Support for Secession: Lancashire and the American Civil War (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS67 conditions) in shaping nineteenth century partisan loyalties. But let it be clear that the criticism here is not that Baker did not find particular social cleavages to my liking, but that she failed to identify solidly any such cleavages other than the quintessential and unavoidable racial element. Did nativism and anti-Catholicism really become insignificant after 1859? Did evangelical-pietist impulses play only an occasionally (and casually) noted role in Know-Nothingism, Unionism, and Republicanism ? There are many hints which suggest that the answer to these questions could lead to a more subtle analysis of electoral politics than Baker has given us. A recent dissertation by Douglas Shaw (University of Rochester) shows that in Jersey City the economic, religious, and ethnic conflicts of the late 1850s continued to excite city politics to 1870, and, like Baker, Shaw argues that the Civil War was not a turning point. It may be that group conflicts in Northern communities were not present in Maryland—yet, again, there are clues in Baker's book suggesting the contrary: in the Democratic splinter States' Rights party of 1861 nominating a Catholic for governor, in the Unionist (Know Nothing) use of evangelicalism and antiparty and the religious ties of its leaders, in the crusading Union Leagues which resembled the Know Nothing lodges, in evidence that religion did strongly intertwine with politics (pp. 98, 157, 180, 183), in the Democrats slapping their opponents in the 1867 Constitution by forbidding ministers to hold state office, in the moralistic crusade of Republican-Unionist Hugh Bond, and more. In the mid-1860's a registry law became a divisive party issue, and Unionists promoted it to disfranchise the disloyal and recalcitrant. Baker discusses the issue solely in terms of party divisions regarding the War, but in the North registry laws were a favorite program of nativists, and one wonders if the quarrel lacked this meaning in Maryland. That Baker's book raises so many questions is at least partly to her credit. Though she failed to push analysis deeper, Baker built solidly where she did venture. If Baker or others continue to probe this period of Maryland politics, her book provides a competent beginning. Ronald P. Formisano Clark University Support for Secession: Lancashire and the American Civil War. By Mary Ellison. (University of Chicago Press, 1973. Pp. ix, 259. $10.50.) This book effectively demolishes the century-old myth that Lancashire cotton-workers, though starved by the Federal blockade of Southern ports, stubbornly supported the North—that because of their love of American-style democracy and their belief that by supporting the Union they were fighting slavery, they bravely resisted British rulingclass intervention schemes. Basing her conclusions on thorough research in Lancashire news- 68CIVIL WAR HISTORY papers and manuscript collections, and on a careful scrutiny of Hansard 's Parliamentary Debates, contemporary books and pamphlets, and most of the pertinent literature published since the 1860s, Mrs. Ellison has found that "the assumption that most Radicals and Nonconformists were pro-North is not founded on fact." She has discovered that working -class and middle-class opinion in the cotton spinning areas of the southeast and in the weaving areas of the northeast, as well as in the large towns of Manchester and Liverpool, heavily favored the cause of the Confederacy, while only the agricultural western region tended to sympathize with the North. She has determined that most of the people in the Lancashire cotton towns "were unshakably convinced that Northern schemes for emancipation were no more than amoral weapons in the armory of war," and that abolition of slavery in America "could and would emerge only from a free South." The west "stood alone in all Lancashire in its basic faith in Northern abolition." And although Manchester and Liverpool were somewhat divided on the subject, the weight of opinion in these large towns "condemned Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as a useless act of war and pinned their faith on emancipation by a free South." Support for neutrality and non-interference "there certainly was" in Lancashire, Mrs. Ellison has asserted, "but it was small and insignificant when compared with the demand for a move to aid the South." In Lancashire there were...