Abstract
President Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation after the battle of Antietam in September, 1862, produced an immediate outcry in the North. Surprisingly to modern readers, it was the Archbishop of New York, John Hughes, who warned Lincoln: “We Catholics … have not the slightest idea of carrying on a war that costs so much blood and treasure just to gratify a clique of Abolitionists in the North.” 1 But perhaps less well known, or understood, is the controversy that the Proclamation attracted abroad. Both Union and Confederate supporters in Britain tried to use it as a propaganda tool, and in the beginning at least, it was the Confederates who benefited the most. The reasons for this were laid down at the beginning of the war, when the British government was still pondering its response to the conflict. A poem in Punch , on March 30, 1861, neatly expressed Britain’s cotton dilemma:
Though with the North we sympathize,It must not be forgotten,That with the Southwe’ve stronger ties, Which are composed of cotton.
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Notes
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 507.
Wendy Hinde, Richard Cobden , (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 305. “As for the separation of the States,” Cobden wrote, “if I were a citizen of a free state, I should vote with both hands for a dissolution of partnership with the slave states.”
Worthington C. Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), I, Charles Francis Adams to Charles Francis Adams Jr., June 21, 1861, 13–15.
Mrs. Gaskell to Charles Elliot Norton, June 10, 1861, in J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, eds., The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 654–658.
Charles Darwin to Asa Gray, June 5, 1861, in Belle Becker Sideman, and Lillian Friedman, eds., Europe Looks at the Civil War (New York: Orion Press, 1960).
Quoted in Clare Taylor, Britain and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974), 407.
Wilding to Hawthorne, November 14, 1861, reproduced in Julian Hawthorne, ed., Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 2 vols. (Boston, MA: Osgood, 1884), II, 165–66.
Lord Russell told an audience in Newcastle on October 14, “I cannot help asking myself as affairs progress in the conflict, to what good can it lead?” According to The Times , Russell then warned his listeners that a moment might come when intervention in the American war would be inevitable. After all, the paper reported him saying, the war was not about slavery but about one side fighting for “empire, and the other for independence.” (In fact, Russell had said “power” rather than “independence,” which was less inflammatory. But someone at the paper had decided the phrase was too anodyne.) See Norman Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy 1861 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1976), 238; and Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams Jr., October 25, 1861, in
Worthing Chauncey Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters , 2 vols. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), I, 61–63.
Frederick William Maitland, ed., The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (London: Duckworth, 1906), 112.
Stephen B Oates, “Henry Hotze: Confederate Agent Abroad,” The Historian, 27 (February 1965): 134.
Wilbur D. Jones, “Blyden, Gladstone and the War,” Journal of Negro History 49 (January 1964): 58.
Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 232.
He added: “Lincoln has a certain moral dignity, but is intellectually inferior, & as men do not generally measure others correctly who are above their own caliber, he has chosen for his instruments mediocre men… I know the men at the head of affairs on both sides, & I should say that in energy of will, in comprehensiveness of view, in habits & power of command, & in knowledge of economical & fiscal questions, Jefferson Davis is more than equal to Lincoln & all his Cabinet.” Cobden to Bright, October 7, 1862, in Elizabeth Hoon Cawley, ed., The American Diaries of Richard Cobden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952) 75.
Virginia Mason, ed., The Public Life and Diplomatic Correspondence of James M Mason (Roanoke, VA: Neale Publishing, 1906), 387–392.
Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie, eds., The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), II: 1110 (entry January 21, 1863)
Philip Van Doren Stern, When the Guns Roared (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 177.
Brian Jenkins, Sir William Gregory of Coole: The Biography of an Anglo-Irishman (Gerrards Cross: C. Smythe, 1986), 154.
Chapple and Pollard, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell , 734 (Gaskell to Charles Elliot Norton, July 4, 1863).
Warren F. Spencer, The Confederate Navy in Europe (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 135–136.
Alan Hankinson, Man of War: William Howard Russell of The Times (London: Heinemann, 1982), 182.
Morris Mowbrey to Charles Mackay, 21 April, 1865, in Stanley Morison, ed., The History of The Times: The Tradition Established, 1841–84 (London: The Times , 1939), 387–388.
As quoted in Oscar Maurer, “Punch on Slavery and the Civil War,” Victorian Studies 1 (September 1957): 4–28.
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© 2013 Iwan W. Morgan and Philip John Davies
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Foreman, A. (2013). Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: A Propaganda Tool for the Enemy?. In: Morgan, I.W., Davies, P.J. (eds) Reconfiguring the Union. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336484_9
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