It also helps put some of the attitudes towards England (part 1 and part 2) that Russell found into some perspective. In our retrospective we think of Great Britain in terms of its relationship as an ally since World War 2, but it was not always so. In fact, when during WW2 we needed to dust off some war plans for safeguarding shipments across the North Atlantic, the ones they found assumed that Britain was the enemy.
Poe says that Britain wanted the South independent of the USA, but as an economic colony of Britain. And a name you might recognize:
On September 25, 1861, following a long string of Union defeats, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a leading British statesman and member of Parliament, gleefully predicted America’s break-up into four or more pieces, “with happy results for the safety of Europe.”“That separation between North and South America which is now being brought about by civil war I have long foreseen and foretold to be inevitable,” said Bulwer-Lytton in a speech.
He predicted that the U.S. would split not into, “two, but at least four, and probably more than four separate and sovereign commonwealths.”
And what France was doing at the same time was no secret either: "Years earlier, Louis Napoleon had carelessly admitted that he wished to “establish a French Gibraltar at Key West, to seize Florida, Louisiana, and the Gulf Coast, and to bring the Mexican Empire under French domination,”"
The Civil War killed a lot of Americans. Alternatives might have killed a lot more.
4 comments:
What was the weather like at Fort Sumter? Was it dark and stormy?
@ Korora- Hahaha. I entered the Bulwer-Lytton writing contest a few years in a row and got some Honorable Mentions. They published a book, and two of my entries made it in.
@ James - linked. It is a deeply challenging essay by Poe. Thank you for putting it out there.
The British offered to sell the South a whole fleet of retiring East Indiamen warships, which the South stupidly rejected in favor of having the British build for them high tech raiders (that took too long to construct to be effective; the fleet might have kept the blockade from being effective).
However, the British came out ahead anyway. The blockade broke the Southern monopoly on cotton production, replaced by British India. Even after the war, South was impoverished for generations in ways that hampered the US economic growth.
I didn't know that. There seem to always be more aspects to things than I expected, and it is delightful to learn new ones.
IIRC British industry took a short-term hit, but Egyptian and Indian sources expanded to meet the demand within a few years.
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