First English Civil War

“ But there were English statesmen and writers of ability who understood that the fight of the North was against slavery; they urged her cause without ceasing, although many times their hearts failed them as they feared she had undertaken an impossible task. They had as their followers the workingmen whom hunger stared in the face but who realized, as did the upper class, that the cause of the Union was the cause of democracy in England.
Up to the latter part of November, Great Britain preserved a strict neutrality. ”

“ Did Great Britain in spite of her long years of championship of personal freedom and of leadership in the cause of anti-slavery seize upon the opportunity offered in the disruption of the American Union, and forgetting humanitarian idealisms, react only to selfish motives of commercial advantage and national power? In brief, how is the American Civil War to be depicted by historians of Great Britain, recording her attitude and action in both foreign and domestic policy, and revealing the principles of her statesmen, or the inspirations of her people? ”

“ But to Americans who conceived the Civil War as one fought first of all for the preservation of the nation, the issue of democracy in England seemed of little moment and little to excuse either the "cold neutrality" of the Government or the tone of the press. To Americans Great Britain appeared friendly to the dissolution of the Union and the destruction of a rival power. Nationality was the issue for the North; that democracy was an issue in America was denied, nor could it, in the intensity of the conflict, be conceived as the vital question determining British attitude. ”

“ A new nation came into being. The friends of the North had triumphed.
Thus in addition to the play of diplomatic incidents, the incidental frictions, the effect on trade relations, the applications of British neutrality, and the general policy of the Government, there existed for Great Britain a great issue in the outcome of the Civil War--the issue of the adoption of democratic institutions. It affected at every turn British public attitude, creating an intensity and bitterness of tone, on both sides, unexampled in the expressions of a neutral people. ”

“ Although, in a narrow political sense, a disruption may be useful to England, in another point of view it is a misfortune, inasmuch as the maintenance of one confederation during seventy-two years, over such a vast extent of territory, with no civil war, and only two foreign wars, is the greatest thing which the English race has done out of England, and its dissolution is sure to be viewed with pleasure by all who in their hearts hate free institutions and the English race. ”

“ The bad effect of sudden and violent changes may best be observed in our own history. The great changes of the Civil War left England without any checks on the violence of parties. The King and Lords had been abolished, and the Commons ruled alone. ”

“ The real origin of your nation is the key to the present relations between you and the different parties in England. This is the old battle waged again on a new field. We will not talk too much of Puritans and Cavaliers. The soldiers of the Union are not Puritans, neither are the planters Cavaliers, But the present civil war is a vast episode in the same irrepressible conflict between Aristocracy and Democracy; and the heirs of the Cavalier in England sympathize with your enemies, the heirs of the Puritan with you.
The feeling of our aristocracy, as of all aristocracies, is against you. ”

“ The cries for a parliamentary reform which reached them across the Channel became in their ears cries of a people as powerless and oppressed as the people of France had been. They still clung to the hope of England's aid in the emancipation of Europe from despotism and superstition, but they came now to believe that England must itself be emancipated before such an aid could be given. Their first work therefore they held to be the bringing about a revolution in England which might free the people from the aristocracy and the aristocratic government which held it down. ”

“ The very suggestion of a concert of Powers was itself one to be avoided. "A conference of the five great Powers is an imposing force, but it is a dangerous body to set in motion. A single intervening Power may possibly contrive to satisfy both the adverse parties; but five intervening Powers have first to satisfy one another." Who could tell what divergence might arise on the question [V2:pg 63] of slavery, or on boundaries, or how far England might find her ideals or her vital interests compromised [815] ? ”

“ Our only influence is that of our example. If our system was a failure, the institutions of England were not endangered, but strengthened by such a result. It was their success only that made them dangerous, not to the people of England, but to dynastic ambition, to aristocratic rule, and to selfish interests. To insure our permanent division, was to destroy us. Hence, she encouraged the South, acknowledged her as a belligerent, welcomed the rebel flag and war vessels into her ports, protected them there, enabled them to elude our cruisers, and prepared to aid and sustain slavery. ”

“ England sprang out of the mass of English states which covered Britain after its conquest, we owe it to the gradual submission of the smaller peoples to the supremacy of a common political head. The difference in power between state and state which inevitably led to this process of union was due to the character which the conquest of Britain was now assuming. Up to this time all the kingdoms which had been established by the invaders had stood in the main on a footing of equality. ”

“ I have acted with the same temper; anxious to prevent, if it had been possible, the effusion of the blood of my subjects; and the calamities which are inseparable from a state of war; still hoping that my people in America would have discerned the traitorous views of their leaders, and have been convinced, that to be a subject of Great Britain, with all its consequences, is to be the freest member of any civil society in the known world. ”

“ The facts would embarrass those who determine to assert that England was our undivided enemy during our Civil War, if facts ever embarrassed a complex. Those afflicted with the complex can keep their eyes upon the Alabama and the London Times, and avert them from Bright, and Cobden, and the cotton-spinners, and the Union and Emancipation Society, and Queen Victoria. ”

“ And no one can believe that, in framing a government intended to guard still more efficiently the rights and liberties of the citizen against executive encroachments and oppression, they would have conferred on the President a power which the history of England had proved to be dangerous and oppressive in the hands of the Crown, and which the people of England had compelled it to surrender after a long and obstinate struggle on the part of the English Executive to usurp and retain it. ”

“ In the southern and western provinces disunion was rapidly spreading. The decisions of the States-General, especially with regard to taxation, were little observed. The soldiery were ill-paid, ill-disciplined, and mutinous; the intolerance of the Catholics and Calvinists was becoming more pronounced; the social and political rivalries were daily forcing themselves more prominently to the front and threatening civil war or anarchy. William had of late been forced to lean on the lower classes, and he was not able to keep them in control. ”

“ In England on the contrary the constitution had practically perished in the struggle. All that survived was a part of it, and that a fragmentary part. The cases would have been parallel if the Americans had emerged from the contest without a President or a Senate, and with about a quarter of the Legislature installed as a provisional government and exercising absolute power. But the position of England between 1651 and 1660 was not like that of the Americans in 1865. ”

“ Papa has made it very clear to me that the Revolutionary War was fought to win freedom from Great Britain’s galling yoke, and make ourselves a nation; the War of 1812 to convince the British that we were free and independent, and not to be maltreated with impunity. Those two wars did that for us;—made the dear old Union; and the Civil War saved it from being destroyed by those who ought to have been ready to defend and preserve it at the risk of their lives. ”

“ Theirs was an age of reorganization in religion, in political life, and in philosophy and science. The Thirty Years' War and the Civil War in England were conflicts in which the basis of modern religious toleration was laid in suffering and desolation. In America the Colonies were begun. In England the continued struggle with the House of Stuart resulted in the assurance of political liberty, to be secured at length by an evolution without the price of blood which the Continent, and especially France, had later on to pay. ”

“ For two years longer, he wanders through Germany still watching the course of the war and then returns to England, soon to take part in another war at home, namely the Civil War, in which the English people were divided into two great parties according as they supported King Charles I or the members of the Long Parliament who opposed him. ”

“ I have already explained how far Americans are from understanding the British Empire. It is a pity; they would understand Englishmen better and like them better. And what the building of the Empire and the keeping of it have done for Englishmen, the Civil War did in large measure for the Americans. Even the struggle with their own wilderness might not have sufficed to keep the people hard and sound of heart and limb through a century of peace and growing prosperity. The Civil War is already beginning to slip into the farther reaches of the people's memory ”

“ On July 6, 1861, the Economist, reviewing the progress of the war preparations to date, asserted that it was universally agreed no restoration of the Union was possible and answered British fears by declaring it was impossible to believe that even the American madness could contemplate a servile insurrection. ”

“ Hence during the nineteenth century Great Britain's policy was to maintain a fleet stronger than that of any possible combination against her.
England's colonial system had been developed into a great empire. Principles of English liberty and representative government were carried by Britishers to many parts of the world. The American Revolution showed the mother country that Englishmen would not brook oppression even by their own king and parliament. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries England adopted the policy of erecting her colonies into self-governing communities. ”

“ From 1150 to 1400, resistance was an ordinary remedy for political disagreements. If a popular leader raised his standard in a popular cause, an irregular army could be assembled in a day. (There was no regular army, since England was protected by the sea from invasion.) So misgovernment by a king would be quickly restrained. Society recovered quickly from conflict and civil war because the national wealth consisted chiefly in flocks and herds and in the simple buildings inhabited by the people. ”

“ The American Civil War, as regards continuity, numbers of men steadily engaged, resources employed, and persistence of the combatants, was the "Great War," to date, of all modern conflicts. Not only British, but nearly all foreign observers were of the opinion by midsummer of 1864, after an apparent check to Grant in his campaign toward Richmond, that all America had become engaged in a struggle from which there was scant hope of emergence by a decisive military victory. ”

“ The results of the Revolution of 1776 have been of like great advantage to both England and the United States. History is full of civil wars, of family quarrels among kindred peoples, in which the result has been, not separation of the parts of the community, but their better integration. Look at England herself; all her internal dissensions grew out of the same {94} principle, which, when established, left the people more firmly united, and on a higher plane than before. ”

“ I have hoped this country would settle her internal disputes advantageously and without bloodshed. As yet none has been spilt, though the British newspapers give the idea of a general civil war. Hitherto, I had supposed both the King and parliament would lose authority, and the nation gain it, through the medium of its States General and provincial Assemblies, but the arrest of the deputies of Bretagne two days ago, may kindle a civil war. Its issue will depend on two questions. 1. Will other provinces rise? 2. How will the army conduct itself? A stranger cannot predetermine these questions. ”

“ Side by side with the gradual developement of the English Empire and of the English race has gone on, through the century that has passed since the close of the Seven Years' War, the transfer of power within England itself from a governing class to the nation as a whole. If the effort of George failed to restore the power of the Crown, it broke the power which impeded the advance of the people itself to political supremacy. ”

“ France, it is true, had suffered severely from her civil war of thirty-six years. Trade and industry had been ruined, and her finances heavily strained.Condition of France. The venality of her administrative system had been increased. The Estates-General and the ‘Parlements,’ the representatives of constitutional life, had been discredited; the former by the extreme views it had at times adopted, both by their subservience to the League. The power and self-importance of the nobles had been increased during the civil wars, and by the system adopted by Henry IV. of buying off their opposition. ”