Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain by Michael J. Turner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain by Michael J. Turner Robert Cook Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain. By Michael J. Turner. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 334. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7108-0.) Not everyone in mid-Victorian Britain supported the breakaway Confederacy. Progressive academics like Francis W. Newman and ex-Radicals such as John Bright sided with the North, as did many unheralded middle- and working-class people who came to associate the imperiled Union with the ongoing struggle for domestic suffrage reform. However, most well-to-do Conservatives (and some prominent Liberals) articulated strong support for the southern cause. Among them was Alexander James Beresford Hope, a High Anglican, quondam Tory member of Parliament and newspaper owner who [End Page 728] championed the South in the pages of his Saturday Review and worked actively alongside Confederate agents in Britain to promote southern independence. As Michael J. Turner explains in this well-researched study, Hope also played a leading role in an ultimately successful project to build a statue of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, which was unveiled in Richmond, Virginia, in 1875. Basing his findings on an impressive number of British newspapers and Hope’s published writings, Turner broadly confirms the Confederacy’s appeal to Englishmen committed to social hierarchy, the protection of property rights, and white supremacy and opposed to the putatively leveling democracy of the American North. Hope insisted that “our brethren of the South” were fighting for the quintessentially Anglo-Saxon values of liberty and self-determination and, in the process, were “trying to raise up a new English nation” (pp. 55, 56). Aware that slavery was hardly the Confederacy’s main selling point in Britain, he depicted the southern variant as benign and derided the Emancipation Proclamation as unenforceable. His considerable efforts to promote the southern cause at home were thwarted by the Palmerston government’s decision in late 1862 to put the national interest above the ruling class’s affective attachment to the Confederacy and by the decisive Union military successes in the second half of the Civil War. Turner’s analysis of the Richmond statue is rich in detail. He convincingly roots the statue’s genesis in the fact that Stonewall Jackson attained celebrity status in Britain during the war. For many Britons, Jackson exemplified the manly courage and devotion to high principle that they associated with the Confederacy. Ordinary folk as well as elite Tories like Hope thrilled to press reports of how the southern hero repeatedly outwitted hapless Yankee commanders in the Shenandoah Valley, and they admired his religious faith, self-discipline, and apparent affection for England and Scotland after his transatlantic trip in 1856. Manifestations of Jackson’s popularity included his name affixed to a race-horse, a boat at the Glasgow royal regatta, and a factory engine in Blackburn. E. M. Grace, brother of the more famous W. G. Grace, was applauded as “the Stonewall Jackson of the cricket field” after enjoying an exemplary cricket season in 1862 (p. 165). Jackson’s death did nothing to stem many Britons’ admiration for the general. Hope was the prime mover in a concerted campaign to raise money for a monument that would not only express its funders’ admiration for the general and his cause but also legitimate their support for the Confederacy. A brief Republican interregnum in postwar Virginia delayed matters, but defeated ex-Confederates quickly restored their political power in the state. They were predictably eager to accept a tangible testimony of well-to-do Englishmen’s admiration for one of the wartime South’s leading men. Although the author’s judgments are generally sound, there is good reason to question his assertion that into the twentieth century Stonewall Jackson’s “name and fame had abiding relevance in Britain” (p. 261). Few Britons today have any knowledge of either Jackson or the American Civil War. More abiding by far is the affinity of leading English Tories—illustrated by their fawning embrace of Donald J. Trump—for American opponents of democracy and racial equality. [End Page...