Beyond the Last Best Hope of Earth

Abstract

Similarly frustrated by the British response to the Civil War, Unionists and Confederates often agreed that Great Britain did not understand the American crisis and did not seem to care enough to learn about it. Republicans only partly retracted this complaint when they began to praise the English middle and working classes for discerning the values at stake in the war and favoring the side of right. R.J.M. Blackett's Divided Hearts roundly rejects these charges of ignorance and indifference. He declares that no other international event of the era, on the Continent or in the colonies, reached as deeply into British public life as the American conflict. His study of the British response illuminates the transatlantic impact of the Civil War and facilitates measurement of the accuracy of wartime American perceptions of foreign views. Divided Hearts offers the most thorough study yet of British public opinion about the war, as Blackett defines that public. His definition does not include the positions of government officials or leaders of Parliament. The names of prime minister Lord Palmerston, foreign minister Lord John Russell, and chancellor of the exchequer William Gladstone are not listed in the index. Except for figures who demonstrated influence at home, Blackett also does not focus on the intellectuals whom many Americans regarded as representative of British thought. Such commentators on the war as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold appear fleetingly in the book or not at all. Blackett's goal is instead to measure as accurately as possible the extent of support for the Union and Confederacy, particularly among the middle and working classes of England. This project design tests on a broader field the line of interpretation centering on Mary Ellison's Support for Secession: Lancashire and the American Civil War (1972), which argued that British workers devastated by the cotton famine strongly supported the Confederacy. Ellison deflated what she called the myth that British workers united with the cause of free labor despite enormous personal sacrifices, a version of history that Peter d'A. Jones