The American Civil War in British Culture

During one of the United States darkest hours, our cousins across the sea, the British, looked upon the unfolding drama within their strongest daughters borders, and came away with some VERY interesting conclusions. As Goldwin Smith believed “America was not a ‘foreign nation, alien to our political concerns, but…the great colony of England.” “The essential Englishness of the South, and the mongrelised nature of the North, was manifested, argued pro-Confederates, on America’s battlefields. While Southern ranks were comprised of ‘men who own the soil they are defending’, Northern armies were made up of ‘more than two-thirds hireling foreigners.” Many in England, including Beresford Hope, argued of religious sectionalism in respect of America’s warring halves as well as their hostility to democracy, generating a conviction in many that “Britain and the South were bound together by common Christian civilization.” Further it was argued that the white people of the South had a greater claim to Anglo-Saxon pedigree than their Northern counterparts. “In population terms this was essentially true; Southern white racial demographics were largely unchanged from colonial times. Southern whites were indeed (allowing for some French creole influence around New Orleans) overwhelmingly of English, or at least of British, derivation” Hugh Dubrulle argues, “British military men looked almost solely to the Confederacy for positive lessons.” The British Military was also VERY impressed with the Confederates performance on the Battlefield, “[Britons] thought that the Confederate States Army executed its military operations on a level near perfection.” This high military praise, was directly accredited to the South’s Officers, chief among them, Robert E. Lee. In 1863 a British military observer, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur L. Fremantle, would write this of the good General, “General Lee is, almost without exception, the handsomest man of his age I ever saw…a thorough soldier in appearance; and his manners are most courteous and full of dignity…He is a perfect gentleman in every respect. I imagine no man has so few enemies, or is so universally esteemed…In the old army he was always considered one of its best officers” Winston Churchills favorable view of the Confederacy is widely known, but I was shocked to find it was a sentiment widely held in the British ruling class, and even among many of the countries middle class. “On political grounds, they supported the South’s struggle for national independence, the preservation of its agrarian, genteel way of life, and its social and political hierarchies. British military thinkers attributed the Confederacy’s superb military conduct to these values and goals. By contrast, they viewed the North as imposing an unwanted national unity and decadent lifestyle on the South. Northern institutions — especially capitalism and mass democracy that the British regarded as derivatives of mob rule — appalled Britain’s military elite, who regarded those institutions as the source of the North’s military weaknesses and failures”