American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832-1863, by Peter O’Connor

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863 by Peter O’Connor Christopher Hanlon (bio) American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863, by Peter O’Connor; pp. x + 268. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017, $47.95. Peter O’Connor arranges American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863 between two methodological insights. The first is historical and relates to O’Connor’s understanding that British apprehension of the American Civil War cannot be understood through reference to 1861–65 alone, because sectional discord in the United States and British perception of it evolved over the course of decades. The second insight is archival, in O’Connor’s decision to reference extensively what he calls “texts by cultural commentators,” a category comprised of texts “not written with the expectation of immediately altering government policy” (4). Though he is also informed, for instance, by politicians’ speeches, O’Connor is especially drawn to writers of travelogues, novels, poems, longform essays, and editorials. Five chapters document the fits and starts of British understanding of American disunion over the course of three decades, when the dominant feeling among Britain’s elite toward the U. S. North was lukewarm. Chapter 1 details British understanding of American slavery and emancipation—in many Victorian minds, an issue shaped by a more complex set of questions than could be reflected in any reductive polarity aligning the South with slavery and the North with freedom. Surveying a series of influential British opinion-makers on the issue of American slavery—ranging from the trenchantly anti-slavery Harriet Martineau and John Robert Godley to lesser-known Southern apologists like Charles Lyell and Matilda Charlotte Houstoun—O’Connor shows the ways in which commentators such as the latter “intend[ed] to highlight the hypocrisy of the free states rather than launch a crusade for racial equality” (35). Chapter 2 explores British views of the ethnic distribution of the United States according to which the South was composed of a British Cavalier culture; the Northeast, a Puritan derivation; [End Page 123] and the mid-Atlantic formed a more ethnically diverse region shaped by immigration. The Puritan/Cavalier dichotomy came to subsume more complex considerations of the ethnic dimension of U. S. sectionalism, though O’Connor never broaches the ways in which this polarity evolved into other sectional discourses in the United States that pitted so-called Southern Normans against Northeastern Saxons. These chapters set the stage for O’Connor’s third and fourth chapters, which take up the core issues at play in British understandings of American sectional strife. These deeply informed explorations of the works of British opinion-makers such as Martineau, Frederick Marryat, Frances and Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray open up the ways in which a series of such writers understood variously the precarious situation of the United States in the aftermath of the nullification crisis, which brought questions over federalism and states’ rights to the forefront of much British commentary. Writers such as Martineau, for instance, recognized the depth of sectional antipathy between North and South and yet viewed the United States as fundamentally cohesive. For many other commentators, questions over the potential endurance of the federal union related to other concerns over the potential for mob rule and despotism in the United States. Abraham Lincoln’s and William Seward’s reputations in Britain as Anglophobes, for example, contributed to such anxieties, as did the Trent affair (during which a Union naval frigate boarded a British merchant vessel in the process of delivering three Confederate ambassadors to Britain). As the Civil War approached, many British commentators sympathized increasingly with what they saw as a more Anglophile, Cavalier South under the yoke of an arrogant North, but O’Connor closes his study describing the process by which British equivocation during the war itself transformed to the detriment of the South. And in an intriguing epilogue, O’Connor describes the transformation of Anglo-American relations in the postbellum period when a new generation of transatlantic thinkers created an atmosphere of rapprochement in which the United States came to be viewed by Britons as a unified and kindred nation that had endured a struggle over...