Friday, May 30, 2014

How those in England Viewed the American Civil War

1) "The struggle of today is on one side for empire and the other side for independence." Wigan Examiner, 1861.............2) "The Southerners are admired for everything but their slavery and that their independence may be speedily acknowledged by France and England is, we are convinced, the strong desire of the vast majority, not only in England but throughout Europe." Liverpool Daily Post, 1862.............3) "Twenty millions (the North) say to the other ten millions (the South), 'You shall continue to live under a government you detest, you shall submit to laws you wish to change, you shall obey rulers you repudiate and abjure.' Their inherent right to secede if they chose, can, it seems to us, be denied by no one but a nisi prius lawyer." Northern British Review, 1862.............4) "The barbarous character of the warfare is a subject too painful to be needlessly dwelt upon....The sacking and burning of homesteads and undermining railway bridges; the infliction of torture and murder for supposed opinion; the suspension of laws and rights - these scandals and miseries are of a nature and extent never required or imagined in international wars." Charles Dickens, 1862.............5) "We do not claim to be carrying on a war of emancipation. We are not fighting for the blacks, but for the whites....The object of the war is to preserve the Union." MacMillan's Magazine (synopsizing what were literally hundreds of interviews with Northerners from all walks of life), 1862.............6) "For the contest on the part of the North is now undisguisedly for empire. The question of slavery is thrown to the winds. There is hardly any concession in its favor that the South could ask which the North would refuse, provided only that the seceding States would re-enter the Union....Away with the pretence on the North to dignify its cause with the name of freedom to the slave!" Quarterly Review, 1862.............7) "The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty." Karl Marx (while living in England), 1861.............8) "Congress was passing a new tariff of the most stringent protectionism to Northern manufacturers!...The untimeliness of the measure has filled all England with astonishment. It is a new affront and wrong to the slave states, and raises a wall against the return of the seceder." Fraser's magazine, 1861.............9) "The North has adopted a system of revenue and disbursements in which an undue proportion of the burdens of taxation has been imposed upon the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the North....the South, as the great exporting portion of the Union, has in reality paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue." American Issues, 1861.............10) "No wonder then that the citizens of the seceding states should feel for half a century they have sacrificed to enhance the powers and profits of the North; and should conclude, after much futile remonstrance, that only in secession could they hope to find redress." James Spence, Northern British Review, 1862.............11) "As a rule, the great mass of the public expenditures were made from the North, not in the South, so that Southerners found themselves doubly taxed - taxed first from the benefit of the Northern manufacturers, and then in the disbursement of the public funds, denied an equal participation in the benefits accruing therefrom." Athenaeum, 1861.............12) "...she (the United States) has become a land of passports, of conscriptions, of press censorship and post office espionage, of bastilles and lettres de cachet....there was little difference between the Government of Mr. Lincoln and the Government of Napoleon 3. There was the form of a legislative assembly, where scarcely any dared to oppose, for fear of a charge of treason." Quarterly Review, 1862.............13) "The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states." Charles Dickens, 1862.............14) "There must be some degree at least of homogeneousmess; there must be harmony, if not identity, of interests; there must be mutual liking, if not mutual respect. Or, in default of these binding links, there must be power....to enforce Union and compel submission." James Spence, North British Review.

2 comments:

BB-Idaho said...

Charles Dickens and Karl Marx-
eclectic pair.

dmarks said...

At least tens of millions don't die in attempts to put Dickens' fictions into reality. But that happens with Marx.