Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain

Michael Turner

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780807174500
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

In this comprehensive examination of British sympathy for the South during and after the American Civil War, Michael J. Turner explores the ideas and activities of A. J. Beresford Hope—one of the leaders of the pro-Confederate lobby in Britain—to provide fresh insight into that seemingly curious allegiance. Hope and his associates cast famed Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson as the embodiment of southern independence, courage, and honor, elevating him to the status of a hero in Britain. Historians have often noted that economic interest, political attitudes, and concern about Britain's global reach and geostrategic position led many in the country to embrace the Confederate cause, but they have focused less on the social, cultural, and religious reasons enunciated by Hope and ostensibly represented by Jackson, factors Turner suggests also heightened British affinity for the South. During the war, Hope noticed a tendency among British people to view southerners as heroic warriors in their struggle against the North. He and his pro-southern followers shared and promoted this vision, framing Jackson as the personification of that noble mission and raising the general's profile in Britain so high that they collected enough funds to construct a memorial to him after his death in 1863. Unveiled twelve years later in Richmond, Virginia, the statue stands today as a remarkable artifact of one of the lesser-known strands of British pro-Confederate ideology. Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain serves as the first in-depth analysis of Hope as a leading pro-southern activist and of Jackson's reputation in Britain during and after the Civil War. It places the conflict in a transnational context that reveals the reasons British citizens formed bonds of solidarity with the southerners whom they perceived shared their social and cultural values.

1

FRIENDLY RELATIONS?

By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain and the United States were moving toward what many call “the special relationship.” The two governments and peoples regarded each other in a special way and assumed a unique connection. British dealings with America and America’s with Britain were quite unlike their dealings with anyone else.1 Closeness and cordiality were evident, though there were reservations on both sides, a reminder that the relationship in earlier times had not been so friendly. For much of the nineteenth century, indeed, there was open rivalry. Britain was uneasy about the growing influence of the United States and the challenges it foreboded, and there were periods—above all, during the American Civil War—when animosity, not amity, was the order of the day.

After the American war, too, several problems affected British opinion about the United States. The Irish question was among them. Ireland played an important role in British-American relations. Trade was another concern, linked as it was with the impact of U.S. tariff increases and a resurgent struggle between protectionists and free traders. For many in Britain, consideration of these issues was shaped by the premise that the U.S. political system would remain exemplary to British reform movements, although, as in the decades before secession and war, admiration for the United States in some pro-reform circles was matched by disappointment in others. The prospects for rapprochement at the governmental level improved after wartime disputes, but this did not mean the end of suspicion and stereotyping. Americans still described the British as enemies to democracy, and British visitors to the United States still presented a picture of the vulgar, pushy, uncultured American.2

Some British observers were struck by the fact that even in America, the great republic and beacon of liberty, national cohesion was no easier to maintain than it was in Britain and Europe. The shock of civil war and instability of the Reconstruction period indicated, as Eugenio Biagini puts it, “contrasting forms of national identity,” something that pro-southerners in Britain had highlighted during the war years. Britain had its Irish question and the potential dismemberment of the United Kingdom, and historic, ethnic, religious, social, regional, and other centrifugal forces across Europe meant that the unity of the French, Italian, Spanish, and German states was far from assured. How to reconcile nationalism, constitutionalism, central authority, popular sovereignty, and community was one of the preoccupations of the late nineteenth century.3 There were no easy solutions in Britain or Europe or in America. If the ideal was a harmony of different groups and interests within the nation, all enjoying equal status, it was not clear that such a nation existed. British writers on America referred to its egalitarianism, but equality did not guarantee unity. Reconstruction did not remove sectionalism. There remained in America an “essential bipolarity,” as Robert Kelley terms it. To Kelley, economic conditions, religious beliefs, social and ethnic identities, and reform debates were just as likely to divide people in the United States as in Britain. On both sides of the Atlantic, “there was a struggle going on between majority and minority cultures,” between those who wanted pluralism and those who wanted homogeneity.4

For all this, Britain and the United States were drawing together. Previous conflict between the governments had been mitigated. When the Americans sought overseas territories, they targeted Spain, not Britain, and there was a shared anxiety about the rise of Germany. U.S. naval power allowed the British to withdraw vessels from waters that could be policed by the Americans. Transatlantic commerce was important to both countries. Cooperation might also have been facilitated by social changes, for the arrival in the United States of people from southern and eastern Europe aroused American nativism and clarified the notion of natural kinship between Britain and America.5 This kinship had been under consideration for a long time. Jonathan Parry has argued that in the formation of a British liberal-progressive tendency, much was made of perceived contrasts and affinities with other cultures, races, and polities. Britain’s political and economic maturity compared to other nations reinforced the idea, stronger after the 1848 revolutions, that a large part of Europe was underdeveloped. In this context, a sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority had evidence behind it. By the 1870s, it was usual to group the United States and Britain’s white settler colonies with Britain in the front rank. The rest of the world lagged behind. Various schemes were proposed to bind Anglo-Saxon people together and inculcate their values as widely as possible.6 In Britain, these attitudes promoted a continuing interest in American events, but it was also thought that superiority might be jeopardized by the costs of the common British and U.S. quest for ascendancy.

At the end of the century, troublesome consequences of urbanization and industrial expansion elicited much comment. Social surveys influenced the outlook of politicians and philanthropists, and there were new ideas about taxation, planning, and the role of trade unions and churches. Reformers in Britain and America, rethinking the division of responsibilities between public and private, decided that government should be doing more as an agent of reform. Daniel Rodgers has shown that several initiatives were rooted in a rejection of free markets and that reformers on either side of the Atlantic were eager to learn from each other, an alliance also stressed by Duncan Campbell. British reformers were disappointed by the slow advance of corrective policies in America. Constitutional deadlock in Washington was blamed. But gradually, reform proceeded. There was more press backing. Legislation in one place became a template for legislation in another. Conferences, studies, correspondence, and visits brought different groups together, and in Britain and America, there was a strong spiritual dimension to all this, seen in the “social gospel” and in Christian socialism.7

America’s image as the land of liberty and opportunity was not as strong as it had been in Britain, and old assumptions about the link between democracy and material progress were questioned, which had implications for democratization in Britain. Conservative spokesmen who had derided the U.S. Constitution were more likely now to point out that it placed limits on democracy (through the division of powers, authority of the Supreme Court, and indirectly elected Senate). Though some progressive commentators went on as before, praising American government and society, others had lost confidence in America. Among younger British radicals, who had not been active during the American Civil War or the struggle for the 1867 Reform Act, the experience of urbanization and industrialization focused their efforts against the exploitation of labor, social distress, inequality, monopolies, the power of capital, and class legislation.8 Strikes and other disturbances in the United States suggested that political democracy did not necessarily deliver social and economic justice.

Interaction between Britain and America at the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, promoted a mix of positive and negative assessments. Variability of opinion was also characteristic of the first half of the century. Many British people arrived at firm conclusions about America, whether or not they went there to see for themselves.

In a discussion of “America through foreign eyes,” Stephen Brooks brings out both the fascination that the United States stimulated in observers from afar and the eagerness of Americans to be admired by others. Through the generations, people saw what they wanted to see in America, to which they attached “expectations of greatness.”9 Historians have often remarked upon this. In the late 1940s, Allan Nevins declared that America had remained a “favorite observation-ground of Britons” for well over a hundred years. He used such categorizations as “practical investigation,” “condescension,” “mixed criticism and praise,” and “unbiased portraiture” to demonstrate some common findings by British observers of America during the nineteenth century.10 Nevins also recognized the desire of Americans to know what others thought of them and, in particular, a sensitivity to British comment. Despite America’s autonomy, there remained a “cultural dependence” on Britain. The wish for British favor meant that British disapproval stoked resentment. Some Americans were conscious only of disdain from the British, but it was less prevalent than they supposed. Opinion about the U.S. system of government, for instance, was divided, reflecting political disagreements that already existed in Britain.11 George Lillibridge’s Beacon of Freedom, published in 1955, elucidated British reformers’ pro-American leanings, and it was followed by works by others in the same vein. Beacon of Freedom was a book of its time, and the statements of Nevins also reflect the time in which they were published. One reviewer of Max Berger’s British Traveler in America, 1836–1860 (originally published in 1943) remarked in 1945 that the book was “particularly pertinent in days like these, when Anglo-American analyses are assets for common understanding.”12 An intellectual accord arose during the twentieth century, resting on British historians’ emphasis on past evidence of friendship between Britain and the United States and on American historians’ privileging of their own national paradigm, America as the home of liberty and destined to spread its benefits to the rest of the world. British-U.S. cooperation in the two world wars and the Cold War encouraged scholars to play down previous tensions. The agreed framework was that a common heritage and shared goals made for inevitable harmony.13

Nevertheless, relations since the American Revolution have been undeniably complex. In the era of America’s war for independence, argues Kevin Phillips, pro-American sentiment in Britain was strongest among groups and in places that had a “history of economic innovation, religious dissent, and political assertiveness.” This pattern endured. America was created mainly by refugees from Britain, who took with them their traditions and ideas and contributed to a wider discussion on both sides of the Atlantic about political and religious rights. George Lillibridge argues that when reformers in nineteenth-century Britain used the model of American democracy to condemn “the old order,” they upheld “the American destiny,” the belief that America’s one purpose was to exhibit the blessings of liberty. To Fred Leventhal and Roland Quinault, “evolving democratic aspirations in both countries can be ascribed to mutual parentage.”14 This helps to explain why British visitors to the new republic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—people who were curious about America but had no plans to remain there—made favorable comments.15 Some were impressed by the contrast with the Britain of this period, a country blighted by war and debt, repressive legislation, and the dislocating effects of industrialization, in comparison with which America looked peaceful and prosperous. Most of all, perhaps, these visitors could take pride in a young and thriving nation that was a British offspring. They joined in the debate about “English liberty overseas.”16 The transfer of “liberty” from one place to another was not easy, and there were doubts about the viability of republicanism and democracy as alternatives to monarchical and aristocratic structures and about the place of slavery in the Union. But still, America could be thought of as “British,” and Americans could feel that they shared something meaningful with Britain.17

Economic links were no less important than cultural or institutional ones. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Friendly Relations?
• I. BERESFORD HOPE’S CIVIL WAR
• II. STONEWALL JACKSON, BRITISH HERO
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index