The Historiography of Victorian Britain and the US Civil War

Abstract

The Historiography of Victorian Britain and the US Civil War David Brown (bio) The influence of the American Civil War within British historiography, by which I refer to the historiography of the Victorian era and of the British Empire in the mid-nineteenth century, is minimal. Of course, Anglo-American and transatlantic historians taking a comparative approach have written extensively on this topic, but this essay confines its analysis to the work of card-carrying historians of British history in the Victorian era. There has been a long and distinguished tradition of British scholars of the American Civil War—which includes William Brock, J. R. Pole, and Peter J. Parish—and more recently much interest the war’s transnational impact, but what impact has this literature made outside of its subfield? To be frank, it has had very little influence on scholars of Victorian Britain, and I took a couple of weighty books from the library shelf at random to illustrate the point. [End Page 156] How many pages do you think the US Civil War takes up in the work covering 1846–1886 in Oxford University Press’s multivolume New Oxford History of England? The index of The Mid-Victorian Generation has just four subheadings under the United States of America: agriculture; economic competition; relations with; and Civil War. The three separate entries listed under “Civil War” begin on page 13 by suggesting that the supply of wheat to Britain was disrupted “by wars in the Crimea and the United States.” The eagle-eyed might raise an eyebrow at this, because common wisdom suggests that transatlantic wheat exports increased during the early 1860s, partly compensating for the dearth of cotton in calculating the war’s disruption of the British economy.5 On page 197, two sentences discuss the “good deal of interest in British military circles” in battle tactics and weaponry, although with little lasting effect because “British experts dismissed” them “as aberrations arising from unique circumstances.” Coverage of the American Civil War peaks on pages 230 and 231 of this 787-page work. When I say “peak,” I mean ends—and two full pages are not given to the Civil War, because Poland’s 1863 rebellion against Russia takes up half a page, as does Garibaldi’s British visit in 1864. The narrative of the American Civil War’s transatlantic effect is covered in one paragraph that is, it must be said, remarkably cogent. The paragraph emphasizes neutrality threatened by the “rabidly anti-British” William Seward, diplomatic spats over the Trent and the Alabama, and Gladstone’s speech at Newcastle in October 1862, where much alarm was caused by his declaration that Jefferson Davis “has made a nation.” The war’s significance is covered in just three sentences in the next paragraph, contextualizing Gladstone’s faux pas at Newcastle and his subsequent transition to liberal champion of working-class reform.6 The Civil War does not have much traction for domestic historians of the Victorian era, then, but surely it has more purchase within the context of Empire? No. The forty essays of a 756-page 2012 edited collection, The Victorian World, provide more separate index entries for the American Civil War, but in terms of the events between 1861 and 1865, greater detail is found in The Mid-Victorian Generation.7 The citations are, without exception, brief mentions of the war in passing, set within the context of other themes, even in a final essay titled “The Victorian Period of American [End Page 157] History.” This chapter appears most pertinent but does not examine the war’s impact within Victorian Britain. Instead, it contests the standard historiographical practice of using the Civil War as a convenient periodization device that divides US history into ante- and postbellum to argue that the last two thirds of nineteenth-century American history should be treated as one era: the Victorian period.8 In other words, it examines the ways the British Victorian experience informs US history, rather than vice versa. There are just two strands of British historiography in which the Civil War makes an intervention. The first is the domain of military historians who confront the—by now venerable—question...