This was the
reason that the fight to ban the slave trade took so long and was so bitter. Once it
happened, the UK put muscle into the ban with the use of Royal Navy ships to interfere
with the transatlantic ships.

On the Trent, I think the British outrage was genuine. When the tables were turned, the
US was willing to go to war in 1812 in significant part due to such actions by the Royal
Navy. At the time of the Trent action, British belief in its naval supremacy was a core
element of its national identity. The naval officer's action in the Trent affair was seen as
a egregious affront to British honor, sovereignty, and dominion over the high seas.
Coming from its former colonies added insult to injury. Fortunately, cooler heads,
especially Lincoln's on the US and the Prince Consort in one of his last acts of service to
his adopted country, prevailed and arrived at a solution which allowed both nations to
back down honorably and prevent another such crisis from occurring.

I think another thing that never seemed to occur to the secessionists was that the UK had
other concerns that were much more important to it than the fate of the United States.
The US Civil War began only five years after the Crimean War ended and only 9 years
before the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War and the rise of Germany. The period
was an extremely turbulent one (at one point there were those who blamed the
premature birth of Prince Albert Victor on the anguish of his mother, the Danish-born
Princess of Wales over war between Prussia and Denmark making royal family relations
very awkward since the Prince of Wales' older sister, Victoria, the Princess Royal, was
married to the heir to the Prussian throne). The British government had no intention of
getting bogged down in a land war in America, although it was quite willing to exploit
the situation if it could do so without much risk to itself.
<<



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