BRITISH ARISTOCRATS HOPING FOR THE END OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT. James McPherson has a review in the New York Review of Books (July 14) of Amanda Foreman’s new book about British foreign policy toward North and South during the American Civil War: A WORLD ON FIRE: BRITAIN’S CRUCIAL ROLE IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR. British public opinion was divided as to which side to favor. Foreman says that one of the purposes of her book was to find out why so many British thought the Southern position was morally superior. McPherson says that the British aristocracy and gentry tended to favor the South and quotes Charles Francis Adams, the American minister in Britain, as saying “‘the great body of the aristocracy and the wealthy commercial classes are anxious to see the United States go to pieces.'” Mc Pherson says:
“The Earl of Shrewsbury looked upon ‘the trial of Democracy and its failure’ in America with pleasure.”
McPherson quotes the Earl of Shrewsbury: “‘I believe that the dissolution of the Union is inevitable, and that men before me will live to see an aristocracy established in America.'” He says: “The voice of the British establishment, The Times, considered the downfall of ‘the American colossus’ a good ‘riddance of a nightmare”, and quotes the Times: “‘Excepting a few gentlemen of republican tendencies, we all expect, we nearly all wish, success to the Confederate cause.'”
These quotes made me rethink how America was viewed by the European upper classes in the nineteenth century—that America’s republican form of government was still viewed as a dangerous idea.