Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War.

By R. J. M. Blackett. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Pp. [xvi], 273. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8071-2645-4; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8071-2595-4.)

Is there no end to books on why Britain failed to intervene in the American Civil War, as the South hoped it would? The problem still puzzles because most recent historians have emphasized the overwhelming sympathy for the Confederacy evident within the cabinet, in Parliament, in leading newspapers, and among notable sections of the public. But now Richard Blackett's thorough investigation of a myriad of different communities, countless partisans, and the dynamic interaction between the public and a range of persuaders and agitators shifts our understanding in the most authoritative and balanced statement we are likely to have for a long time.

Blackett's deep knowledge of Anglo American abolitionism enables him to assess the widespread assumption that British antislavery sentiment had waned since the great triumphs of the 1830s. Undoubtedly, a more strident racial feeling had developed in the decade before the war, and popular antislavery enthusiasm had lost its edge and fervor. However, abolitionist silence in the first year of the war owed much to the ambiguity of the Union cause, while British Garrisonians actually welcomed secession because it freed the Union from the sin of slaveholding. After the Emancipation Proclamation, many abolitionists--though far from all--overcame their hostility to the use of force and reconciled themselves to the idea that right could be imposed by arms. Their agitation revealed that popular antislavery sentiment could still sway opinion and decisively countered the demand that Britain should intervene in the war in order to end the disastrous "Cotton Famine" (pp. 7-8). Whereas Mary Ellison's Support for Secession: Lancashire and the American Civil War (Chicago, 1972) stressed the considerable pro-Confederate sentiment among distressed Lancashire cotton workers, Blackett demonstrates that in many cotton towns the economic arguments were successfully offset by political hostility to any cause that denied the freedom and rights of workers.

In fact, the war aroused an extraordinary debate within Britain, during which ordinary people discussed matters of high policy as at almost no other time. "Warm street debates" (p. 180) followed public meetings, African Americans on soapboxes harangued passersby, fistfights broke out among contesting parties, and the press was more evenly divided than concentration on a few leading prints suggests. The division of opinion, though by no means simple, reflected basic class, religious, and political cleavages: major employers and manufacturers, Anglicans and aristocrats, landowners and professionals, and small towns and rural places tended to favor the Confederacy, while the Union won support mainly among small businessmen and Dissenters, working-class leaders and radicals, and larger towns and cities. The war mused such passion on either side because men perceived that the issues at stake had deep meanings for the future of British politics, and the victory of the Union cause, apotheosized by Lincoln's martyrdom, was hailed as a triumph for democracy and the cause of Liberal reform at home.

It is perhaps nit-picking to find fault with such a penetrating presentation of overwhelming evidence. But much of the valuable detail will be lost to historians because the book lacks a decent index, while a map that showed the many small communities to which it refers might have made the account more comprehensible to those who don't know their Bacup from their Rawtenstall. The debate also deserves a little more context: for example, if abolitionism explains the ultimate strength of Unionist organization, surely the amazing events that the British reading public had witnessed in Italy in 1859-60 help to explain the broad sympathy in the early stages of the war for a people fighting for self-determination, and the continuing belief that a people so inspired could win against even overwhelming odds.

DONALD J. RATCLIFFE
University of Durham